Worth noting simply for the technique:
Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that “ABC does not tolerate comments like those” made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?
-@RealDonaldTrump
Trump’s tweets fascinate me because he is the master of persuasion. I often find masters seem to have, at some point in their development, identified a simple core premise, easily remembered and applied constantly, which they then internalize, practice endlessly, and the resulting skillset is then used as a foundation of their mastery.
For Trump, I think a core concept may have been the concept of resistance in hypnosis. Resistance may best be described as a tweak of the amygdala. Often it is so small as to merely be a minor quirk of the phrase which the brain identifies, almost subconsciously, as aversive in some way.
It may be a technical aspect of the statement which your brain identifies as difficult to corroborate completely. I see this with absolute statements, which leave no wiggle room in their assertions. The statement and the absolute aspect may be technically correct, but to a novice to the subject you are discussing, it will still trigger caution in adopting the statement. That caution is amygdala, and that amygdala is resistance. And that is a person who will not think like you, and who may not have even been slightly moved toward thinking like you, because of that resistance.
Resistance may be an aspect of the idea which triggers too much cognitive dissonance in the brain of an ideologue, and thus is unable to be accepted. This could be a theme, a fact, or even something which demonstrates unequivocally that the ideology of the observer is incorrect. Again, the autistic, as I was just a few years back, will present these harsh, shocking facts unmasked and in the open, and not understand why their persuasion is lacking. But the persuader may actually diminish the emphasis on the facts, or present them as supportive of the observer’s stance instead of their own. Milton Erickson would actually incorporate the idea he wanted to communicate into a story about something totally unrelated to his target, and specifically designed to not trigger his target. But the story would be designed to implant the core idea in the brain, and leave it perceived as a harmless, non-triggering reality which would bloom later into a realization.
As I look out on it, going forward I am going to try and use the core concept of resistance, mildly reimagined as the concept of amygdala to train my brain constantly. I am beginning to notice as I write that I write some concepts, and on the re-read, from the perspective of an observer who knows nothing of the issue, I find that I can feel my amygdala trigger in very minor ways when things are phrased one way. I can then rephrase them in ways that the amygdala of an unschooled observer will not trigger on seeing it.
I can also feel sometimes that when I broach a subject, even when the idea is completely correct, that the neophyte to the issue will feel resistance because the concept is in some way harsh. In such a case I will remove the subject, and try to bring around something similar, but less harsh, which may point to the harsh conclusion if you think about it enough.
Here, Trump is looking at his presentation of himself on a much larger scale, when deciding what to broach with respect to Rosanne. The Rosanne issue had to be addressed. He could have defended her, or attacked her, but that would be amygdala-triggering in one population or another. So he chose an idea that is 100% factually correct, which skips entirely what she said (which just due to the conflict will produce resistance on all sides). Notice also how it attaches all of its negativity to Bob Iger, who is portrayed as wronging innocent people (which is proven subconsciously by his documented apologizing), and then not apologizing to Trump despite having wronged him.
When I look at this tweet, I see an avoidance of resistance and amygdala in the viewer as a driving force in its creation. I think that is how I would recreate this myself, and thus follow in the God Emperor’s master-persuading intellectual foot steps one day, more than any approach-driven method pulling me toward a specific topic.
It is vastly different from how I thought before observing Trump and reading Scott Adams, and the hypnosis material I have been reviewing. Before, I looked at what I wanted to say and how to say it, but now I try to scan for what I do not want to say, and how I do not want to say it.
I think that is what I am trying to communicate. That process of avoidance may be a core concept in one aspect of persuasion, and it is where I am beginning, because I am a neophyte. But I suspect that in Trump, with decades of practice, he has so internalized that avoidance that it has emerged as an internal compass which instinctively points him in the right direction by paring away all of the wrong directions. As you learn what to avoid through practice every day, you learn what you can approach, and that becomes an instinct.
It will take more effort. It is much easier to think about one thing you want to say, than to process fifteen or twenty different things you do not want to say, while trying to locate the one version which offers little or no resistance among those listening.
Resistance is not everything. Words and ideas can contaminate each other with their different meanings and emotional valences when presented together. The mind is susceptible to making connections and/or drawing conclusions about implied or vague things without consciously realizing it. Ideas can drift in while the amygdala is distracted with other stimuli. The mind can build beliefs with subsequent repetitions of the concept, or perceived proofs. And the mind does calculate probabilities with respect to truth using things like the Overton window and perceptions of social pressure.
But resistance is a core concept which I think everyone on the right who presents ideas needs to understand and begin using to develop their mind to be more like the God Emperor when making arguments. We tend to be blind to this idea, as we embrace amygdala, and like the clash of ideas in intellectual fights.
The amygdala hijack still has utility with leftists and others who can never be reasoned with. But not everybody in the middle is like us in embracing amygdala or like the hard left in fleeing it to a degree reason is impossible.
As Trump has shown, if you craft your messages to appeal to everyone in your target audience of reasonable moderates, there may be no end to the winning you can enjoy.
This is probably why Vox Day has been having the interactions he’s had regarding his takedown of Jordan Peterson. Despite having cited the IQ gap himself many times, his world is one which is considerably less grey because of how well read and how intelligent he is. He sees a problem, connects the dots, and then tells people the results.
Folks who can’t connect the dots themselves cannot also struggle to comprehend that the dots could even be connected at all, so the reaction is often defensive in Jordan Peterson’s favor, even if Vox is completely correct. It’s almost as if, because of his higher intelligence, he doesn’t know how to make it any simpler, break it down into digestible bits, and sadly due to the years of burnout from MPAI, as well as the many parallel projects he’s trying to manage in addition to having a private life, his willingness to try is nonexistent.
But this really shouldn’t be a surprise.
From a professional standpoint, we “know” that just because someone is a good engineer that they are not necessarily a good manager. Just because someone knows a topic really well, does not mean they can teach it to someone else. While these folks mock those who can, “those that can’t do teach”, they’re missing out on the important aspect of bringing people alongside you and equipping them to work with you. It’s not forming a herd, but training your pack.
An anecdote from my own experience is trying to learn guitar from someone who is already very skilled. They’d play a particular series of notes, look to me and say “ok now you do that”, and not comprehend that there are many smaller steps, muscle memories, that need to be trained well before I could “just do” a particular chord progression.
The internet equivalent is “lurk moar” or “LMGTFY”, where folks don’t realize that folks don’t even know where to start, and one can find evidence of anything you want on the internet, so merely searching doesn’t tell you whether what you’ve found is really helpful and educational to you or not.
This is part of what I think you’re getting at with this post. Trump knows how to train people through more carefully crafting how he interacts. They mocked his simple language, but Scott Adams talked about how simpler language is also more persuasive, and for the reasons you’ve talked about in this post.
Trump is obviously smart and knows his stuff at the detail level, down in the weeds, but he also knows how to bridge the gap between those who don’t know and those who do, even if it’s needing to be done over a period of time. He knows how to win people over, to recruit, to motivate and engage with them uniquely even if he’s operating by generic guidelines. He knows how to play the long game and short game and win, but also let those he’s interacting with share in the glory as well.
That would go a long way to help explaining why, despite having superior ideas and rationality behind them, “conservatives” on the whole have always been losing ground to “liberals”, because the focus has been on being right, not on being leaders and building actual movements of correctly competent people that have impact in the real world. “Liberals” don’t care about the details as much as getting results, and they’ve gotten very good at doing that.
Most people on the “right” still behave as if, once they’ve presented the “correct answer”, that their work is done and Trump continuously demonstrates that the work has only just begun. We’ve built technical competency, knowledge and detail, but lack the ability to manifest it into anything meaningful, so the proficiency is almost irrelevant.
While at the individual level I can swallow this painful realization in private, I am a nobody with no history to contradict with my new understanding, it’s plain to see that a lot of folks cannot make the jump, and so Trump is not only having to try and make the forward progress necessary to “save the country”, but also to try and bring along as many as he can to help with that process.
