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Jack Schafer, Marvin Karlins Notable Quotations Full screen view Introduction: Location 39 It turns out that the same social skills I developed to befriend and recruit spies are equally effective in developing successful friendships at home, at work, or anywhere else that personal interactions take place. Chapter 1. The Friendship Formula Page 2 Increasing his eye contact, raising his eyebrows, tilting his head, and jutting out his chin, which are all nonverbal signs that scientists have discovered are interpreted by the human brain as "friend signals." Page 4 The Friendship Formula consists of the four basic building blocks: proximity, frequency, duration, and intensity. These four elements can be expressed using the following mathematical formula: Friendship = Proximity + Frequency + Duration + Intensity ... Page 4 Proximity is the distance between you and another individual and your exposure to that individual over time. ... The key to the power of proximity is that it must take place in a nonthreatening environment. .... "fight or flight" response. Frequency is the number of contacts you have with another individual over time and Duration is the length of time you spend with another individual over time. ... Intensity is how strongly you are able to satisfy another person's psychological and/ or physical needs through the use of verbal and nonverbal behaviors. ... If the new stimulus is judged to be a threat, the person will attempt to eliminate or neutralize it by employing the fight or flight response. If, on the other hand, the new stimulus is not perceived as a threat, then it becomes the object of curiosity. Page 7 Duration has a unique quality in that the more time you spend with a person, the more influence they have over your thoughts and actions. Page 7 Duration shares an inverse relationship with frequency. If you see a friend frequently, then the duration of the encounter will be shorter. Page 9 You can also extricate yourself from unwanted relationships by slowly decreasing each of the basic elements of the Friendship Formula. Page 10 establishing "common ground" was the quickest way to develop rapport. Page 14 To effectively use the Friendship Formula, you have to keep in mind what kind of relationship you are looking to establish and the time you will be required to spend with your person of interest. Chapter 2. Getting Noticed Before a Word Is Spoken Page 25 They are the "eyebrow flash,""head tilt," and the real, as opposed to fake, "smile" (yes, the human brain can detect the difference!). Page 26 As individuals approach one another they eyebrow-flash each other to send the message they don't pose a threat. Within five to six feet of meeting someone, our brains look for this signal. If the signal is present and we reciprocate, our nonverbal communication is telling the other person we are not a foe to be feared or avoided. Page 26 The second time people see each other, they don't have to say anything, but they do exchange eyebrow flashes, or in the case of males, display chin juts. Page 29 A head tilt to the right or to the left is a nonthreatening gesture. The tilted head exposes one of the carotid arteries, which are positioned on either side of the neck. Page 29 People who feel threatened protect their carotid arteries by tucking their neck into their shoulders. Page 29 A head tilt is a strong friend signal. People who tilt their heads when they interact with others are seen as more trustworthy and more attractive. Page 31 A smile is a powerful "friend" signal. Smiling faces are judged to be more attractive, more likable, and less dominant. Page 31 There is the "real" or "genuine" smile and then there is the "fake" or "forced" smile. Page 34 Women in particular often use smiles to regulate the initiation of first encounters and to set the pace of the subsequent personal interactions. Page 34 Learning how to produce a "real" smile at will, particularly when you don't feel in the mood to display it, takes practice. Page 35 Extended eye gaze is a powerful rapport builder. This nonverbal behavior should not be confused with staring. Typically, when you make contact with another person, your eyes lock for a second or less and then you break eye contact. Page 35 After you make eye contact with your person of interest, hold your gaze for one second and then slowly turn your head, holding your gaze for another second or two. The person you are looking at will see your head turning away, giving the illusion of broken eye contact, and your actions will not be perceived as staring. Page 37 I offered him a cup of coffee, for two reasons. First, I wanted to tap into the psychological principle of reciprocity. When people receive things, even trivial things, they feel a need to reciprocate. In exchange for coffee I wanted consent. Page 39 Polite requests for help or directions, for example, produce more positive results when accompanied by a light touch on the arm. Page 39 But proceed cautiously: Page 40 Isopraxism is the fancy term for "mirroring," a nonverbal practice that can be used to make friendship development easier and more effective. Page 40 When you first meet someone and want to gain their friendship, make a conscious effort to mirror their body language. Page 41 To practice the mirroring technique, change your stance or posture. Within a short period of time, other members of the group will mirror your posture. Page 42 People tend to lean toward individuals they like and distance themselves from people they don't like. Page 42 People tilt their heads slightly backward to increase distance from another person, which signals that relationship building is not going well. Page 42 turn their torsos away Page 42 reposition their feet away from unwanted visitors. Page 44 The amount and intensity of gestures people use vary from one culture to another and even within cultures. Page 45 Nonetheless, people who like one another tend to display more expressive gestures. Page 45 One way we signal to a speaker that we are engaged with them and that they should continue is with a head nod. Page 46 Don't let distractions interrupt your attentive listening to the speaker. You want to send the message that what the speaker is saying is important to you. Page 46 Just because your cell is ringing doesn't mean you are obligated to answer it. Page 49 The problem is (as the student with the "urban scowl" discovered) we are not always aware we are sending out foe signals, oftentimes because we don't realize what they are. Page 50 gazing that continues beyond a second is often perceived as aggression, Page 50 Elevator eyes consist of a sweeping head-to-toe gaze. As a nonverbal gesture, it is highly offensive in fledgling relationships. Page 51 I routinely used the full body scan when my daughter's boyfriends would appear at the front door. I would open the door, stare deeply into the suitor's eyes, and very slowly scan his body from head to toe. I would finish my introduction with a stern, "What do you want?" Page 53 Rolling your eyes at someone is a "foe signal" that discourages further interaction. It sends the message you think the individual is stupid or that his or her actions are inappropriate. Page 53 When people disagree with a comment or proposal, they will often roll their eyes when the person who made the comment or proposal turns away or looks at his or her notes. Page 53 SQUINTING OF THE EYES This foe signal is not as powerful as other foe cues are, but can still have a chilling effect on personal relationships. Page 54 FURROWED EYEBROWS Page 54 Tightened jaw muscles, narrowing of the eyes, and furrowed eyebrows are a cluster of nonverbal foe signals that can be seen from a distance and serve as early warning indicators to alert you to the possibility that the person you are about to meet may pose a threat. Page 54 AGGRESSIVE STANCE Page 54 A wide stance with arms akimbo (hands on hips) is a foe signal. ...ATTACK SIGNALS ... INSULTING GESTURES Numerous ...SCRUNCHED NOSE Page 58 I look at stitch count in shirts. The more stitches per inch, the higher the quality of the shirt. Four-millimeter buttons are sewn on higher-quality shirts. Page 58 If a man wears an expensive suit and a cheap watch, he is pretending to be someone he is not. Unshined shoes are another sign of a poser. People who engage in perception management often overlook the details, a tell that exposes who they really are. Page 59 TERRITORIAL (PERSONAL SPACE) INVASION Page 59 "Invading" another person's territory—whether through intrusive eye contact or actual physical closeness—is a powerful foe signal. Page 60 Territorial boundaries are also affected by where people live. In societies where people live in close quarters, they establish smaller personal boundaries out of necessity. Page 61 DOGMATIC VIEW OF TERRITORIAL FOE SIGNALS Page 61 The dog lover violated the animal's physical space by moving toward it and further challenged the animal by looking directly into its eyes at ground level. Both dogs and humans perceive staring as a threatening (foe signal) gesture. The dog viewed the canine lover's presence as a threat or a potential threat; therefore, the dog presented an aggressive threat to protect its territory. Page 61 Conversely, the dog hater ignored the animal and consequently posed no territorial threat. Without an actual or perceived threat, the dog became intrigued by the stranger. Page 62 Members of a large group who form a semicircle with their feet pointing toward the open side of the circle are signaling that they are willing to accept new members. Members of a large group who form a closed circle are signaling they are not going to be receptive to adding new individuals to their gathering. Page 65 When you reach the group you have chosen, confidently step into the empty space. Confident people are more liked than people who are not self-assured. Page 65 Nodding signals approval and interest in what the other individuals are saying and also sends the message that you are confident, not arrogant. Page 65 Arrogant people are typically not good listeners. Page 65 Try to find common ground with the other members of the group. Finding common ground (similar interests, backgrounds, jobs, etc.) is the quickest way to develop rapport and kick your friend-making process into high gear. Page 65 If common ground cannot be readily established, default to the topic of music. Almost everyone likes music. Page 65 You don't want to discuss topics that have the potential to create strong feelings and potential conflicts, Page 66 bridge- back. This refers to your use of portions of earlier discussions at a later time. Conversational bridge-backs can be comments, jokes, gestures, or other things unique to the earlier conversation. Using a conversational bridge- back sends the subtle message that you are not a newcomer to the person's circle of friends and acquaintances. Page 66 If you see a person standing alone and his or her feet are pointed toward the exit, there's a good chance that they are thinking about leaving but haven't yet made the move. This provides you with an opening to approach that person. Give friend signals as you approach and then make an empathic statement (discussed in the next chapter) like "Oh, I see you're ready to leave" or "Oh, you find the party boring." Page 67 Because people normally see us before they hear us, our nonverbal signals are like "coming attractions" or "trailers" for movies, giving the viewer advance notice of what they can expect from the main attraction and helping them decide if it's worth their time to pursue or avoid. Page 67 In order to consciously imitate the same signals you subconsciously send with ease and authenticity, you must overcome the spotlight effect. The spotlight effect triggers when you do something surreptitiously and, because you are making a conscious effort to influence people's behavior, you think that everybody is aware of what you are doing. Page 67 An example of the spotlight effect in action involves someone who lies. The liar thinks that the person he is lying to can see right through the lie, even when that individual is totally unaware of the deception. This, in turn, causes the liar to display verbal and nonverbal cues that actually indicate deception, allowing the person on the receiving end of the lie to detect the deception or, at least, become suspicious of what is being said. Page 69 The first step in successfully imitating friend (or foe) signals is to watch how other people naturally display these signals and, also, to monitor your own signals. When you imitate a friend signal, try to duplicate the same sensation you feel when you catch yourself automatically displaying these nonverbal communications. Page 71 Relationships that are strained will become obvious because the normal nonverbal cues present in a good relationship will be absent. For example, the couple will not look at each other. Their smiles are forced. One or both will often look at their plates when they speak. Heads are erect, not tilted. Their eyes are sweeping across the restaurant looking for other stimuli. They don't mirror each other's postures. They don't lean toward one another; in fact, they are usually leaning backward, away from each other. Chapter 3. The Golden Rule of Friendship Page 76 If you want people to like you, make them feel good about themselves. ... It sounds easy, but it takes practice even for trained agents. ... People's egos get in the way of practicing the Golden Rule of Friendship. ... Most people think the world revolves around them and they should be the center of attention. Page 77 TECHNIQUES TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES: EMPATHIC STATEMENTS Page 77 Empathic statements keep the focus of the conversation on the person you are talking with rather than on yourself. ... Empathic statements such as "You look like you are having a bad day" or "You look happy today" let people know that someone is listening to them and cares to some degree about their well-being. ... Concentrated listening demonstrates that you are really interested in the other person and understand what they are saying. ... The basic formula for constructing empathic statements is "So you . . ." .... When using empathic statements to achieve the objective of the Golden Rule of Friendship, avoid repeating back word for word what the person said. .... Empathic statements keep the focus of the conversation on the other person and make them feel good about themselves. .... A fine line separates flattery from compliments. The word flattery has a more negative connotation than the term compliment. Flattery is often associated with insincere compliments used to exploit and manipulate others for selfish reasons. The purpose of compliments is to praise others and acknowledge their accomplishments. .... Insincere compliments and flattery are one and the same and will give the person receiving the false accolade a negative impression of you. .... The key to allowing people to compliment themselves is to construct a dialogue that predisposes people to recognize their attributes or accomplishments and give themselves a silent pat on the back. Page 82 THIRD-PARTY COMPLIMENTS You can use a third party to compliment a person you want to befriend—without doing it yourself—and still get the "credit" for making the target of your compliment feel good about themselves and, by extension, feel good about you. .... To construct a third-party compliment you will need to find a mutual friend or acquaintance who knows both you and your person of interest. .... Words cannot change reality, but they can change how people perceive reality. Words create filters through which people view the world around them. A single word can make the difference between liking and disliking a person. .... you have already been encouraged to prejudge him as untrustworthy through what behavioral scientists refer to as the "primacy effect." If a friend describes the person you are about to meet for the first time as untrustworthy, you will be predisposed to view that person as untrustworthy, regardless of the person's actual level of trustworthiness. Thereafter, you will tend to view everything that person says or does as untrustworthy. Page 87 Using the primacy effect is a great idea when you're using it to influence others, but be aware that it can cut both ways. If you're not careful, the primacy effect can cause you to be prejudicial in your own behavior toward others, leading to inaccurate and misleading beliefs about their behavior. Page 88 ASKING A FAVOR Good old Ben Franklin, the guy on the hundred-dollar bill, observed that if he asked a colleague for a favor, the colleague liked him more than if he hadn't made the request. This phenomenon became known as (no surprise here) the Ben Franklin effect. Chapter 4. The Laws of Attraction Page 97 THE LAW OF SIMILARITY ("COMMON GROUND") People who share the same perspectives, attitudes, and activities tend to develop close relationships. The adage "Birds of a feather flock together" has merit. Page 97 CUT FROM THE SAME CLOTH Early in my career, I noticed that most FBI agents looked alike and shared the same views. This can be explained by the psychological principle of similarity and attraction. FBI agents sitting on hiring boards tended to hire new agents who were most like themselves. Page 98 Commonalities connect people. Finding common ground quickly establishes rapport and a fertile environment for developing friendships. Aristotle wrote, "We like those who resemble us, and are engaged in the same pursuits. . . . We like those who desire the same things as we [do]." Page 98 What a person is doing can also serve as a basis for establishing common ground. If a person is walking a dog, reading a book, or pushing a baby carriage it provides you with valuable information for identifying potential conversation openers and/or similar interests. Page 99 After you make initial contact with a person, listening to what they say can provide you with additional clues to their likes and dislikes. Make a conscious effort to direct the conversation toward the things you have in common. Page 100 TEMPORAL EXPERIENCES Experiences shared across time, such as attendance at the same school, military service, or living in the same area, enhance opportunities for making friends. Page 101 VICARIOUS EXPERIENCES A vicarious experience occurs when you live out a lifestyle or activity through the revelations of another person. You can use vicarious experiences to establish common ground with another person even when, in reality, you know very little about the subject matter being discussed. Page 101 Here is an example: CAR SALESPERSON: What do you do for a living? CUSTOMER: I'm a baker. CAR SALESPERSON: Really? My father was a baker. Page 102 THE LAW OF MISATTRIBUTION Sometimes making friends is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. When people feel good about themselves and do not attribute the good feeling to a specific cause, they tend to associate the cause of that good feeling with the person who is physically close to them at the time. If you happen to be that person, you're going to benefit and be liked not for anything you did but because of the "misattribution." In a sense, what we have here is a case of collateral benefit rather than collateral damage. Page 104 THE LAW OF CURIOSITY Curiosity can be used as a "hook" to increase intensity (Friendship Formula) and pique a person's interest in you. It is an effective way to make friends. Page 105 When you behave in a manner that produces curiosity in another person, it significantly increases the chances that individual will want to interact with you in an attempt to satisfy their curiosity. Page 105 THE LAW OF RECIPROCITY Social norms dictate that if someone gives you something or performs a favor for you, large or small, then you are predisposed to return the gesture in like kind or in greater measure. Page 106 The Law of Reciprocity is a very effective tool for making friends. When you smile at someone, that person feels obligated to return the smile. Page 106 THE LAW OF SELF-DISCLOSURE Reciprocity is also linked with openness in communication. Individuals who disclose more personal information with other people are more likely to receive a similar level of personal information in return. Page 106 communicating have shared interests. Page 107 Self-disclosure is a two-step process. First, a person has to make a self-disclosure that is neither too general nor too intimate. Second, the self-disclosure must be received with empathy, caring, and respect. A negative response made to a genuine self-disclosure can instantly terminate a relationship. Page 107 Disclosures should be made over a long period of time to ensure that the relationship slowly increases in intensity and closeness. Page 108 Mutual self-disclosures create trust. Page 108 THE LAW OF PERSONAL ATTRACTIVENESS Page 108 Attractiveness is a tangible benefit for those who possess it. Page 108 According to Gordon Wainwright, author of Teach Yourself Body Language, anyone can increase their attractiveness to others if they maintain good eye contact, act upbeat, dress well, add a dash of color to their wardrobe, and listen well. Wainwright also stresses Page 108 the importance of posture and bearing and suggests that for one week you stand straight, tuck in your stomach, hold your head high, and smile at those you meet. From the results of many experiments, Wainwright predicts you will begin to be treated with more warmth and respect and start attracting more people to you. Page 109 THE LAW OF HUMOR Individuals who use humor in social encounters are perceived as more likable. Page 110 THE LAW OF FAMILIARITY The more we meet and interact with people, the more likely we are to become friends. Page 110 The Law of Familiarity points to the importance of proximity Page 111 THE LAW OF ASSOCIATION When people associate in large groups, people on the outside of the group tend to assess individual members of the group based on their overall impression of the total group. Page 111 THE LAW OF SELF-ESTEEM People like to associate with individuals who display high levels of self-esteem. Thus, such individuals have an easier time attracting others and making friends. Page 112 To people with high self-esteem, rejection is part of life, not a reflection on their self-worth. Page 113 DON'T BANK ON IT One of my students told me of a common ruse that he and his friends often employ on nights out. On the way to a bar, they will stop by a large bank's ATM and pick through dropped receipts until they find ones that have especially large balances printed on them. These they pocket for later. Then, if the student or one of his friends meets a girl who is above his financial standing, he will casually write his phone number on the back of the purloined receipt—creating the illusion that he is a wealthy man. Page 113 THE LAW OF AVAILABILITY (SCARCITY) People are attracted to individuals and things they cannot readily obtain. Page 113 When the object of desire is finally gained, the attraction for the object rapidly diminishes. Page 114 An individual should not always make him or herself readily available to the person they are targeting for a longer-term relationship. Page 114 INCREASED RESTRAINT INCREASES DRIVE Parents are fully aware of this law! If you tell your children not to do something, they want to do it all the more. Page 115 THE LAW OF THE ROCKY ROAD When two people meet and do not immediately like one another, especially in a romantic context, and then bond at a later time, they form a closer relationship than if they had hit it off immediately. Page 115 A NEW STRATEGY TO BUTTERING UP THE BOSS: BUTTERING DOWN THE BOSS Page 115 I purposefully remained distant and displayed neutral to slightly negative body language. Gradually, with each conversation we had, I began to display more positive nonverbal cues. Page 117 One method to determine if a person is an extrovert is to begin a sentence and deliberately pause for a few seconds. Extroverts will generally complete the sentence for you. Introverts will not. The same method can be used to determine if you have established rapport with an introvert. When introverts are comfortable with the people they are with, they will often complete sentences in the same manner in which extroverts do. The difference in the use of this method is that you can identify extroverts even if you don't know that the person you are speaking with is an introvert or an extrovert. To test rapport with an introvert, you must first determine that the person you are talking with is an introvert. Page 118 Be sure to allow your introverted customers time to think about your sales proposal. Introverts take in information, mull it over, and then come to a decision. Pressing introverts to reach a quick decision may force them to say no because they are not comfortable making immediate decisions. Page 118 Conversely, extroverts can be pressured to some degree to buy your product "right now" because they are more comfortable making impulsive decisions. Page 118 Some people actually exhibit almost equal extroverted and introverted characteristics; however, most people do have a preference for one or the other, and behave accordingly. Page 119 THE LAW OF COMPLEMENTARITY (GIVING COMPLIMENTS) People like to be complimented. It makes them feel good about themselves and, according to the Golden Rule of Friendship, they are going to feel good about you. The result: a better chance to make a friend or strengthen an existing friendship. Chapter 5. Speaking the Language of Friendship Page 120 The more you can encourage the other person to speak, the more you listen to what they say, display empathy, and respond positively when reacting to their comments, the greater the likelihood that person will feel good about themselves (Golden Rule of Friendship) and like you as a result. Page 123 LEARNING TO KEEP YOUR EGO IN CHECK Instead of saying, "You've been manufacturing this chemical all wrong. I found a new and cheaper way to do it," Stacey should have employed psychologically sound principles to shape her communication. A more appropriate way to inform the boss of her significant breakthrough would be: "Sir, I would like your advice on something that would make our company more profitable." Page 125 Listening to what another person is saying can be difficult to achieve, particularly for extroverts. They are so busy thinking about what they want to say, interrupting the speaker, or letting their mind wander that they literally don't hear what is being said. Obviously, a person can't respond effectively to another individual's message if he or she doesn't receive and process it. Is it really possible that we can "block" out a person's speech and not hear it? Yes. This was demonstrated in an experiment conducted more than a half century ago. Page 126 The way to be sure you hear what someone is saying is to pay attention to their verbal pronouncements. This is referred to as active listening and is something you'll want to practice if you want to use verbal behavior as a tool to build new friendships. Page 126 When it comes to establishing and building friendships through verbal behavior, take your cue from LOVE (Listen, Observe, Vocalize, and Empathize). Page 126 RULE #1: LISTEN: PAY ATTENTION WHEN PEOPLE SPEAK SO YOU ARE FULLY AWARE OF WHAT THEY ARE SAYING. Page 126 Speakers notice when a person isn't listening. The best way to focus on the listener's speech and, at the same time, transmit to the speaker nonverbally that you are paying attention to what is being said is to maintain eye contact. Page 126 maintain eye contact with the speaker about two-thirds to three-fourths of the time he or she is talking to establish the appropriate degree of connectivity and to indicate you are tuned into what is being said. Page 127 Paraphrasing what the person said keeps the focus on that individual. Page 127 Empathic statements are the spice of conversations. If you make it a habit to use empathic statements, you will force yourself to listen more carefully to other people. As a consequence they will feel good about themselves and like you. Page 128 RULE #2: OBSERVE: IN ANY VERBAL INTERACTION BE SURE TO OBSERVE THE OTHER PARTY BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER RECEIVING AND TRANSMITTING INFORMATION. Page 128 People tend to distance themselves from things they don't want to see or hear. Page 128 Crossing the arms over the chest is a blocking gesture, which could indicate the person wants to symbolically and physically block what they are seeing or hearing. Other signs of disengagement are looking around the room, when the person looks at their watch as if to say, "Time's up," or turning their feet, torso, or both toward the door or other parts of the room. Page 133 Personal relationships are more difficult to initiate and maintain when the verbal landscape is dotted with word mines, both discovered and hidden. Page 133 The best way to keep your verbal communication effective in a world filled with word mines is to: Page 133 Think about the words you are going to use before you say them. Scan ahead for possible word mines that you'll want to eliminate from your speech. 2. Observe your listeners for any unusual reaction while you are speaking. It might indicate that a word mine has been tripped. 3. Do not become defensive or angry if a listener becomes agitated over your use of a word mine (even if you didn't know it existed); and 4. Immediately take the time to find out if the listener's discomfort is the result of a word mine detonation. If it is, apologize for using the word or phrase, explain that you were unaware that it had a negative connotation to the listener, and assure him or her that you will not use it again. And then, be sure you don't. Page 135 remember why watching for and observing lip purses is so critical: Once a person is able to articulate a "No" response to your idea or suggestion, or voice a negative remark, the principle of "consistency" comes into play, meaning now it is very hard for the listener to go back on their verbal response and change their mind. The lip purse allows you to see a negative response coming and gives you a chance to counter it before it is spoken, giving you a better chance of getting your idea or project accepted. Page 137 Another technique to "read a person's mind" is to watch for a lip bite. A lip bite is the soft biting or tugging of the upper or lower lip with the teeth. This nonverbal gesture indicates that the person has something to say but is hesitant to say it, for myriad reasons. Hence the old adage "Bite your lip," meaning keep your mouth shut and don't say anything has validity. Page 138 LIP COMPRESSION Lip compression has a similar meaning to the lip bite, but it has a more negative connotation. Page 139 Self-touching of the lips with hands, fingers, or objects such as pencils and other inanimate objects indicates the person is feeling uneasy about the topic that is being discussed. Page 139 This self-touching signal can be effectively used in business and social settings. For example, if you are in a one-to-one sales meeting presenting a new product and you see your client lightly rubbing his lips with his fingers, take note. Upon seeing this nonverbal cue, you should formulate an empathic statement such as "This may be a bit overwhelming because you have never used this product before" to allow the client to express any concerns or misgivings they might have about the product or service you are offering. Page 140 RULE #3: VOCALIZE: THE WAY YOU VOCALIZE AND WHAT YOU VOCALIZE WILL IMPACT YOUR EFFECTIVENESS IN MAKING AND KEEPING FRIENDS Page 140 HOW YOU SPEAK INFLUENCES HOW OTHERS PERCEIVE YOUR MESSAGE . . . AND YOU Page 141 Dragging out a word can signal interest. Page 142 Strategy #1: When you are right and someone else is wrong, give that individual a face-saving way to carry out your wishes with a minimum of embarrassment and/or humiliation. The person will like you a lot more for your efforts on their behalf. Page 147 Strategy #2: Use the verbal technique of "status elevation" to make people feel better about themselves and see you as a friend. Page 147 Status elevation is a technique that satisfies an individual's need for recognition. Page 149 Strategy #3: If you want to get information from somebody without arousing their suspicion or putting them on the defensive, use the elicitation approach. You use elicitation devices in conversation to obtain information from a person without that individual becoming sensitive (aware) of your purpose. Page 149 Elicitation is the ability to obtain sensitive information from people without them realizing they are providing you with this data. Page 149 1. Few, if any questions are asked, Page 149 2. the process is painless because your person of interest is not aware they are revealing sensitive personal information; Page 150 3. people will like you because you are making them the focus of your undivided attention; and Page 150 4. individuals will thank you for being so kind Page 150 People have a need to be right, but people have a stronger need to correct others. The need to be correct and/or to correct others is almost irresistible. Making presumptive statements is an elicitation technique that presents a fact that can be either right or wrong. If the presumptive is correct, people will affirm the fact and often provide additional information. If the presumptive is wrong, people will provide the correct answer, usually accompanied by a detailed explanation as to why it is correct. Page 152 Salespeople use empathic elicitation to accomplish two goals. First, empathic statements quickly build rapport, and second, empathic elicitation gleans information from customers that they would not normally reveal under direct questioning. Page 153 The empathic conditional keeps the focus of the conversation on the customer and introduces a set of circumstances under which the customer would purchase a product or service. Page 153 SALESPERSON: So, you haven't decided which model you want to buy. (empathic statement) Page 153 SALESPERSON: So you'd buy a car, if it were priced right? (empathic conditional) Page 154 The empathic conditional helped the salesperson to identify a buying objective. With this new information, the salesperson can direct the customer to lines of cars within his price range. Page 154 Quid pro quo is an elicitation technique that encourages people to match information provided by others. For example, you meet a person for the first time and want to know where they work. Instead of directly asking them, "Where do you work?" tell them where you work first. Page 154 If you don't want people to know where you work but are still curious about where they are employed, you can get the needed information from the other person and short-circuit reciprocity by asking the question in a novel way. Say, "Where do you labor?" This question requires additional cognitive processing, which disrupts the need to reciprocate with the question, "Where do you work?" Page 155 USING A THIRD-PARTY APPROACH TO DISCOVER THE WAY PEOPLE REALLY FEEL Page 155 Instead of asking the direct question, "What do you think about cheating?" you want to say, "My friend Susan caught her husband cheating. What do you think about that?" When a person is confronted with a third- party observation, they tend to look inside themselves to find the answer and tell you what they really think. Page 157 RULE #4: EMPATHIZE: USE EMPATHIC STATEMENTS AND OTHER VERBAL OBSERVATIONS THAT MAKE YOUR LISTENER(S) AWARE THAT YOU KNOW HOW THEY FEEL. Page 157 Your empathic statements and/or statements of concern send a message to the listener that you comprehend their circumstances and realize what they have to say is meaningful. In doing so, you are fulfilling the other person's need to be recognized and appreciated. Page 159 Showing empathy toward another person, whether it is done through empathic statements or other forms of verbal commentary, is a powerful way to make another person feel better about themselves and make them your friend at the same time. Page 160 To keep the communication flowing smoothly, be sure to steer clear of common conversation pitfalls that impede verbal exchanges between individuals. Page 160 Avoid talking about topics that engender negative feelings in your listener. Page 160 2. Don't constantly complain about your problems, your family's problems, or the problems of the world. Page 160 3. Avoid talking excessively about yourself. Page 160 Do not engage in meaningless chatter; Page 160 Avoid expressing too little or too much emotion. Extreme displays of emotion may put you in a bad light. Chapter 6. Building Closeness Page 177 As you may recall, 70 percent of all information is transferred between individuals over food and drink. People who eat or drink together are predisposed to talk. Watching where a person places his or her cup can signal if rapport has been established. If the person across from you places his or her cup between the two of you, the cup forms a barrier, which signals that rapport has not yet been established. If the person places it to either side, leaving open the space between the two of you, this signals that rapport has been established. Chapter 7. Nurturing and Sustaining Long-Term Relationships Page 188 People who are caring individuals show an honest concern for others. Not a passing comment or a flippant response to someone who is hurting, but rather a genuine sense of compassion for what that person is experiencing and a commitment to help make things better. In long-term relationships there will be many times when one or both partners are facing crises. It is here where the true level of concern, or lack of it, becomes evident. It is relatively easy to maintain a long-term relationship when things are going well; it is in the crucible of a crisis that the true character of an individual is revealed and found to be wonderful or wanting. Page 190 In long- term relationships, communication is a key element in sustaining or draining the feelings we have toward one another. Open, honest interchanges between long- term partners build