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Obama Vs. Iran - Who is the Wizard?

This is a good time to remind you that the Master Wizard Hypothesis I have been blogging about is for entertainment, not enlightenment. Truth is probably at a different URL. And I remind you that you should never take advice from cartoonists on issues such as nuclear proliferation. That is just one example.

The larger context of the Master Wizard Hypothesis is showing you some of the science-tested methods of persuasion on display from various leaders. The fun part (I hope) is seeing how well my predictions fit the data compared to whatever crystal ball you were using before. (None of this should be confused with science.)

That said… 

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A popular American view of the Iran nuclear deal is that President Obama, a Kenyan Muslim, has gutted our government from within and now he is surrendering to Iran, a sworn enemy that plans to destroy us, and themselves at the same time, because someone picked the wrong God. 

The weaker view is that Obama unnecessarily made a bad deal that exposes Israel and the United States to catastrophic risk. Those sanctions would have worked in the long run, say this group of critics. Or maybe we could have looked extra-hard and found everything that needed a good bombing. Any military action would presumably continue forever because if we stopped bombing Iran, one assumes they might get all revengy. Realistically, once you start bombing, you have to keep that line item in the budget forever. But it might be better than nuclear annihilation, say the critics.

Then there are the optimists who assume our government would not agree to the deal we have been shown, so surely there must be lots of secret side deals that make Iran and America allies behind the scenes. I want to believe that version, so look for my cognitive bias as I tell you how this deal looks through the Master Wizard filter.

For starters, I have blogged that Obama is a Master Wizard of persuasion. He uses the same science-tested tools of persuasion that Trump uses, and to similar good effect. That is all described in the backlog of my blog here. (#Trump)

So we know we have in Obama a Master Wizard on one side of the Iran deal. According to the Master Wizard Hypothesis, The United States almost certainly “won” the negotiations even if the information that has been made public does not support that view. A Master Wizard would not lose a negotiation against an untrained opponent. (Even if he was not in the same room.)

But what if you have a Master Wizard on the other side? Wizard-on-Wizard is harder to predict. To dig into that question, I give you three quotes from Iranian President Rouhani, from his 60 Minutes Interview. Then I explain his technique.

Rouhani: “Of course, for reaching trust between the U.S. and Iran, there is need for a lot of time.”

Persuasion Method: Big Picture Maneuver. He takes us to a perspective where everyone agrees that if you wait long enough, anything can change. And we know patience is a good thing. The first person in a conversation to use the big picture maneuver always sounds like the wisest person in the room. In this case, our egos recognize Rouhani’s linguistic challenge to rise to his big-picture level of wisdom, and we do so automatically. We are wired to do so. Knowing it is a persuasion method does not protect you from the effect.

Rouhani: “The enmity that existed between the United States and Iran over the decades , the distance, the disagreements, the lack of trust, will not go away soon. What’s important is which direction we are heading? Are we heading towards amplifying the enmity or decreasing this enmity? I believe we have taken the first steps towards decreasing this enmity.

Persuasion Method: Big Picture Maneuver again. The first person in a conversation to say some version of “The direction of things matters most” always sounds the wisest. Your ego is triggered to join Rouhani on the level of wise people who understand that life is about direction, not destination. And by now Rouhani has established a pattern of saying big picture things that make you agree. Every time you agree with one thing – no matter how trivial – it primes you to agree with the next. So using the big picture maneuver more than once compounds its power by creating a pattern in your mind.

Rouhani: “We cannot forget the past, but at the same time our gaze must be towards the future.”

Persuasion Method: That sentence is a tell for a Master Wizard. It is engineered to a degree that made me tingle when I read it. I think I could write a thesis on it, but here are a few standout points:

1. “Cannot forget the past” will be processed by most brains as “forget the past.” Rouhani needs both sides to forget the past in order to move on. But on the surface he must say we “cannot forget” because that agrees with what everyone believes, so we let in that agreeable thought without editing. Once past your guard, the word “cannot” dissolves. What is left is “forget the past.”

2. Rouhani uses at least three Big Picture Maneuvers in one interview. All three get at the same issue of being patient and moving slowly in the right direction. But because each of Rouhani’s quotes comes at it differently, it is like working your abs with three exercises instead of one. Rouhani came at Kroft with a hat trick of Big Picture Maneuvers that he finished off in one perfect thought: “We cannot forget the past, but at the same time our gaze must be towards the future.”

My Verdict: Rouhani is a Master Wizard.