So, since we know he can do that, all I can do is thank God for Trump, he’s apparently the perfect man for this job who is in the right place at the right time to turn the tide. Whoever follows may still mess it all up, nothing’s set in stone, but I am tempted to be optimistic these days.
Amen.
My consulting job is essentially bridging that gap. I take complex subjects and break them down until they can be followed (well enough) by regular folk. I think that my superpower has always been the ability to actually empathize with less intelligent people and put myself in their shoes, looking at it from their standpoint. It really is magic. (One of my clients described me to his colleague as “the guy I go to when I want to know what people who shop at Walmart think.”)
I think that gap is one of the major things holding JBP back. I saw his spoken word thing recently in person, and I was struck how he goes astray on the most basic of premises despite his pessimism. One of the major ones is that he said, “most people are done with just being comfortable, they want to make the world better.” I had to mentally correct that to “most people JBP has had contact with want to make the world better, because most people he’s had contact with are born from Christendom and instilled with the Protestant work ethic. Most people in the world don’t give two shits about making the world a better place after they are personally comfortable.”
If you go to those people with a “let’s make the world a better place” sell, you will fail every time. You need to sell them on “making the world a better place will make you more comfortable.”
“…Vox Day has been having the interactions he’s had regarding his takedown of Jordan Peterson…”
I admit to being too dull to see the danger in Jordan Peterson promotion and Peterson had phrased things. I haven’t studied him just seen a couple videos. Vox Day made it very plain to me the errors of Peterson. So I do think he is effective.
AC I understand I think all your post but this one gives me a little trouble. I fully understand what Trump did in his tweet and how this relates to resistance but…the general principle and how to apply it I think is hazy to me. I hope you’ll provide other examples when you see them.
I saw a link, I think from one of the commenters here, about a group that are using the “chan” servers and bots to do a serious mind warp on the Left.
AC I think you really should read this first post at least. I believe it will really light you’re neurons. It is bit dense at times though. It appears they are boxing in the Left. They are using the Lefts model of social capital/status to drive them to farther and farther extremes the whole while cluing in the norms on how they are running off the deep end. At the same time they are hijacking the censorship system put in place to drive this. So the Left is defeating themselves by their insular nature.
The Planned Destruction of the Alt-Right
http://cultstate.com/page/3/
I think this is what someone linked from here on your site.
The Butterfly War
https://archive.fo/7Mffi#selection-455.0-457.1
This is some really good stuff.
Heh. Reminds me of a story about Willie Mays. After he retired as a player, the hapless NY Mets hired him as a batting coach. One day in practice, frustrated by the inability of the Mets to make contact, he stepped into the batter’s box himself to demonstrate. “Do it like this”, the Hall-of-Famer said, as he jacked the first two batting practice pitches over the wall…
Great post. For a long time, AC, you ‘ve been suggesting that we need to trigger people to force them to reckon with ideas they can’t ignore or bury. In this way, the so-called Overton window is shifted within both society and within the minds of individuals in that society. And that Overton window could only be shifted, I thought, by forcing ideas into the public square, that is, coercing people to deal with ideas they would have otherwise been able to ignore, or did not know.
But now you’re saying that these ideas have to be packaged in such a way that people aren’t triggered, that the Overton window can be moved painlessly and stealthily.
These two approaches seem incompatible. Either we brazenly trigger and offend, or we sneak the information into sweet inoffensive packaging .
Lets say we have an idea that our opponents find so upsetting that put up mental barriers to that idea. I once watched students react to a pro-life display at a state university, for example: some were really mad, shouting obscenities, etc.; some were offended and thus avoided walking past the display by taking a longer route; very few (of the unconverted) stood there and looked at the pictures of aborted fetuses. The approach these pro-lifers took was your original approach — they wanted to trigger but forcing students to view revolting, in-your-face images of dead babies.
What you’re saying, now, is that these pro-lifers were going about it incorrectly, that they should have packaged pro-life ideas in such a way that it didn’t trigger resistance. So, perhaps, they could have put up a display about war crimes to get a discussion going about the horrors pregnant woman experience in wartime , or the murder of babies during wars, to backhandedly introduce the notion of abortion as a moral evil. In your words, they could have scanned for information that shouldn’t have been there so they don’t trigger any barriers.