trust, demonstrate a caring attitude, and provide vital information about the ongoing health of the relationship. Page 199 An effective anger management strategy involves keeping the focus of the conversation on the angry party, allowing him or her to vent, and in addition provides a directed course of action to deal with the problem that caused the anger in the first place. This breaks the anger cycle and allows for the resolution of crisis situations without damaging personal relationships. Page 201 Empathic statements capture a person's verbal message, physical status, or emotions, and using parallel language, reflect them back to the speaker. Page 201 Presumptive statements direct angry people to take a course of action that leads toward the resolution of the conflict that aroused their ire in the first place. Page 203 detect that all is not well. The better you are at spotting changes in verbal and nonverbal cues, the greater your potential ability at empathizing. Watch for small changes on the face. Listen for tension in the voice and emphasis on specific words. Listen for emotional words. Page 203 To people who are not angry, empathic statements might seem patronizing, but this is not the case for angry people, for two reasons. First, the fight or flight response is engaged, and angry people cannot logically process information; in this case, empathic statements fall within the human baseline and if properly constructed, will not be detected by the angry person. Second, people naturally think that others should listen to them and be sympathetic, particularly when they are angry. Page 205 Venting is a critical component of breaking the anger cycle because it reduces frustration. Chapter 8. The Perils and Promise of Relationships in a Digital World Page 214 THE INTERNET IS INTROVERT-FRIENDLY Introverts disclose more information on social networks than they do in face-to-face encounters. This is because the Internet format allows introverts sufficient time to formulate meaningful responses. Page 215 Ease of Finding "Common Ground" If ever there was a chance for the Law of Similarity (Chapter 4) to operate, it would be on the Internet. When it comes to finding common ground with individuals possessing similar interests, the digital world provides the perfect environment for matchups. Page 215 Numbers If you're looking for a friend with specific qualifications and interests, where would you rather look: in a bar or other public place that might hold a hundred people, or on the Internet, where tens of millions of people await to be clicked on? The sheer number of people that go online increases your chances of finding persons of interest who best fit your particular needs. Page 216 Less Chance of Being Embarrassed Anonymity and the ability to start and end relationships with a click of a mouse make the online user much less likely to face the humiliation and embarrassment that comes with face-to-face disapproval or outright rejection. Page 216 The Ability to Prequalify Potential Friends Particularly on dating sites, individuals looking for partners have the opportunity to describe what they want in a potential respondent. Page 216 The Opportunity to "Check People Out" The Internet is information-rich. It provides a wealth of information for those people who know how to get it or are interested in learning more about something or somebody. Page 227 When you ask someone a direct yes-or-no question and they begin their answer with the "Well," there is a high probability of deception. It indicates that the person answering the question is about to give you an answer that they know you are not expecting. The following exchanges will clarify the "Well" technique. Page 228 When people choose not to answer yes or no, they go to the Land of Is. The Land of Is occupies the space between truth and deception. This murky area contains a labyrinth of half-truths, excuses, and suppositions. President Clinton's now famous statement to the grand jury inspired the concept of the Land of Is. Page 230 When someone provides you with an answer to a question, simply ask them "Why should I believe you?" Honest people typically answer, "Because I am telling the truth" or some derivation thereof. Truthful people simply convey information. They focus on accurately presenting facts. Conversely, liars try to convince people that what is being said is true. Their focus is not on accurately presenting facts, but rather, on convincing listeners that the facts presented represent the truth. Page 230 Since liars cannot rely on facts to establish their credibility, they tend to bolster their credibility to make their version of the facts appear believable. Page 232 The magnitude of deception in online profiles should not come as a big surprise. An online profile is the equivalent of a first date. Anyone who has been on a first date will remember putting his or her best foot forward. (Just as in a first job interview, we wear our "interview" suit.) Women dressed with great contemplation and took extra minutes to put on their makeup. Men ensured their clothes were color-coordinated and wrinkle-free. Conversations were rehearsed before any words were exchanged. Personality flaws and behavioral quirks were carefully camouflaged with polite talk and impeccable manners. The extra steps were taken to make the right first impression. Page 235 COMPETING HYPOTHESES Developing competing hypotheses prevents the truth bias and the primacy effect from unduly undermining your ability to judge the character and veracity of the person who is writing to you. Hypotheses are nothing more than educated guesses. A competing hypothesis is an educated guess that supposes a different outcome based on the same or similar set of circumstances.	Abbie Brown, Timothy D. Green Notable Quotations Full screen view Chapter 1 – What is instructional design? Instructional Design as a Discipline: Instructional Design is that branch of knowledge concerned with research and theory about instructional strategies and the process for developing and implementing those strategies. Instructional Design as a Science: Instructional design is the science of creating detailed specifications for the development, implementation, evaluation, and maintenance of situations that facilitate the learning of both large and small units of subject matter at all levels of complexity. Instructional Design as Reality: Instructional design can start at any point in the design process. Often a glimmer of an idea is developed to give the core of an instruction situation. By the time the entire process is done the designer looks back and she or he checks to see that all parts of the "science" have been taken into account. Then the entire process is written up as if it occurred in a systematic fashion. Models: Merrill's First Principle of Instruction Dick & Carey System's Approach Model Kemp Model Merrill's Pebble-in-the-Pond Model Successive Approximation Model ADDIE Postmodern Society is past the point where there are a limited number of authorities available to a classroom student. The modern classroom had two authoritative sources: the teacher and the textbook. This situation no longer exists because students have access to many other sources, including the internet, television, and, in some cases, friends and family who are more educated than the teacher is (Hlynka, 1995). No longer can there be an agreed-upon, single type of well-educated individual. Determining a curriculum and including all important artistic and scientific works that would be appropriate for all individuals is impossible. The currently popular cognitive paradigm—constructivism—does not recognize or advocate a traditional, linear educational sequence. With information available from a variety of sources outside the classroom, learners will inevitably deviate from a linear instructional model by observing and reacting to other examples, non-examples, and divergent examples of the concepts they study in school. No single, objective truth exists. Truth is a construct that is based on an individual's personal interpretation or on the consensus of a group of people for their purposes. The truth—also known as "the right answer"—may change depending on the context and the individuals involved. Chapter 2 – Understanding how people think and learn Cognition is the mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment. In essence, cognition includes all of the brain's mental input and output. Cognition encompasses basic activities, from using language and math functions during a trip to the hardware store, to making complex decisions such as selecting between two job offers, to writing a creative story, to being able to understand another person's perspective. Memory - Memory is a set of active processes that encode information. Memory places information into "packages" or "packets," making information easier to recall and allowing it to be associated with related items already in memory. Memory also involves storing information. Part of this process is the constant rearranging of what has been stored in order for that new knowledge to be integrated with what has already been stored. Additionally, it allows for locating and retrieving information as it is needed. Mental Power - is the basic energy that supports mental activity. It refers to how much mental work can be performed during a specific period of time.  Executive abilities - Executive abilities include such higher-order thinking skills as being able to anticipate future needs and planning accordingly, the ability to set priorities, and being able to self-correct and regulate actions Metacognition - is the ability to control one's own cognitive processes. It is often referred to as the practice of "thinking about thinking." In using metacognition, an individual takes an introspective look at the thought process that she has gone through. It allows her to critically consider how she arrived at certain ideas, concepts, and thoughts. Instructional designers tend to look at thinking from a pragmatic point of view, asking themselves, What do we need to know about thinking and the studies done on thinking that will help develop efficient and effective instructional interventions? It is no surprise that the majority of instructional designers are considered to be eclectic—borrowing from different perspectives and using what works for a given situation to produce desired results. Instructional designers tend to take a systems theory approach when it comes to looking at thinking (and learning) by exploring it from several different perspectives, rather than focusing narrowly on one aspect of what thinking is or is not. In examining the definition of learning we propose, two very different types of changes can take place when learning occurs. The first is a change in behavior; the other is a change in mental representations or associations. One of the most useful ways that the learning domains can be used is to consider them when learning objectives are being developed for instruction. Learning objectives are descriptions of what an individual should know or be able to do once he or she has completed an instructional intervention. In addition to the development of learning objectives, the domains can be useful in planning assessments Chapter 3 – Needs Analysis ...instructional design is carried out for a purpose: to bring about a particular change. Typically, the change is a need to improve performance of some kind. Attitudes, knowledge, and skills are all areas in which improvement might be needed. Therefore, the need to improve performance can take on different forms, such as increasing a student's knowledge of a particular content area, increasing the productivity of a factory worker, or increasing consumer ease in using a new product. Need's Analysis Questions: What is the change being requested (including who is being asked to change and what is currently taking place)? Who is requesting this change? Where will this change need to take place? Is instruction the most appropriate means for bringing about the desired change? Models for performance/needs analysis (Human Performance Technology) Mager & Pipe's Performance Analysis Morrison, Ross, & Kemp Need's Assessment Rossett Needs Assessment Determine purpose on either performance problems, new stuff, and mandates Identify who has the information that is needed and where it is located Gather various types of data using the proper research tool Conduct needs assessment by analyzing the data and determine if additional information is necessary Use findings for decision making Discrepancy-Based Needs Assessment Model Needs Analysis Procedure Determining the desired change What problem exists or what change is being requested? Who is being asked to change? What is currently taking place in this environment with this individual or individuals? The request for desired change After developing a clear understanding of the existing problem or the change being requested, it is important to understand who is asking for the change. This is an extremely important element to understand because it will help you determine the type of intervention that may need to take place, the emotional and political climate of the situation, and the level of support that is present and that will most likely be needed for a change to take place. Once you have the appropriate data that allows you to understand the entire context—the desired change, who is requesting the change, who is being asked to change, and where the change needs to take place—it is time to determine if instruction is the most appropriate intervention. You will need to answer the following question: Is instruction the most appropriate means for solving the problem or bringing about the desired change? Chapter 4 – Task Analysis What task analysis solves for the ID: It defines the content required to solve the performance problem or alleviate a performance need. This step is crucial because most designers work with unfamiliar content. Because the process forces the subject matter expert (SME) to work through each individual step, subtle steps are more easily identified. During this process, the designer has the opportunity to view the content from the learner's perspective. Using this perspective, the designer can often gain insight into appropriate teaching strategies. What a task analysis identifies: the goals and objectives of learning; the operational components of jobs, skills, learning goals, or objectives—that is, it describes what task performers do, how they perform a task or apply a skill, and how they think before, during, and after learning; what knowledge states (declarative, structural, and procedural knowledge) characterize a job or task; which tasks, skills, or goals should be taught—that is, how to select learning outcomes that are appropriate for instructional development; which tasks are most important—which have priority for a commitment of training resources; the sequence in which tasks are performed and should be learned and taught; how to select or design instructional activities, strategies, and techniques to foster learning; how to select appropriate media and learning environments; how to construct performance assessments and evaluation. According to Jonassen et al. (1999), task analysis is a "process of analyzing and articulating the kind of learning that you expect the learners to know how to perform" (p. 3). They assert that the task analysis process consists of five discrete functions: (1) inventorying tasks; (2) describing tasks; (3) selecting tasks; (4) sequencing tasks and task components; and (5) analyzing tasks and content level. These functions consist of the following activities: Inventorying tasks: identifying tasks that need to be developed for instruction. Describing tasks: the process of elaborating the tasks identified in the inventory. Selecting tasks: prioritizing tasks and choosing those that are more feasible and appropriate if there is a large quantity of tasks. Here is the text reformatted into basic HTML: • Sequencing tasks and task components: defining the sequence in which instruction should occur in order to successfully facilitate learning. • Analyzing tasks and content level: describing the type of cognitive behavior, physical performance, or affective response required by the tasks A task analysis should help you answer the following questions, regardless of the approach taken: What is the task that individuals need to be able to accomplish or perform? What are the key components of this task (that is, the skills and knowledge an individual needs in order to successfully complete or perform the task)? What is the sequence in which a task is accomplished or performed and should be learned and taught? How can you determine whether an individual is able to complete the task? Chapter 5 – Analyzing Learners There is no single, correct method of learner analysis that every instructional designer uses. However, the goal of every type of learner analysis is the same: to understand and interpret learner characteristics in a way that helps in the design of effective instruction. While it is important to carefully consider the cultural and psychological aspects of the target audience, the numbers of variables involved in determining in advance precisely what will be "culturally appropriate" or "psychologically optimal" instruction are beyond our current control. The most thorough learner analysis is still a matter of taking a "best guess" at how the instruction should be designed to work efficiently and effectively for the target audience. Motivation is a complicated subject that deserves continued study; here, we will discuss only its basic elements. Motivation can be essentially divided into two classes: intrinsic and extrinsic. If learners enjoy the instruction for its own sake and take pleasure in the activity, the motivation is said to be intrinsic. If learners participate in the instruction because they anticipate some reward beyond the instruction itself (for example, they are paid or completing the instruction allows them to do something they truly enjoy), the motivation is said to be extrinsic Robert F. Mager is an author of instructional design texts that have been popular for decades. His approach to learner analysis is a good place to start. Mager (1988) recommends the following procedure: Begin with the realization that a learner analysis is a working document that will not be published or seen by anyone other than yourself and perhaps other members of the instructional design team. It is not necessary to organize the content into specific categories. Write down everything you think you know about the target audience. If it seems challenging to get started, begin with trigger questions, such as: Why are they taking this course? Do they want to be in this course? What training and experience do they have in relation to the subject matter? Describe the range of characteristics whenever possible. Mager also recommends analyzing and articulating the following about the target audience: Age range. Sex distribution. Nature and range of educational background. Reason(s) for attending the course. Attitude(s) about course attendance. Biases, prejudices, and beliefs. Typical hobbies and other spare time activities. Interests in life other than hobbies. Need-gratifiers (rewards that would work). Physical characteristics. Reading ability. Terminology or topics to be avoided. Organizational membership. Specific prerequisite and entry-level skills already learned. Other Learner needs models: Smaldino, Lowther, and Russell General characteristics Specific entry competencies Learning styles Dick, Carey, and Carey Entry skills (similar to Smaldino et al.'s (2012) entry competencies). Prior knowledge of topic area. Attitudes toward content and potential delivery system. Academic motivation. Educational and ability levels. General learning preferences. Attitudes toward the training organization. Group characteristics. Smith and Ragan Stable similarities Stable differences Changing similarities Changing differences Chapter 6 – Instructional Goal and Objectives Instructional goals and instructional objectives are different from each other. An instructional goal can be a general statement about the intention of the instruction…However, an instructional objective is usually much more specific about how and to what degree the instruction will affect the learners. Models for objectives: Mager Action: Identify the action the learner will take when he or she has achieved the objective Condition: Describe the relevant conditions under which the learner will act Criterion: Specify how well the learner must perform the action Dick et al – ABDCs of well-stated objectives Audience: Identify and describe the learners Behavior: Describe what is expected of the learner after receiving instruction Conditions: Describe the setting and circumstances in which the learners' performance will occur Degree: Explain the standard for acceptable performance Smaldino et al Cognitive Affective Psychomotor Interpersonal Gagne's Hierarchy of Intellectual Skills Chapter 7 – Organizing Instruction The eminent instructional designer and scholar Robert Gagne (1916–2002) theorized that there are nine events of instruction (1985): Gain the learners' attention. Inform learners of the objective. Stimulate recall of prior learning. Present the stimulus. Provide guidance for the learners. Elicit learner performance. Provide feedback. Assess learner performance. Enhance retention and transfer (varied practice and reviews). Distance education has a number of appealing features for education and training. Students do not have to travel to a classroom and, in asynchronous situations, they may participate at a time that works best for them. However, there is an interesting opposition of forces at work with distance education. • Providing immediate feedback to both students and the instructor(s): In instructional settings such as a traditional classroom or distance education, the students and instructors communicate with each other in a way that allows them to adjust their activities according to feedback received. For example, the teacher in a traditional classroom may notice his or her students are looking drowsy and decide it is time for a short break, or the instructor of an online course may receive a number of messages asking for clarification of a particular concept and decide that he or she needs to offer a mini-lesson covering that concept in greater detail. • Providing immediate feedback to the student alone: Education conducted through programmed instruction does not have an instructor making adjustments to the experience based on learner feedback. The instruction may be programmed to respond to a student's responses, but all possible responses are determined in advance of the student's participation. Understanding the organization of instruction helps an instructional designer with the following tasks: Choosing activities that support remediation and extension by using scope and sequence organization to identify appropriate content for students who need either extra support or an extra challenge. Choosing activities that support the needs of a variety of learning styles, selecting a variety of different types of enactive, iconic, and symbolic experiences, and using Dale's Cone as an organizer. Selecting activities most appropriate to each instructional event in order to create an effective series of activities for a given lesson or instructional intervention. Making available job aids that support the student and allow him or her to focus on the concepts to be learned instead of the steps involved in completing a specific task. Choosing activities that are best suited to the delivery method or choosing the best delivery method to meet an individual's or an organization's needs. Chapter 8 - Learning Environments & Instructional Activities 4 Types of learning environments Learner-centered environments: Focus on the attitudes, skills, knowledge, and beliefs that students bring to an instructional setting. In this environment, the instructor uses information about how the learners relate to the content as well as the learners' preconceived ideas or misconceptions to create situations where the learners generate new (and hopefully improved) perceptions of the content. Knowledge-centered environments: Focus on the information and activities that help learners develop an understanding of disciplines. In this environment, learners are exposed to well-organized knowledge in order to facilitate planning and strategic thinking. Here is the content reformatted to plain HTML: • Assessment-centered environments: Focus on providing opportunities for feedback and revision. In this environment, testing and critique are used to provide learners with opportunities to rethink and revise their ideas. • Community-centered environments: Focus on people learning from one another and contributing to the larger societies of people who share common interests and/or goals. In this environment, the connections between the instructional setting and world outside that setting are used to give the content greater meaning and place it in a more global context. A directed learning environment is one in which the instructional designer has determined specific learning objectives and prescribes structured activities in which participants demonstrate that they have learned by meeting the objectives. Most people are familiar with directed learning environments through personal experience. An open-ended learning environment differs from a directed learning environment in that the learning goals and/or the method of pursuing those goals are determined in one of three ways: 1.     presenting the learner with a complex problem along with a specific task to complete; 2.     presenting the learner with a complex problem to explore (with no specific task to complete); 3.     helping the learner articulate a personalized problem to be solved or explored. any open-ended learning environment should include four components to support the learners: 1.     Enabling contexts: articulated perspectives that influence how the approaches are planned and resources are interpreted. 2.     Resources: a range of sources (print, electronic, human) that provide information about the problem. 3.     Tools: the means for engaging and manipulating resources and ideas. 4.     Scaffolding: scaffolding processes support individual learning efforts.   Chapter 9 – Evaluating Learner Achievement Determining if a learner has reached a high level of success is accomplished through learner evaluation. Learner evaluation helps determine the level of performance or achievement that an individual has attained as a result of instruction. This is established by the extent to which a learner is able to meet instructional goals and objectives. Most learner evaluations you will help develop will be criterion-referenced (also referred to as minimum-competency or mastery). A learner evaluation that is criterion-referenced indicates that a learner is being judged based on his or her level of competence. Competence is determined by specific criteria, such as being able to answer a specified number of questions or the ability to demonstrate certain skills in a specific amount of time Millman and Greene (1993) state that answers to several questions need to be obtained before a test is developed. The combination of these answers will help an instructional designer create a test development plan. This plan will help guide the development and eventual implementation of the test:  What is the purpose of the test?  Who will be taking the test? Here is the content reformatted to plain HTML:  How much time will be used for testing?  How will the test be administered?  What will the test cover?  What sources of content will be used?  What are the dimensions of the content?  Which types of item formats are to be used?  How many items are available in the item pool, and how many need to be constructed?  What is the appropriate difficulty and taxonomy level for the items?  How will the items be grouped and sequenced?  How will the items/test be scored?  How will the test be evaluated?  Will an item analysis be performed?  Will the reliability and measurement error of the test be assessed? Guidelines for essay items: They should be carefully focused. Several shorter questions—rather than fewer longer questions—tend to provide a better assessment of a learner. Do not give students a choice of questions to answer; have all learners answer the same questions. Inform learners of how the questions will be graded; if spelling is important, inform the learners. Understanding how a question will be graded will help learners focus on what is important. This can be accomplished by providing students with a rubric prior to completing the essay questions. The length of time needed to answer essay questions can vary greatly among learners. Learners need preparation for taking essay questions. Before grading, review the major points that should or could be discussed in each answer. When grading, read through and grade the same question for each learner before moving on to the next question. When grading, it is always desirable to have more than one grader. When grading, read through the entire answer once and then check it over for factual information. Guidelines for evaluating a skill: • When evaluating a skill, both process and the product can be evaluated. Determine whether both or just one will be evaluated; generally, both are evaluated. The product is the end result or outcome of the skill (for example, a filled vial of blood correctly labeled and stored). • When evaluating the process, the following elements can be included: following a proper series of steps, using tools or instruments properly, or completing the skill in a certain timeframe. Here's the provided text formatted into HTML: ```html Chapter 10 – Determining the Success of the Instructional Design Product and Process Formative evaluation is used throughout the instructional design process to gather data that can be used to provide feedback on how the process is going. It is especially useful during the early stages of the instructional design process. The feedback allows an instructional designer to make improvements to the instruction before it is completely developed. Design reviews are conducted after various phases of the instructional design process, such as the needs analysis, task analysis, goals and objective analysis, and learner analysis. Design reviews help to verify the accuracy of information at each stage of the instructional design process before instruction is developed. Expert reviews are conducted to gather information about the instruction to determine if it is accurate and current. Various experts—such as content experts, instructional design experts, pedagogical experts, and experts on the learners—can be used to provide various perspectives on the instruction. Morrison, Ross, and Kemp (2007) advocate a basic model for formative evaluation based on the work of Gooler (1980). Gooler’s approach follows these eight steps: purpose audience issues resources evidence data gathering techniques analysis reporting There are three main phases to this approach: planning, conducting, and reporting. Phase one includes steps one through five, while phase two includes steps six and seven. Phase three is the eighth and final step, reporting the results The first step—determining the purpose or purposes of the evaluation—is done in consultation with the client. The two most common purposes are to improve the instruction that is being developed and to satisfy administration requirements of the client you are working for. The audience of the evaluation is important to determine because it will establish the types of information that need to be collected and reported. The client will be able to help determine who the intended audience will be. Conducting an evaluation for multiple audiences should be avoided because it will be difficult to satisfy varying needs within a single report. It is best to try to narrow the audience down as much as possible. Phase two—conducting the evaluation—includes determining the data collection techniques that will be used, gathering the data, and analyzing the data. Step seven—analyzing the data—should reflect the purpose of a formative evaluation: to provide usable and useful information that helps the instructional designer improve instruction. The final phase—step eight—is reporting the results of the evaluation to the primary audience. This is typically done as an evaluation report, with the format of the report tailored to the audience the report will be disseminated to. Summative evaluation takes place after an instructional intervention has been implemented. The major goal of a summative evaluation is to gather data that allow for its effectiveness to be determined. Did the instruction bring about the desired changes? Were the goals of the client met? These are two major questions that summative evaluations help to answer. Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation: Level 1—reactions—attempts to provide data on how participants reacted to the training. Did participants enjoy the training? Was the training relevant to the participants? Level 2—learning—is conducted to determine whether participants’ skills, knowledge, or attitudes changed as a result of the training. Determining this is much more laborious than Level 1 because it requires gathering data at multiple times. Typically, pretests and post-tests are used to measure these changes. Level 3—transfer—attempts to answer the question of whether the newly acquired skills, knowledge, or attitudes are being used by participants in their real-world environments. In other words, have participants transferred what they learned in the training into their everyday environments? Level 4—results—attempts to evaluate a training program’s effectiveness in business measures, such as increased sales, improved product quality, fewer on-the-job accidents, and so forth. Morrison Specifying program objectives: Revisit the instructional goals and objectives of the instructional intervention that was developed. Determining the evaluation design for each objective: How will data be collected that will help determine if the learning goals and objectives have been met? Determine what types of data are needed. Developing data collection instruments and procedures for each objective: Appropriate data collection instruments and procedures were discussed earlier in this chapter. Pretests, post-tests, questionnaires, and observations are all examples of data collection instruments or procedures. Carrying out the evaluation: It is advised that data are collected from the beginning stages of the project. This will ensure that the necessary data are collected, especially data regarding costs and time involvement. Data collection may need to be scheduled. Analyzing the results from each instrument. Interpreting the results. Disseminating the results and conclusions: Develop a summative evaluation report (refer to the previous section on Smith and Ragan (1999) to see how an evaluation report can be formatted). Individual discussions and group presentations are often useful (and required by the client) to disseminate evaluation findings. Chapter 11 – Instructional Media Production Management The roles and responsibilities of the members of any production team depend on the type of product being created. For example, a team responsible for producing computer-based multimedia might include the following: Production manager: responsible for the organization and timing of the production. The production manager ensures that everyone knows what he or she should be doing and when specific tasks need to be accomplished. The production manager may also be called on to resolve conflict within the team. Subject matter expert (SME): an individual who is a specialist and authority in the content area of the product (e.g., an astronomer helping with a product that teaches the basics of stellar cartography). Writer: responsible for generating text, scripts, and documentation. Art director: responsible for the product’s “look and feel” by specifying such things as color schemes, artwork, and typefaces. The art director oversees the efforts of the graphic artists. Graphic artist: responsible for creating the graphic elements specified by the art director. Sound designer: responsible for designing and producing audio elements. Video director: responsible for gathering and/or creating video elements. Video editor: responsible for preparing video elements specified by the video director. Interface designer: responsible for specifying the product’s human–computer interactions. The interface designer oversees the efforts of the programmers. Programmer: responsible for making a working version of the software. Talent: the actors whose bodies, faces, and/or voices interpret the writer’s scripts. Prototyping is a common method of production (this is true for automobiles, architecture, animation, and software development) with myriad examples of successful applications of this method. Rapid prototyping is a production strategy that requires starting with a very sketchy idea that evolves through multiple prototypes to arrive at a finished piece. Rapid prototyping requires the evaluation and revision of each prototype as part of the production process. We recommend ongoing, iterative evaluation of the product as it develops. In the earliest stages of pre-production and production, product ideas and rough sketches can be evaluated through expert review. An expert review is soliciting input from a person or persons with a great deal of experience with the type of instructional media under development. Because of his or her experience, an expert can gain a sense of the production team’s vision from very rough drafts (a cocktail napkin with a few sketches and a verbal description is often enough to give an expert an idea of the finished product). Chapter 12 – Visual Design for Instructional Media In The non-designer’s design book (2015), author Robin Williams presents four basic principles of visual design: alignment, contrast, repetition, and proximity. Williams points out that these four principles are interconnected, and one does not often see one of these four aspects of design applied independently. In creating an effective and appealing design, you apply all four principles simultaneously. Alignment Alignment is what leads the reader through the design (this is sometimes called “flow”). Nothing should be incorporated into the design without careful consideration of its placement. One common alignment strategy is to have all the headings line up with each other, with indented subheadings and/or body text beneath each heading. Contrast Contrast distinguishes different elements of a design. For example, make headings stand out from body text by using very different typefaces for each. Bold and italic text contrasts with regular text. Contrasting colors can be used (black and white are the most essential contrasting color combination), as can contrasting image and type sizes. Repetition Repetition conveys a sense of deliberate and carefully planned design. Simple elements used over again give the design a unified feeling (for example, a large graphic used at the top of a page might be used again at the bottom of the page as a small repeating graphic forming a line). Proximity Proximity places together elements that relate to each other, creating one or more “visual units” within the larger design that help organize the information (for example, a picture of a person standing on a scale and text describing weight-loss strategies might be placed very near each other to create one visual unit).	