Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter

by Scott Adams

Nick Bostrom takes things one step further by asking whether we are a “real” species or a simulation created by an intelligent civilization that came before. This idea comes from the simple fact that we will someday be able to create software simulations that believe they are real creatures. And when we achieve that level of technical proficiency, we’re unlikely to stop with one simulation of that type. In the long run, you could expect far more simulated realities than the real one that started it all. So the math of it says we are far more likely to be a simulation than an original species. The interesting thing here is that neither the real species nor the simulations would be in a position to know which one they are. (But just for fun, in appendix C, I propose a way to figure out whether you are real or simulated.)

“the McGurk effect.”

the best way to objectively determine the usefulness of a filter is by asking if it makes you happy and also does a good job of predicting the future.

believed everything the church told me because I didn’t see any reason they would put so much energy into a centuries-long, elaborate lie. And I assumed all those people couldn’t be wrong.

you become aware that your perceptions are independent from the underlying reality. That awareness never leaves you. Once you understand your experience of life as an interpretation of reality, you can’t go back to your old way of thinking.

the biggest benefit of learning hypnosis is what it does to your worldview, and how it influences all of your decisions

Obviously the facts and policies do matter to outcomes. But in terms of persuasion, facts and policies and reason are almost useless.

The illusion is that you have this thing called common sense and many others do not. The Persuasion Filter takes it one step further and says no one has common sense. According to the filter, sometimes we make good choices and sometimes we don’t.

This instinct to support our own team is the reason major sports are big business. It makes no logical sense to support your local team just because it is local. But we do. It is a reflex.

reticular activation.

If you can’t change your habits, acknowledge them with humor and wait for people to get used to you. If your intentions are good, sometimes that’s all you need.

What you say is important, but it is never as important as what people think you are thinking.

In emotion-charged situations such as elections, we decide first and rationalize later.

In the context of science, the simplest explanation that explains your observations is more likely to be right than the one with hundreds of variables and assumptions. But when you take Occam’s razor to the nonscience world, it quickly becomes nonsense. The reality is that we humans fool ourselves into thinking that the explanation of the world we hold in our minds is usually the simplest one.

For a war against Hillbullies.

the human mind is not equipped to understand reality in any deep way. Instead, we create little movies in our minds, and we live in those movies until events in the observable world make that impossible. When our current movie fails, we subconsciously call for a mental rewrite of the script, and our movie changes to fit the observed facts.