Scott Adams's Blog, page 276

DAESH Linguistic Kill Shot

In a culture that allows powerful men to have multiple wives, the leaders have to reduce the number of male competitors so the math works. The best way to do that is to convince young men to go kill themselves in the name of some greater good. As an added incentive to die, the young men are promised a worthy cause, respect, sex slaves, and 72 virgins in heaven.

The reality is that most of the DAESH fighters are working hard to spread the genetic material of the more successful men leading them. They just don’t know it.

If you want to change someone’s mind, you have to go deep. You have to bypass rational thought entirely. You need to find the ego. 

Here are some arguments that would be a total waste of time.

1. We think you misinterpreted your religious books.

2. Evil is bad. You really should do less of it.

3. We can help you get a job if you stop killing us.

4. We will kill you if you keep trying to kill us first.

I could go on. The point is that reason isn’t in play. So let’s ignore it.

When you are a young man – and here I speak from experience – you are naturally distrustful of authority. And your sex drive is – by far – your dominant impulse. Combining those two elements, one effective form of persuasion might go like this:  

Linguistic Kill Shot: DAESH fighters are genetic dead-enders fighting to spread the genes of their leaders. And they are succeeding.

Why it should work:

- It plays on the natural distrust young people have for the old(er).

- Sex and reproduction are such strong impulses that they overwhelm any other sense of reason. You can’t fight promises of sex unless you offer other promises of sex. There is no substitute in the world of persuasion.

- The statement is unambiguously true. Dead fighters do not spread their genes. Leaders with multiple wives do. There is nothing to argue.

Speaking of Trump, he’s the only one in the game who could pull this off. I know you think I’ve gone too far in my Trump-loving, but this topic is still in the wheelhouse of persuasion, not politics. (I don’t agree with a number of Trump’s policies.)

I remind you that I am not smart enough to know which candidate would be the best president. All the candidates look qualified to me. But objectively speaking, if you want to fix a leak, hire a plumber. And if your biggest problems can only be solved by changing people’s minds, you want to hire a persuader. That much is certain. But we don’t know what the future holds or what skill set would matter most several years from now.

Update: I should have mentioned that the best way to approach this is to test different linguistic kill shots on captive jihadists. Hook a brain scanner to their noggins and see which ideas light up the right areas of the brain.

We only need to reprogram a few captives to know whether a particular method works. Once the best linguistic kill shot is identified from the candidates, you release it to the wild like an idea virus.

Chances this would work: 100%

It won’t reprogram most jihadist, but if you influence 20%, that’s enough to break their momentum and permanently infect them with the idea virus.

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To learn more about the advantage of systems versus goals in a moist robot world, see my book that is critically acclaimed by anonymous strangers on Amazon.com. Anonymous strangers are very wise.

Readership Mystery Today

Half of my blog readers today are originating from a source that Google Analytics can’t (or won’t) identify within the United States, which is odd. Most of the traffic is coming to see my post on how to be a better writer. (So the traffic isn’t about politics or anything politically incorrect.)

I can see traffic coming from Twitter, Reddit, and the usual suspects. But something else is brewing that Google can’t see. Can you fill me in?

[Answered: Tim Ferriss mentioned the post in his email newsletter.]

Trump’s Current Odds

Drip…drip…drip…

Nate Silver’s current opinion of Donald Trump’s odds, from Business Insider today:

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The way I characterize the situation is that Trump brought a flamethrower to a stick fight. What’s the track record for sticks beating flamethrowers? Hard to say, but a stick won all the other stick fights. We know that much.

To keep things fun, I predict that Ted Cruz will have a prominent cabinet position in a Trump administration. Maybe Secretary of State… or Defense. Or both. This prediction is NOT based on the Master Persuader filter. This one is based on the hypothesis that we are software beings, created by a programmer who reuses code to fill out the universe. To us, that would look as if the same patterns are popping up in unrelated realms. In 2004 I wrote a book (fiction) called The Religion War in which a hardcore leader named Cruz rises to power in the U.S. to lead the fight against an Islamic Caliphate. I called it “The Religion War.” Ted Cruz is calling it a “War on faith.”