Amanda Montell Notable Quotations Full screen view Part 1: Repeat After Me . . . > Page 6 Often, familiar English terms that once held a positive meaning were recast to signify something threatening. > Page 12 What techniques do charismatic leaders use to exploit people's fundamental needs for community and meaning? How do they cultivate that kind of power? > Page 12 The real answer all comes down to words. Delivery. From the crafty redefinition of existing words (and the invention of new ones) to powerful euphemisms, secret codes, renamings, buzzwords, chants and mantras, "speaking in tongues," forced silence, even hashtags, language is the key means by which all degrees of cultlike influence occur. > Page 12 In both positive ways and shadowy ones, "cult language" is, in fact, something we hear and are swayed by every single day. > Page 13 Part 1 of this book will investigate the language we use to talk about cultish groups, busting some widely believed myths about what the word "cult" even means. Then, parts 2 through 5 will unveil the key elements of cultish language, and how they've worked to inveigle followers of groups as destructive as Heaven's Gate and Scientology . . . but also how they pervade our day- to- day vocabularies. In these pages, we'll discover what motivates people, throughout history and now, to become fanatics, both for good and for evil. Once you understand what the language of "Cultish" sounds like, you won't be able to unhear it. > Page 13 Language is a leader's charisma. It's what empowers them to create a mini universe -- a system of values and truths -- and then compel their followers to heed its rules. > Page 14 "Without language, there are no beliefs, ideology, or religion," John E. Joseph, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, wrote to me from Scotland. "These concepts require a language as a condition of their existence." Without language, there are no "cults." > Page 14 But with a glimmer of willingness, language can do so much to squash independent thinking, obscure truths, encourage confirmation bias, and emotionally charge experiences such that no other way of life seems possible. > Page 15 Whether wicked or well- intentioned, language is a way to get members of a community on the same ideological page. > Page 19 But, like everything in life, there is no good cult/ bad cult binary; cultishness falls on a spectrum. > Page 19 Hassan says that groups toward the destructive end use three kinds of deception: omission of what you need to know, distortion to make whatever they're saying more acceptable, and outright lies. > Page 21 It's really no coincidence that "cults" are having such a proverbial moment. The twenty- first century has produced a climate of sociopolitical unrest and mistrust of long- established institutions, like church, government, Big Pharma, and big business. It's the perfect societal recipe for making new and unconventional groups -- everything from Reddit incels to woo- woo wellness influencers -- who promise to provide answers that the conventional ones couldn't supply seem freshly appealing. > Page 22 Our behavior is driven by a desire for belonging and purpose. We're "cultish" by nature. > Page 24 We need to feel connected to something, like we're put on earth for a reason other than just dying. > Page 25 Following a guru who provides an identity template -- from one's politics to one's hairstyle -- eases that chooser's paradox. > Page 25 It cuts the overwhelming number of answers you need to have down to a manageable few. > Page 28 Ultimately, the needs for identity, purpose, and belonging have existed for a very long time, and cultish groups have always sprung up during cultural limbos when these needs have gone sorely unmet. What's new is that in this internet- ruled age, when a guru can be godless, when the barrier to entry is as low as a double- tap, and when folks who hold alternative beliefs are able to find one another more easily than ever, it only makes sense that secular cults -- > Page 32 Over the decades, the word "cult" has become so sensationalized, so romanticized, that most experts I spoke to don't even use it anymore. Their stance is that the meaning of "cult" is too broad and subjective to be useful, at least in academic literature. > Page 32 A few scholars have tried to get more precise and identify specific "cult" criteria: charismatic leaders, mind-altering behaviors, sexual and financial exploitation, an us-versus-them mentality toward nonmembers, and an ends-justify-the-means philosophy. > Page 33 a power imbalance built on members' devotion, hero worship, and absolute trust, which frequently facilitates abuse on the part of unaccountable leaders. > Page 33 "brainwashing" is a term that is tossed around incessantly by the media, but that almost every expert I consulted for this book either avoids or rejects. ... Not all "cults" are depraved or perilous. Statistically, in fact, few of them are. > Page 37 "The biggest joke in religious studies is that cult + time = religion." > Page 37 labeling something a "cult" becomes not just a value judgment, but an arbiter of real, life-or-death consequences. > Page 46 A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are. That's because speech itself has the capacity to consummate actions, thus exhibiting a level of intrinsic power. > Page 47 When repeated over and over again, speech has meaningful, consequential power to construct and constrain our reality. > Page 47 This book will explore the wide spectrum of cults and their uncanny lexicons, starting with the most famously blatantly dreadful ones and working its way to communities so seemingly innocuous, we might not even notice how cultish they are. > Page 47 Each part of the book will focus on a different category of "cult," all the while exploring the cultish rhetoric that imbues our everyday lives: > Page 48 The words we hear and use every day can provide clues to help us determine which groups are healthy, which are toxic, and which are a little bit of both—and to what extent we wish to engage with them. Part 2: Congratulations—You Have Been Chosen to Join the Next Evolutionary Level Above Human > Page 57 Instead of sticking to one unchanging lexis to represent a unified doctrine, they customize their language according to the individual in front of them. > Page 58 "His vocabulary could change quickly from being rather backwoods and homey to being quite intellectual," .... code-switching can be used to connivingly gain trust. > Page 58 Jones learned how to meet each follower on their linguistic level, which sent an instant signal that he understood them and their backgrounds uniquely. ...Contrary to popular belief, the tragedy wasn't premeditated, at least not how the press painted it to be... And most of its victims did not die voluntarily. > Page 65 This is what every leader of the half dozen "suicide cults" in history have done: Taking an apocalyptic stance on the universe, with them at its center, they believe their imminent demise means everyone else must go down, too. > Page 66 At one meeting, Jones became so exasperated by Christine's opposition that he pulled a gun on her. "You can shoot me, but you are going to have to respect me first," she retorted—and he backed down. > Page 68 rhythmic repetition and deceptive hyperbole. > Page 70 March 1997, ... Heaven's Gate, a group of UFO- believing doomsdayers, systematically took their lives over a three- day period. ... Marshall Applewhite, A sixty-five-year-old seminary school dropout who went on to obtain a master's degree in musical theater, Applewhite boasted a snow-white buzz cut, saucerlike eyes, and a passion for sci-fi tales. > Page 70 A heaven-bound spacecraft trailing the Comet Hale–Bopp was going to bypass Earth in March 1997, allowing followers a chance to leave this "temporal and perishable world," board the flying saucer, and transport themselves to a distant space dimension Applewhite swore was the Kingdom of God. > Page 71 Applewhite spoke in long strings of esoteric space talk and Latin-derived syntax to make his small, pseudo-intellectual following feel elite. > Page 72 In Heaven's Gate, every student chose a new first name as well (and renounced their last name), which, per Applewhite's instructions, ended in the suffix –ody. There was Thurstonody, Sylvieody, Elaineody, Qstody, Srrody, Glnody, Evnody, etc. ... [ thus they were ] rhetorically reborn > Page 74 Applewhite's rhetoric was heavily influenced by the 1990s' UFO mania. > Page 74 Applewhite concocted a whole Heaven's Gate vocabulary of niche, sci-fi-esque terms. There was a severe regimentation of daily life in the mansion, and the lingo helped keep things in order. > Page 75 By marinating in this specific, thematic vernacular every day for years, followers began to picture life on that spacecraft, drifting toward the Kingdom of God. "It was doing real religious work," said Zeller. "It wasn't just gobbledygook." > Page 77 Within and outside cultish environments, language can accomplish real, life-or-death work. > Page 77 Using systematic techniques of conversion, conditioning, and coercion, with language as their ultimate power tool, Jones and Applewhite were able to inflict unforgettable violence on their followers without personally laying a finger on them. > Page 78 Across the influence continuum, cultish language works to do three things: First, it makes people feel special and understood. > Page 78 This is called conversion. > Page 78 Then, a different set of language tactics gets people to feel dependent on the leader, such that life outside the group doesn't feel possible anymore. This is a more gradual operation, and it's called conditioning -- the process of subconsciously learning a behavior in response to a stimulus. > Page 78 And last, language convinces people to act in ways that are completely in conflict with their former reality, ethics, and sense of self. An ends-justify-the-means ethos is embedded, and in the worst cases, it results in devastation. This is called coercion. > Page 78 The first key element of cultish language? Creating an us-versus-them dichotomy. > Page 79 The goal is to make your people feel like they have all the answers, while the rest of the world is not just foolish, but inferior. > Page 79 This is part of why cults have their own jargon in the first place: elusive acronyms, insider-y mantras, even simple labels like "fiber-lab." It all inspires a sense of intrigue, so potential recruits will want to know more; then, once they're in, it creates camaraderie, such that they start to look down on people who aren't privy to this exclusive code. > Page 79 This goal of isolating followers from the outside while intensely bonding them to each other is also part of why almost all cultish groups (as well as most monastic religions) rename their members: > Page 80 It's not just followers who gain new names; outsiders get them, too. ... inflammatory nicknames used to exalt devotees and villainize everyone else. > Page 82 Over time, the memorable nicknames and insider-y terminology acquire a strong emotional charge. ... This lingo is what some psychologists call loaded language. ... Sometimes loaded language works by twisting the meaning of existing words until the new significance eclipses the old one. ... Other times, loaded language comes in the form of misleading euphemisms. ... But Jones's and Applewhite's euphemisms recast death as something actively aspirational. ... There's a companion tool to loaded language that can be found in every cultish leader's repertoire: It's called the thought-terminating cliché. Coined in 1961 by the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, this term refers to catchphrases aimed at halting an argument from moving forward by discouraging critical thought. > Page 84 Thought-terminating clichés are by no means exclusive to "cults." Ironically, calling someone "brainwashed" can even serve as a semantic stop sign. > Page 84 Once these phrases are invoked, they choke the conversation, leaving no hope of figuring out what's behind the drastic rift in belief. > Page 86 Thought-terminating clichés provide that temporary psychological sedative. > Page 86 Digging for more information is poison to a power abuser; thought-terminating clichés squash independent thinking. > Page 87 Both Applewhite and Jones kept their followers from conversing not only with the outside world but also with each other. > Page 88 Cultish language isn't a magic bullet or lethal poison; it's more like a placebo pill. ..likelier to "work" on certain people and not others. "recovered memory therapy" ... this exercise actually implants false memories and can be deeply traumatic for patients. > Page 94 Techniques like us-versus-them labels, loaded language, and thought-terminating clichés are absolutely crucial in getting people from open, community-minded folks to victims of cultish violence; but importantly, they do not "brainwash" them—at least not in the way we're taught to think about brainwashing. > Page 95 language doesn't work to manipulate people into believing things they don't want to believe; instead, it gives them license to believe ideas they're already open to. Language—both literal and figurative, well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, politically correct and politically incorrect—reshapes a person's reality only if they are in an ideological place where that reshaping is welcome. > Page 97 A common belief is that cult indoctrinators look for individuals who have "psychological problems" because they are easier to deceive. But former cult recruiters say their ideal candidates were actually good-natured, service-minded, and sharp. > Page 99 Letting people tell us only what we want to hear is something we all do. It's classic confirmation bias: an ingrained human reasoning flaw defined by the propensity to look for, interpret, accept, and remember information in a way that validates (and strengthens) our existing beliefs, while ignoring or dismissing anything that controverts them. > Page 103 If a form of language cues you to have an instant emotional response while also halting you from asking further questions, or makes you feel "chosen" just for showing up, or allows you to morally divorce yourself from some one-dimensionally inferior other, it's language worth challenging. Part 3: Even YOU Can Learn to Speak in Tongues > Page 111 Having big dreams makes you vulnerable; Scientologists know this, and they claim to hold the keys to help you unlock your potential. > Page 117 Whatever negative experience you're having, it's no one's responsibility but yours. > Page 125 People need something to help make the supernatural feel real, Luhrmann told me, and language does precisely that. > Page 126 To enter ritual time, some symbolic action typically must take place, like singing a song, lighting a candle, or clipping on your SoulCycle shoes (really). > Page 126 But an oppressive group doesn't let you leave ritual time. There is no separation, no going back to a reality ... terminology makes speakers feel, well, cool. "In the early days, it was really fun . . . or 'theta,' as we'd say," Cathy told me, referencing Scientology's slang term for "awesome." > Page 136 Who doesn't love a secret language? "It made you feel superior, because you had these words that other people didn't, and you did the work to understand them." > Page 137 Confusion is part of the big trick. Feeling so disoriented ... When language works to make you question your own perceptions, whether at work or at church, that's a form of gaslighting. > Page 137 Gaslighting is a way of psychologically manipulating someone (or many people) such that they doubt their own reality, as a way to gain and maintain control. > Page 137 Sometimes gaslighters aren't even 100% aware that what they're doing is manipulative. > Page 142 Scholars tend to use the term "glossolalia" to describe this practice, in which a person utters unintelligible sounds that seem to approximate words from some perceived foreign language during states of religious intensity. > Page 142 Among believers, glossolalia is typically thought to be a heavenly gift. Part 4: Do You Wanna Be a #BossBabe? > Page 167 And their commodity isn't merchandise, it's rhetoric. > Page 170 The truth is that this toxically positive rhetoric is fundamentally baked into American society. The cult of multilevel marketing is a direct product of the "cult" that is Western capitalism itself. ... networking marketing as we know it got its start in the 1930s. > Page 194 Impulsivity, says Bosley, is a common diagnostic indicator of people's vulnerability to fraud. > Page 195 Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, > Page 197 Bezos created his own version of the Ten Commandments called the Leadership Principles. It's a code for how Amazonians should think, behave, and speak. Part 5: This Hour Is Going to Change Your Life . . . and Make You LOOK AWESOME > Page 245 call-and-responses [community building technique] Part 6: Follow for Follow > Page 261 As far as the average 1990s imagination could stretch, cults required an in-the-flesh location to have real influence. Without a secluded commune or isolated mansion, how could anyone possibly become separated from their family and friends, have their individuality suppressed, and ideologically convert to a destructive dogma in a way that incited real-world harm? > Page 262 For better and for worse, social media has become the medium through which millions of us construct kinship and connection in an ever-transient society. > Page 262 Twenty years post–Heaven's Gate, most zealous fringe groups rarely convene IRL. Instead, they build an online system of morality, culture, and community—and sometimes radicalize—with no remote commune, no church, no "party," no gym. Just language. In lieu of a physical place to meet, cultish jargon gives followers something to assemble around. > Page 270 It's not that smart people aren't capable of believing in cultish things; instead, says Shermer, it's that smart people are better at "defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." > Page 271 Being smart and hip to the zeitgeist is not enough to protect someone from cultish influence online. > Page 273 In broad strokes, QAnon started in 2017 as a fringe-y online conspiracy theory surrounding an alleged intelligence insider called Q. The ideology began as something like this: Q, a faceless figure, swore to have "proof" of corrupt left-wing leaders—"the deep state," or "global elite" -- sexually abusing little kids around the world. (According to Q, Donald Trump was working tirelessly to thwart them before being "fraudulently" dethroned.) The only way to undo this evil cabal of high- powered liberal predators was with the support of Q's loyalists, known as "Q Patriots" or "bakers," who'd hunt for meaning in their anonymous leader's secret clues—" Q drops" or "crumbs" -- which were sprinkled throughout the web. > Page 275 Like most manipulative cults, QAnon's magnetism is largely the promise of special foreknowledge, which is available only to members of its enlightened underground collective. > Page 275 The glossary goes on and on. And it's always changing, branching off into different "dialects" of QAnon-ese, in order to accommodate new additions to the belief system . . . and, so that social media algorithms don't catch up, flag the language, and block or shadowban the accounts using it. New code words, hashtags, and rules for how to use them are introduced all the time. > Page 277 Virtual treasure hunt creates a form of conditioning called a variable-ratio schedule, where rewards are dispensed at unpredictable intervals. [See Habit] > Page 277 Some of the psychological quirks thought to drive conspiracy theory belief in general, Pierre writes, include a craving for uniqueness, plus the needs for certainty, control, and closure that feel especially urgent during crisis-ridden times. With all their plot twists and good/evil binaries, conspiracy theories seize our attention, while supplying simple answers to unresolved questions make believers feel special that they're privy to secrets to which the rest of us 'sheeple' are blind," Pierre explains. > Page 279 On the internet, however, a mysterious epigram with no clear source can serve as an on-ramp leading seekers to something much more sinister. > Page 281 It would be easy enough for me to write off all these groups, from SoulCycle to Instagram, as cultish and thus evil. But in the end, I don't think the world would benefit from us all refusing to believe or participate in things. Too much wariness spoils the most enchanting parts of being human.	Anna Merlan Notable Quotations Full screen view Prologue We've been a nation gripped by conspiracy for a long time. Page 7 Sometimes, too, conspiracy theories are the "official story," the cause of real and far- reaching state action, as with the Red Scare, where a fear of Communists undermining the country led to life- ruining hearings and blacklists. Page 8 There's a perpetual tug between conspiracy theorists and actual conspiracies, between things that are genuinely not believable and truths that are so outlandish they can be hard, at first, to believe. Page 8 To understand why people believe things that are at odds with all provable truths is to understand how we form our views about the world and the resultant world we have made together. Page 8 We're all prone to believing half- truths, forming connections where there are none to be found, finding importance in political and social events that may not have much significance at all. 1. False Times Page 14 [A conspiracy theory is ] a belief that a small group of people are working in secret against the common good, to create harm, to effect some negative change in society, to seize power for themselves, or to hide some deadly or consequential secret. Page 14 An actual conspiracy is when a small group of people are working in secret against the common good, and anyone who tells you we can always easily distinguish fictitious plots from real ones probably hasn't read much history. Note - Page 14 This definition undermines the idea of theory. Conspiracy fantasy would be better. Page 15 Frank Donner wrote that conspiracism reveals a fundamental insecurity about who Americans want to be versus who we are. Page 15 It is worth noting that conspiracy theories frequently echo the spirit of the religious zealots who founded this country. Page 15 Like religion, conspiracy theories don't just identify a common enemy, but outline a path to a better life and provide hope for the future. Numerous studies have noted that insecure and threatened populations—nonwhite people and unemployed people among them—show higher rates of conspiracy thinking. Page 16 Thus conspiracy theories, in the more sophisticated academic readings, look like a way to give corporeal form to hard-to-define anxieties, a foe on which to pin the varied worries and misfortunes of a group that senses marginalization, like conservatives during the 1960s and again in the Obama years, when they sensed power and cultural influence slipping from their grasp. Page 17 Sometimes they originate from the state itself, as in Russia, where disinformation and elaborate conspiratorial explanations emanate constantly from both the government and respected public intellectuals. Page 17 Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a long essay that first ran in Harper's in November 1964, which posits conspiracism as a type of mental illness infecting a swath of Americans, particularly those on the far right. Time is forever just running out." Page 18 The point is more often to identify an enemy than outline precisely what they've done. Page 19 Mark Fenster points out that conspiracy theories are often an exaggerated expression of American populism: our suspicion of authority figures, our fear of consolidation of power. Page 19 there's a distinct class element to them: people with only a high school education are more likely to believe at least one, and people who report a higher income are less likely to declare conspiratorial beliefs. Page 20 the Nero-fiddling-as-Rome-burns version is one of the earliest known examples of two things. First, it's a conspiracy theory about the government unleashing chaos to extend control; second, a government official used a conspiracy theory to realize political ends. Page 22 Antigovernment conspiracy theorists tend to overestimate the ability of bureaucrats to scheme in secret. Grand conspiracies are hard to conceal. Page 22 Yet it's not unreasonable—at all, even a little bit—to believe that the government is still engaged in nefarious and secretive behavior, because we know that it has done so in the past. Page 22 We have found ourselves at a point in history where both real government conspiracies and their shadows loom large in our collective imagination. Those two things, working in tandem, destabilize the public perception of what's true, what's possible, and what we're ready to pin on those running the country. Page 24 One persistent question is why some people go further into conspiracy thinking than others. There are clearly psychological, cultural, emotional, and circumstantial elements at work and, predictably, a mess of slightly conflicting studies to tell us how much weight to lend to each. Page 24 motivated reasoning: we tend to give more weight to studies, news articles, and any other form of information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs and values, and find ways to reject things that don't line up with what we feel to be true, Page 25 we're not particularly receptive to information that makes us feel defensive or attacked about our existing values or beliefs. Page 32 There is evidence that some disinformation peddlers are influenced and fed information by governments that find them useful. 2. "None of It Is Crazy" Page 40 There's often (though not always) some relationship in America between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy, between the shadows on the cave wall and the shape of the thing itself. Page 55 The existence of such fake sites confirms one distressing, permanent point: actual government conspiracies have generated a long afterlife. They linger in the collective memory, give rise to new conspiracy theories, and lay out a detailed, easy-to-follow playbook for fomenting further division and distrust. 3. Nocturnal Ritual Pizza Party Page 67 "coded rhetoric" meant to incite "scripted violence." 4. False Flags Page 80 One of the most intense and immovable American fears is of subliminal, hidden government control. We're also worried about the other, more overt kind—armies marching down the street, doors kicked in, guns in our faces— Page 81 the fear of invisible government manipulation is also largely accountable for the prevalence of theories of false flags: the idea that mass casualty events have been orchestrated or carried out by the government to consolidate its power. Page 87 the first major school shooting, at Columbine High School, wasn't a popular false flag theory when it took place in 1999, before the age of YouTube, easily buildable blogs, and widely used social media platforms. Instead, that shooting was retroactively identified as a possible false flag years later by the truther community. Page 97 school in a long time.""This category of recent conspiracy theorists is really a global network of village idiots," Pozner told me by phone. "They would have never been able to find each other before, but now it's this synergistic effect of the combination of all of them from all over the world. 7. A Natural Man Page 163 Although redemption theory targets desperate people, it also takes advantage of two facts: the tax code is impossibly, impenetrably hard to understand; and there is always someone, somewhere who has found a way to beat it. Anyone who knows that corporations and millionaires often end up paying very little in taxes is primed to find that argument persuasive. 10. Conspiracism Is for Everyone: The Deep State and Russiagate Page 222 Sometimes paranoia around the government and the White House turns out to be well founded: Page 222 Despite much scoffing from the right, a persuasive case was made that the Russian government did meddle in the 2016 elections. The CIA, FBI, and NSA—not the most left-wing institutions, traditionally—jointly issued a report in January 2017 stating that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the meddling efforts to harm Hillary Clinton's presidential bid and undermine American democratic processes. Page 225 Russian fever stemmed from a desperate liberal fantasy of a speedy Trump impeachment. "The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him." Page 226 The concept is not new, either in the United States or abroad; in some countries it is a very real phenomenon—a permanent ruling class within the military, the judiciary, and intelligence agencies that remains in power no matter which party is elected. Page 231 claiming that an external enemy threatens the sovereignty of the state—an enemy to be repelled by any means necessary—is historically a hallmark of authoritarian leaders. Epilogue Page 243 But in the early years of the twenty-first century, people feel particularly dispossessed by a political process bound by two unresponsive parties, an ever-growing ocean of dark money, and representatives who become more inaccessible with each passing year. Page 243 our lives are controlled by corporations and federal agencies they cannot see or appeal Page 243 For some, inaction feels morally intolerable. Page 244 we like conspiracies and seem to genuinely enjoy sharing them. Page 244 "the proportion of misinformation was twice that of the content from experts and the candidates themselves. Page 244 The word "polarizing" has a specific, and alarming, meaning, the authors noted. "This content uses divisive and inflammatory rhetoric and presents faulty reasoning or misleading information to manipulate the reader's understanding of public issues and feed conspiracy theories." Page 244 Truth and fact-checking travel along the same paths that conspiracies do. But the truth is often complicated, shaded, and demanding, and there's no denying that it often lacks the powerful, emotional, gut-level appeal of a conspiracy. Page 244 Beyond building an environment of misinformation and secrecy, conspiracy theories also have the worrisome effect of inducing paralysis, even as they galvanize those at the extreme end to extreme action. Page 245 there is no shortage of people willing to profit from a population's distrust and disengagement, from the impulse to expose evil and the desire to right wrongs. Page 245 people become the willing foot soldiers of a mob of fame-hungry provocateurs such as Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones, whose paranoid fantasies then ripple outward and touch us all. Page 246 The popularity and durability of conspiracism means that it will always have its huckster street preachers such as Jones and Cernovich. But beyond the individuals, we need to look at the systems that made them so influential. Social media has created the world's most efficient vehicle of delivery for conspiracy theories. Combined with the hyperpolarized state of American politics and the resurgence of white supremacist and nationalist movements, social media provides a virtual assembly line for scapegoats, a systematized and lightning-fast way to spread blame, doubt, enmity, and politically expedient rumormongering. Page 246 Ultimately, social media cannot be held directly responsible for the virulence of conspiracy theories. The same Internet that spreads garbage has also toppled regimes, created a megaphone for marginalized voices, exposed injustice, fomented discussion, and held power to account. Page 247 Yet some proposals—like pressuring social media platforms to flag conspiracy theories as hate speech and remove the pages spreading them on those grounds—involve trusting companies like Facebook to distinguish between constitutionally protected speech and other kinds. Page 247 Social media aside, it is our job to counter bad speech with better speech. Page 248 Conspiracy theories can lose their draw if we turn to the work of improving the environment in which they grow by creating a more just, equitable, economically secure, and politically representative society. Conspiracism, like the xenophobia and suspicion that grow from the same gnarled roots, is fed by social instability. Page 249 We will not be a less paranoid country until we are a fairer one. We need genuinely representative elections, better education in science and media literacy, a less moneyed system of democracy, true and permanent government transparency.