There are people who are evil, for lack of a better description. They know what is right, and they want to cause hurt. They need the amygdala hijack. They need constraint by force. Trump did this when Hillary and a moderator tag-teamed him at a debate and began hammering him endlessly on some bullshit. He broke out the Special Prosecutor, full investigation trigger out, and talked about Hillary being imprisoned. Immediately, both shut up and the debate continued as normal, and Trump kicked ass. But until he cracked the whip, they would have just spent the whole debate attacking him. There, use the amygdala. Ideally dogwhistle it so only they feel triggered, and nobody else notices.
But with the masses who are not evil, I am now coming around to realizing that is often counterintuitive. I might never have seen it without Trump. But he shows it as clear as day.
Lock her up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbh2qXBMjuY
AC, much of what you discuss in this post is the foundation of my world, public relations and communications. I’ve enjoyed very much your discussions about the ancient origins of modern human communication and always learn something I had not considered before about what causes a person to react/ignore to verbal, written, or image stimuli. That physical outcome is a basic desire of modern public relations.
Much of what is taught today about public relations is thinly disguised SJW b.s., or it’s corporate psychobabble. The industry at times today deserves the scorn of the public, for when its “on” it can be incredibly persuasive to mass audiences. Today’s p.r. programs just go for repetition, and ratings basis points.
The best combination of your examination of primeval amygdala stimuli and modern public relations probably would be found at the start of the 20th century in Edward Bernays’s works. Bernays’s influences were much more basic and raw that the sugar-coated nonsense p.r. practitioners find themselves mired in today. I highly recommend reading his “Propaganda.” Le Bon’s theory of crowds was eye-opening as well.
From Wiki’s entry on Bernays, and please note the phrase ‘herd instinct’, for it sounds familiar, doesn’t it?:
“Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.”
Re-read or read Machiavelli’s Prince. There are also blogs dissecting it online.
> These two approaches seem incompatible. Either we brazenly trigger and offend, or we sneak the information into sweet inoffensive packaging .
Carrot and stick.
Wisdom is having both and using them as needed.
Don’t be the man with the hammer who sees everything as a nail.
This is really good stuff. I’m very much of the mold of putting stuff out there that generates all kinds of resistance, and loads of people tell me that personally I come across as harsh and inflexible and hard-edged. This doesn’t normally bother me much, because I see the world as harsh, reality as inflexible and hard-edged. But it means that I fail to be very convincing quite often except when preaching to the choir.
There’s a great lesson here in being effective, if only I have the wit to internalize it.
Thank God someone grasps the import of what Trump tweeted.
He’s definitely the Master Craftsman. Can often disguise an insult as a compliment too, I’ve noticed.
Btw, how do we follow you on Twitter? What’s yer handle?
Presently I am not posting to Twitter due to time constraints. They actually nuked my old account in one of their purges, and I am just too tight on time to do it.
Hi AC/All
I’ve been getting some reasonable success ‘r/K Pilling’ individuals on Twatter, i never realized though that you were ever on it.
“Wow! this explains everything” being a common response.
I always combine Computing forevers – “Why the world is how it is” with your home page.
K’s spot it immediately
r’s cry immediately
Very satisfying.
I can do it too but when you can you prefer to choose not to with people who can skip the 101 dunce classes. Then it becomes like a competition of who’s sharper on a subject. Speaking to smart people versus the ordinary.
I was essentially indifferent to Trump prior to 2016. I never watched the Apprentice or read Art of the Deal. I obviously knew who he was and that he positioned himself as a Popularis (word choice intentional), but not much else.
But, having watched him for about two years now — when it became clear to me that he had the skills to become President that I really took notice and tried to learn more of his methods. I was very sure that he would win when I saw him do something that only Newt Gingrich had done, and only for a brief moment — viciously (and righteously) engage in direct knife-fights with the media.
That he has methods is quite obvious to anyone who simply pays attention and doesn’t just reflexively hate him. I have read Art of the Deal now and I encourage everyone to do so. Many of his ideas about business (and to him everything is business) are there.