Okay, okay. I know what you are thinking. You’re thinking that none of this matters because Rouhani is not the real power in Iran. The real decisions come from The Supreme Leader, Khamenei. 

That was certainly the case with Iran’s last president. That guy didn’t seem to have much power.

But the last president wasn’t a Master Wizard. Look for Khamenei to support whatever deal Rouhani makes.

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In Top Tech Blog, now we can do an MRI scan of internal organs and create 3D digital models of them. How long before HP comes out with a scanner/printer that lets you scan your heart, print it out, keep it beating with a potato battery, and have the coolest science project of all time? That has A+ written all over it.

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Who is the Better Business Person - Trump or Fiorina?

The common wisdom goes like this:

1. Fiorina ruined HP and Lucent totally by herself yet made a fortune in CEO pay. Therefore, Fiorina is bad at business. She only makes money for herself, not the stockholders. Also, she eats employees and poops them out. 

2. On the other hand, Donald Trump is a successful entrepreneur across several lines of business. Therefore, he is the better business person.

But then you say…

3. “But what about Trump’s four bankruptcies? His partners lost money!”

Then someone with more than ten minutes of business experience says…

4. Trump had a diversified portfolio of holdings. Some were guaranteed to be better than others. So he did the smart thing and created separate entities that could fail individually, just like any stock investor with a diversified portfolio. Plus, banks and investors require that sort of separation as a requirement for funding. There really wasn’t a second way to do it.

But then you say…

5. “I saw a calculation that said Trump would be richer now if all he did was invest the tens-of-millions he got in inheritance in stocks. So he must be bad at business.”

Then I say…

6. Trump’s successful run for the presidency (if he succeeds) will make the Trump brand ten-times more valuable by the time he leaves office. The presidency is an investment for Trump in ways it would not be for anyone else. Becoming President, should it happen, makes the Trump brand valuable in perpetuity whereas otherwise it might have withered after his passing.

After you hear that last point, perhaps you think Trump is a far better business person than Fiorina. All she did was ruin HP and Lucent. At least Trump built some businesses and created jobs, even if several of his ventures could have worked out better.

Now I will convince you that Fiorina is Trump’s equal in business, as far as we can tell.

For starters, both Trump and Fiorina are capitalists operating within the rules of the system. The point of capitalism is to maximize your own gain, not the gain of your customers or your stockholders. We like to happy-talk about how everyone is in it as a team, but capitalism only works if we all know that to be a lie. The system works best when people pursue an enlightened selfishness that understands how things work. Here I am not judging capitalism; I am simply describing it. 

So, by the standards of business, and the rules of capitalism, Fiorina elbowed her way to the top of two enormous companies and walked away richer each time. That is an A+ performance under the rules of capitalism. 

Was Fiorina’s management bad for shareholders and employees? Maybe. But since we don’t know how another CEO would have performed in each of her situations we are left to imagine it. And then we confuse our biases with reason.

There’s a reason that science demands a control case. Without the control, test results have no meaning. Yet we think we can judge Fiorina’s job performance without a control. If there is no control, it ain’t science. And if it ain’t science, it is just guessing.

I know I haven’t changed your mind about Fiorina’s business skills yet. But I’m not done either. I was saving my best point for last. 

I call this move The High Ground Maneuver, and by now my regular readers are alert to this method of persuasion. Watch how powerful it is even though I pointed out my method in advance. 

— The High Ground Maneuver —

I say…

Every seasoned business person knows that failure teaches you more than success. Trump has had plenty of failures. He knows what they look like, he knows how to manage risk, and he knows how to recover. 

Likewise, Fiorina has been in the corporate cage-fights for years. One assumes she picked up some skills because – in case you haven’t noticed – she shook off all of that bad press from HP and Lucent and made herself a legitimate contender to lead the largest economy on the planet.

Is Fiornia bad at business? Maybe. But the scoreboard (her bank account and her surge in the polls) say otherwise. That is the only objective data we have. To say more would involve imagining how things would have gone at HP and Lucent without Fiorina. And your imagination is not evidence.

I say Trump and Fiorina are both super-hardened by failure. Both are at the tops of their games, and both are serious contenders for the presidency. Given the data at hand, if you don’t see Trump and Fiorina as equals in terms of business skills, you might want to have a talk with yourself about gender bias.

If you would like to learn more about how companies can extract value from failure, read The Other F-Word, by John Danner and Mark Coopersmith. They teach at Haas School of Business (Berkeley), where I got my MBA long ago. Now I work with them in the Berkeley start-up ecosystem. 

My book takes a similar view on failure, but in the context of the individual. 

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In Top Tech Blog, whenever I see a story that says science has figured out a way to “mimic a spleen,” I get worried that the rest of my body will become worthless too. The spleen is like the canary in the colon. It always goes first.

Calling Jimmy from the Third Dimension

Have you ever randomly turned on your television and discovered that the topic was you? I have, several times. It’s a freaky experience. The whole world becomes tiny for an instant – so small that it all fits in your living room – then it slowly expands to where it was.

Anyway, some friends saw me taking a walk last night and alerted me that I was mentioned on The Tonight Show. It was easy to find the quote on Google. I’m glad I didn’t see it live because of the freakiness factor. Here it is:

“The creator of Dilbert predicted that Trump will win the presidency and also compared him to Jesus. And people hope he’s right because they would love a three-day break from Donald Trump.” – The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

In two-dimensional chess, both Trump and I have been dismissed in cartoon fashion in service of the joke. And that’s fair. We’re all professionals. I’m sure the joke succeeded with the audience. Viewed from the perspective of the two-dimensional world, some might say I am diminished in some small way because the Jesus reference is intentionally used out of context to make me look foolish. That would be bad.

But in the third dimension, where I live and work, associations matter more than reason. And Jimmy Fallon referred to me as “the creator” in the same sentence with Jesus and the next President of the United States.

Trade-off accepted.

How was your day?

Checking My Gender Bias - Master Wizard Hypothesis

I’ve been blogging about my Master Wizard Hypothesis while focusing on Donald Trump and a number of other men. For the sake of balance, I will “out” for you two of the greatest living female Master Wizards of persuasion. Before I tell you their names, see if you can guess who they are based on my list of known tells for a Master Wizard.

1. Unusual success in a field, as if coming from out of nowhere.

2. A gifted communicator with a simple, visual, story-telling style.

3. A big influence on hundreds of millions of people.

4. A tie to a known wizard.

5. High intelligence.

6. Success in a variety of business ventures.

7. Unusually high productivity.

Okay. What famous women, still living, fit all of the tells for a Master Wizard of persuasion? If you are coming up blank, you might be a sexist.

Are you ready for the answers?

1. You should have guessed this one.

But here comes the funnier one. Remember: They hide in plain sight. That’s part of the skill set. 

2. I’ll bet you didn’t guess this Master Wizard.

See? Hiding in plain sight.

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Reminder to new readers: The Master Wizard Hypothesis is just for entertainment. There are many ways to view the world. This one just happens to fit the data. Your way of viewing the world might work great too.

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I wrote this book. If you don’t read it, someday you will be the only one in the room who doesn’t understand why systems are better than goals. And I will feel bad for you. But you will have it coming for not reading my book. Karma. Just saying. Play it safe.

Thinking Past the Sale - Trump Persuasion Series

Trump issued a series of five tweets in quick succession as a response to the controversy over the Obama-birther guy at the Trump event.

Why five tweets?

I assume the two-dimensional chess pundits will tell you it is a sign of desperation from a campaign that was always destined to flame out. Sure looks like a guy grasping at straws, right?

Maybe it is.

The Master Wizard Hypothesis has another filter on this. According to this way of thinking, Trump just made you think about which of several reasons you will choose to agree with him.

He made you think past the sale.

And to get there he said at least one, maybe two, things you agree with. That’s pacing. It is a tell.

On the Master Wizard scale, this was an A+ performance in engineered persuasion. Will it be enough?

Depends what the Master Wizard in the White House does next.

— Reminder —

I remind readers that the Master Wizard Hypothesis is for entertainment, not enlightenment. Truth is at a different URL. All we are doing here is seeing how well the data fits the hypothesis, especially for predictions. This is just for fun. And yes, I am forcing the data to fit the hypothesis. That is the whole point. You should do the same with whatever hypothesis you prefer as an explanation of Trump’s success so far. Then compare. None of this should be confused with science.

The Scariest Executive Order. Ever.

Do you want to read the scariest executive order that ever came from a Master Wizard?

If you have been reading my Master Wizard Hypothesis series, and you also like science fiction movies, see if you can find the moment that humanity decided to evolve into fuel for our future robot overlords.

It’s right in the title.

[For the record, I am kidding. And by that I mean maybe.]