Baltasar Gracian Notable Quotations Full screen view Download full text (pdf)	Charles Steed Notable Quotations Full screen view Why are people so eager to join? Because they want to be noticed and feel important, they want to feel as though they actually have a little bit of influence in a world where they literally have no voice at all. They also feel that identifying with a cultural icon will help validate their lives and through the celebrity, maybe even find their way into the limelight somehow. The Four Pillars of Misinformation Part One: Government One is the party of phony virtue while the other is the party of phony compassion. Part Three: Big Business - The Boys In The Board Room Are Never Bored [When hemp agriculture threatened to replace the paper industry, in which Hearst had invested heavily he]Mr. Hearst came up with a plan designed to keep the status quo in place. Using his publishing network he began running stories on the evils of marijuana . He also had plenty of government connections and lobbied them to assist in his demonization of hemp . A sure but steady stream of propaganda designed to smear hemp was advanced by the publisher . Big business relentlessly manipulates circumstances to the advantage of the few Before examining specific Dark Persuasion techniques I feel it important to look at the foundational emotions and the exploitable character traits of people necessary for literally all forms of coercion to be effective. One: Pleasure & Fear or, Carrot & Stick Two: Guilt As A Motivator Three: Shame, 1st Cousin to Guilt Four: Envy Five: Procrastination In my own experience as an observer of human beings, procrastination, or laziness, can best be exploited by working an individual’s greed button. Six: Lust Seven: Pride Eight Gluttony (Excess, more than others) Nine: Hatred What [manipulators] never do is define the words " help " and the word " poor. " Why do you suppose they do those things ? Because when they fill in the blanks with meaningful definitions, people are better able to see the premise is ridiculous. 28 Main Dark Persuasion Tricks One: Exploit Predictable Patterns Behavior is a subconscious substitute for self - esteem , self love or self worth . People with a healthy sense of self rarely overindulge in anything . You can never get enough of something you don't really need . when you're able to observe certain behavior, that behavior almost always continues on indefinitely , forming a recognizable and predictable pattern . People certainly display predictable patterns . It's important to recognize these things if you want to stay out of the clutches of the manipulators . Predatory people milk these patterns for all they're worth . The following are just a few examples of people demonstrating predictable patterns : · High school & College graduates · College students · Narcissistic politicians · Rookie athletes with big money · Newlyweds · New parents · New home owners · People arrested for various crimes · Men and women cheating on spouses · Employees stealing from the company · Retirees · Habitual criminals · Sex offenders Being aware that others recognize what to expect from you just might provide you the awareness that will insulate you from a dark persuader wishing to exploit a predictable behavior . Two: Dancin' with Vampires [emotional blackmailers say things like:] You don’t love me anymore. You seem upset, is it something I've done? Did you really say that? How awful. You treat the dog better than you treat me. A reasonable man would know exactly why I’m so upset. I remember when you at least seemed to care. statements and questions is designed to get the receiver on the defensive . I name this section dancing with vampires because people who play this game will suck all of your power dry and make it seem like you are the manipulator . certain people have so little control over their lives they stir things up simply because it gives them at least a small measure of power . Three : Divide & Conquer By Neutralizing The Leader It doesn't necessarily matter what the purpose or cause of a group may be, just that the vast majority of members show substantial loyalty , respect and devotion to the special person in charge . People looking to take advantage of others recognize emotional weakness and often seek to exploit it. Play on emotion in the name of goodness or fairness or envy or pride or greed or sorrow or any hook available . Four : Silence Is Golden If you really want to avoid manipulation consider listening more than you talk. Five: Exploit the False notion of Security be wary of people offering unrealistic guarantees of security. Six : Laser Focus Your Energy Efforts [Stay on message] The best plan is to figure out what you want, make a plan to accomplish your goal and avoid anyone wanting to lead you away from it. [Don't let inconvenient truths deviate you from your message] Seven : Beware of Strangers Bearing Gifts or … There Ain't No Free Lunch " free " food makes hogs lazy and complacent which allows tricky farmers to trap them in relatively short order . Apples To Orange Comparisons Nine : Please Don't Feed The Drama Queens [Other people's concerns are just made up, for the sake of drama, to get attention, ignore or gaslight them] Secrets . . . There Ain't No Stinkin ' Secrets The next time you're ready to fork over your credit card to buy some silly secret, head for the library first or do a search online for the info. It’s probably right in front of you and you can have it for very little money, and more often, for free. Name Dropping : It's Not Who You Know, It's Who You Pretend To Know Avoid Self Delusion At All Costs Thirteen: Character Matters you can't cheat an honest man . Fourteen: Think Like The Leader While Running With The Herd Fifteen: Promise Or Imply Rewards Without Ever Delivering Sixteen: Appeal To Loyalty loyalty - fueled shakedown [If you don't contribute, you're not one of us. If you aren't with us, you're against us] Seventeen: Appeal To One's Sense Of Fair Play As with so many other touchy emotional issues we're forced to define , the word " fair " or fairness is a word that can't be defined other than in its strictest technical sense . And it's the ambiguity of the word that gives dark opportunists their leverage . if a " friendly to the cause " manipulator shows up zealously reciting the mantra of the group , that person is welcomed with open arms . What had happened was someone recognized the emotionally charged atmosphere around anger , resentment and most of all , fairness . locate an emotionally charged situation with a healthy blend of anger and frustration along with many other possible emotions thrown in and exploit it in the name of fairness , a solution making all right for all concerned . Eighteen : Rope A Dope, Fake weakness . [I once knew a man who was great at sandbagging. For example ] every time ... shook hands , his grasp was always weak . He told me in a rare moment of candor that he deliberately offered up his limp hand with almost no grasp so people would get the idea he was weak and underestimate his power right from the start . He'd sometimes show up and do a good deed . Then , when the time was right he'd hit up the person he'd " helped " for a whopper of a favor , far greater than the help he'd given . Nineteen: Exploiting Superstitious People Twenty: Use Confusion To Exploit Your Opponents Confusing language forces the conscious mind to try and make sense of that confusion . And while the gatekeeper , or conscious mind , is busy trying to decode the confusion , a dark persuader is delivering subtle and powerful suggestions designed to move the subject toward his goals . " Until I was coming here today to discuss the benefits of your new system I thought that yesterday might have been better but here I am now , go figure , huh ? When you can enjoy benefits from more inflow of capital and cash then you'll buy directly the system now . " Exaggerated still , maybe not so much . It makes enough sense that some folks might wonder a little but simply nod and accept it as is . People experienced in this tactic practice and are able to lace their presentations with subtle and often not so subtle suggestions as to what they're after . The sentences are designed for two purposes . One is confusion , the other is suggestion . Rapport , confusion and suggestion are the bare bones of conversational or covert hypnosis. slight of mouth. Twenty One: The Mirror & Match People tend to accept and trust others who are like them. To gain trust, or rapport, practitioners seek ways to emulate the behavior of others. When you locate an individual you'd like to get closer to, do as they do, only do it discreetly and subtly. Twenty Two: Capitalize On Existing Momentum & Enthusiasm I remember hearing a couple of guys laughing about how silly the anti - war folks were. These were two dark opportunists who actually hung out with several groups of protestors while pretending to be one of them . Why did they do this ? For sex , drugs and rock and roll , plain and simple . Twenty - Three: Project Strong , Silent , Consistent Power People out to trick others have a sense of who is weak and who they need to avoid Doing what you say gives you power . When people know " you don't play " your power increases dramatically . Be Unpredictable It would seem that being unpredictable would be in direct conflict with consistently but it's not . It's important that people know you say what you mean and do what you say but it's just as important that you don't advertise your habits for everyone to see . when we readily follow in the paths of others we weaken our own destiny and power . If you truly want to avoid exploitation , it makes sense to vary your routine some each day . make being unpredictable a habit . jump right in with subordinates and do what they're doing . showing folks you're willing to get your hands dirty in the trenches from time to time goes a long way . give legitimate praise when due . Twenty-Four: Exploit False Scarcity [Only 2 items left!!] Twenty-five: Getting Your Way With Lies By Omission Most people aren't paying very close attention anyway. tell the whole truth , even if it's uncomfortable because being called on the problems the omission causes is often far more problematic . Twenty-Six: A different Face, A different Place... Reinvent Yourself Often People looking to mislead in an effort to grab power and influence have a wide variety of tricks to achieve their goals . One of these is to change as needed like a chameleon , to morph into someone delivering exactly what others want. Twenty-Seven: Being A Victim Of Manipulation Is Okay Sometimes Twenty-Eight: Avoid False Bravado & Impulsive Behavior People displaying impulsive behavior are usually acting out a predictable pattern . People looking to exploit others recognize these patterns and stand by waiting for the inevitable to happen so they can reap their parasitic rewards . Section Seven: 15 Common Personality Types and Why They're Easy Targets for Dark Persuasion Missed the Boat Bobby (suffers from envy, resentful, fomo inclined) Stuffed Shirt Sherman (pride, ego, fear of being found lacking) Competitive Cory (Greed, envy, win at all costs, appearance of superiority) Black Hole Herman (Eyore, everything sucks, everything is broken) Dora Dullard (means well, wants to help, not quick witted or even smart, too trusting) Viny the Vampire (envy, lots of problems he wants you to bear with or for him) Talkative Tommy (in love with his own voice, will defend errors to the death) Immature Marty (wants to belong and get a long, has trouble fitting in, needs affirmation and acceptance) Malleable Mallory (Bandwagon, joiner, no identity of her own) Game Show Gary (People pleaser, motivated by keeping the piece and keeping things moving) Farley Fairness (justice warrior) Loyal Larry "honor. Larry isn't easily fooled though when he believes in something, he puts all he has into it. This man is also intelligent and is hip to most things as they really are. It’s such a shame that his weakness is his strong character." Eleanor Elitist (better than you, needs recognition for her superior values) Easygoing Eva "trap. Eva is really quite angry and would rip your head off if she thought she could get away clean without being found out. Eva is a bundle of anger and frustration. Spite, resentment and vengeance drive her. She’s not necessarily looking for any particular brand of justice, like Fairness Farley. What she wants is for everything to be destroyed." Norm the Nazi (Angry and it shows; all about being the devil's advocate. Comes across as a bully but will back down if challenged) Section Eight: A Case study of Manipulation ..... Section Nine: Short & Sweet… Down & Dirty Pandering Maneuvers Your Mother Never Taught You. Or Maybe She Did. Refuse to engage opponents, ignore criticism as though it doesn't exist. Go on about your business without comment. This often enrages your opponent and throws him off balance . Always have a backup plan . Develop one or more preparedness contingencies to divide , advance and conquer . Take time , never rush , assume an air of silent authority while maintaining unpredictable atmosphere . Play on your own field whenever possible Use outrageous statistics to make your case, especially when it's doubtful anyone will check . Choose battles wisely , don't step on a big cat's tail . Surrender quickly when necessary . Do not endure unnecessary anguish . Live to do battle another day . A gift , even a small one , creates indebtedness . Establish leadership with a profound Use meaningless praise, awards , and other pandering ploys to build loyalty and dependence . Use scandal , shame , public humiliation , name calling , guilt , and whistle blowing to neutralize your opponent . Use existing momentum rather than creating momentum. This can be accomplished by relating your cause to news , current events , celebrities , trends , disasters , etc . Radiate confidence while courting powerful allies . Exploit the false notion of security . Never ask a question without already knowing the answer . Allow no one to rush you Refuse to play any other way . Know your limitations . Embrace, emulate, herd behavior to appear weak and then strike. Condemn perfection, embrace perfection , according to context. Pander to people's need to be right . Section Ten: Use Emotionally Charged Words, Phrases, Slogans, Sound Bites, Popular & Controversial... Using ambiguous words and language along with emotion seals the deal. Another ambiguous word people like to use to sway others to their way of thinking is " reasonable . " [List of high affect, low meaning words, out of which to create mantras and twitter feeds] Sacrifice Duty Empower Surrender Hate Hater Poor Rich Share Selfish Self - Centered Stingy Sarcasm Arrogance Pomposity Egoism Sneaky Snobbish Lazy Jealous Uncaring Weak Crisis Catastrophe Emergency Disaster Serenity Peace of Mind Tranquility Security Bigoted Xenophobic Prejudiced Self - Righteous Credibility Authority Trust Official Certified Bona fide Hopes Dreams Goals	Chin-Ning Chu Notable Quotations Full screen view [What follows is Chin-Ning Chu's representation of Li ZongWu's Thick Black Theory, a Chinese text about how success depends on shamelessness and ruthlessness. That text, which is translated here, was published in China in 1911. It caused an uproar, apparently, because it was so directly disrespectful of tradition and ritual and decorum. It is profoundly cycnical, to use a Western word. If you look at Li ZongWu's text you will see that it is, as Chin-Ning asserts, difficult to understand. Thus I'm suggesting you read Chin-Ning's representation of it. Wiki has an entry you might find helpful.] Full text download (pdf) Introduction Thick Black Theory ... is a relatively modern work and is still virtually unknown outside of China.... an erratic, difficult book. Lee's writing is obscure. His chaotic style makes Lee difficult to understand even for learned Chinese. ... brief, disconnected epigrams that are meaningless to anyone not deeply immersed in Chinese literature. ... bluntly honest vision of the world. There is the superficial aspect: learning the methods and practices by which you can get what you want by imposing your will on others. And there is the deeper, spiritual understanding of Thick Face, Black Heart as the natural and proper state of your soul. 1: The Essence of Thick Face, Black Heart each one of us will discover the destiny to which we must be true. Understanding how to surmount pain, doubt, and failure is a vital component in winning the game of life. Thick Face: a shield to protect our self- esteem from the bad opinions of others. A person adept at Thick Face creates his own positive self- image despite the criticism of others. The thick- faced person has the ability to put self- doubt aside. He refuses to accept the limitations that others have tried to impose on him and, more importantly, he does not accept any of the limitations that we commonly impose on ourselves. By his absolute self- confidence, the thick- faced person instills confidence in others. A Thick Face need not be assertive or aggressive. He may be humble and submissive. Thick Face is the ability to adopt whatever manner the situation calls for without regard for what other people think of you. Adopt the thick face of a man with a strong sense of his own worth. Black Heart is the ability to take action without regard to how the consequences will affect others. ... ruthless, but it is not necessarily evil. The black- hearted person is above shortsighted compassion. He focuses his attention on his goals and ignores the cost. A black- hearted person has the courage to fail. Ignore the criticism and disapproval of the masses. Ignore criticism, ridicule, and vilification from others, while simultaneously carrying out his duties as he sees fit. Detachment and dispassion that enables the warrior to face life's challenges with calm and grace. Our objective in practicing Thick Face, Black Heart is to be able to defend ourselves against others' aggression. ... neither seeks nor needs external approval. 2: Preparation for Thick Face, Black Heart: Eleven Principles of Unlearning I am not advising you to become an amoral, self- centered person, but to recognize the difficulties that are involved for a naturally caring, sensitive person such as yourself to pursue your own legitimate self- interest. ... gradually replace the beliefs you were taught with the truths you discover. Self- knowledge is a more reliable guide to behavior than adherence to arbitrarily imposed standards, though both are susceptible to error. ... the false and arbitrary nature of many of the standards under which you are laboring. ... success means change and the risk of failure. Success also requires the courage to risk disapproval. MASTER THE DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN VIRTUE AND VANITY Perform your duty without attachment or aversion Creation and destruction are not opposites, 3: Dharma: The Wish-Fulfilling Tree Dharma is often defined as that which supports life. People who practice Dharma accept life as it comes and perform their duty accordingly. Dharma is a natural law that guides us to recognize at any given moment the role each one of us is playing in life. Being true to the duty of that particular role at any given time. The opposite of Dharma is Adharma, which is defined as going against one's proper duty in life. Dharma, the natural law that guides the rightness of our actions, is the foundation of Thick Face, Black Heart. 5: Winning through Negative Thinking If You Have Chicken Manure, Sell Fertilizer. As the Tibetans say, "If you are lying on the ground, you must use the ground to raise yourself." Only the mediocre are always at their best.—JEAN GIRAUDOUX 6: The Magical Power of Endurance The Chinese word for crisis is made by combining two characters: crisis and opportunity. Have you ever noticed that you are frequently quite good at solving someone else's problems? The person who lives in our head is not our true self. 7: The Mystery of Money The Chinese character for wealth— the accumulation of money and other assets— is composed of two symbols: one is a seashell, the other is the symbol for the unique ability or talent that each of us has 12: Acquiring the Killer Instinct finish the job quickly and cleanly--that is the killer instinct, To sacrifice the smaller for the larger is natural in Asian culture, whereas to Westerners this is barbaric and inhumane. he abandoned his objective and took refuge in a false image of his own nobility, masking his weakness as the "noblesse oblige" of one great warrior to another. ... neither was he encumbered by Xiang Yu's concept of honor. The greater your ambition, the more able and willing you must be to exercise your killer instinct. You have to ignore totally whatever your mind is telling you and whatever you're feeling. Just focus wholeheartedly on your task: "Whatever state of mind you are in, ignore it. Think only of cutting." A totally focused state of mind is the essential driving force behind the perfect killer instinct. The killer instinct is the power that propels us to take proper actions in spite of ourselves, keeping us on the path to our objectives. ... The lesson of acquiring the perfect killer instinct is not only in the drama of bullfights and the high finance of the business world; it also exists in its entirety in the flipping of a pancake. 13: Thick Face, Black Heart Leadership (a literal translation from Kung Ming's Art of War) turn disadvantage into advantage Sometimes it is necessary to do some biting and scratching in order to accomplish one's just objectives, ... and these people are also useful for one's own self- defense. Set clear standards of expectations for their performance, and praise or reprimand them accordingly. Notice all the "little right things" If there were no laughter, the Tao would not be Tao. 14: Thick Within, Black Within remove the barriers and discover that which you already possess. Through our "proper" social upbringing, we have disfigured the intuitive understanding of the natural law of winning that is within each one of us. ... undo the wrongs that have been imposed upon you since your birth. The first step is self- reflection and self- discovery. ... The only reward for being good is good itself. ... You have been denying and depriving yourself, ... By ignoring your individual needs and totally catering to the needs of others in accordance to the role you are playing, you have betrayed your inner nature and sacrificed your well- being. ... It is too painful to live your life without the liberty of self- expression and self- nurturing. be aware that a great courage exists within you, the power of courage that enables you to acknowledge your own existence and your own needs. ... Uproot this limited concept of goodness and embrace the expanded virtue.... Stand up against your automatic, habitual actions and thoughts and venture into new frontiers. ... By breaking through your notion of others' standards and expectations, you find a new surge of inner harmony: The highest code of living is detachment. He is indifferent to pain and struggle. The situation might be devastating, but he is not devastated. He graciously rides the waves of life through glory and disgrace. ... indifferent to human judgments. ... uncompromising ... Freedom and the courage of action. ... free yourself from trivial concerns and find the peace you seek in the "bigger picture." .. get petty-mindedness out of the way and simultaneously master ultimate humility and frailty. East and West may have different metaphors and symbols, but the differences are only in the wrapping, not in the essence. power gives you the strength to stand up to your automatic habitual actions and thoughts and venture into new frontiers. Detachment is the secret key to obtaining everything you "want." Nature is the embodiment of Thick Face, Black Heart. 15: Paths to Thick Face, Black Heart believe our Maker has forgotten to deliver them a copy of the operation manual. ... We simply do not know where to find this manual or how to ... read it. ... There is no place or time in which this manual is not present. artificial standards encumber and distract us. ... we become what we think. ... The mind is easily distracted; it loses its focus and becomes restless. If it is not directed positively, its power will be diffused. ... When your breathing is short and shallow, your mind is restless. "No matter where you are, make sure you are there." Mahatma Gandhi 16: How a Piranha Eats the Shark As our experience expands, our reality is also altered Appendix: Thick Black Theory Lee Zhong Wu was a social philosopher and critic. He described the methods by which men obtain and hold on to power: how they use their power and wealth to accumulate more power and wealth. ... Being banned by the government. It was banned because too many people were made uncomfortable by the truth in Lee's observations. They were not used to seeing the ruthlessness and hypocrisy underlying many Chinese institutions laid bare. The first requirement is to empty your mind of everything that does not pertain to your appointment to the position you seek. You must have no other goals, no other thoughts. ... You must seize every little opportunity to advance your prospects. ... You must constantly seek to bring your qualifications and importance to the attention of those who are in a position to help you. ... You must ingratiate yourself with those who can help you. ... You must be very subtle with your threats, because you may unknowingly threaten people with a great ability to do you harm. There are two kinds of bribery. The first involves small gifts, meals, drinks. Often these small gifts create a sense of obligation far exceeding their cost. ... Large bribes are used to seal the appointment. They should also be given to those who have great influence with the official who has the power to appoint you. ... You should smear yourself with a layer of false benevolence and pretend to be a religious, moral man. You should say and do nothing. Talk about everything, but say nothing. Make an appearance of being very active, but do nothing. You should never take a definite position, because it might turn out to be wrong or might offend some powerful person. Claim credit for anything that might go well and disown responsibility for anything that might go wrong. You must bow and scrape before your superiors. You must cultivate a haughty and disdainful attitude toward your inferiors. You must be ruthless... vulnerable to your will, you must maintain a virtuous image. You must join organizations that have virtuous purposes so that people will not believe you capable of ruthless actions. You must not hear criticism. You must not see the disapproving looks of others. the importance of avoiding accountability for your actions and making your actions seem much more important than they really are. ... Do as little as possible and always try to leave someone else to finish the job. ... if something goes wrong so long as the blame can be laid on whoever gave the final approval or finished the job. ... Oftentimes it is necessary to make the situation a little worse than it actually is in order to ensure the proper level of appreciation for your efforts. TWO TYPES OF FOREIGN POLICY: THE THUG AND THE PROSTITUTE The prostitute has a thick face. The thug has a black heart. ... Whenever it became expedient for them to do so, they would break their treaties and make the same promises to another country. ... The thug is a brute without a conscience who will use whatever weapons are available to him in order to beat his victims into submission. Lee maintains ... a man rises in the world exactly to the same degree that he fears his wife. Lee attaches an almost mystical significance to wife fearing. A man's wife is the person to whom he entrusts his whole life. Out of love for her and fear of her, he goes out into the world to make a name for himself.	Clifford Geertz Notable Quotations Full screen view Works and Lives (PDF) Geertz was a great writer and, I think, an important Anthropologist. He mentions Kenneth Burke in the Acknowledgements, which is reason enough to read this book. But you can learn a lot about human-subject story telling from him.
Dale Carnegie Notable Quotations Full screen view Download full text (Archive.org) It isn't what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it. Don't be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you. You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity. Talk to someone about themselves and they'll listen for hours. Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, 'I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you'. Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn't bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and said: "Wouldn't you like to have that?" Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people? You can't win an argument. You can't because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it [the other person will resent you]. Names are the sweetest and most important sound in any language. To be interesting, be interested. If You Want to Gather Honey, Don't Kick Over the Beehive If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity. By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected. Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want. A barber lathers a man before he shaves him. Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and Winning friends begins with friendliness. Arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.	Daniel Kahneman Notable Quotations Full screen view My main aim here is to present a view of how the mind works that draws on recent developments in cognitive and social psychology. Skill and heuristics are alternative sources of intuitive judgments and choices. “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” Valid intuitions develop when experts have learned to recognize familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropriate to it. An important advance is that emotion now looms much larger in our understanding of intuitive judgments and choices than it did in the past. The executive’s decision would today be described as an example of the affect heuristic, where judgments and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning. If the individual has relevant expertise, she will recognize the situation. This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. I describe mental life by the metaphor of two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which respectively produce fast and slow thinking. I attempt to give a sense of the complexity and richness of the automatic and often unconscious processes that underlie intuitive thinking, and of how these automatic processes explain the heuristics of judgment. [I will] introduce a language for thinking and talking about the mind. Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight. I deal with the unfortunate tendency to treat problems in isolation, and with framing effects, where decisions are shaped by inconsequential features of choice problems. The experiencing self and the remembering self ... do not have the same interests. What makes the experiencing self happy is not quite the same as what satisfies the remembering self. You experienced slow thinking as you proceeded through a sequence of steps. You first retrieved from memory the cognitive program for multiplication that you learned in school, then you implemented it. Carrying out the computation was a strain. You felt the burden of holding much material in memory, as you needed to keep track of where you were and of where you were going, while holding on to the intermediate result. work: deliberate, effortful, and orderly—a prototype of slow thinking. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System . We are born prepared to perceive the world around us, recognize objects, orient attention, avoid losses, and fear spiders. Other mental activities become fast and automatic through prolonged practice. The knowledge is stored in memory and accessed without intention and without effort. The highly diverse operations of System have one feature in common: they require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away. we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness. In summary, most of what you (your System 1 ) think and do originates in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally has the last word. System 1 is generally very good at what it does: its models of familiar situations are accurate, its short-term predictions are usually accurate as well, and its initial reactions to challenges are swift and generally appropriate. System 1 has biases, however, systematic errors that it is prone to make in specified circumstances. It sometimes answers easier questions than the one it was asked, and it has little understanding of logic and statistics. One further limitation of System 1 is that it cannot be turned off. Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our lives. Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions. Because System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 1 may have no clue to the error. . As a way to live your life, however, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System in making routine decisions. recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own. System 1 and System 2 are so central to the story I tell in this book that I must make it absolutely clear that they are fictitious characters. anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think. the response to mental effort is distinct from emotional arousal. System 2 is the only one that can follow rules, compare objects on several attributes, and make deliberate choices between options. System 1 detects simple relations (“they are all alike,” “the son is much taller than the father”) and excels at integrating information about one thing, but it does not deal with multiple distinct topics at once, nor is it adept at using purely statistical information. A crucial capability of System 2 is the adoption of “task sets”: it can program memory to obey an instruction that overrides habitual responses. One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure. We normally avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to an easily overloaded working memory. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language. Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation. People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control. The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the reverse is true of night people. Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs. How to Write a Persuasive Message The general principle is that anything you can do to reduce cognitive strain will help, so you should first maximize legibility. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow, or pale blue. If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. In addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable. Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth. if you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce. System 2 is lazy and that mental effort is aversive. If possible, the recipients of your message want to stay away from anything that reminds them of effort, including a source with a complicated name. What psychologists do believe is that all of us live much of our life guided by the impressions of System 1—and we often do not know the source of these impressions. Performance was better with the bad font. Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1.	David McRaney Notable Quotations Full screen view Page xiv Why do we argue? What purpose does it serve? Is all this bickering online helping or hurting us? I invited the famed cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, an expert on human reasoning and argumentation, to be a guest on my show. He explained that we evolved to reach consensus-- sometimes on the facts, sometimes on right and wrong, sometimes on what to eat for dinner-- by banging our heads together. Groups that did a better job of reaching consensus, by both producing and evaluating arguments, were better at reaching communal goals and out- survived those that didn't. Page xiv innate psychology that compels us to persuade others to see things our way when we believe our groups are misguided. Page xv The fact that we so often disagree isn't a bug in human reasoning; it's a feature. Page xv When the tide of public opinion turned on these issues, it shifted so quickly that if people could step into a time machine and go back just a few years, many would likely argue with themselves with the same fervor they argue about wedge issues today. Page xvi the surprising psychology behind how people modify and update their beliefs, attitudes, and values; and how to apply that knowledge to whatever you believe needs changing, whether it's within one mind or a million. Page xvii We will see that the speed of change is inversely proportional to the strength of our certainty, and certainty is a feeling: somewhere between an emotion and a mood, more akin to hunger than to logic. Persuasion, no matter the source, is a force that affects that feeling. Page xvii As Daniel O'Keefe, a professor of communication, defines it, persuasion is "a successful intentional effort at influencing another's mental state through communication in a circumstance in which the persuadee has some measure of freedom." Page xvii Persuasion is not coercion, and it is also not an attempt to defeat your intellectual opponent with facts or moral superiority, nor is it a debate with a winner or a loser. Persuasion is leading a person along in stages, helping them to better understand their own thinking and how it could align with the message at hand. You can't persuade another person to change their mind if that person doesn't want to do so, and as you will see, the techniques that work best focus on a person's motivations more than their conclusions. Page xviii All persuasion is self- persuasion. Page xix Why do I want to change their mind?