Possibly — well, probably — ordinary mortals cannot use all of his techniques, but there are some that we can apply.
I want to comment on this statement before continuing to read your post.
Before, I looked at what I wanted to say and how to say it, but now I try to scan for what I do not want to say, and how I do not want to say it.
I think that is what I am trying to communicate. That process of avoidance may be a core concept in one aspect of persuasion, and it is where I am beginning, because I am a neophyte.
The concept of “negative space” and learning to see it applies here. Once you learn to see negative space, you tend to look for it and it becomes an indespensible tool.
One example, when I center a rectangular picture on a wall, I don’t look at the picture, I look at the wall (specifically the four rectangles surrounding the rectangle that is the picture). When those four rectangles are the same size, the picture is centered and then I can view the centered picture without the cognitive dissonance.
What I have found is that when encountering a new picture, I routinely scan all the negative space in it and around it.
This is what Trump is doing. The trick is to learn to see it.
Here is a first stab at a heuristic.
When encountering a thing, don’t look at the thing, look at its surrounding space.
Ok, let’s apply that to the Roseanne tweet.
Don’t look at The* Roseanne, look at the things surrounding it. They are…
Iger
Tone (?)
Power
Popularity
Mass Entertainment**
*The “The” helps distance the subject from the surroundings.
**Notice that Mass Entertainment is the “Biggest” surrounding thing.
Now, target the “off centeredness” of the situation and “straighten it” within that context.
boom!
I guarantee that once we learn to see these things, we will deploy them like lightening!
Ok, I finished reading and the model is taking form.
Now put your next statement into the context of the negative space model:
“That would go a long way to help explaining why, despite having superior ideas and rationality behind them, “conservatives” on the whole have always been losing ground to “liberals”, because the focus has been on being right, not on being leaders and building actual movements of correctly competent people that have impact in the real world. “Liberals” don’t care about the details as much as getting results, and they’ve gotten very good at doing that.
They have focused on “The Picture” not on “The Negative Space” surrounding the picture.
They can NEVER get it right because they are not addressing the source of cognitive dissonance. They will ALWAYS fail because they are LOOKING AT THE WRONG THING.
Conservative Ideas are the skewed picture on the wall of reality.
Something I’ve been trying recently. When talking to someone to prep them for the possibility of big changes in understanding, I use this example:
You are about to go to a great new murder mystery movie. You’ve heard it’s got lots of twists and subtle turns and misdirection. Shortly before you leave to watch it with a friend, another friend gives you a spoiler on accident – “I can’t believe it was Mrs. Peacock!” You don’t know that your movie-going partner just heard that Mr. Brown did it, and he doesn’t say anything; he’s hoping to notice something pointing that direction and brag he’d seen it on his own and “figured it out on his own.” You both go to watch the same movie. You both hear the same audio clues and see the same images. You both hear the audience gasp or clap or otherwise react. You have five minutes to go to the end, and the at the big reveal the Private Eye says… the butler did it!
You are both thinking WTF, over?! You suddenly have to reconsider all the clues and evidence you thought you saw, and you compare notes with the your friend as the credits scroll by, trying to sort it all out. You remember things he does not, because you were looking for one set of clues, and he reminds you of things you’d already forgotten or totally missed because he had a different focus. A different preconceived understanding of what was going on. You are both wrong. Part of it makes sense, but there are still a lot of loose ends that don’t seem to get properly resolved by the butler being the culprit. Then, as the last credit rolls up, the dreaded “to be continued…” hits the screen, and the three other remaining people watching all alternately cheer, groan, or face-palm.
Between now and November is the last ten minutes of the film. We’ve seen a lot, think we know what’s going on, but we are all going to be surprised by something. I tell the leftists that I expect to be wrong about some things, just like I was shocked with I learned the truth about Sputnik when documents were revealed last year. The official story was known by one and all; it was the official lie. Most people haven’t heard about it, and are surprised about it. But it’s nice and neutral, shows the deviousness in a way that’s hard to get defensive about. It primes them to consider new ideas.
What new official lies might be revealed?