If you read my book as a set of predictions – and it was written to be that – then it might seem weirdly accurate already. But if you imagine we are software creations, where programming code is often reused, all that is happening here is that my imagination and the observed reality used the same code snippets.

For new readers of this blog, I don’t believe everything I say here. Nor am I endorsing Trump for president. My view is that the human brain is not designed to understand its reality, and I am no exception. But some filters on the world might have better predictive power than others. That’s why I try to focus on prediction. This is for entertainment only.

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I wrote a book that is less weird than any of this. People seem to like it.

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Relevant to nothing, this is me in 1979, in Windham NY. I had just graduated college and traded my rusty, old car for a one-way ticket to California. The cheap suit was a graduation gift from my parents. I never owned a suit before that week and I didn’t know how to pack it without getting it wrinkled, so I wore it on the plane. (And to be honest, I thought all adults dressed that way to fly. I had never been on an airplane at this point.)

This picture is taken before I went to the airport, as I prepare to take a big bite out of an unsuspecting world. As the photo suggests, I was both clueless and cocky, a combination that often breeds success. (It helps to not know what can’t be done.)

Which Interpretation of DAESH is Right?

One interpretation of DAESH is that a bunch of horny young males are pursuing the only options they have in their society to obtain women. DAESH soldiers are encouraged to rape captives. They have an elaborate system for doing just that. Reports from the region say DAESH uses access to rape as a recruitment incentive.

Another interpretation of DAESH is that all the psychos somehow got together, and there are more of them than we thought. Why so many from one region? Somewhere in the comments is a link to articles about inbreeding in those societies, and allegations about how it creates a disproportionate number of young people with depression or physical handicaps. (Needs a source.) One claim is that most suicide bombers were just plain suicidal (outcasts with mental or physical issues) and they found a culturally acceptable way to kill themselves.

Then we have this interpretation in a Rod Dreher article, in which DAESH is seen as a glamorous, world-changing adventure that appeals to the young and purposeless, as all past revolutions have.

And a fourth explanation is that DAESH fighters simply believe their own interpretation of their religion, especially the parts about conquering the rest of the world.

Are all of those interpretations true to some degree? Is one more true than the others?

I can answer that with the Moist Robot filter. Under this way of thinking (which springs from the field of hypnosis) your body experiences your environment and your pitiful little brain tries to explain it. But your brain is not up to the task. It was not designed to understand reality or purpose. It simply evolved in a way that keeps you alive. Nothing more. So what you experience as your sense of reason is actually a series of rationalizations after the fact. Those rationalizations have a “tell” that is obvious only to observers: You appear crazy.

So here’s a unifying hypothesis to explain all the other explanations of ISIS. The Moist Robot filter says that young men with no access to sex will do ANYTHING in their power to fix that situation. Men in prison, for example, become temporarily sexual with each other. Young males without sexual partners will have sex with blow-up dolls, their hands, pillows, fruit, you name it. The only thing young men are incapable of doing is ignoring their sexual impulse. It’s gonna come out.

Pulling it all together, the Moist Robot hypothesis does the best job of explaining all the other hypotheses. By this way of thinking, males become horny and frustrated, with no hope of female contact in their normal lives. So – as all males do in that situation – they become more “flexible” about everything from violence to same sex relations. But our brains do not allow us to believe our bodies are controlling our thoughts. So we create little stories in our heads about why we do what we do. One story is that God says it is okay. Another story is that jihad is a glorious adventure. Another story says the Christians are the real invaders, or Israel is evil. And so on.

The Moist Robot hypothesis says that asking jihadists why they do what they do will always give you the rationalization answer and not the real one, because the people involved come to believe the stories.

