This was about the time that my opinion of experts, and authority figures in general, began a steady descent that continues to this day.
We humans don’t like uncertainty, so we are attracted to those who offer clarity and simple answers, even if the answers are wrong or incomplete. Master Persuaders can thrive in chaotic environments by offering the clarity people crave. And if an environment is not chaotic already, a skilled persuader who understands both social media and the news business can easily stir the pot to create an advantage through chaos. Candidate Trump was a champion of this method.
You know you’re in a bureaucracy when a hundred people who think ‘A’ get together and compromise on ‘B.
One thing I can say with complete certainty is that it is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which both complexity and large amounts of money are involved.
Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.
People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling.
I don’t read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time.
Whenever you have money, reputations, power, ego, and complexity in play, it is irrational to assume you are seeing objective science.
The most effective way to stop people from trying to persuade me is to say, ‘I’m not interested.’ You should try it. Don’t offer a reason why you aren’t interested. No one can say why a thing holds interest for some and not for others. There’s no argument against a lack of interest.
You often hear advice from successful people that you should “follow your passion.” That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it.
A smarter approach is to think of learning as a system in which you continually expose yourself to new topics, primarily the ones you find interesting. My.
You might be familiar with a television show that was called The Dog Whisperer. On the show, Cesar Millan, a dog-training expert, helped people get their seemingly insane dogs under control. Cesar’s main trick involved training the humans to control their own emotional states, because dogs can pick up crazy vibes from their owners.
The prediction models are more about persuasion than science.
Just remember to keep your eye out for ways to maximize your schedule freedom in the long term.
No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day.
The challenge was that the bad ideas sounded terrific to the uninformed person. You couldn’t kill these particular bad ideas with logic because the arguments against them would be too complicated. You had to go in through the back door.
Confirmation bias isn’t an occasional bug in our human operating system. It is the operating system. We are designed by evolution to see new information as supporting our existing opinions, so long as it doesn’t stop us from procreating. Evolution doesn’t care if you understand your reality. It only cares that you reproduce.
Make a claim that is directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration or factual error in it. Wait for people to notice the exaggeration or error and spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is. When you dedicate focus and energy to an idea, you remember it. And the things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as though they are high in priority, even if they are not. That’s persuasion.
Success caused passion more than passion caused success.
Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen.
Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness.