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81 " I have no reason to believe humans evolved with the capability to understand their reality. That capability was not important to survival. When it comes to evolution, any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough. "
― , Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter
82 " 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. "
83 " Humans think they are rational, and they think they understand their reality. But they are wrong on both counts. "
84 " Philosopher 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. "
85 " Keep in mind that disapproving of Trump’s style and personality is a social requirement for people who long for a more civil world. Effectiveness is a separate issue from persuasive skill. "
86 " But here’s the fun part: I also believed that Trump—the Master Persuader—was going to do far more than win the presidency. I expected Trump to rip a hole in the fabric of reality so we could look through it to a deeper truth about the human experience. And he did exactly that. "
87 " The ideas that you think about the most are the ones that automatically and irrationally rise in your mental list of priorities. And Trump made us think about the wall a lot. He did that because he knew voters would see him as the strongest voice on the topic. It also sucked up media energy that might have focused on political topics he didn’t understand at the same depth as his competitors. Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason. "
88 " What I saw with Trump’s candidacy for president is that the “within reason” part of our understanding about reality was about to change, bigly. I knew that candidate Trump’s persuasion skills were about to annihilate the public’s ability to understand what they were seeing, because their observations wouldn’t fit their mental model of living in a rational world. "
89 " Internet search for “the McGurk effect.” Click on the first video you see. "
90 " As a general rule, irrational people don’t know they are irrational. "
91 " If you don’t understand confirmation bias, you might think new information can change people’s opinions. As a trained persuader, I know that isn’t the case, at least when emotions are involved. People don’t change opinions about emotional topics just because some information proved their opinion to be nonsense. Humans aren’t wired that way. "
92 " In my view of the world, the few individuals I call Master Persuaders are a level above cognitive scientists in persuasion power and possess what I call weapons-grade persuasion skills. The qualities that distinguish weapons-grade persuasion from the academic or commercial types are the level of risk taking and the personality that goes with it. Trump the candidate had an appetite for risk, a deep understanding of persuasion, and a personality that the media couldn’t ignore. He brought the full package. "
93 " When Trump said he would deport millions of undocumented immigrants who were otherwise obeying the law, his critics saw it as the beginning of a Hitler-like roundup of the people who are “different” in some way. I saw it as a thoroughly impractical idea that served as a mental “anchor” to brand Trump as the candidate who cared the most about our porous borders and planned to do the most about them. "
94 " When candidate Trump answered questions about policies, it was clear he didn’t have a detailed understanding of the more complicated issues. Most observers saw this as a fatal flaw that would keep him out of the White House. I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as Trump recognizing that people don’t use facts and reason to make decisions. A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful. "
95 " I sometimes describe this situation in a more generic sense as having a system instead of a goal. A goal is, by definition, one way to win and infinite ways to lose. A good system gives you lots of ways to win and far fewer ways to fail. "
96 " Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words. In these situations there is no appeal to reason. But that’s okay, because facts and logic are not persuasive anyway. Word-thinking usually happens when people are bad at logic but don’t realize it. "
97 " Prior to the summer of 2016, while Senator Bernie Sanders was still competing for the Democratic nomination, the Clinton persuasion game was nonexistent. I have already described her campaign’s backward-persuasion tweeting and their artless campaign slogans. As far as I could tell, no one trained in persuasion was advising the Clinton team. I saw no signs of that talent whatsoever, and the signs would have been obvious to me. "
98 " We think we are reasonable and rational most of the time. But what hypnotists have long known, and scientists have in recent years confirmed, is that our decisions are often made without appeal to the rational parts of our brains. We literally make our decisions first and then create elaborate rationalizations for them after the fact. "
99 " You might have seen a viral video on Jimmy Kimmel Live of street interviews in which a prankster presented Trump’s policy positions as Hillary Clinton’s policies and asked her supporters if they agreed with those positions.3 Lots of people said they did. I’ll take it one step further by saying Trump would have won the election even if he and Clinton had switched positions and erased our memories of their old opinions. It literally didn’t matter what policies either person brought to the table. People made up their minds based on biases alone. "
100 " When a decision involves lots of facts, and we have access to all the facts, we are more likely to hallucinate that we used our powers of reason to reach a decision. But when we recognize that we don’t have all the facts, we hallucinate that we used our gut feeling to bridge the gap. In both cases we acted irrationally, and we tried to rationalize it to ourselves after the fact. That’s how the Persuasion Filter sees it. "