To be direct, I’m saying male horniness can cause violent religious belief. It can also cause any other kind of rationalization. All that matters is that the brain concocts a “reason” for the sexual release. To be clear, male horniness can cause ANY kind of rationalization. But in the Middle East, you should not be surprised that religion fills the gaps.

So, is it true that jihadists are young idealists who find value in sacrificing for the cause? Absolutely yes, in a sense. If you ask them, they will tell you exactly that, and mean it. But the underlying cause of those beliefs is repressed male sexual energy. That’s the Moist Robot hypothesis in a nutshell.

Crazy?

By analogy, did you know your body can’t tell the difference between fear and arousal? The book Influence describes a study showing that people in scary situations will believe they are falling in love. The brain simply creates a story to explain the feelings in the body. And the story is wrong.

Did you know that fatigue often feels like hunger to your body? Your body is feeling one thing, but your brain is giving it an entirely false interpretation. You eat instead of sleep. 

My point is that humans put rationalizations (misinterpretations) on their physical sensations. In this context, a teen with a hard-on and no socially acceptable outlet will rationalize rape under the mantle of religion. And it won’t even be a hard mental leap. You could take teens from my little suburb, put them in the same situation, and some would almost instantly convert to Islam just for sexual release. But if you ask the teen why he so quickly converted, he would reply in all honesty that the religion itself sounded appealing.

You don’t need to believe anything I said here. I’ll only make one point, and I think it is important: 

People don’t know why they do what they do.

By this way of thinking, any explanation offered by a DAESH fighter is a rationalization. The real reasons for their actions are heat, horniness, and no idea how to fix either one without revolution.

As always, the real test of the Moist Robot filter is not how well it fits the data of the past (because any idea can do that) but how well it predicts. My prediction for today is that you will see lots of smart people with lots of smart explanations for why DAESH is so popular. And those explanations will be all over the map. 

That’s a tell.

We can also test the Moist Robot hypothesis by observing whether there is a correlation between access to sex and likelihood of being a suicide bomber. Anyone want to take bets?

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I see a lot of new traffic coming in other sites on this topic so I should mention that the Moist Robot idea is more developed in my book. The regular readers of this blog have more background on that.

Global Gender War

Note: My Clown Genius Post (about Trump) is nominated for a Best Writing of 2015 award called the Golden Giraffes. You can vote for it here. (Do a page search to find my name.) 

I don’t care about awards of this type, but this is an opportunity to shine some light on the Moist Robot hypothesis and the Master Persuader concepts if you think the ideas are worthy.

Now back to business…

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I wonder if the discussion of so-called radical Islam is disguising the fact that male-dominated societies are at war with female-dominated countries. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Islam doesn’t look so dangerous in countries where women can vote. 

Consider the United States.

When I go to dinner, I expect the server to take my date’s order first. I expect the server to deliver her meal first. I expect to pay the check. I expect to be the designated driver, or at least manage the transportation for the evening. And on the way out, I will hold the door for her, then open the door to the car.

When we get home, access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman. If the woman has additional preferences in terms of temperature, beverages, and whatnot, the man generally complies. If I fall in love and want to propose, I am expected to do so on my knees, to set the tone for the rest of the marriage.

Personally, I don’t go on dates. So the story above is just an example. But if I go to dinner with a female business associate, the story usually plays out the same way. The difference is that she might pick up the check if we are talking business, and the night ends earlier.

I won’t reopen the discussion of gender pay imbalance in this post. I’ll just summarize by saying that well-informed feminists don’t see much gender discrimination in the data. So if you think women in the United States are paid less for the same work, please take it up with well-informed feminists. I’m just reporting what they say.