Running Against a Branding Wizard - Trump Series

Who thought they could beat a branding wizard in a political race? Ask Sweaty, Plenty, Nice, Robot, or Low-energy.

To be fair, Trump’s opponents have also branded him… as a person who speaks his mind and doesn’t pretend to know more than he does.

Let’s call that roughly equal.

By the way, labeling Rubio “sweaty” is a brilliant debate tactics for next time. If you are a person who perspires heavily on stage, the one thing you do NOT want to do is think about it on stage. Makes it far worse. Expect Rubio to be a flop-sweat mess at the next debate.

And my favorite Jedi mind trick that Trump used in the first debate was directed toward Rand Paul. Trump said, “You’re having a hard time tonight.” That is weapons-grade mindf*cking.

I haven’t mentioned Walker, but only because voters probably don’t know that he and Rubio are different people. As I watched the second debate, I imagined the viewing public wondering why Rubio sometimes looked handsome and sometimes goofy. They probably thought it was a lighting problem.

If your firewall is preventing my illegal comics from pretending to be residents in your corporate servers, you can usually find them seeking amnesty on Twitter at @ScottAdamsSays

Trump Linguistic Kill Shot Alert!

Master Wizard Hypothesis Mode: ON

This just in … Trump is calling Fiorina “very robotic.”

How clever is that?

Let me count the ways.

Half of you just thought about Botox injections, didn’t you. 

Trump never said anything about Botox, and he clearly said Fiorina’s ACTIONS were robotic, not her looks. Specifically, Trump says she repeats the same memorized lines like a robot.

But I’ll bet many of you heard the word robot in relation to Fiorina and automatically thought of her stern, unsmiling face. Can that robot smile, you wonder? Does it have feelings like people?

Trump got that association in your mind for free. With total deniability.

This linguistic kill shot works on another level too. Remember my post about Obama, the Master Wizard, winking at Trump so hard it made Trump change his campaign slogan to “greater”? Obama did that to nudge Trump off his game, basketball-style. Obama leaned into him and put him off balance. Trump recovered, but you know it got into his head, as intended. 

Now we see Trump do the same basketball-style lean-in on Fiorina. When Trump called attention to her memorized performance he forced her to choose between changing to an uncomfortable new style or be ridiculed as a robot.

Once again, Trump has found a fresh word with no baggage in the realm of politics, yet the word is quotable and current. And it puts into language what you were probably feeling in a vague sense. It made your feelings real.

See a pattern yet? If so, you are seeing the Master Wizard Hypothesis come to life before your eyes.

If not, you may continue to believe Trump sprays random insults in every direction because he is a big, dumb, rich jerk. You could be right.

Unless there’s a pattern. And it keeps working.

People Who Don’t Know How Business Works - Trump Persuasion Series

Over at Quartz, someone who doesn’t know things explains to us why both Fiorina and Trump are failures at business. The explanation goes like this:

Trump had four separate bankruptcies on four individual properties. 

Fiorina’s was CEO of both HP and Lucent, and things went poorly at both places. 

Sounds bad, right? I mean, Trump and Fiorina both sound like terrible decision-makers. 

Assuming you are an Art Major. 

People who have ten minutes of business experience probably see it differently.

The truth is that none of us have the minimum data to make an informed decision about how well either of them managed anything. 

How many of Trump’s properties performed well? And what were the circumstances of the bankruptcies? Professional investors know that a broad portfolio of holdings should be separated into entities than can fail without taking down the others. Trump did that. In his line of work, some failures are guaranteed. The only things we know for sure are that he set up the right kind of corporate structures and enough of his ventures went right for him to be a multi-billionaire. 

Likewise, when looking at Fiorina’s record, you have to ask yourself how things would have worked out at HP and Lucent with a different CEO. And that we can’t know. If you think you know how Fiorina performed compared to the imaginary base case in your mind, you are probably projecting some bias into the situation.

So what do we know for sure about both Trump and Fiorina, business-wise?

We know both of them are seasoned at the highest levels of business. Both of them have made loads of money for themselves. And both of them are serious contenders to lead the most powerful nation in the world. 

Or – as the art majors say – total failures at business.

When Wives Attack - Trump Persuasion Series

If you watched the second debate, you saw Carly Fiorina’s great retort about Trump’s insulting “look at that face” comment. Fiorina said, “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.” 

It was brilliantly open-ended (wizard-style!). The viewer filled in the blanks with whatever is the worst interpretation possible. That would have been a kill shot for any normal candidate, but Trump’s persona provides some armor.

In other news, Hillary Clinton recently tweeted that Trump should “cut it out.” She was referring to Trump’s decision to not correct a voter who thinks Obama is a dangerous Muslim. 

On paper, this looks like a bad week for Trump. But let’s dig a little deeper, to the Master Wizard dimension, where persuasion is based on emotion, not reason. Here things become less clear. And that takes some explaining.

The following thinking is stolen from slatestarcodex.com, a blog you should be reading. I am too lazy to find the direct link. My version is a bastard version, so don’t blame anyone else if this doesn’t make sense.

What do these Trump gaffes have in common:

1. Trump referred to blood coming out of Megyn Kelly’s vagina.

2. Trump insulted the attractiveness of Fiorina’s face.

If you are man, you already know the answer: Neither thing happened in reality.

The blood comment was obviously just Trump trying to correct his first statement that “blood was coming out of her eyes.” Since blood does not come out of eyes, but it sounds somewhat like a famous saying, Trump was thinking aloud about where else blood might be spurting from in order to create a visual analogy for anger. I doubt “vagina” was on Trump’s short list.

And when Trump said about Fiorina, “Look at that face,” it seems obvious to me that he was speaking about Fiorina’s stern look, not her sex appeal. And I think that is obvious simply because Fiorina is attractive. I don’t think Trump lied when he complimented her physical appearance at the debate.

The Slatestarcodex.com point I am stealing is that the stories most likely to make headlines are THE ONES LEAST LIKELY TO BE TRUE. There is a common-sense reason that will make you laugh when you hear it. Here it is.

True stuff isn’t interesting because it all makes sense.

In order for a headline to be “news” (unless violence is involved) there has to be a head-scratching element to it. You have to wonder how-the-hell someone could act so inappropriately, sexist, racist, whatever. So when you see “news” about a person’s outrageous behavior revealing their terrible inner soul, the facts upon which it is based are unlikely to be true. News isn’t news until it doesn’t make sense.

Do you believe Trump was making a public joke about a reporter’s vagina bleeding while running for president? Hard to believe. But you tell yourself that Trump does insult people, and he is sort of sexist in a general way, so … maybe?

Do you believe Trump made a sexist comment to a Rolling Stone reporter who was literally writing down everything Trump said? Hard to believe. But you tell yourself that Trump is a loose cannon, so… maybe? 

That’s what makes a story. You have to simultaneously doubt it happened while believing it happened. When people do predictable things, in character, it is not news. That’s why the news is often fake. Real stuff isn’t interesting.

But back to my point.

To my ears, both Fiorina and Clinton were treating Trump like a husband, not a candidate. Men, has a women ever been mad at you and refused to give you details about what made her mad? That was Fiorina telling the world that women know what the problem is with Trump, and details are not needed.

And Clinton’s “cut it out” sounds more like a spouse rebuke than politics. That’s how it came across to me, on an emotional level. I bristled.

So here’s how I score Trump’s week on the Wizard scale. I think many men bonded with Trump this week. Men feel the pain of female anger that has an unspecified cause, in this case from Fiorina. We feel the “cut it out” from Clinton. And we don’t want to experience eight years of man-scolding and fake apologizing for nothing.

I predict you will see Trump’s numbers among men remain strong or improve.

Women are harder to predict. But I am going to reveal a secret to women that men already know: Many women really, really, dislike other women in power. Or at least that’s what women tell me privately. Everyone is different, but that’s what I hear most often. I will look to the comments to see if my experience is unique.

So I think Trump’s “woman problem” will worsen for women voters who care about sexist remarks from a clown. That might be 25-50% of women, based on my personal experience. The rest of women probably dislike Clinton and Fiorina for whatever set of reasons some women use to hate other women in power. So my second prediction is that the more Trump gets slapped down by powerful women, the more popular he will become. With women. 

Now you have a prediction for comparing the Master Wizard Hypothesis to your standard way of viewing the world. The standard model says Trump’s “woman problem” will get worse because of recent events and probably more to come. The wizard filter says Trump’s popularity with women will stay far higher than the pundit class can explain. 

I remind new readers that I have no idea who would be the best president. I am not that psychic. My obsession with Trump has to do with his persuasion skills. 

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In Top Tech Blog, now we have a material that heals when you shoot a bullet through it. As if robots needed another advantage in the coming war.

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In other news, some people like my book.