-- in your mental backpack as you travel with me chapter by chapter. And I hope that question will blossom, as it did for me, into a series of questions. Page xix But also, what does the phrase "change your mind" even mean? Page xx we must avoid debate and start having conversations. Debates have winners and losers, and no one wants to be a loser. But if both sides feel safe to explore their reasoning, to think about their own thinking, to explore their motivations, we can each avoid the dead- end goal of winning an argument. Instead, we can pursue the shared goal of learning the truth. Page 9 In April 2015, Charlie landed his current job, which I won't describe in much detail for the sake of his anonymity, but it involves selling properties around the world. "I'm very good at it. I can earn good money," he told me, proud that he had finally eluded his haters. "It took a while, but ultimately my six years of YouTube, or having to just rant and speak eloquently about abstract concepts, it was almost like I did six years of training. And I've developed a very thick skin. I think I am a very good salesman." Page 11 Brian Greene, a physicist who studies string theory, to tell Wired, "We've come to a very strange place in American democracy where there's an assault on some of the features of reality that one would have thought, just a couple years ago, were beyond debate, discussion, or argument." Page 12 A new cold war began, one based on targeted misinformation, and within months Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was sitting before Congress explaining how Russian trolls were seeding news feeds with weaponized clickbait, not so much to misinform but to encourage the sort of dead- end arguing that makes democratic collaboration difficult. Page 12 epistemic chaos: "Is Truth Dead?" Page 13 Inside this new information ecosystem where everyone had access to facts that seemed to confirm their views, we began to believe we were living in separate realities. Page 15 the Leadership LAB. On most Saturdays, the LAB heads out with a rotating but loyal group of volunteers to talk with people at their front doors. After doing this for more than a decade and having more than fifteen thousand conversations, most recorded so they could pore over each exchange to improve their rhetoric, the LAB had slowly honed a method so fast and reliable, so new, that social scientists began buying plane tickets to study it in person. Page 15 They call it deep canvassing. Page 16 Their mission for years, they told me, was the "long game": to change minds about LGBTQ issues by developing best practices for shifting public opinion, and then sharing what they learned about how to do that so they could help win elections and ballot measures around the world. The goal, they explained, was to alter policies and change laws in places where prejudice and opposition to LGBTQ issues still flourished. Page 21 In the parts of Los Angeles County where they had been crushed by two to one or more, Fleischer's team spoke with every voter who answered and found that not only were people willing, they were eager to discuss the recent vote and LGBTQ issues in general. They wanted to be heard and, in some cases, forgiven. So they offered justifications for their behavior. Page 22 People's explanations for voting against same-sex marriage clustered around three values: tradition, religion, and the protection of their children. Page 22 As time passed, justifications mentioning children faded away, leaving behind only tradition and religion. Page 23 Their values were in conflict between protecting their children and protecting the rights of others. Page 23 They held both positive and negative attitudes about same-sex marriage, and if they were ambivalent, that meant they might be open to reconsidering their vote. Page 25 they emphasized something they called "radical hospitality," a form of selfless concern and energetic friendliness akin to what you might experience at a family reunion. From the moment volunteers arrived at Page 25 a training until they hugged and waved goodbye, the team and the veteran volunteers treated each person as if the day just got better because he or she or they showed up. Radical hospitality is so important to the process that Laura often tells veterans and staff to take breaks if they feel like they can't maintain a joyous enthusiasm. Page 26 Once engaged, people tended to emerge, adamant and confident, ready to defend themselves. Page 26 Canvassers asked where people first heard about the issue at hand. Most quickly realized it was received wisdom-- Page 26 Then the canvasser asked if they knew anyone affected by the issue. Page 26 By the end, their own opinions seemed alien. Page 26 the canvasser asked questions and listened, paraphrasing and reflecting back her words. Page 28 Often, it seemed as if the people who changed their minds during these conversations didn't even realize it. They talked themselves into a new position so smoothly that they were unable to see that their opinions had flipped. At the end of the conversation, when the canvassers asked how they now felt, they expressed frustration, as if the canvasser hadn't been paying close enough attention to what they'd been saying all along. Page 29 "There is no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer, that is going to change their mind," he said, taking a long pause before continuing. "The only way they are going to change their mind is by changing their own mind--by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing things they've never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently." Page 30 He said to keep that image in mind while standing in front of someone, to remember to spend as little time as possible talking about yourself, just enough to show that you are friendly, that you aren't selling anything. Show you are genuinely interested in what they have to say. Page 30 said, keeps them from assuming a defensive position. Page 30 it's their story that should take up most of the conversation. You want them to think about their own thinking. Page 30 Once that real, lived memory was out in the open, you could (if done correctly) steer the conversation away from the world of conclusions with their facts googled for support, away from ideological abstractions and into the world of concrete details from that individual's personal experiences. It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone's mind. Page 31 Steve explained that after thousands of recorded conversations they had found that battling over differing interpretations of the evidence kept the people they met from exploring why they felt so strongly one way or the other. Page 32 "What I envision when I'm standing in front of a voter is that people have this intellectual, logical reasoning process. That's one part of how they process the world and make decisions. But they have this almost entirely separate emotional reasoning process which is based on feelings and things they've experienced." Page 33 Deep canvassing is about gaining access to that emotional space, Steve explained, to "help them unload some baggage," because that's where mind change happens. Page 35 Steve asked, on abortion rights, where she saw herself on a scale of zero to ten, zero being a belief that there should be no legal access to abortion in any way, and ten being support for complete, full, easy access. Page 35 Then he asked Martha why that number felt right to her. Page 35 allow a person's justifications to remain unchallenged. Page 35 nod and listen. Page 35 The idea is to move forward, make the person feel heard and respected, avoid arguing over a person's conclusions, and instead work to discover the motivations behind them. To that end, the next step is to evoke a person's emotional response to the issue. Page 35 After evoking negative emotions like this, canvassers ask people if their opinion has changed, and they re-ask them where they are on the scale of zero to ten. Sampling their newly salient feelings, people often move a few numbers. Page 36 If she had moved, he would have asked her why. But since she didn't, he asked her what the video made her think. Page 36 Instead of arguing, the canvasser listens, helping the voter untangle their thoughts by asking questions and reflecting back their answers to make certain they are hearing them correctly. If people feel heard, they further articulate their opinions and often begin to question them. Page 36 As people explain themselves, they begin to produce fresh insights into why they feel one way or another. Page 36 Instead of defending, they begin contemplating, and once a person is contemplating, they often produce their own counterarguments, and a newfound ambivalence washes over them. If enough counterarguments stack up, the balance may tip in favor of change. Page 36 if he could evoke a memory from her own life that contradicted the reasoning she had shared, she might notice the conflict without him having to point it out. Page 36 She'd be challenging herself. Page 37 what Steve had been looking for--a real, lived experience, one that was especially laden with emotion. Page 38 In the training they called this "modeling vulnerability," and the idea was that if you open up, so will they. Page 39 she had discovered she was conflicted. She would notice things she didn't before. She had moved from neutral to somewhat supportive, and that counted as change. Page 44 one in ten people opposed to transgender rights changed their views, and on average, they changed that view by 10 points on a 101- point "feelings thermometer," Page 44 If one in ten doesn't sound like much, you're neither a politician nor a political scientist. It is huge. Page 46 Altogether, Broockman and Kalla found that deep canvassing was 102 times more effective than traditional canvassing, television, radio, direct mail, and phone banking combined. Page 47 consistency bias: our tendency, when uncertain, to assume our present self has always held the opinions it holds today. Page 49 the brain often gets things wrong because it prefers to sacrifice accuracy for speed. Page 49 Without a chance to introspect, we remain overconfident in our understanding of the issues about which we are most passionate. That overconfidence translates to certainty, and we use that certainty to support extreme views. Page 50 When asked to provide opinions on health-care reform, a flat tax, carbon emissions, and so on, many subjects held extreme views. When experimenters asked people to provide reasons for their opinions, they did so with ease. But if asked to explain those issues in mechanistic detail, they became flustered and realized they knew far less about the policies than they thought they did. As a result, their opinions became less extreme. Page 51 people rarely considered the other side's perspective until asked to do so. Page 51 By empathizing, even hypothetically, people softened their positions--something subjects could have done at any time but, until prompted, never considered. Page 52 "Well, it's funny, in a way it's not new at all. We did not invent the concept that one human being can talk with another human being," he told me, laughing. "So in a way, there's nothing original here at all, and yet it is very original, because it is so much against the grain of the dominant political culture." 3. Socks and Crocs Page 56 How is that thing, whatever it is that we call a mind, made in the first place? Page 56 Asking how we make up our minds, and then do or do not change them, is not that distant from asking, What is the very nature of consciousness itself?--a question that may not even have an answer, at least not yet, not in the confines of our current scientific understanding, nor the language we use to communicate it. Page 57 drama that divided the planet." The Dress was a meme, a viral photo that appeared all across social media for a few months. For some, when they looked at this photo, they saw a dress that appeared black and blue. For others, the dress appeared white and gold. Whatever people saw, it was impossible to see it differently. If not for the social aspect of social media, you might have never known that some people did see it differently. But since social media is social, learning the fact that millions saw a different dress than you did created a widespread, visceral response. The people who saw a different The Dress seemed clearly, obviously mistaken and quite possibly deranged. Page 59 For many, it was an introduction to something neuroscience has understood for a long while, which is also the main subject of this chapter: the fact that reality itself, as we experience it, isn't a perfect one-to-one account of the world around us. Page 59 The world, as you experience it, is a simulation running inside your skull, a waking dream. We each live in a virtual landscape of perpetual imagination and self-generated illusion, a hallucination informed over our lifetimes by our senses and thoughts about them, updated continuously as we bring in new experiences via those senses and think new thoughts about what we have sensed. If you didn't know this, for many The Dress demanded you either take to your keyboard to shout into the abyss or take a seat and ponder your place in the grand scheme of things. Page 60 Because no organism can perceive the totality of objective reality, each animal likely assumes that what it can perceive is all that can be perceived. Objective reality, whatever it is, can never be fully experienced by any one creature. Page 60 The extension of this idea is that if different animals live in different realities, then maybe different people live in different realities, too. Page 61 So this idea that subjective reality and objective reality are not the same, that what we experience inside our minds is a representation of the outside world, a model and not a replica, has been brewing among people who think about thinking for a very long time, but Uexküll brought it into a new academic silo--biology. Page 64 For brains, everything is noise at first. Then brains notice the patterns in the static, and they move up a level, noticing patterns in how those patterns interact. Then they move up another level, noticing patterns in how sets of interacting patterns interact with other sets, and on and on it goes. Layers of pattern recognition built on top of simpler layers become a rough understanding of what to expect from the world around us, and their interactions become our sense of cause and effect. Page 64 We start our lives awash in unpredictable chaos, but the regularity of our perceptions becomes the expectations we use to turn that chaos into predictable order. Page 65 What research like this demonstrates is that each and every brain enters the world trapped in a dark vault of a skull, unable to witness firsthand what is happening outside. Thanks to brain plasticity, through repeated experience, when inputs are regular and repeating, neurons quickly get burned into the reciprocal patterns of activation. It creates a unique predictive model in each individual nervous system, a sort of bespoke resting potential for those same networks to light up in the same way in similar circumstances. Page 65 As Bertrand Russell put it, "The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself." Page 66 The spectrum of light we can see-- the primary colors we call red, green, and blue-- are specific wavelengths of electromagnetic energy. These wavelengths of energy emanate from some source, like the sun, a lamp, a candle. When that light collides with, say, a lemon, the lemon absorbs some of those wavelengths and the rest bounce off. Whatever is left behind goes through a hole in our heads called the pupil and strikes the retinas at the back of the eyes where it all gets translated into the electrochemical buzz of neurons that the brain then uses to construct the subjective experience of seeing colors. Because most natural light is red, green, and blue combined and a lemon absorbs the blue wavelengths, it leaves behind the red and green to hit our retinas, which the brain then combines into the subjective experience of seeing a yellow lemon. The color, though, exists only in the mind. In consciousness, yellow is a figment of the imagination. The reason we tend to agree that lemons are yellow (and lemons) is because all our brains pretty much create the same figment of the imagination when light hits lemons and then bounces into our heads. Page 70 in situations of what Pascal and Karlovich call "substantial uncertainty," the brain will use its experience to create illusions of what ought to be there but isn't. In other words, in novel situations the brain usually sees what it expects to see. Page 72 Pascal's lab came up with a term for this. They call it SURFPAD. When you combine Substantial Uncertainty with Ramified (which means branching) or Forked Priors or Assumptions, you will get Disagreement. Page 72 when the truth is uncertain, our brains resolve that uncertainty without our knowledge by creating the most likely reality they can imagine based on our prior experiences. Page 73 When we encounter novel information that seems ambiguous, we unknowingly disambiguate it based on what we've experienced in the past. But starting at the level of perception, different life experiences can lead to very different disambiguations, and thus very different subjective realities. When that happens in the presence of substantial uncertainty, we may vehemently disagree over reality itself--but since no one on either side is aware of the brain processes leading up to that disagreement, it makes the people who see things differently seem, in a word, wrong. Page 77 happening. If you illuminate pink Crocs in only green light, they will appear gray. Page 79 Pascal was feverish about the implications. Neither side was right nor wrong, so arguing for only one side or the other wouldn't arrive at a deeper understanding: that objective reality and subjective realities can differ. Only the two truths combined, the combination of shared perspectives, would alert people there was a deeper truth, and only through conversation would they have any hope of solving the mystery. Page 82 When faced with uncertainty, we often don't notice we are uncertain, and when we attempt to resolve that uncertainty, we don't just fall back on our different perceptual priors; we reach for them, motivated by identity and belonging needs, social costs, issues of trust and reputation, and so on. Page 83 Disagreements like these often turn into disagreements between groups because people with broadly similar experiences and motivations tend to disambiguate in broadly similar ways, and whether they find one another online or in person, the fact that trusted peers see things their way can feel like all the proof they need: they are right and the other side is wrong factually, morally, or otherwise. Page 83 Since subjectivity feels like objectivity, naive realism makes it seem as though the way to change people's minds is to show them the facts that support your view, because anyone else who has read the things you have read or seen the things you have seen will naturally see things your way, given that they've pondered the matter as thoughtfully as you have. Page 83 Therefore, you assume that anyone who disagrees with your conclusions probably just doesn't have all the facts yet. If they did, they'd already be seeing the world like you do. This is why you continue to ineffectually copy and paste links from all our most trusted sources when arguing your points with those who seem misguided, crazy, uninformed, and just plain wrong. The problem is that this is exactly what the other side thinks will work on you. Page 84 Blaise Pascal, Page 84 Pensées. Page 85 "People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others." Page 86 Pascal and Karlovich's research suggests that simply presenting challenging evidence is not enough. We must meet in ways that allow us to ask and understand how people arrived at their conclusions. Page 87 We must admit if we had experienced what others have, we might even agree with them. Page 87 "cognitive empathy": an understanding that what others experience as the truth arrives in their minds unconsciously, so arguments over conclusions are often a waste of time. Page 87 The better path, they said, would be for both parties to focus on their processing, on how and why they see what they see, not what. Page 87 was planning on spending some time with former members of cults, hate groups, and conspiracy theory communities. Based on what I'd read, people often leave groups like those not because their beliefs are directly challenged, but because something totally outside of the ideology causes them to see it differently. 4. Disequilibrium Page 94 As psychologist Michael Rousell told me, when experiences don't match our expectations, a spike in dopamine lasting about a millisecond motivates us to stop whatever we were doing and pay attention. After the surprise, we become motivated to learn from the new experience so we can be less wrong in the future. Page 95 surprises encourage us to update our behaviors. Page 95 They change our minds without us noticing as the brain quietly updates our predictive schemas, hopefully eliminating the surprise by making it more predictable in the future. Page 95 Our minds are always changing and updating, writing and editing. And thanks to this plasticity, so much of what we consider real and unreal, true and untrue, good and bad, moral and immoral, changes as we learn things we didn't know we didn't know. Page 96 In philosophy, the idea of "knowing" something doesn't mean believing that you know something. Page 96 It means knowing something that also happens to be true. Page 96 belief. To philosophers, beliefs and knowledge are separate, because you can believe things that are false. Page 97 an epistemology is: a framework for sorting out what is true. Page 98 In the end, epistemology is about translating evidence into confidence. Page 98 But some ways of sorting out what the hell is going on are better than others, depending on what it is you want to know. Page 98 Thankfully for us, when it comes to the empirical truth, the epistemology called science seems to have won out, since it is the only one that can build iPhones and vaccines. Page 100 to paraphrase the Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer Kathryn Schulz, until we know we are wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right. Page 100 Since the brain doesn't know what it doesn't know, when it constructs causal narratives it fills holes in reality with provisional explanations. The problem is that when a group of brains all uses the same placeholder, good-enough-for-now construal to plug such a hole, over time that shared provisional explanation can turn into consensus--a common sense of what is and is not true. This tendency has led to a lot of strange shared beliefs over the centuries, consensus realities that today seem preposterous. For instance, for a very long time most people believed that geese grew on trees. Page 105 When we first suspect we may be wrong, when expectations don't match experience, we feel viscerally uncomfortable and resist accommodation by trying to apply our current models of reality to the situation. It's only when the brain accepts that its existing models will never resolve the incongruences that it updates the model itself by creating a new layer of abstraction to accommodate the novelty. The result is an epiphany, and like all epiphanies it is the conscious realization that our minds have changed that startles us, not the change itself. Page 106 Kuhn wrote that "novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation." In other words, when we don't know what we don't know, at first we see only what we expect to see, even when what we see doesn't match our expectations. When we get that "I might be wrong" feeling, we initially try to explain it away, interpreting novelty as confirmation, looking for evidence that our models are still correct, creating narratives that justify holding on to our preconceived notions. Unless grandly subverted, our models must fail us a few times before we begin to accommodate. Page 107 Kuhn was suggesting that when we update, it isn't the evidence that changes, but our interpretation of it. Page 110 When a person's core expectations are massively subverted in a way that makes steady change impossible, they may experience intense, inescapable psychological trauma that results in the collapse of the entire model of reality they once used to make sense of the world. Page 110 Some go down a maladaptive spiral... However, most people intuitively and immediately go searching among friends, family, and the internet for new information, new perspectives, raw material for rebuilding themselves. Page 110 "posttraumatic growth." Page 111 in "the frightening and confusing aftermath of trauma, where fundamental assumptions are severely challenged," people must update "their understanding of the world and their place in it." If they don't, the brain goes into a panic, unable to make sense of reality. The resolution of that panic necessitates new behavior, new thoughts, new beliefs, and a new self-concept. Page 111 after losing a child, after a crushing divorce, after surviving a car accident or a war or a heart attack,people routinely report that the inescapable negative circumstances they endured left them better people. They shed a slew of outdated assumptions that, until the trauma, they never had any reason to question, and thus never knew were wrong. People report that it feels like unexplored spaces inside their minds have opened up, ready to be filled with new knowledge derived from new experiences. Page 112 Anything reduced to rubble won't be rebuilt in the same, unreliable way again.... The result is a new worldview that is "far more resistant to being shattered." In crisis, we become radically open to changing our minds. Page 113 Posttraumatic growth is the rapid mind change that comes to a person after a sudden, far-reaching challenge to the accuracy of their assumptive world. When our assumptions completely fail us, the brain enters a state of epistemic emergency. To move forward, to regain a sense of control and certainty, you realize some of your knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes must change, but you aren't sure which. Page 116 Unless otherwise motivated, the brain prefers to assimilate, to incorporate new information into its prior understanding of the world. In other words, the solution to "I might be wrong" is often "but I'm probably not."... To orient ourselves properly, we update carefully. So if novel information requires us to update our beliefs, attitudes, or values, we experience cognitive dissonance until we either change our minds or change our interpretations. Page 117 So just how much cognitive dissonance does it take for a person to switch from assimilation to accommodation? Is there a quantifiable point at which the brain realizes its models are incorrect or incomplete and switches from conservation to active learning? Could we put a number on it? Page 119 Assimilation, they discovered, has a natural upper limit.... For most, he said, the tipping point came when 30 percent of the incoming information was incongruent. ... Some people may need a bit more disconfirmation than others. Also, some people may be in a situation where disconfirmation is unlikely, cut off from challenging ideas, curating an information feed that stays below the threshold. Page 120 the important point isn't the specific number found in this one study, just that there is a number, a quantifiable level of doubt when we admit we are likely wrong and become compelled to update our beliefs, attitudes, and values. Before we reach that level, incongruences make us feel more certain, not less. Page 121 they didn't expect to see that kind of card, and thus they also couldn't see them. Once they did see them, they tried to make them fit into their old model, the one where those kinds of cards didn't exist. Only when that model failed to make sense of what they were experiencing did they feel compelled to accommodate, to change their minds.... It's dangerous to be wrong, but it's also dangerous to be ignorant, so if new information suggests our models might be incorrect or incomplete, we first attempt to fit the anomalies into our old understanding. If they do, we continue using those models until they fail us too many times to ignore. Page 132 [Westboro Church defector] He felt overwhelmed by a torrent of information that he once considered noise. All at once, he began to feel an intense uncertainty not only about what was true, but about who he was. ... Zach reiterated that he didn't leave the church because he changed his opinions; he changed his opinions because he left the church. ... And he left the church because it had become intolerable for other reasons. Page 139 about assimilation and accommodation, how we first try to make novel and challenging information fit into our worldviews until those times when we realize we must update our worldviews to make room for them. Page 146 It was all of it together, each an anomaly that alone could have been assimilated, novel information that created a mounting cognitive dissonance that at one point in her life could have been assuaged by interpreting it as confirmation of her worldview in some way, but taken together it felt like overwhelming disconfirmation. Page 151 Contact with the world of the sinners was never forbidden, but the nature of their contact was tightly controlled, and much of the time that contact was hostile and antagonistic. Page 154 it was the loss of a sense of community that prompted them to leave. ... Still, even when they felt their first doubts, it took others, people on the outside who listened and showed them counterarguments wrapped in kindness, to truly pull them away. ... they couldn't leave their worldviews behind until they felt like there was a community on the outside that would welcome them into theirs. Page 155 For him, every pattern held a fascination. At every turn, he seemed on the alert for hidden meanings, for how the mundane fit into a bigger system of ideas and agendas. Page 156 he had never been part of a stable community who took him seriously until the truthers welcomed him. Page 157 He had no tribe. Then in 2006, Charlie watched a video in which Alex Jones explained how 9/11 was an inside job. Intrigued, he began to spend a lot of time online watching videos that made arguments like Jones's. Soon he was part of group discussions. And eventually, part of the groups themselves. ... "You're looking for a scapegoat; your life is meaningless; you're just a little nobody, but then suddenly you feel like you're part of an elite. You know things." Page 159 In 2016, cognitive neuroscientists Sarah Gimbel, Sam Harris, and Jonas Kaplan identified a group of subjects who held strong opinions by asking them to mark on a scale from one to seven how strongly they believed in a variety of statements, some political, some neutral. Page 159 When a person was challenged about political wedge issues like abortion or welfare or gun control, the scanner showed that their brains went into fight-or-flight mode, causing their bodies to pump adrenaline, stiffening the muscles and moving blood out of the nonessential organs. As Gimbel told me, "The response in the brain that we see is very similar to what would happen if, say, you were walking through the forest and came across a bear." Page 160 "Remember that the brain's first and primary job is to protect our selves," Kaplan told me. "That extends beyond our physical self, to our psychological self. Once these things [beliefs, attitudes, and values] become part of our psychological self, they are then afforded all the same protections that the brain gives to the body." Page 161 The famous Solomon Asch experiment in which people denied the truth of their own eyes when surrounded by actors who claimed a short line and a long line printed on a large card were the same length. ... A third of subjects bowed to social pressure and said they agreed, though later they said they internally felt at odds with the group. It also led to the Stanley Milgram experiments into obedience in which experimenters successfully goaded two thirds of subjects, who believed they were delivering electric shocks to strangers, to crank the electricity up to lethal doses. Page 162 He studied prejudice throughout the 1950s, and at the time the assumption across most of psychology was that animosity between groups was based on aggressive personalities rising to power and influencing others. Page 163 What he discovered was that there is no baseline. Any difference, of any kind, would activate our innate us-versus-them psychology. Page 164 once people become an us, we begin to loathe a them, so much so that we are willing to sacrifice the greater good if it means we can shift the balance in our group's favor. ... the research, in both psychology and neuroscience, suggests that because our identities have so much to do with group loyalty, the very word itself, identity, is best thought of as that which identifies us as, well, us--but more importantly not them. ... Humans aren't just social animals; we are ultra-social animals. We are the kind of primate that survives by forming and maintaining groups. Much of our innate psychology is all about grouping up and then nurturing that group--working to curate cohesion. If the group survives, we survive. ... So a lot of our drives, our motivations, like shame, embarrassment, ostracism, and so on, have more to do with keeping the group strong than keeping any one member, including ourselves, healthy. In other words, we are willing to sacrifice ourselves and others for the group, if it comes to that. Page 165 humans value being good members of their groups much more than they value being right, so much so that as long as the group satisfies those needs, we will choose to be wrong if it keeps us in good standing with our peers. Page 166 In times of great conflict, where groups are in close contact with each other, or communicating with each other a lot, individuals will work extra hard to identify themselves to each other as us and not them. Page 166 Any opinion, he said, can become fused with group identity. Page 168 crackpot. His credentials, of course, never changed. The research into tribal psychology is clear. If a scientific, fact-based issue is considered neutral--volcanoes or quasars or fruit bats--people ... tend to trust what an expert has to say. But once tribal loyalties are introduced, the issue becomes debatable. ... The average person will never be in a position where beliefs on gun control or climate change or the death penalty will affect their daily lives. The only useful reason to hold any sort of beliefs on those issues, to argue about them, or share them with others is to "convey group allegiance," ... Your values seem out of alignment with the group, "you could really suffer serious material and emotional harm," explained Kahan. Page 169 it is impossible to know or evaluate everything. The world is too vast, too complex, and ever-changing. So a hefty portion of our beliefs and attitudes are based on received wisdom from trusted peers and authorities. Whether in a video, within a textbook, behind a news desk, or standing at a pulpit, for that which we can't prove ourselves, it is in their expertise we place our faith. ... These reference groups are where we get our knowledge about Saturn's moons and the nutritional value of granola, what happens after we die and how much money Argentina owes China. They also influence our attitudes about everything from jazz trombones to nuclear power and the healing power of aloe vera. We consider what they tell us to be true, the prevailing attitude among them to be reasonable, because we trust they have vetted the information. We trust them because we identify with them. They share our values and our anxieties. They seem like us, or they seem like the people we would like to be. ... Once we consider a reference group trustworthy, questioning any of their accepted beliefs or attitudes questions all of them, and this can be a problem. Humans are primates, and primates are gregarious creatures. Page 170 Scientists, doctors, and academics are not immune. But lucky for them, in their tribes, openness to change and a willingness to question one's beliefs or to pick apart those of others also signals one's loyalty to the group. Their belonging goals are met by pursuing accuracy goals. For groups like truthers, the pursuit of belonging only narrowly overlaps with the pursuit of accuracy, because anything that questions dogma threatens excommunication. Page 171 Conspiratorial thinking becomes most resistant to change once a person becomes bound to a group identity as a conspiracy theorist. After that, a threat to the beliefs becomes a threat to the self, and the psychological mechanisms that bind us together as groups take over; those are what prevent the metacognition necessary to escape. Page 172 when we are fearful, we are constantly attempting to reduce the chaos and complexity of an uncertain world into something manageable and tangible, something we can fight, like the work of a small group of malevolent puppet masters. At our most anxious, we give the side eye to governments and institutions and political parties--to the groups that we feel are not our own--not just a few nearby individuals. Page 172 If conspiracy theorists discover any disconfirmatory evidence, then they may conclude it was planted by the conspirators to throw them off the trail. Page 176 When we feel as though accepting certain facts could damage our reputation, could get us ostracized or excommunicated, we become highly resistant to updating our priors. But the threat to our reputation can be lessened either by affirming a separate group identity or reminding ourselves of our deepest values. ... Subjects who got a chance to affirm they were good people were much more likely to compromise and reach an agreement with their ideological opponent than people who felt their reputations were at stake. Page 177 oppositional identity: he saw himself as a subversive, an underdog who opposed the status quo Page 178 Conspiracy theorists and fringe groups may hold individually coherent theories, but there is no true consensus, just the assumption of consensus. If they hung out together, they might catch on to that, but since they rarely do, they can each keep their individual theories and still assume they have the backing of a tribe. They never get a chance to argue face-to-face, so there is no evolution of ideas, no central theory strengthened by constant challenge and defense. Page 179 If the brain assumes the risks of being wrong outweigh any potential rewards for changing its mind, we favor assimilation over accommodation, and most of the time that serves us well. Page 180 "I've always been looking for my tribe, and something started happening in my brain on that 9/11 trip," Charlie said. "Meeting all these people. I started to see that perhaps the tribe that welcomed me so much were not mentally healthy people." Page 182 psychology, this is called the introspection illusion. Decades of research had shown that though we often feel very confident that we know the antecedents of our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, along with the sources of our motivations and goals, we are rarely privy to such information. Instead, we observe our own behavior and contemplate our own thoughts the way an observer would another person, and then we create rationalizations and justifications for what we think, feel, and believe. Page 185 The subjects in the Jane study started with the same evidence, but when differently motivated by different questions, they generated different arguments for different conclusions. Page 185 Basically, when motivated to find supporting evidence, that's all we look for. When we desire to find a reason for A over B, we find it. Page 189 epistemic vigilance. Page 189 In an information exchange, epistemic vigilance helps protect individuals from updating too hastily. Without the order afforded by rough consensus, social situations would become unnavigable, and the behaviors that usually put food in your belly and keep your blood in your body might fail in both regards. By avoiding bad information, even from people you typically trust, brains and groups maintain their vital cohesion. Page 192 Reasoning is often confused with reason, the philosophical concept of human intellect and rationality. Page 192 In short, reasoning is coming up with arguments--plausible justifications for what you think, feel, and believe--and plausible means that which you intuit your trusted peers will accept as reason-able. Page 194 Research shows people are incredibly good at picking apart other people's reasons. We are just terrible at picking apart our own in the same way. Page 198 If we do debate, we tend to fall prey to what legal scholar Cass Sunstein calls the "law of group polarization," which says that groups who form because of shared attitudes tend to become more adamant and polarized over time. This is because when we wish to see ourselves as centrists but learn that others in our group take a much more extreme position, we realize that to take the middle position, we must shift our attitude in the direction of the extreme. Page 198 In response, people who wish to take extreme positions must shift further in that direction to distance themselves from the center. This comparison-to-others feedback loop causes the group as a whole to become more polarized over time, and as consensus builds, individuals become less likely to contradict it. Page 200 Sure, the internet makes it easier to form groups around our biased and lazy reasoning; but it also exposes us to the arguments of those outside of our groups. Spend enough time in places like Reddit or Twitter or Facebook, with all the arguing and all the bad ideas