Women have made an issue of the fact that men talk over women in meetings. In my experience, that’s true. But for full context, I interrupt anyone who talks too long without adding enough value. If most of my victims turn out to be women, I am still assumed to be the problem in this situation, not the talkers. The alternative interpretation of the situation – that women are more verbal than men – is never discussed as a contributing factor to interruptions. Can you imagine a situation where – on average – the people who talk the most do NOT get interrupted the most? I don’t know if the amount of talking each person does is related to the amount of interrupting they experience, or if there is a gender difference to it, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis. My point is that men are assumed guilty in this country. We don’t even explore their alibis. (And watch the reaction to even bringing up the topic.)

Now compare our matriarchy (that we pretend is a patriarchy) with the situation in DAESH-held territory. That’s what a male-dominated society looks like. It isn’t pretty. The top-ranked men have multiple wives and the low-ranked men either have no access to women, or they have sex with captured slaves.

While I’m being politically incorrect, let me describe to you the mind of a teenage boy. Our frontal lobes aren’t complete. We don’t imagine the future. Our bodies want sex more than we want to stay alive. Literally. Lonely boys tend to be suicidal when the odds of future female companionship are low. 

So if you are wondering how men become cold-blooded killers, it isn’t religion that is doing it. If you put me in that situation, I can say with confidence I would sign up for suicide bomb duty. And I’m not even a believer. Men like hugging better than they like killing. But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I’m designed that way. I’m a normal boy. And I make no apology for it.

Now consider the controversy over the Syrian immigrants. The photos show mostly men of fighting age. No one cares about adult men, so a 1% chance of a hidden terrorist in the group – who might someday kill women and children – is unacceptable. I have twice blogged on the idea of siphoning out the women and small kids from the Caliphate and leaving millions of innocent adult men to suffer and die. I don’t recall anyone complaining about leaving millions of innocent adult males to horrible suffering. In this country, any solution to a problem that involves killing millions of adult men is automatically on the table.

You want a linguistic kill shot to end DAESH recruiting? I don’t have the details worked out, but perhaps something along the lines of…

If you kill infidels, you will be rewarded with virgins in heaven. But if you kill your own leaders today – the ones holding the leash on our balls – you can have access to women tomorrow. And tomorrow is sooner.

Teens aren’t good at planning ahead. 

Cognitive Dissonance Update 1

In a prior post, and as part of my Master Persuader Series (about Trump), I predicted that Trump’s success would trigger cognitive dissonance the likes of which you have rarely seen. That is a tell for mass persuasion.

I give you two examples from today.

The Huffington Post tells us Donald Trump’s rise is over. They’re calling a top to his popularity and pre-gloating his demise.

At Redstate.com we learn that polls are misleading and the real leader in the GOP primary is Rubio.

While Reuters tells us Trump has surged to an all-time high in the polls.

As I have explained before, reality is subjective. Any one of those filters on reality could be as “true” as any other. But what model of reality does the best at predicting?

Keep watching and find out.

Update: And now we learn that modern polling is totally unreliable. Or better than ever. Read more here.

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If you think this blog is creepy, you should see my books. 

France

France, I hope you know we have your backs. Always will.

It’s time to put a wall around the Caliphate and remove all the heathen-built technology inside, including all forms of digital communication. We can add back food, medical supplies, and primitive farm tools. Let’s do some A-B testing and let God decide which system works best.

Sometimes the best way to change a person’s mind is by agreeing with them. That’s a trick I learned in hypnosis class. The method works so well (on the right personality types) that it looks like magic. 

So let’s actively and obviously help the bad guys achieve their Caliphate. That will rewire their brains overnight.

If you want to kill people, you need a military leader. But if you’re trying to win a global mind game, call Tony Robbins, or someone with similar skills. We need to go at the idea directly.

We have a collective illusion – because we hear it so often in the media – that you can’t kill an idea. But the truth is that you absolutely can kill an idea. You just need the right kind of killers. So far we haven’t tried. 

FYI

I am commenting on Disqus as ScottAdams925. Sorry about the confusion.

Trump on Carson

If you have nine minutes, and you want to see the most interesting political speech of all time, watch Donald Trump compare Ben Carson to other “pathological” folks such as pedophiles.

Yeah, that happened yesterday.

For those interested in my Master Persuader Filter, look for the following elements of persuasion in Trump’s performance:

1. Repetition. Lots and lots.

2. Visual imagery. Watch how visual he gets. You see movies in your head when Trump talks.

3. Trump so often referred to Carson being in second place that you think it must be true. (Depends what polls you look at.)

4. Association. Trump never calls Carson a pedophile. But he does say pedophiles are incurable, just like “pathological” Carson. You can’t unhear that association. 

5. Trump finally showed a card he has been holding back. The most frequent criticism I hear about Trump is that he might be a risky choice to handle the nuclear codes. But evidently he has a 69-year history of never being out of control. (Otherwise you would have heard about it by now.) Compare that to Gentle Ben the serial attacker (according to Carson’s autobiography).

6. Trump is holding off (for now) on the final kill shot. As I already blogged, Carson claims he cured his prostate cancer with a food supplement but went ahead with prostate surgery anyway just to be a role model. At this point in the race I assume Trump prefers Carson to be “crippled” but not killed, to keep the damper on the other challengers in the pack. 

7. Presentation skills. Holy cow. Trump has always been good at this game, but he took it up a level with the Iowa speech. I’m a professional speaker, and I was in awe. Watch his body language, his intonations, and his humor. He owned that audience. And he wasn’t reading a teleprompter. I believe this speech will be replayed in college classrooms for years as an example of best practices in persuasion.

8. Trump asks “How stupid are the people of Iowa that they would believe this crap?” or words to that effect. Influencers do not say, “The data is inaccurate.” Influencers say, “Do you want to be a gullible loser?”

Influence is about you, not data.

Remember the famous story about Steve Jobs convincing John Sculley to come work for Apple? Jobs did not describe the pay or the job benefits. He simply asked if Sculley wanted to be a person who changes the world or a person who sells sugar water. 

So ask yourself who you want to be. I do that every time I wake up.

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If you have not heard of Google or Amazon.com, and you wonder how to find out more about my latest book, here’s a helpful link. (Yes, people ask me all the time how they can find my books.)

Election Notes (Trump and Stuff)

In no particular order.

Trump the Incumbent

When Trump hosted Saturday Night Live, his opening skit involved a future fantasy with Trump as president doing great things. As regular readers of this blog noted that night, he made you think past the sale. I assume Trump was involved in approving or suggesting that theme. Brilliant persuasion technique. Probably his best move so far.

In the minds of many, Trump is already running as an incumbent president. He simply seems as if he already has the job. Trump has made you think of him as both the sitting president … and an outsider… at the same time. Hypnotists use this method so the subject will embrace the interpretation with the greatest personal appeal. Do you like Trump for being an outsider, or do you like him as the incumbent president of your imagination? Pick one. 

Not So Unelectable Trump

Among the pundit class, Trump’s odds have risen from “impossible” to “maybe.” I still say almost certainly. His odds look better than ever at the moment.

Carson the Competitor

What is the best situation for Donald Trump at this stage of the election cycle? I would think his best situation is running neck-and-neck against Ben Carson. That keeps the insiders (Rubio, Cruz, etc.) at bay while giving Trump the most beatable rival when it comes to the final weeks of the nomination run. 

According to The Daily Beast, Carson claims he cured his prostate cancer with a diet supplement, yet he went ahead and had prostate surgery anyway to serve as a role model. And… the supplement company was paying him to talk about their product.

You can assume Trump is saving that little beauty for when he needs it. Keep in mind that the biggest criticism of Trump is that he is a snake oil salesman. But he might be running against a doctor who literally sold overhyped supplements for a living. You can’t get a better Trump matchup than that. But Trump will wait to deliver the Carson kill shot until Carson’s strength drives out the stronger competitors. 

I’m not convinced that the reports about Carson’s claims of prostate “cure” are accurate, given the false reports against him recently. But I haven’t heard this one debunked yet.