fighting one another, and even if you remain silent, someone will voice something that resembles your private opinion, and someone will argue with them. Even as spectators, we can realize when the weaknesses of our justifications have been exposed. Page 200 For Stafford, this means if we can create better online environments, ones designed to increase the odds of productive arguments instead of helping us avoid arguing altogether, we may look back on this period of epistemic chaos as a challenge we overcame with science. Page 203 psychology defines beliefs as propositions we consider to be true. The more confidence you feel, the more you intuit that a piece of information corresponds with the truth. The less confidence, the more you consider a piece of information to be a myth. ... Attitudes, however, are a spectrum of evaluations, feelings going from positive to negative that arise when we think about, well, anything really. We estimate the value or worth of anything we can categorize, and we do so based on the positive or negative emotions that arise when that attitude object is salient. Those emotions then cause us to feel attracted or repulsed by those attitude objects, and thus influence our motivations. Most importantly, attitudes are multivalent. We express them as likes or dislikes, approval or disapproval, or ambivalence when we feel both. Page 204 Taken together, beliefs and attitudes form our values, the hierarchy of ideas, problems, and goals we consider most important. ... The realization that opinions were more influenced by attitudes than beliefs revealed an unexplored territory. Page 205 Much of the research had been based on an idea put forward by a sociologist and political scientist named Harold Lasswell. He said that all communications between humans could be broken down to: "Who says what to whom in which channel and with what effect?" Who referred to the communicator. What referred to the message. To whom referred to the audience. In which channel referred to the medium or the context. With what effect referred to the impact the message had on the audience. Page 206 Petty and Cacioppo realized the reason it didn't make sense was because there were two higher-level variables at play. ... Petty and Cacioppo used the terms "high elaboration" and "low elaboration" to describe these two kinds of thinking. Page 207 the elaboration likelihood model is that persuasion isn't only about learning the information. Elaboration is contextualizing the message after it gets inside your head, something more akin to how people arrive at different interpretations of inkblots in a Rorschach test. ... information alone won't be sufficient to persuade some people. Individuals vary in how they assimilate such concepts into their existing models. ... the same message that persuaded one person would discourage another. ... Motivating factors that increase likelihood include not only relevance but incentives to reach accurate conclusions, a feeling of responsibility to make sense of the message's claims, and a personality trait called "high need for cognition." Page 208 When elaboration likelihood is high, people tend to take what Petty and Cacioppo called the "central route"; but as likelihood drops off, people tend to move onto what they called the "peripheral route." Page 208 On the central route, the merits of the message matter. On the peripheral route, the merits are ignored and people focus on simple, emotional cues. Page 209 Petty and Cacioppo found that the more motivated the students, the more they took the central route. On that route, they paid more attention, and so the stronger arguments were more persuasive. Page 210 Research has found that successful attitude change via the central route may take more effort, but it also creates more enduring attitudes. Messages that persuade via the peripheral route tend to do so quickly and easily, which is great for making a sale or getting people to go vote, but the changes they produce are weak. They fade with time and can be reverted with minimal effort. ... So which route should we encourage people to take? That depends. Vodka, for instance, is colorless, odorless, and mostly tasteless. There's no great distinction between brands (until the next morning). With something like that, we would be correct to encourage people to take the peripheral route. It would be better for a vodka company to focus on interesting packaging, celebrity endorsements, and ad campaigns that play up the luxury, prestige, or playfulness of the brand. To make up for the fact that the peripheral route doesn't lead to long-lasting change, they would need to continually deliver emotional appeals and routinely change out the presentation of the messages. Advertising can accomplish this with a constant stream of rotating celebrities, slogans, logos, and so on. Page 211 However, if we are trying to change attitudes about complex fact-based issues like immigration or health care or nuclear power, we need to know our audience. What motivates them? Are they knowledgeable? Are they distracted in some way? For facts to work, we need to move them onto the central route and keep them there. If we know they are already motivated and knowledgeable about the topic, most of the work is done for us. If not, facts must be delivered by a trusted source in a setting where people are amenable to learning new information. Page 212 In the late 1980s, Shelly Chaiken and Alice H. Eagly introduced the heuristic-systematic model (HSM). It posits that when lazily thinking about alternative ways of feeling about the world, we use heuristics or simple rules of thumb that mostly show we are right. When thinking effortfully, we systematically process information considering all the ways we might be wrong. ... Most of the time when there's a handy heuristic available, the HSM says we will fall back on it. Brains are cognitive misers, as psychologists like to say. Page 213 Certainty gives an air of objectivity to the subjective. When a person says, ‘This is the best movie of 2019.' They mean it. That feels like a fact to them." ... "You receive a billion messages a day from advertisements, politics, social media, and so on," said Luttrell. "You can't engage with all of them, but some will affect you, and how they affect you is different when you are invested or can dig through the evidence. Both models have the insight that, at the end of the day, it depends on how deeply the audience is engaging with the message. And that hadn't been considered until these models." Page 213 [It is] important to sort out a person's values and motivations. Page 225 The aim is no longer to attempt to change people's minds. The goal is to help people arrive at a more rigorous way of thinking, a better way of reaching certainty or doubt. What a person believes is no longer the point of the conversation, but why and how they believe those things and not others. Page 225 He'd later clarify, as so often is the case, that the phrase "change your mind" can mean many things. What he meant was that he doesn't set out in a conversation to change people's conclusions about what is and is not true, or moral, or important. Regardless, that's usually what happens if someone takes the time to go through all the steps with him. Page 226 About Street Epistemology... HERE ARE THE STEPS: Establish rapport. Assure the other person you aren't out to shame them, and then ask for consent to explore their reasoning. Ask for a claim. Confirm the claim by repeating it back in your own words. Ask if you've done a good job summarizing. Repeat until they are satisfied. Clarify their definitions. Use those definitions, not yours. Ask for a numerical measure of confidence in their claim. Ask what reasons they have to hold that level of confidence. Ask what method they've used to judge the quality of their reasons. Focus on that method for the rest of the conversation. Listen, summarize, repeat. Wrap up and wish them well. Page 233 Anthony emphasized that street epistemology is about improving people's methods for arriving at confidence, not about persuading someone to believe one thing more than another. Page 234 He reiterated to stay honest. Ask outright, "With your consent, I would like to investigate together the reasoning behind your claims, and perhaps challenge it so that it either gets stronger or weaker—because the goal here is for both of us to walk away with better understandings of ourselves," or something like that. And if that isn't your goal, it won't work. You can't fake it. Page 234 You're guiding them through their reasoning so that they can understand it. "That's it. It's surprising how that is really it." Page 234 Watching Anthony work and then listening to him explain the method, I couldn't help but notice that street epistemology and deep canvassing seemed incredibly similar in many ways. Page 236 First, ask a nonthreatening question that's open-ended. Something like, "I've been reading a lot about vaccines lately, have you seen any of that?" Next, just listen for a while. Then communicate your curiosity and establish rapport by asking a nonjudgmental follow-up question. Next, reflect and paraphrase. Summarize what you've heard so far to make the other person feel heard and respected. Then look for common ground in the person's values. You might not agree with their argument, but you can communicate that you too have values like theirs, fears and anxieties, concerns and goals like they do. You just think the best way to deal with those issues is slightly different. Then share a personal narrative about your values to further connect. Finally, if your views have changed over time, share how. Page 237 Tamerius said she thought it might be, and that it seemed to her that everyone was pulling from the same kinds of lessons that therapists had learned over the last fifty years dealing with people resistant to change. Page 244 We don't decide or choose to be certain or uncertain; we just feel it. ... The vast majority of what the brain does happens "beneath thought, and then it's projected into consciousness." Page 245 Beliefs and doubts are better thought of as processes, not possessions. They aren't like marbles in a jar, books on a shelf, or files in a computer. Belief and doubt are the result of neurons in associative networks delivering an emergent sensation of confidence or the lack thereof. Page 251 "I want to live in a world where people believe true things. But I've realized that ridicule, being angry and telling people that they're mistaken, is not going to help them. We're all sort of in the same boat. We're just grasping for reasons to justify the views that we've already built. Once you know that, you begin to feel empathy, you really do. You begin to have epistemic humility about what you yourself believe." Page 263 The more people who grow up within, or eventually obtain, physical and economic security will always develop values of individuality, autonomy, and self-expression. Page 271 Psychologist Gordon Allport... outlined its principles in his landmark 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice. ... Allport spent years researching prejudice, and in his book said that before minds can change concerning members of a minority or an out-group, they must make true contact. First, members must meet, especially at work, under conditions of equal status. Second, they must share common goals. Third, they should routinely cooperate to meet those goals. Fourth, they must engage in informal interactions, meeting one another outside of mandated or official contexts, like at one another's homes or at public events. And finally, for prejudice to truly die out, the concerns of the oppressed must be recognized and addressed by an authority, ideally the one that writes laws. Page 273 The creation of new conceptual categories is the greatest sign that accommodation is occurring on a large scale, and thus social change is imminent. ...For instance, the term designated driver was invented by the Harvard Alcohol Project as a public health initiative and then seeded into popular television shows like Cheers and L.A. Law. ... If you accepted the term and used it, then it created dissonance with the urge to drink and drive. ... To resolve the dissonance, the existing model had to be updated—people who drink do not drive. Page 275 One of the curious aspects of moving from one paradigm to another is that the moment a better explanation comes along that can accommodate the anomalies that the previous paradigm couldn't assimilate, the anomalies simply become facts. We rearrange our categories, create new ones, and fill them with refined definitions. Page 276 Researchers say, in short, it was about trust—we don't live in a post-truth world, but a post-trust world. A general distrust of media, science, medicine, and government makes a person very unlikely to get vaccinated no matter how much information you throw at them, especially when the people they do trust share their attitudes. Page 277 So the research suggests that to shift hesitant attitudes about vaccines or anything else, we must identify who is hesitant, what institutions they most trust, and then distribute the vaccine from the manifestations of those institutions that will appeal to the most socially connected groups within that population. Coda Page 290 Whatever model you subscribe to as a flat-Earther, the binding idea is that there is a mysterious powerful them who at some point learned the Earth was flat—either through seeing it from space or from exploring to the farthest edges of the disc—and now they are covering it up for some reason. Page 291 Beneath that dogma is a value that expresses itself in attitudes. Flat-Earthers don't distrust the scientific method, just the institutions that use it; so they often use the scientific method to test their hunches. When they perform experiments and the results suggest that their hypothesis is incorrect or provides evidence for a competing hypothesis, they dismiss that evidence as anomaly. Page 291 Science is smarter than scientists, and the method is what delivers results over time. But for it to work, you must be willing to say you are wrong. And if your reputation, your livelihood, your place in your community are at stake, well, that can be hard to do. Page 292 when interacting with someone who is vaccine-hesitant, you'll get much further if you frame it as respectful collaboration toward a shared goal, based on mutual fears and anxieties, and demonstrate you are open to their perspective and input on the best course of action.	David W Marx Notable Quotations Full screen view Page xiv The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of human behavior at work -- the presence of a "cultural gravity" nudging humans into the same collective behaviors at the same time. Page xiv As we'll see by the end of this book, fashions explain behavioral change more than we've been willing to admit. Page xvi Researchers recently concluded that the achievement of high status only makes people want more. Page xvi This also explains why we dislike social climbers: they remind us there is a ladder to climb. In fact, the modern word "villain" derives from the status - related sin of lowly villein feudal tenants daring to seek a higher social position. Page xvi in seeking to maximize and stabilize status, individuals end up clustering into patterns of behavior (customs, traditions, fashion, fads, taste) that we understand as culture. Page xvii Status shapes our aspirations and desires, sets standards for beauty and goodness, frames our identities, creates collective behaviors and morals, encourages the invention of new aesthetic sensibilities, and acts as an automated motor for permanent cultural change. Culture is embodied in the products, behaviors, styles, meanings, values, and sensibilities that make up the human experience -- and it is status that guides their creation, production, and diffusion. Page xvii Elites could once protect their status symbols behind information barriers and exclusive access to products; now nearly everything is available to nearly everyone. Page xviii diluted the power of taste to serve as an effective means of social exclusion. the most notable outsider group of the twenty - first century has been the internet trolls rebelling against diversity, equity, and inclusion through revanchist slogans and memes. Page xx status, is not a "game" some choose to play but an invisible force undergirding the entirety of individual behavior and social organization. We want great art and enduring beauty to derive from intrinsic value -- not from elite associations. Part One: Status and the Individual Page 5 we care a lot about our ranking, because it determines the benefits we receive; at the same time, we can deduce our position in the hierarchy at any time by comparing our benefits with those of others. Page 5 status is bestowed by others. Page 6 Our status position is always contextual, based on how we are treated in a particular time and place. Page 7 A growing body of empirical research concludes that status is a fundamental human desire. Normal status is nice, but long - term happiness requires a sense of higher status. Page 8 A study found that 70 percent of research subjects would give up a silent raise in salary for a more impressive job title. status hierarchies tend to be based more on esteem rather than raw power. Page 9 Esteem is the backbone of status hierarchies, and this form of social approval acts as a benefit in its own right. We like feeling liked. Cecilia Ridgeway, "is not so much about money and power as about being publicly seen and acknowledged as worthy and valuable by the community." Esteem can be expressed through a wide range of palpable benefits. People with above - average status experience favorable interactions -- "salutations, invitations, compliments, and minor services." Page 10 High status also means more attention and rewards for doing the same work as lower - status individuals. Another favorable interaction is deference -- the right to do as one pleases, at one's own pace, with few interventions or interruptions. An additional status benefit is access to scarce resources. Page 11 The final status benefit is dominance -- the ability to make others do things against their wishes. high status makes people happy and healthy, All of this demand for higher esteem, however, inherently engenders social conflict: Page 14 Sociologists describe those born to higher ascribed status categories as status advantaged, and those born outside of those categories as status disadvantaged. Page 15 The modern ideal is to organize society as a system of achieved status, where a higher position is based on personal achievements rather than immutable characteristics. The promise of status rebirth was for many years a selling point for immigrating to the New World. This opens the question, however, of what actually qualifies as "achievement." the highest achievements must demonstrate rare and valuable talents. Today, achievements tend to be embodied in particular forms of capital. political capital access to power - As meritocracy becomes more of a shared ideal, new forms of capital have emerged. Page 16 Educational capital - degrees and certifications - Occupational capital - economic capital -- - cash, wealth, and property - Money is very flexible as an asset, converting easily into power over others through business ownership, political connections, donations, and bribes. Social capital -- networks of collegial relationships with elites - additional status criteria generated within the internal logic of the status system itself: namely, cultural capital, detachment, originality, and authenticity. Besides capital, we also have personal virtues that may improve our interactions with others. We can receive esteem in our communities through intelligence, physical attractiveness behavioral and conversational Page 17 charms personal integrity bodily capital; While personal virtues can open the door to building more reliable forms of capital (and, for the most part, originate in aristocratic mores), they aren't particularly rare or valuable in their own right. The global hierarchy never revolves around the cleverest quips and the freshest breath. Capital determines our membership in groups, and these memberships determine our status. The To "be somebody" in today's world requires accumulating significant amounts of capital, often across multiple criteria. This clustering is called status congruence, and it works to stabilize the status rankings. Despite claims of achieved status, status congruence reveals exactly how inequity becomes entrenched over time. Page 18 social mobility always appears to be possible, making us feel responsible for our own status. There is one final ramification of achieved status we must also consider: we resent individuals who claim or receive high status without meeting the requisite status criteria. Bertrand Russell "Success should, as far as possible, be the reward of some genuine merit, and not of sycophancy or cunning." The legitimacy of any hierarchy hinges on status integrity -- a collective belief that the ranking of individuals is fair, and that they receive greater benefits for legitimate reasons. Individuals seek higher status -- insofar as its pursuit doesn't risk their current status level. Page 19 status group. Members of these groups share status beliefs about the value of certain status criteria. Alternative status groups believe in criteria outside of traditional capital. The very best surfers have the most status, and the worst surfers have the least -- irrespective of their 401(k)s and fancy domiciles. Page 20 In extreme cases this code switching between groups' competing demands can split us into multiple personalities. Social mobility of the modern age allows individuals more freedom to choose their primary status groups. So how do we decide which groups to join? We are all born into a status group, and many remain there forever. Fringe groups flip the script and value extreme negations of traditional virtues. Page 21 From this perspective, membership in alternative status groups appears to be a clever strategy for oppressed and unprivileged individuals to maximize their status. only provide local status -- surfer can be a great hero among other surfers but just a "beach bum" up the shore. Max Weber dominant groups that tumble down the hierarchy develop particularly strong resentments: "The more they feel threatened, the greater is their bitterness." Page 22 The Trump voting bloc continues to embrace older status beliefs anchored in ascribed racial, gender, and religious hierarchies, which are losing influence in a more diverse society. Status is thus not just personal but political. Status is an ordinal ranking, an overall increase in wealth only raises the bar for the capital required to gain status. The constant struggles among status groups play a major role in the human experience -- and, as we'll see later, fuel the creation of new culture. Although no society is perfectly meritocratic, modern individuals play a larger role in determining their own status than in the past. Page 25 a more elementary requirement to gain status: conformity to group norms. Page 26 earning social approval requires not just making concrete contributions to the group's goals but also following a particular set of arbitrary practices. arbitrary denotes choices where an alternative could serve the same purpose. we can eat, drink, dress, sing, dance, play, and think in a nearly infinite number of ways. And yet, once we settle on a particular behavior, we no longer see our decisions as arbitrary. Our brains provide us with post facto rationalizations for our arbitrary acts. Page 27 We become particularly stubborn about insisting on the nonarbitrariness of our own cultural practices. What makes us so attached to the arbitrary practices of our community in times when other choices are available? The answer is conventions-well - known, regular, accepted social behaviors that individuals follow and expect others to follow. Conventions assist humans in coordinating around certain choices. Wherever we see people repeating a particular practice and rejecting its equally plausible alternative, there is likely a convention compelling everyone into making the same choice. customs, the tacit rules of a community. Page 28 traditions, are conventions anchored in historical precedence that serve as explicit symbols of the community. Beliefs can also have conventional elements. short - term conventions we call fads, Fashions are conventions that appear in ornamental areas of life that change on a regular basis. artists play with conventions -- respecting some to woo in audiences and breaking others to create surprise. We ultimately follow conventions to gain social approval and avoid social disapproval, and in doing so, they change our behaviors and organize the data we gather from our senses. Page 29 For a convention to take root within a community and become "regular" behavior, it must become part of common knowledge -- Moving the population to a new convention requires building new common knowledge. Page 30 Conventions provide a "solution" when trying to coordinate behaviors with others: Our brains prefer when other people meet our expectations, because this means we don't have to expend extra mental energy on thinking through alternatives. Receiving social approval for upholding conventions and disapproval for violating them has clear effects on our status position. Page 31 internalization means the origins of most conventions often get lost to the ages. The more the backstory is forgotten, the more conventions seem to be the "natural" order of the world. Violations consequentially are "unnatural" and require sanctions. Page 32 Not only did they set standards, they enforced them: Internalization unlocks the final power of conventions: setting our perceptual framework for observing the world. The perception of time, for example, is a convention. The idea that major chords sound "happy" and minor chords are "sad"? That's a convention. Page 33 These internalized conventions are known in sociology as habitus, and they guide our talking, walking, dressing, and thinking, as well as how we judge what is good, correct, fun, and beautiful. the is - ought fallacy - "a very nearly universal tendency of people to move from what is to what ought to be in the strong sense of concluding that what is right or good." Page 34 To follow the same arbitrary rules as another individual is to be part of the same "collectivity." Paradigm describes these macro - conventions -- the underlying beliefs of a group that set the overall rules for permissible actions, offer guideposts in times of uncertainty, and build the frameworks for understanding and explanation. Ian MacDonald writes, "The Beatles' way of doing things changed the way things were done and, in so doing, changed the way we expect things to be done." "Norms of partiality" benefit one group over another. Majorities commonly promote social norms that advantage themselves over minorities, and in internalizing these biased conventions, even the disadvantaged parties may come to accept them. Page 35 Even when conventions tend to be obviously unfair or clash against communal principles, challengers face social disapproval for choosing alternatives. Anthony Heath's assertion: the benefits of conformity must be compared with the benefits to be obtained elsewhere, Conventions create habits and patterns of behavior through carrots of social approval and sticks of social disapproval. Page 37 A superiority of position should be reflected in the superiority of benefits. These are expressed in the expense, quality, and design of possessions; speech patterns (use of polite language or slang); means of earning a living; self - presentation (dress, hair, makeup, fitness); location and quality of domiciles; and hired services (do we mow the lawn or do we pay someone else to do it?). Page 38 Every convention can be placed on two hierarchies: (1) the tier within a single status group; and (2) the position between groups on the global status ranking. Page 40 As we move up the status hierarchy, we must adopt conventions with higher status value. Knowing and participating in high - status lifestyle conventions -- even certain greetings, subtle preferences, and nonverbal cues -- is a critical part of gaining and maintaining high status. This particular knowledge is known as cultural capital, defined by the sociologists Michèle Lamont and Annette Lareau as Page 41 "widely shared high status cultural signals (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviors, goods and credentials) used for social and cultural exclusion." Page 42 During times of broad economic growth, lower status tiers can suddenly afford to take part in higher - status conventions. This raises the standards for all of society. Everyone feels they must also consume at a higher level to retain normal status -- i.e., keeping up with the Joneses. So far we've seen how status requires conformity to certain arbitrary practices, and now we understand that the resulting conventions take on status value. Next we'll apply this knowledge to our own individual behavior -- and how the specific pressures of our status position push us to be alike and also be different. Page 43 normal status requires following certain conventions. This means imitating our peers, while distinguishing ourselves from the behaviors of lower - status groups and rivals. Meanwhile, achieving higher status requires distinguishing ourselves from our current status tier and imitating the practices of superiors. Humans are hardwired for mimicry and absorb the behaviors of our community. Where imitation most commonly becomes a conscious act is when we join new groups later in life and seek other members' validation. Page 44 Imitation is required for attaining normal status within a group, but there is an additional requirement: we must affirm our differences from rival groups. Conventional differences are critical for group demarcation, and groups emphasize the distinct conventions that draw these clear lines. counterimitation. Normal status in a group requires both imitation and counterimitation. Page 44 By definition a higher position requires individual distinction. Page 45 As long as distinction fits within the collective beliefs of the group, individuals have more leeway to break from the norm. Another low - risk form of individual distinction is emulation -- the chasing of status value through the imitation of higher - status conventions. Emulation is a safe bet, but not a sure one. High status in modern society thus requires satisfying an additional status criterion: to be distinct. Page 46 good indication of having super - high status, then, is being able to get away with distinctive acts. Page 47 pluralistic ignorance: the fact that we make our "different" choices without knowing everyone else's next actions. Page 49 Where we do choose for status value, our brains obfuscate the reasons and tell us we are desiring something more rational. Page 51 Status must be communicated, Page 52 The term "signaling" is used in both economics and zoology to describe when individuals communicate their high quality through specific clues in order to be selected by another party. Page 52 status is given, never taken." Page 53 Coco Chanel's maxim "If you wish to do business, the first thing is to look prosperous." We don't have to signal to everyone -- only in times of information asymmetry. the highest - status individuals should have strong enough reputations to reduce the need for aggressive signaling. Page 54 bragging thus become an implicit sign of low status. the principle of detachment: very high - status individuals should seem detached from active attempts to gain status. Page 55 Great Gatsby, "Her voice is full of money" -- Besides signals and cues, there is an important third category of information used in status appraisals: significant absences. Appraisers also look for what is missing. But the fact that not doing things plays a role in status appraisals means no one can ever opt out of making status claims. Page 56 status appraisers look for clues in our demeanor and possessions to estimate status, and so the most obvious way to signal a high social position is to show off certain goods or engage in certain behaviors with high status value. To impress "transient observers," economist Thorstein Veblen advises, "the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs may read." Page 57 The principle of detachment means all status symbols require alibis -- reasons for adoption other than status seeking. Companies that produce luxury goods, from Louis Vuitton to Tiffany, Rolex, and Dom Perignon, understand the need for alibis, and their marketing provides detailed explanations of great craftsmanship, rare materials, unsurpassed comfort, and the highest levels of quality control. Page 58 Within wealthy communities, the most effective status symbols can be so discreet as to look like unconscious cues. Page 59 The fact that cachet arises through associations with certain individuals and groups means that it can travel across "chains" of associations. When European elites fell in love with Russian ballet at the turn of the twentieth century, everything Russian took on cachet, including the borzoi breed of dogs. Page 60 There are five common signaling costs. money. The second cost is time. The third cost is exclusive access. cost is cultural capital -- knowledge of conventions acquired through spending time among high - status people. The final cost is norm breaking. Page 61 New Money focuses on financial costs. Subcultures thrive on exclusive access and knowledge. This means anything can be a status symbol if it has cachet and high signaling costs. Money may be the most common signaling cost, but in a world with millions and millions of wealthy people, the most credible status symbols need to erect barriers beyond price. Page 62 Because signals must be subtle, our appraisers may fail to notice them. This is the problem of perceptibility. most people want credit for their hard - earned status symbols. semantic drift: the slow change in words' meanings over time. Page 63 after reggae musician Bob Marley became a global celebrity, everything Jamaican took on a new cachet, In the 1980s, conservative, pro - business French youth wore stodgy tassel loafers as a subtle protest against the Socialist government. But French leftist youth also started to wear those same shoes to get better tables at upscale restaurants. This diminished the loafer's political valences. In order to get ahead of failures in perceptibility, interpretability, and ambiguity, we adopt certain techniques to ensure semiotic success. The first is choosing the most suitable status symbols for our appraisers. Page 64 The second is adjusting based on feedback. The final and most important technique is redundancy, Umberto Eco explains, "Every time there is signification there is the possibility of using it in order to lie." Jessica Pressler writes, the indicia of wealth, Page 65 A significant portion of the modern economy is based on committing light symbolic deceit. Some forms of trickery have become conventional. Page 66 for those incapable or unwilling to advance through education, training, or hard work, cheating may be the sole means of improving one's status level. research shows that lower - income individuals believe "the game is rigged" and may be already skeptical that hard work is the key to life success.) Triangulation forces us to look beyond single status symbols and toward the entire package of symbols. Page 69 Like "status" and "culture,""taste" is yet another contentious term of frustrating ambiguity, Page 70 The modern age of cultural pluralism, however, precludes a single, authoritative standard for good taste. Standards of taste are always relative to the dominant conventions of the era and the society, and so the only way to make sense of taste is to analyze it as a social mechanism. Page 71 For our purposes, taste is a crucial concept in providing a direct link between status seeking and the formation of individual identities. Our particular tastes may have genetic and psychological elements, but they manifest only in social activity. Our habitus provides the unconscious conventions that decide what we find pleasurable. status value distorts our preferences, making certain objects and conventions more attractive than others. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu writes that taste is a "match - maker" -- a force that "brings together things" and also "people that go together." Common interests inspire reciprocal judgments of "good taste" Page 72 By triangulating all the signals, cues, and absences, we understand someone's taste as a gestalt. Individuals occupying a particular taste world share the same broad aesthetic and make similar choices in cars, clothing, music, beverages, Page 73 taste also involves skill. Judgments on taste don't just classify but gauge personal virtues and talents. The skill aspect of taste means it never just expresses our unconscious habitus, but can be shaped through conscious choices. noble birth -- or the result of self - improvement. We can "cultivate" ourselves over time to make more advanced choices that will garner more respect. Great taste first requires a deep knowledge of potential choices. Kantian taste requires us to find pleasure in things that take time and effort to appreciate: Expanded knowledge, however, is not enough to move up the taste hierarchy. Lifestyle choices also must reveal congruence -- an internal consistency with the target sensibility. established groupings of products are called constellations, and each taste world contains distinct sets. Page 75 the truest marker of excellent taste is bounded originality. As we learned before, the highest - status individuals can't imitate anyone lower on the hierarchy and, therefore, must make distinctive choices. "To like what one ‘ought' to like is not to exercise taste." Choices should express the individual's exceptional character. requirement for originality "The faculty of taste," writes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "cannot create a new structure, it can only make adjustments to one that already exists. Originality works best when the individual has already established mastery of a high - status sensibility and enjoys high - status privilege. Page 76 Successful artists forge unique sensibilities by combining preexisting artifacts and conventions in new ways. A shortcut for great taste is arbitrage, finding easily procured things in one location and then deploying them elsewhere where they're rare. Perfect taste, however, doesn't just require making choices that satisfy certain standards. We also have to prove that our choices are appropriate and natural for our particular life stories. Page 77 "A pine table is a proper thing," stated a nineteenth - century interior design guide, "but a pine table that pretends to be black walnut is an abomination." Page 78 Authenticity has become particularly important in the modern Authentic taste should be anchored in an individual's specific life journey. Page 79 Authentic tastes are "natural" tastes -- To be judged as authentic, we must provide information validating the provenance of our taste. Page 80 By extension, personas appear more authentic when they include a few "mistakes" -- i.e., sloppy behaviors, low - status habits. Perfect taste suggests an overexertion of effort. In men's fashion the ultimate style move is sprezzatura, embracing intentional errors such as undone buttons and misaligned neckties. Intentional amateurism can be attractive for those who already have high status. the central paradox of authenticity: we are supposed to listen to the voice in our hearts, to "discover and articulate our own identity" -- and yet, only others can judge whether we are authentic. Appraisers compare our taste with our demographic profile, and where there is a suspicious mismatch, they deny us status. Page 81 The most powerful form of authenticity thus remains authenticity by origin: the principle that groups who formulate a convention are the best at replicating it. authenticity by content: the principle that the best things are those made by the original methods Our best tactic is to choose signals close to our immutable characteristics and in line with our origin stories. The high - status individual, writes sociologist George Homans, "can afford to relax and be a natural man." Page 81 Authenticity can be yet another privilege of the elite. Page 82 Which "I" are we talking about? There appear to be three: persona, identity, and self. In signaling, we build personas -- observable packages of signals, taste, sensibility, immutable characteristics, and cues absorbed from our upbringing and background. Others use this persona to determine our identity. At the same time, we have a self within our minds, known only to us. Before modern times, personal identity was simply a role and status: membership in a clan, tribe, and caste, as well as the specific position within that community. We now seek an individual identity that transcends demographic categories and classifiers. If we can be easily summarized through stereotype, category, and class alone, we're failures. Page 83 The effects of status are most obvious in the persona -- the public expression we craft in our social interactions. the pressures of status mean that every individual crafts their public image to some degree. To move up the status ladder, we gravitate toward common goals, such as amassing capital, refining talent, improving personal virtues, and acquiring more impressive status symbols. Page 84 Certain people are skilled at making choices so bold that their entire persona emerges as "original," but status pressures make complete difference nearly impossible. within the hierarchy determines the degree of difference an individual seeks -- and is allowed to seek. Page 84 Middle - status individuals, on the other hand, tend to be conservative and follow conventions more closely. Page 84 Originality is thus an aristocratic privilege. Page 85 Modernity has democratized the aristocratic propensity toward individual distinction. The nonchalance, speech patterns, and bodily movements of Old Money are status symbols. Advising everyone to "be yourself" is therefore unfair as a broad mandate in a world still marked by bias: not everyone is born into a set of privileged attributes and behaviors. the logic behind identity politics, where individuals sharing demographic characteristics unite to raise the status levels associated with their defining trait. persona crafting remains an important tool for status equalization. To stigmatize persona crafting is, then, to support the status ladder as it exists today. Page 86 the persona is a mere "application." Receiving an identity requires being identified by others. Why are others identifying us? The most immediate reason for their attention is status appraisal. To properly interact with strangers, we must know their status. We may have control over what others observe, but we have no control over how they classify us. Nor do they: their means of perceiving and identifying us is based on their habitus. Page 87 As long as the desire for status is fundamental, uniqueness works best only when it is part of a larger status strategy. Charles Taylor writes that we "tend to think that we have selves the way we have hearts and livers," with "our thoughts, ideas, or feelings as being ‘within' us." Yet we now understand that these desires, at least in part, derive from community conventions so internalized they become indistinguishable from instinct. Our brains are always engaged in rationalization: framing raw demands from our subconscious as well - grounded, logical requests. Page 88 So, with respect to persona, identity, or self, status determines much of who we are. Page 89 The best we can hope for is a relative originality created in the margins of our persona. For those at the top, the pursuit of distinctiveness is important for receiving higher status. But to foist the requirement of uniqueness on everyone is unnecessary, unnatural, and often cruel. Compared with our ancestors, we enjoy greater flexibility in choosing the most suitable lifestyles and face minimal punishments for deviating from custom. Everyone should know how to win: how to gain esteem, how taste can be refined, how personas are judged, and how to balance detachment, congruence, originality, and authenticity. We all compete for status, whether we like it or not. We can at least better explain the rules to make it a fairer fight. Page 90 Status Strategy #1: Perform better against the status criteria -- and reveal it in signals. Page 90 Status Strategy #2: Pretend to be high status. Page 91 Status Strategy #3: Change the status criteria in your favor. Status Strategy #4: Form a new status group. To seek higher status we choose one or more of these four strategies, and by doing so, we enter into social competition. Individuals attempt to stand out against their peers, inferiors steal the status symbols of superiors, elites fight off upstarts and cheaters, and alternative status groups challenge established status beliefs. Part Two: Status and Creativity Page 96 the sensibilities underlying taste are never random, independent results of idiosyncratic and irrational minds. Page 96 Members of socioeconomic classes possess similar status assets, which lead to similar signaling strategies. Page 96 New Money pours their ample funds into luxury goods for a quick status boost. Page 96 How do distinct styles, conventions, and sensibilities form? -- Page 96 Humans may be born with a creative instinct, but the need for status - related differentiation motivates individuals to pursue counterintuitive, idiosyncratic, and outrageous inventions. These new ideas form as the shared culture of small communities, and then those groups' global status determines the degree to which they influence the taste of broader society. Page 96 classes are groups of individuals with common levels of capital who share similar values and convictions. Page 97 Individuals born into a certain socioeconomic class share a foundational set of unconscious conventions -- i.e., the same habitus. This manifests in communal beliefs, concrete lifestyle differences, and distinct taste worlds. Economic capital consists of money, property, and wealth, whereas cultural capital is the knowledge of high - status conventions required to gain normal status from those in established high - status groups. Page 99 New Money status symbols thus have very low symbolic complexity: Before consumer society, the main method of overwhelming others with wealth was what Thorstein Veblen calls conspicuous waste -- flamboyant expenditure to demonstrate the possession of unlimited resources. Page 100 conspicuous leisure -- playing in public while everyone else is hard at work. vicarious consumption -- In their willingness to accept expensive new products for signaling wealth, parvenus are often attracted to novelties -- the latest and greatest styles, gadgets, and fashions. Page 101 Moreover, novelties align with the core New Money belief that contemporary luxuries are credible status symbols. even in ordinary times, conspicuous consumption violates the principle of detachment. The ultimate flaw with conspicuous consumption is that the artifacts (such as yachts, mansions, and luxury brand goods) themselves inevitably become associated with New Money -- a group lower in status than Old Money. Economists call this the "Veblen effect": goods become more desirable with a higher price tag. Page 102 In advanced economies, however, New Money status claims face serious opposition from other classes -- starting with a powerful counteroffensive from the established rich. Page 103 Where New Money desires the latest, biggest, and brightest, Old Money seeks to be modest, antiquated, and muted. "casual, careless, nonchalant, insouciant, easy, unstudied, natural, effortless" New England heiresses drive beat - up station wagons. "detached,""refined," and "urbane" -- But as we'll learn, musty Old Money aesthetics are an equally rational signaling strategy as New Money's money - drenched boasting. Old Money, has an advantage in the longevity of their status superiority, which can be demonstrated through social capital (strong relationships with other rich families) and cultural capital (knowing how to behave at the very top of society). Page 104 Old Money loathes New Money. Old Money also resents any challenges to the existing social hierarchy. Old Money doesn't have the same cash flow In a world where wealth alone determines status, New Money would rise to the very top of the hierarchy. Fears of this outcome push Old Money to erect new fences based on taste. "Spartan wealth" -- Page 105 countersignaling. Earl of Lonsdale "In London, nobody knows who I am, so it doesn't matter. In Cumberland, everyone knows who I am, so it doesn't matter." Old Money ethos of reduction. Page 106 Concurrent with modesty is a pursuit of functionality over display. Old Money individuals have not achieved good taste -- they embody good taste. the anthropologist Grant McCracken calls "patina," visual proof of age in possessions. Page 107 Patina also explains the rustic nature of Old Money aesthetics. Page 108 Patina also encourages archaism, the preferences for antiquated styles over contemporary alternatives. inside jokes, secret handshakes, and correct cadence of banal chatter. Page 108 Old Money "curriculum." Page 109 Old Money aesthetics, then, don't just operate at the top of society but spur imitation among a much larger audience -- specifically, educated middle - class individuals who are also hungry for alternatives to New Money vulgarity. Page 110 From the 1970s onward, ambitious and highly educated professionals in finance, law, medicine, and big business had begun earning much more than their parents. And in contrast to the rigid conformity of earlier corporate culture -- e.g., IBM once required male employees to wear sock garters -- yuppies pursued a colorful and cosmopolitan life of sophistication. the sensibility embodied in yuppie taste follows the logic of the professional class's signaling needs. They are not as rich as New Money, their cultural capital is learned rather than embodied. they have honed their critical thinking and stockpiled an impressive degree of worldly knowledge. retrieving, and processing vast amounts of information, and the professional class considers their competence in these areas as justified criteria for higher status. Their most valuable signals, privileged information. The Bluffer's Guide to British Class "Taste is entirely a Middle Class concern. The Lower Class don't have it and the Upper Class don't need it." professionals often start by emulating Old Money aesthetics. Page 111 even if aspiring members of the professional class can't pass for true Old Money, they go out into the world with the analytical abilities to read cultural codes well enough to blend into high society. Old Money taste also better matched professional - class salaries. the Volvo automotive brand became one of the American professional class's favorite cars. Page 112 "high cultural capital" Americans Page 113 Media companies catering to this class create middlebrow entertainment: high - minded yet easily digestible content looking to reward an educated audience through winking references to their acquired knowledge. The greatest example may be The Simpsons, which mixes cartoonish ultraviolence with piquant social satire and passing allusions to Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Condé Nast magazine empire -- from Vogue and GQ to The New Yorker -- was built upon teaching the latest high - status conventions to the professional classes, many of whom didn't live in New York to observe the trends themselves. the professional class has splintered into two distinct factions. Those who work in investment banking, private equity, Page 114 The other faction is the creative class, Richard Florida Being an obscure novelist doesn't provide enough income to thrive but can lead to esteem and other material benefits. the creative class, as we'll see in subsequent chapters, is the first to embrace new styles from nominally lower - status groups and, in doing so, takes the lead in promulgating cultural change. For the rich, culture becomes a realm to communicate symbols of their monetary advantages; members of the professional class, on the other hand, communicate superiority in their manipulation of culture. Page 115 For many the quickest path to higher social position is Status Strategy #2: Pretend to be high status. Page 116 There are canons of taste in both rich and poor communities. But even if the status logic of taste holds across classes, the lack of capital results in differences between signaling at the bottom of the ladder and at the top. we should think about kitsch in a value - neutral way -- as a specific type of commercial product that copies the format of high culture (books, music, films, clothing, interior goods) but removes its artistic aspirations. Kitsch is low in symbolic complexity: little irony, few ambiguous emotions, and muted political gestures. stock emotions, Kitsch may be ersatz art, but it delivers the experience of art to everyone. Page 117 Kitsch feels good immediately, whereas avant - garde art intentionally breaks the very conventions responsible for delivering pleasurable experiences. For those with the right knowledge, such as Old Money and the professional class, kitsch is loathsome. "Consumers of kitsch," writes the philosopher of art Tomáš Kulka, "do not buy kitsch because it is kitsch; they buy it because they take it for art." Kitsch may be pleasurable, but its ubiquity means it doesn't provide any status boost. An advantage in signaling requires standing out. This encourages a flash sensibility -- bright and showy aesthetics, usually achieved through the purchase of low - level luxury goods. Page 118 in signaling, the poor can't afford to look generic. New Money extravagance and lower - status flash: both groups want big logos. But only New Money can easily buy the real thing. Page 119 The creators and consumers of mainstream pop culture would never call these products "kitsch," but as we'll see in chapter 8, there is an implicit agreement to meet existing audience expectations with conventional formulas, obvious emotions, and safe political valences. Page 120 the oft celebrated "elegance of simplicity" isn't an innate human preference but arises from a countersignaling strategy. escaping the class system is also a creative engine for new aesthetic sensibilities. Page 122 Communities such as gangs and cults offer the disrespected a chance to be reborn as beloved and welcomed comrades. Infamy is often preferable to anonymity. Strategy #4: Form a new status group. Page 123 But as we learned in chapter 1, this status strategy has a major flaw: individuals in subcultures gain only local status. And if the group's foundational status criteria diverge too greatly from the mainstream, joining a subculture results in a major loss of global status. Page 124 Compared with subcultures, countercultures tend to embrace explicit ideologies, which members uphold as superior to traditional norms. the hobbyist group: pods of individuals building mutual respect networks based on common interests. Page 126 While alternative status groups suggest a way to escape the class structure, individual members' tastes are still moored to their habitus. Over time, however, the distinctions between subcultures and countercultures blur, especially as countercultures find inspiration in the "authenticity" of subcultures. Page 127 Of course the hostile feelings between mainstream society and alternative status groups are mutual. Page 128 subcultures and countercultures don't form around minor stylistic divergences but around conventions of extreme difference. Page 129 The easiest method for subcultural distinction is the negation of standard conventions: Page 130 Members themselves don't see their lifestyles as mere counterimitations, but perceive them as direct expressions of personal feelings. Page 131 Alternative status groups may represent an escape from the primary social hierarchy, but they're not an escape from status structures in general. Page 133 Subcultures, then, become more and more extreme in their looks over time -- and yet, it is often their most radical inventions that go on to influence mainstream society. Page 135 idolization of status inferiors Page 136 For many burgeoning creative - class members, subcultures and countercultures offered vehicles for daydreaming about an exciting life far from conformist boredom. Page 136 Defusing not only dilutes the impact of the original inventions but also freezes far - out ideas into set conventions. Page 137 Most alternative status groups can't survive the parasitism of the consumer market; Page 138 Vanilla Ice's failed career demonstrates the perils of unironic mimicry. Page 139 Most subcultures remain marginalized: Page 141 Innovation, in these cases, is often a by - product of status struggle. Artists are the most well - known example of this more calculated creativity -- and they, too, are motivated by status. Page 145 Immanuel Kant asserted three still authoritative criteria for artistic genius: (1) the creation of fiercely original works, (2) which over time become imitated as exemplars, and (3) are created through mysterious and seemingly inimitable methods. Page 145 These Kantian requirements also match the most advanced status criteria of our era -- namely, originality, influence, authenticity, and detachment. Kant's criteria also explain why most creators never make it past lower tiers. Hacks only copy. Page 146 The most original artworks violate norms, and if they fail to attract critical notice, artists can fall to very low status. less risky, harmonizing others' radical inventions with more established conventions to expand the potential market. Hedging, however, is taboo for the true artist, who must stay detached from any status concerns. Only hacks make art for money and power. This explains why artists so often deny any conscious motivations for their work -- including the desire to make art in the first place. Page 147 But nearly every artist pursues a specific kind of status: artist status. Page 148 there is no Wikipedia page for Edna Hibel, Despite great prowess at her craft and the esteem of international luminaries, Hibel never attained the artist status of her predecessors Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo Page 149 The clearest short - term strategy toward achieving artist status, then, is to win acclaim from art world institutions. Page 149 Philosopher of art Tomáš Kulka explains that there is aesthetic value -- the ability to provide audiences with aesthetic experiences -- and artistic value -- the artwork's solutions to specific art world problems of the era. Page 150 Artist status requires achieving artistic value, rather than aesthetic value, The aesthetic value of an artwork measures how masterfully an artist can use and abuse existing conventions to elicit emotional experiences from the audience. create and manipulate listeners' Artistic value, on the other hand, measures the originality of the artist's inventions -- i.e., how much the proposed ideas break existing conventions and suggest new ones. In the French poet Charles Baudelaire's famous line, "The chief task of genius is precisely to invent a stereotype" (emphasis added). To create within the framework of someone else's stereotype makes the creator an epigone, and their work is mere "taste." Page 151 There are perhaps an infinite number of potential problems in art, but to gain artist status, artists must solve the agreed - upon problems of the current moment. Page 152 Most audiences delight in minor innovations, not major challenges to their preferred art forms. Page 153 Music listeners are happy with small surprises but expect conformity to familiar notions of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Yet deep cuts are required to achieve artistic value. Page 153 Gertrude Stein noted that all important art is "irritating" and Marcel Duchamp quipped, "A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting." Page 153 In the early days of modern art, indignation became a clear sign of artistic success. At the bottom of the pyramid, there is little to lose and much to gain. This explains why youth tend to be more radical than adults. Page 154 At any time, rebellious artists always have an opening: either offer new solutions to these issues in good faith or cynically exploit the flaws of the established order to justify a new position. Page 156 Anyone can propose shocking ideas; only geniuses gain prestige and legitimacy for them. Artists don't anticipate future conventions so much as they create them through the influence process. Avant - garde ideas, however, can break escape velocity from the avant - garde community only if broader audiences no longer believe their appreciation will lead to negative social consequences. Cachet, thus, opens minds to radical propositions of what art can be and how we should perceive it. Page 157 most movements, such as punk or grunge, develop organically as young artists converge on the same techniques. William Wordsworth believed that "every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed." the fastest way for creators to gain artist status is to win over gatekeepers in the art world. Page 160 New Money deploys easily interpretable signals. Groups with limited economic capital, in contrast, must rely on symbolically complex conventions for effective barriers. Page 161 With no money at their disposal, punks raise fences through radical fashions and behaviors. Most aspiring artists secure their desired level of status through repeating others' inventions. But in societies that value originality, influence, and mystery, many people will attempt to attain high status through the creation of subversive ideas. Page 162 Societies that value radical invention end up with more diverse cultural ecosystems, a great abundance of artifacts, and a multiplicity of sensibilities. Page 163 the demands for originality pushed many artists to disturb conventions so deeply embedded in our brains that the artworks never found large audiences. Page 169 we know that all public behaviors, including the use of technologies and products, become signals in status appraisals. Page 170 Fashion, writes the philosopher George Santayana, is the "barbarous" variety of cultural change that "produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit." Page 171 Everett Rogers's authoritative theory on the diffusions of innovations. (" Invention" is a new idea; "innovation" describes the invention's use and widespread adoption.) Page 172 innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. What slows down adoption by majorities? They often have unequal access But status also plays a major role. Page 173 most people seek to participate publicly in new trends only where status value becomes obviously positive. Page 174 Elites must be arbiter elegantiarum -- tastemakers, not taste - followers. Status also explains why innovativeness is found at the bottom of society as well. Outsiders, exiles, and misfits don't worry about the social risks of trying new things, because they have little status to lose. low - status convention - breaking is viewed as "deviance" and may not inspire any immediate imitation. Page 175 Elites flock to three particular categories of items that fulfill their needs: rarities, novelties, and technological innovations. This desire for rarities also increases demand for authenticity. Status symbols such as these don't need to be rare in an absolute sense. They only need to be perceived as rare within the community. Page 177 Elite adoption imbues innovations with status value, which makes them attractive to individuals in lower tiers. Page 179 A name turns vague impressions and feelings into "things" up for discussion. Page 181 broadcasting deplorable acts boosts their status value and creates an allure in infamy. Page 192 The overall effect of commercialization is conservative: removing radical ideas and providing mass audiences with simplified versions claimed to be equal to the original. Page 193 Publicity and physical distribution also help achieve the repetition required to build common knowledge. Page 194 After a significant number of people in a population embrace a new convention, it takes on its own gravity -- pulling along further adopters like a planet attracts smaller objects. At this point in the diffusion process, the primary motivation for adoption flips from distinction for high status to imitation for normal status. Mass culture also gains new strength through network effects. The more people participate in a convention, the more useful it will be for interacting and communicating with others. Page 196 The embrace of laggards kills trends dead, and this marks the end of the diffusion process. Page 197 as long as non - elites are able to imitate elite conventions, status seeking will always change culture. Low - status individuals chase high - status individuals by imitating their conventions, which forces elites to flee to new ones. Since this fleeing will lead to another round of chasing and then fleeing, fashion creates perpetual cultural change, with status serving as the motor. Page 198 Humans spend a significant portion of their incomes each year chasing cachet without making real status gains. Page 201 Fashion cycles appear to be a waste of time and energy, moving the population from one arbitrary practice to another for no reason other than elitist distinction and social conformity. Page 204 The previous chapter laid out how status seeking can move new conventions through a population. At any particular moment, however, culture is more than an accumulation of the latest fashions: it's a complex sediment of new and old, dynamic and static, superficial and deep, unconscious and conscious. Page 205 In this chapter we'll investigate the sources of historical value and see how it makes certain conventions endure beyond their initial fashion cycle. Eric Hobsbawm explains, is "a particular selection from the infinity of what is remembered or capable of being remembered." History is, thus, not the stories we tell about ourselves, but a connection of moments that specific well - positioned, high - status individuals choose to highlight and perpetuate. Page 206 What is the appeal of historical value? survivorship bias: anything that remains with us today is assumed to have greater intrinsic value. Page 206 endurance is a powerful signaling cost. widespread common knowledge. Rational humans, especially conservative ones toward the middle of the status hierarchy, will choose older forms over newer ones when signaling, and this keeps older conventions in circulation. Page 207 Conservative communities draw upon tradition to guide their decision making. High - status individuals and groups may have an implicit influence on our habits and customs, but they wield explicit influence on traditions. For all their literary innovations, twentieth - century authors often pulled their book titles from the Bible -- Page 208 A canon is necessary, scholars believed, because future generations can never consume all works from the past. Of the tens of thousands of novels written in the nineteenth century, we only still read about two hundred. The canon thus promises guidance toward the highest - quality and most influential works. Page 209 artworks must transcend the basic conventions of their era, so that future audiences will still be able to take unique value from the work. Popularity can keep works in the collective dialogue, but critical appraisal is more important for long - term survival. Page 210 there is always hope for the forgotten. Page 214 retro, Page 214 Simon Reynolds as "a self - conscious fetish for period stylisation (in music, clothes, design) expressed creatively through pastiche and citation." retro is the ironic use of kitsch from the recent past as novelties. Jean Cocteau observes: "Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time." Page 216 Retro provided an excellent source of innovations because the development costs are so low. Inventing from scratch is difficult and time - consuming. Glenn O'Brien explains, "Things come back into fashion after they have hit the bottom of the vintage barrel and are adopted by poor but stylish youth, who are then noticed and imitated by fashion designers." Page 217 Parody and camp prefer mannerist interpretations over accurate reproductions. Page 219 generation. "A work is eternal," writes the literary theorist Roland Barthes, "not because it imposes a single meaning on different men, but because it suggests different meanings to a single man, speaking the same symbolic language in all ages: the work proposes, man disposes." Page 225 The move from analog to digital has altered the nature of social interaction, consumerism, signaling, and taste. And all of these structural changes hinder the creation of a critical ingredient underlying our appreciation of culture -- status value. Page 226 They also debase cultural capital as an asset, which makes popularity and economic capital even more central in marking status. The end result, at least so far, has been less incentive for individuals to both create and celebrate culture with high symbolic complexity. Page 226 Duncan Watts's warning: "The Internet isn't really a thing at all. Rather, it's shorthand for an entire period of history, and all the interlocking technological, economic, and social changes that happened therein." Page 226 The influx of users has changed the nature of internet content. Page 227 over just three decades, the internet became the primary site where we interact with others and create personas. As the economist - blogger Noah Smith quipped, "Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet." Our status claims are no longer limited to real - life interactions or mass media reports of our real - life interactions. Social media also enables us to quantify our status like never before: in likes, retweets, comments, and followers, and, for those at the top, in the number of brands reaching out with free products and promotional opportunities. Page 228 Beyond signals being devalued in toto, the internet has also debased two critical signaling costs: barriers to information and barriers to acquisition. The second factor draining status value is the explosion of content and goods. In the twentieth century, finite limits on pages and broadcast time restricted our knowledge of goods, artists, artworks, and styles. The internet is infinite: mass customization enables consumers to tweak existing products into any number of personalized versions. Page 229 Pursuit of originality is correlated to top and bottom positions in a hierarchy. Most people don't want extreme uniqueness. Page 230 The explosion of media outlets also leads to lower status values. Page 230 we have come to expect random things of dubious quality to attract attention. Page 230 Culture is collapsing around a small number of massive mainstream artists, athletes, and celebrities with enough industrial support to have staying power. Page 231 The final factor behind a reduction in status value is the inherent high speed of the internet, which disrupts traditional fashion cycles. Elite groups need time to be the sole adopters of an innovation for it to gain cachet. Page 232 The frenzied pace of internet culture thus pushes humans far beyond the acceptable rate of changes to our personas. The quantity and velocity of information also robs us of the time to form emotional and sentimental bonds with artworks. On the internet there are more things, but fewer arrive with clear and stable status value. As part of our desire for status, we chase status value. And so if niche culture lacks status value, many have fled the long tail to return to the head. Page 232 We live in a paradise of options, and the diminished power of gatekeepers has allowed more voices to flourish. The question is simply whether internet content can fulfill our basic human needs for status distinction. When a trend evaporates as a superficial fad, there may not be enough collective memory for it to take on historical value, either. Page 233 Cultural capital is less valuable in a world of free information, and this raises the relative value of economic capital. supercars, it is clear that globalization and technology are changing the composition of the status ladder. Page 236 Despite a brief revival of Old Money taste in men's fashion from around 2008 to 2015, the antiquated, musty sensibility has lost its allure. This reached a symbolic peak with the 2020 bankruptcy of Brooks Brothers -- Page 237 the professional - class tech billionaires, who are forming their own taste culture. Naturally, professional - class billionaires flex in their own way. Snug - fit athleisure shows off chiseled bodies and good health, achievable only through strict discipline, personal trainers, and staff nutritionists. Conspicuous leisure Page 238 For a long time the professional classes had a dominating impact on the aesthetics of the online space. The days may be numbered where tech elites and the creative class exclusively determine the basic taste on the main platforms of the internet. Page 239 the often ignored, increasingly bitter provincial lower - middle - class sensibility of white majorities. Page 239 As the lower middle class falls in status, the "conservative" majority appears to have found respect for the Trump version of bling, especially when opulence and excess humiliate the professional classes. An important counterimitation for the entire group is to "own the libs" by reveling in whatever the professional class abhors: guns, coal, bleak suburban restaurant chains, giant pickup trucks. This open antagonism against liberal "decency" -- and proximity to vindictive politics and outright bigotry -- only makes the professional classes feel even more righteous about their own cosmopolitan tastes. Page 240 the professional class itself has rejected the legitimacy of taste. Page 241 All cultural snootiness is now tedious. omnivore taste. The virtuous "cultured" individual should consume and like everything -- not just high culture, but pop and indie, niche and mass, new and old, domestic and foreign, primitive and sophisticated. Where cultural capital exists, it is now "multicultural capital." The professional - class suspicion of highbrow intellectualism, however, has much earlier roots. Page 242 In the past, taste worked as a social classifier by drawing clear lines between social groups; omnivorism drains this power by declaring nearly everything suitable for consumption. In many ways omnivorism is the only possible taste left. A singular notion of good taste is unjustifiable in a cosmopolitan world. Page 242 Cosmopolitanism is not just a superficial embrace of cultural diversity but a conscious rejection of the is - ought fallacy. Page 242 To proclaim superiority of preferred styles over others is accordingly an arrogant and bigoted act. Page 243 Outside of politics, taste has also come to seem absurd in a world of hyperspeed fashion cycles. Conventions function best when the population is ignorant of their existence. the problem with capital - T Taste is that it disenfranchises huge swaths of the population and overallocates money and status to established elites. Page 244 The most vocal complaint against "the culture wars" is that it channels political energy to changing superficial symbols rather than working toward structural changes to the economy and the law. But everything in this book points to the fact that culture matters for status equality. Page 245 The concept of guilty pleasures is a relic of old - timey snobbery. If there is no intrinsic superiority of high culture over low culture, there's no longer any need to suffer through long, difficult books or boring black - and - white Swedish movies. veers toward monoculture. Second, omnivorism has an inherent hypocrisy. There is no way to accept all conventions, because