Winner of the Debate

I picked Cruz as the winner of the debate. He had the best line of the night when he said things would be different if immigration were suppressing the wages of the media instead of blue collar workers. But Cruz’s lawyerly debate excellence is largely lost on the public. I’m not sure anyone cares who has the most coherent arguments. 

Who I Want to Win

If Trump wins, I will get some bragging rights for calling it early. But I don’t see it changing my net worth. And people will quickly forget that a blind squirrel found one nut. In the short run, it has been good for web traffic and book sales, but not in a life-changing way.

If Carson wins, and he gets his 10% tithing tax plan, I would get a major windfall at the expense of the middle class. That might not sound fair to you, but if Carson says God is okay with it, who am I to argue?

If Cruz wins, I will be directing people to my sequel to God’s Debris, titled The Religion War. The latter book, written in 2004, is set in the future, not far from today, when a Caliphate rises in the Middle East and a hardline conservative leader in the West named Cruz takes control of the fight against them. (Different first name.) In the book, the Caliphate starts sponsoring hobby-sized drone attacks against the United States using sleeper cells. If that happens during a Cruz presidency, it would be good for my book sales. But very bad for the world. That doesn’t seem like a good deal for me.

Rubio

I think 2024 will be his time. He is smart to set himself up for it now. That’s all I see happening.

Who Would Keep Us Safest?

Carson seems the biggest pacifist of the poll leaders (by personality not policy), and that feels dangerous to me. Would other leaders fear him? The man can’t even win a knife fight against a belt buckle.

Trump has a history of wanting the United States to stay out of unproductive fights. And he also wants the strongest military. That seems like the safest situation. Trump also owns large buildings that can’t be defended. I don’t see him starting any unnecessary wars. And his famous exaggerations about our military could reduce the risk of other countries getting adventurous.

The Kinder, Nicer Trump

A few weeks ago Trump signaled that he planned to improve his likability. He softened his tone and moved to a more presidential demeanor. His SNL appearance helped. And you all saw him wade into a crowd and address the problems of a wounded warrior. The media is noticing. Expect Trump’s “niceness campaign” to work. His poll numbers on that dimension should improve by the end of the month. And folks will stop worrying about him having the nuclear codes. In a month Trump will seem like the only rational player in a field of crazies. (Opposite of what you thought in July.)

Fiorina’s Decline

After the second debate, pundits declared Fiorina the winner, and her poll numbers surged. I declared her a loser (using the Master Persuader filter) because she paired her image with that of a dead baby. To me, that was the worst political move of all time. Ever. After the surge, Fiorina’s poll numbers have drifted down, as I predicted.

Bernie Sanders Surges

Bernie Sanders looks terrific in national polls against both Trump and Carson. But I suspect some of that strength has to do with Sanders not being Hillary Clinton. Democrats might be sensing desperation by now. They know that Trump would beat Clinton like a rented drum. The matchup is terrible for Clinton; she would do better against a traditional candidate who will argue the issues and not brand her as the Evil Lying Witch of the West.

I think Sanders would beat Carson in a general election. But so would any other Democrat because of Carson’s prostate “cure” claim. However, if the Democrats run a socialist against the most famous capitalist of all time – and one who wants to tax the hedge funds and corporations more – that looks like a Trump landslide to me.

New Prediction

Trump has criticized the Iran deal because we didn’t get our prisoners back. I think candidate Trump will try to get it done before election. 

Impossible you say?

All Trump needs to do is take some version of this message to the Iranian leadership via private channels: If you release the hostages now, I’ll go easy on you when I’m president. If not, I will unleash economic Hell on day one and never let up. Now tell me how important those four people are to the Iranian future.

He wouldn’t be bluffing.

I don’t predict Trump will try to get back the hostages. But I give him 60% odds of success if he tries. And that is how landslides get made.

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I wrote this book too.