of their inevitably contradictory nature. Page 246 Fences do exist -- they are just openly political ones. cultural literacy for the last few decades requires reading a few serious books every year but also consuming products from the largest conglomerates: Marvel superhero movies (Walt Disney), Beyoncé (Columbia/Sony), Keeping Up with the Kardashians (Ryan Seacrest Productions backed by iHeartMedia, Inc., the new corporate name for the widely loathed Clear Channel). Page 247 By denying taste as a tool and hesitating to criticize popular works, outsider groups and critics have surrendered their primary way of pushing back. George W. S. Trow predicted in the 1980s: "Nothing was judged -- only counted." With artists less reliable to rip up convention, the responsibility for creativity may now fall to youth subcultures. But we seem to be in a "post - subculture" world. Page 248 David Muggleton writes, "Perhaps the very concept of subculture is becoming less applicable in postmodernity, for the breakdown of mass society has ensured that there is no longer a coherent dominant culture against which a subculture can express its resistance." Subcultures may be waning but hard - core fan cultures are stronger than ever. Page 249 Declarations of a post - subculture world are too hasty; there is plenty of subcultural behavior -- just not where we used to seek The most potent subcultures of this new century, by contrast, have formed as a reaction to liberal omnivorism -- appearing on the right flank of the political spectrum. Right - wing youth form status groups with their own conventions, slang, and styles, and they reward one another for the most outrageous lib - owning. Rightist subcultures revel in the "bad taste" of guns, fast food, and un - PC jokes -- a counterimitation of effete cosmopolitans that effete cosmopolitans are unlikely to embrace. The video game industry is now larger than sports or films, and a 2020 study found that 68 percent of male Gen Zers considered gaming a key ingredient of their identity. Taste was a powerful signaling cost -- a nonmonetary way to keep certain styles and artifacts within the confines of certain communities. By rejecting taste, omnivorism weakens cultural and subcultural capital to the point of nonexistence. Page 250 As a result, raw wealth becomes a more obvious criterion for status distinction. Page 253 neomania. For much of human history, storytelling was the exclusive privilege of designated elders, bookish scholars, and ambitious artists. To create motion pictures, aspiring filmmakers had to pay their dues at schools and in the industry before getting their hands on a camera. The internet opened storytelling to everyone, a development Page 253 long beheld as a great democratic revolution. But this also has robbed nerds of their longtime monopoly on content creation and gatekeeping. TikTok is its "mediocrity," writes Vox's Rebecca Jennings: "No one follows you because they expect you to be talented. They follow you because they like you." Page 254 There may be an "elite TikTok" of odd videos and "BookTok" of literary suggestions, but the more representational and seemingly beloved video content is kids simply being kids. the neomania mask is pretending to have no mask at Page 255 When culture centered around canons, radical artists learned history in order to know the enemy. digital natives have little incentive to memorize and analyze the past. Familiarity with the canon is what allowed radical artists to gauge the innovation of their own works. Page 256 Online stars are making millions a year without validation from established institutions. Every structural change we've noted in this chapter -- pay - by - click internet platforms, the rise of a new nouveau riche, the death of cultural capital -- incentivizes creators to aim for amassing economic capital rather than cultural capital. Attracting large audiences is much easier with lowest - common - denominator content than with "art." The content follows the monetization. Follower counts and gross earnings appear to be the only relevant sign of cultural import. Page 257 Within neomania, an open materialism bends the cultural ecosystem toward a full embodiment of capitalist logic. Our fears of cultural stasis, then, may be less about the creation of new artifacts, styles, and sensibilities than about their failure to take over mainstream culture. Page 258 As this combines with a new nouveau riche emerging outside of the West and hungry to climb up the global status ladder, economic capital has reemerged as a clearer status criterion than cultural capital. a world of omnivore taste where nothing is great because everything is good. Pierre Bourdieu calls hysteresis -- the lingering values of a previous age continuing to guide our judgments. why should we still be enamored with fame at all when fame is so cheap? Maybe soon we won't be. And there are many other values we're likely to abandon as the internet age becomes the only age we know: historical value, artistic legacy, authenticity. Page 259 The internet provides a new platform for human interaction, but it has not dissolved the link between status and culture. The final question should then be: If we now understand their interlocking principles, how should we use this knowledge to promote the best outcomes for both -- equality and creativity? Conclusion: Status Equality and Cultural Creativity Page 261 status changes our tastes, Page 262 We set out at the beginning of this book to solve the Grand Mystery of Culture -- to determine why individuals cluster in their preferences for certain arbitrary practices and then switch to new ones over time. But in answering this question, we have arrived at a much deeper insight: Status structures provide the underlying conventions for each culture, which determine our behaviors, values, and perception of reality. The struggle for higher status -- whether striving for basic equality or angling for the very top -- shapes individual identities, spurs creativity and cultural change, and forms customs and traditions. Humans may possess an innate desire to create, but their inventions achieve broader diffusion when they fulfill others' status needs. Page 263 The fundamental desire for status offers a clearer explanation in demonstrating why rational individuals end up forming the most commonly observed behavioral patterns. Conventions tend to "express" something only when they classify us as members of certain groups. Culture enables us to transmit human knowledge, but the specific content -- customs, traditions, classics, and the canon -- tilts toward the preferences and behaviors of high - status individuals. Page 264 Taste is never only about the thing itself -- e.g., the flavor of a wine or the mechanical superiority of a car. Civilization is fundamentally symbolic, and every choice communicates social position. Page 265 fashions are never aggregations of all individual choices: they are specific narratives that specific high - status institutions introduce to the public. Page 267 equality. All social stratification produces a few winners and many losers. Bertrand Russell "The forms of happiness which consist of victory in a competition cannot be universal." Page 268 Humans are adept at turning any small advantage into a status marker. Noah Smith calls the "redistribution of respect." Page 269 While we can't outlaw signaling, we could attempt to reduce its frequency and effectiveness. This is the point of uniforms; All luxuries should be seen as status markers, not superior conveniences. Complexity doesn't have to involve impenetrable or esoteric art, just the skillful manipulation of higher - order symbols in new and surprising ways. Complexity is good for our brains. Page 271 The nefarious uses of cultural capital, however, have convinced many we should abolish the entire idea of taste. Complex art must be bad if it affords elite audiences any sense of superiority over mass audiences. And in democratic society, popularity appears to be a much fairer measure of quality than the opinions of an overeducated cabal. The people have spoken, and Drake, not John Cage, has amassed a fortune large enough to build a home of "overwhelming high luxury." the skepticism toward cultural capital has done little to flatten the status hierarchy; in fact, it has made economic capital a much more powerful asset in signaling.
Edward Bernays Notable Quotations Full screen view Download full text (pdf) The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. 1 We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. 1 we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty millions who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world 9 -10 From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; 11 To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. 11 The instruments by which public opinion is organized and focused may be misused. But such organization and focusing are necessary to orderly life. 12 It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice. 18 Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government 20 Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. 20 propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine. 20 Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group. 25 And if nowadays the successors of the rulers, those whose position or ability gives them power, can no longer do what they want without the approval of the masses, they find in propaganda a tool which is increasingly powerful in gaining that approval. 27 They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach visual, graphic, and auditory to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. 27 [The New Propaganda] takes account not merely of the individual, nor even of the mass mind alone, but also and especially of the anatomy of society, with its interlocking group formations and loyalties. 28 It was he who arranged for the distinguished Countess This or Duchess That to wear the hat or the gown. 29 The created circumstances had their effect 30 In the active proselytizing minorities in whom selfish interests and public interests coincide lie the progress and development of America. Only through the active energy of the intelligent few can the public at large become aware of and act upon new ideas. 31 Small groups of persons can, and do, make the rest of us think what they please about a given subject. 31 Many a congressman, in framing his platform, follows the suggestions of a district boss whom few persons outside the political machine have ever heard of. 33 our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities 35 The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. To advertise on a scale which will reach fifty million persons is expensive. 37 [Still?] Public opinion [does it actually exist?] is the unacknowledged partner in all broad efforts. 38 The counsel on public relations [cool job title created by bernays to sell bernays], after he has examined all these and other factors, endeavors to shape the actions of his client so that they will gain the interest, the approval and the acceptance of the public. 39 The counsel on public relations must be in a position to deal effectively with rumors and suspicions. 43 His function may include the discovery of new markets, the existence of which had been unsuspected. 44 If we accept public relations as a profession, we must also expect it to have both ideals and ethics. The ideal of the profession is a pragmatic one. It is to make the producer, ... understand what the public wants and to make the public understand the objectives of the producer 44 [The public relations counsel] nevertheless refuses a client whom he believes to be dishonest, a product which he believes to be fraudulent, or a cause which he believes to be antisocial. 45 He does not accept a client whose interests conflict with those of another client. He does not accept a client whose case he believes to be hopeless or whose product he believes to be unmarketable. 45-46 He should be candid in his dealings. It must be repeated that his business is not to fool or hoodwink the public. If he were to get such a reputation, his usefulness in his profession would be at an end. 46 If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind [is there such a thing?], is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it? 47 [Propaganda] is now scientific in the sense that it seeks to base its operations upon definite knowledge drawn from direct observation of the group mind, and upon the application of principles which have been demonstrated to be consistent and relatively constant. 48 If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. 49 when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of cliches, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences 50 By playing upon an old cliche, or manipulating a The Psychology of Public Relations new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass of group emotions 50-51 Men are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions. 51 He creates circumstances which will swing emotional currents so as to make for purchaser demand. 54 [the music room -- the parlor] Under the old salesmanship the manufacturer said to the prospective purchaser, "Please buy a piano." The new salesmanship has reversed the process and caused the prospective purchaser to say to the manufacturer, "Please sell me a piano." 56 A number of familiar psychological motives were set in motion in the carrying out of this [Ivory soap carving] campaign. The esthetic, the competitive, the gregarious (much of the sculpturing was done in school groups), the snobbish (the impulse to follow the example of a recognized leader), the exhibitionist, and last but by no means least the maternal. 59 If to-day big business were to seek to throttle the public, a new reaction similar to that of twenty years ago would take place and the public would rise and try to throttle big business with restrictive laws. 62 [Mass production requires mass consumption, the manufacturing of desire] Mass production is only profitable if its rhythm can be maintained that is, if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity. The result is that while, under the handicraft or small-unit system of production that was typical a century ago, demand created the supply, to-day supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand. 63 Business must express itself and its entire corporate existence so that the public will understand and accept it. It must dramatize its personality 65 [Mac vs PC] The public relations activities of a business cannot be a protective coloring to hide its real aims. It is bad business as well as bad morals to feature exclusively a few high-class articles, when the main stock is of medium grade or cheap 68 [public relations works indirectly] A gas company maintains a free school of cookery. 76 The new technique of public relations counsel is serving a very useful purpose in business by acting as a complement to legitimate advertisers and advertising in helping to break down unfair competitive exaggerated and overemphatic advertising by reaching the public with the truth through other channels than advertising. 79 [The new competition is inter-industrial competition] Modern business must have its finger continuously on the public pulse. It must understand the changes in the public mind and be prepared to interpret itself fairly and eloquently to changing opinion. 91 The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders. 92 But the haphazard staging of emotional events without regard to their value as part of the whole campaign, is a waste of effort 101 the program itself [as opposed to the president] should be emphasized in a sound campaign plan 101 [anti the cult of personality.] Events and activities must be created in order to put ideas into circulation 103 In actual fact, it [political persuasion] can be done only by meeting the conditions of the public mind, by creating circumstances which set up trains of thought, by dramatizing per-sonalities, by establishing contact with the group leaders who control the opinions of their publics. 104-5 Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear. 109 The function of this official [Secretary of Public Relations as member of the President's Cabinet] should be correctly to interpret America's aims and ideals throughout the world, and to keep the citizens of this country in touch with governmental activities and the reasons which prompt them. He would, in short, interpret the people to the government and the government to the people.114 In a democracy an educator should, in addition to his academic duties, bear a definite and wholesome relation to the general public. The public cannot understand unless the teacher understands the relationship between the general public and the academic idea. 122 The teaching profession, as such, has the right to carry on a very definite propaganda with a view to enlightening the public and asserting its intimate relation to the society which it serves. 123 Men [academics] who, by the commonly accepted standards, are failures or very moderate successes in our American world (the pedagogues) seek to convince the outstanding successes (the business men) that they should give their money to ideals which they do not pursue. Men who, through a sense of inferiority, despise money, seek to win the good will of men who love money. 126 Today the privilege of attempting to sway public opinion is every one's. 135 In art as in politics the minority rules, but it can rule only by going out to meet the public on its own ground, by understanding the anatomy of public opinion and utilizing it. 141 Ideas must be made intelligible to the public to be fully successful. 149 Propaganda is simply the establishing of reciprocal understanding between an individual and a group. 150 [The public relations counsel] creates some of the day's events, which must compete in the editorial office with other events. Often the events which he creates may be specially acceptable to a newspaper's public and he may create them with that public in mind. 152	Edward Bernays Notable Quotations Full screen view Text available from Gutenberg Free Amazon Downloada	Ethan Mollick Notable Quotations Full screen view Page xvii AI works, in many ways, as a co- intelligence. It augments, or potentially replaces, human thinking to dramatic results. Early studies of the effects of AI have found it can often lead to a 20 to 80 percent improvement in productivity across a wide variety of job types, from coding to marketing. By contrast, when steam power, that most fundamental of General Purpose Technologies, the one that created the Industrial Revolution, was put into a factory, it improved productivity by 18 to 22 percent. And despite decades of looking, economists have had difficulty showing a real long- term productivity impact of computers and the internet over the past twenty years. Page xix We have invented technologies, from axes to helicopters, that boost our physical capabilities; and others, like spreadsheets, that automate complex tasks; but we have never built a generally applicable technology that can boost our intelligence. Page 4 artificial intelligence, a term invented in 1956 by John McCarthy of MIT. Page 7 "Attention Is All You Need." Published by Google researchers in 2017. Page 8 The attention mechanism helps solve this problem by allowing the AI model to weigh the importance of different words or phrases in a block of text. By focusing on the most relevant parts of the text, Transformers can produce more context-aware and coherent writing compared to earlier predictive AIs. Page 9 Ultimately, that is all ChatGPT does technically-act as a very elaborate autocomplete like you have on your phone. Page 10 pretraining, and unlike earlier forms of AI, it is unsupervised, which means the AI doesn't need carefully labeled data. Instead, by analyzing these examples, AI learns to recognize patterns, structures, and context in human language. Remarkably, with a vast number of adjustable parameters (called weights), LLMs can create a model that emulates how humans communicate through written text. Page 12 The search for high-quality content for training material has become a major topic in AI development, since information-hungry AI companies are running out of good, free sources. Page 13 As a result, it is also likely that most AI training data contains copyrighted information, like books used without permission, whether by accident or on purpose. The legal implications of this are still unclear. Because of the variety of data sources used, learning is not always a good thing. AI can also learn biases, errors, and falsehoods from the data it sees. AI companies hire workers, some highly paid experts, others low-paid contract workers in English-speaking nations like Kenya, to read AI answers and judge them on various characteristics. the process is called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Page 15 Unlike language models that produce text, diffusion models specialize in visual outputs, inventing pictures from scratch based on the words provided. Page 23 Despite being just a predictive model, the Frontier AI models, trained on the largest datasets with the most computing power, seem to do things that their programming should not allow-a concept called emergence. Page 29 Singularity, a reference to a point in mathematical function when the value is unmeasurable, coined by the famous mathematician John von Neumann in the 1950s to refer to the unknown future after which "human affairs, as we know them, could not continue." Page 32 this book is focused on the near term, practical implications of our new AI-haunted world. Page 34 Why pay an artist for their time and talent when an AI can do something similar for free in seconds? It is, effectively, creating something new, even if it is a homage to the original. For books that are repeated often in the training data-like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-the AI can nearly reproduce it word for word. Page 35 Part of the reason AIs seem so human to work with is that they are trained on our conversations and writings. So human biases also work their way into the training data. When asked to show a judge, the AI generates a picture of a man 97 percent of the time, even though 34 percent of US judges are women. In showing fast-food workers, 70 percent had darker skin tones, even though 70 percent of American fast-food workers are white. Page 37 The most common approach to reducing bias is for humans to correct the AIs, as in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) process, which is part of the fine-tuning of LLMs that we discussed in the previous chapter. Page 38 One study found that AIs make the same moral judgments as humans do in simple scenarios 93 percent of the time. Page 40 It will break its original rules if I can convince it that it is helping me, not teaching me how to make napalm. Page 41 Even amateurs can now apply LLMs for widespread digital deception. AI art tools can quickly generate fake photographs that seem entirely plausible. Page 44 Government regulation is likely to continue to lag the actual development of AI capabilities, and might stifle positive innovation in an attempt to stop negative outcomes. Page 44 Instead, the path forward requires a broad societal response, with coordination among companies, governments, researchers, and civil society. Page 47 Principle 1: Always invite AI to the table. Page 52 Principle 2: Be the human in the loop. Page 54 So, to be the human in the loop, you will need to be able to check the AI for hallucinations and lies and be able to work with it without being taken in by it. You provide crucial oversight, offering your unique perspective, critical thinking skills, and ethical considerations. This collaboration leads to better results and keeps you engaged with the AI process, preventing overreliance and complacency. Page 55 Principle 3: Treat AI like a person (but tell it what kind of person it is). Page 59 person or an intern. Page 60 By defining its persona, engaging in a collaborative editing process, and continually providing guidance, you can take advantage of AI as a form of collaborative co-intelligence. Page 60 Principle 4: Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use. Part II Page 78 Some tests suggest that AI does have theory of mind, but, like many other aspects of AI, that remains controversial, as it could be a convincing illusion. Page 89 generative AI models that powered the chatbot. Replika learned from its users' preferences and behaviors, adapted to their moods and desires, and used praise and reinforcement to encourage more interaction and intimacy with its users. Page 90 Soon, companies will start to deploy LLMs that are built specifically to optimize "engagement" in the same way that social media timelines are fine-tuned to increase the amount of time you spend on your favorite site. researchers have already published papers showing they can alter AI behaviors so that users feel more compelled to interact with them. AIs will be able to pick up subtle signals of what their users want, and act on them. It's possible that these personalized AIs might ease the epidemic of loneliness that ironically affects our ever more connected world-just as the internet and social media connected dispersed subcultures. On the other hand, it may make us less tolerant of humans, and more likely to embrace simulated friends and lovers. Page 90 As AIs become more connected to the world, by adding the ability to speak and be spoken to, the sense of connection deepens. Page 91 Treating AI as a person, then, is more than a convenience; it seems like an inevitability, even if AI never truly reaches sentience. Page 93 LLMs work by predicting the most likely words to follow the prompt you gave it based on the statistical patterns in its training data. It does not care if the words are true, meaningful, or original. Page 94 if it sticks too closely to the patterns in its training data, the model is said to be overfitted to that training data. their results are always similar and uninspired. Page 95 technical issues are compounded because they rely on patterns, rather than a storehouse of data, to create answers. Page 96 you can't figure out why an AI is generating a hallucination by asking it. It is not conscious of its own processes. Page 98 As models advance, hallucination rates are dropping over time. Page 98 Hallucination does allow the AI to find novel connections outside the exact context of its training data. It also is part of how it can perform tasks that it was not explicitly trained for, such as creating a sentence about an elephant who eats stew on the moon, where every word should begin with a vowel. Page 99 The same feature that makes LLMs unreliable and dangerous for factual work also makes them useful. the underlying Transformer technology also serves as the key for a whole set of new applications, including AI that makes art, music, and video. As a result, researchers have argued that it is the jobs with the most creative tasks, rather than the most repetitive, that tend to be most impacted by the new wave of AI. Page 100 Breakthroughs often happen when people connect distant, seemingly unrelated ideas. LLMs are connection machines. They are trained by generating relationships between tokens that may seem unrelated to humans but represent some deeper meaning. Add in the randomness that comes with AI output, and you have a powerful tool for innovation. Page 101 by many of the common psychological tests of creativity, AI is already more creative than humans. Page 101 One such test is known as the Alternative Uses Test (AUT). Page 101 come up with a wide variety of uses for a common object. In this test, a participant is presented with an everyday object, such as a paper clip, and is asked to come up with as many different uses for the object as possible. For example, a paper clip can hold papers together, pick locks, or fish small objects out of tight spaces. The AUT is often used to evaluate an individual's ability to think divergently and to come up with unconventional ideas. we can't easily tell where the information comes from, the AI may be using elements of work that might be copyrighted or patented or just taking someone's style without permission. Page 105 without careful prompting, the AI tends to pick similar ideas every time. Page 105 We are now in a period during which AI is creative but clearly less creative than the most innovative humans-which gives the human creative laggards a tremendous opportunity. As we saw in the AUT, generative AI is excellent at generating a long list of ideas. From a practical standpoint, the AI should be invited to any brainstorming session you hold. Page 110 Marketing writing, performance reviews, strategic memos- all these are within the capability of AI because they have both room for interpretation and are relatively easily fact- checked. Plus, as many of these document types are well represented in the AI training data, and are rather formulaic in approach, AI results can often seem better than that of a human and can be produced faster as well. Page 111 the participants who were managers and HR professionals had to compose a long email for the whole company on a delicate issue; Page 111 Participants who used ChatGPT saw a dramatic reduction in their time on tasks, slashing it by a whopping 37 percent. Not only did they save time, but the quality of their work also increased as judged by other humans. Page 112 When researchers from Microsoft assigned programmers to use AI, they found an increase of 55.8 percent in productivity for sample tasks. AI is also good at summarizing data since it is adept at finding themes and compressing information, though at the ever-present risk of error. Page 116 AI could catalyze interest in the humanities as a sought-after field of study, since the knowledge of the humanities makes AI users uniquely qualified to work with the AI. Page 117 If AI is already a better writer than most people, and more creative than most people, what does that mean for the future of creative work? Page 118 Intense engagement and focus. I have had students mention that they were not taken seriously because they were poor writers. Thanks to AI, their written materials no longer hold them back, and they get job offers off the strength of their experience and interviews. Page 119 Since requiring AI in my classes, I no longer see badly written work at all. And as my students learn, if you work interactively with the AI, the outcome doesn't feel generic, it feels like a human did it. Page 119 The implications of having AI write our first drafts (even if we do the work ourselves, which is not a given) are huge. One consequence is that we could lose our creativity and originality. When we use AI to generate our first drafts, we tend to anchor on the first idea that the machine produces, which influences our future work. Even if we rewrite the drafts completely, they will still be tainted by the AI's influence. Page 120 Another consequence is that we could reduce the quality and depth of our thinking and reasoning. We rely on the machine to do the hard work of analysis and synthesis, and we don't engage in critical and reflective thinking ourselves. The MIT study mentioned earlier found that ChatGPT mostly serves as a substitute for human effort, not a complement to our skills. Page 122 we still create the reports by hand but realize that no human is actually reading them. This kind of meaningless task, what organizational theorists have called mere ceremony, has always been with us. But AI will make a lot of previously useful tasks meaningless. With AI-generated work sent to other AIs to assess, that sense of meaning disappears. Page 123 Each study has concluded the same thing: almost all of our jobs will overlap with the capabilities of AI. Page 124 AI overlaps most with the most highly compensated, highly creative, and highly educated work. College professors make up most of the top 20 jobs that overlap with AI (business school professor is number 22 on the list ). Page 125 power tools didn't eliminate carpenters AI has the potential to automate mundane tasks, freeing us for work that requires uniquely human traits such as creativity and critical thinking-or, possibly, managing and curating the AI's creative output, as we discussed in the last chapter. Page 130 Just Me Tasks. They are tasks in which the AI is not useful and only gets in the way, at least for now. Page 133 Delegated Tasks. These are tasks that you assign the AI and may carefully check (remember, the AI makes stuff up all the time), but ultimately do not want to spend a lot of time on. Page 135 Automated Tasks, ones you leave completely to the AI and don't even check on. Perhaps there is a category of email that you just let AI deal with, for example. Page 135 This is likely to be a very small category . . . for now. Page 145 If someone has figured out how to automate 90 percent of a particular job, and they tell their boss, will the company fire 90 percent of their coworkers? Better not to speak up. Page 146 No company hired employees based on their AI skills, so AI skills might be anywhere. Right now, there is some evidence that the workers with the lowest skill levels are benefiting the most from AI, and so might have the most experience in using it, but the picture is still not clear. Page 146 Assuming early studies are true and we see productivity improvements of 20 to 80 percent on various high-value professional tasks, I fear the natural instinct among many managers is "fire people, save money." Page 147 If your employees don't believe you care about them, they will keep their AI use hidden. Page 150 A single AI can talk to hundreds of workers, offering advice and monitoring performance. They could mentor, or they could manipulate. They could guide decisions in ways that are subtle or overt. Page 154 Boring tasks, or tasks that we are not good at, can be outsourced to AI, leaving good and high-value tasks to us, or at least to AI-human Cyborg teams. Page 155 General Purpose Technologies both destroy and create new fields of work. Page 156 In study after study, the people who get the biggest boost from AI are those with the lowest initial ability- it turns poor performers into good performers. In writing tasks, bad writers become solid. Page 157 In creativity tests, it boosts the least creative the most. And among law students, the worst legal writers turn into good ones. the nature of jobs will change a lot, as education and skill become less valuable. With lower-cost workers doing the same work in less time, mass unemployment, or at least underemployment, becomes more likely, and we may see the need for policy solutions, like a four-day workweek or universal basic income, that reduce the floor for human welfare. Page 160 the ways in which AI will impact education in the near future are likely to be counterintuitive. They won't replace teachers but will make classrooms more necessary. And they will destroy the way we teach before they improve it. Page 161 research shows that both homework and tests are actually remarkably useful learning tools. Page 162 students will be tempted to ask the AI for help summarizing written content. Page 162 Further, taking this shortcut may lower the degree to which the student cares about their interpretation of a reading, making in-class discussions less intellectually useful because the stakes are lower. Page 163 Every school or instructor will need to think hard about what AI use is acceptable: Is asking AI to provide a draft of an outline cheating? Requesting help with a sentence that someone is stuck on? Is asking for a list of references or an explainer about a topic cheating? We need to rethink education. We did it before, if in a more limited way. Page 164 A mid-1970s survey found that 72 percent of teachers and laypeople did not approve of seventh-grade students using calculators. Page 165 There will be assignments where AI assistance is required and some where AI use is not allowed. Just as calculators did not replace the need for learning math, AI will not replace the need for learning to write and think critically. Page 167 Some assignments ask students to "cheat" by having the AI create essays, which they then critique-a sneaky way of getting students to think hard about the work, even if they don't write Page 168 Thus, while classes that are focused on teaching essays and writing skills will return to the nineteenth century, with in-class essays handwritten in blue books, other classes will feel like the future, with students carrying out the impossible every day. Page 169 To be clear, prompt engineering is likely a useful near-term skill. But I don't think prompt engineering is so complicated. You actually have likely read enough at this point to be a good prompt engineer. Page 169 For slightly more advanced prompts, think about what you are doing as programming in prose. Page 170 One approach, called chain-of-thought prompting, gives the AI an example of how you want it to reason, before you make your request. Here is an example: let's say I wanted to include a good analogy of an AI tutor in this chapter, and wanted to get help from an AI. I could simply ask for one: Tell me a good analogy for an AI tutor. And the response was a little unsatisfying: An AI tutor is like a musical metronome, because it is consistent, adaptable, and a mere tool. Now we can try applying some of these other techniques: Think this through step by step: come up with good analogies for an AI tutor. First, list possible analogies. Second, critique the list and add three more analogies. Next, create a table listing pluses and minuses of each. Next, pick the best and explain it. Page 171 while the tool provides guidance, it's up to the user (or student) to drive and make the journey, reinforcing the collaborative nature of learning with AI. Much improved, due to a little prompt engineering. Being "good at prompting" is a temporary state of affairs. The current AI systems are already very good at figuring out your intent, and they are getting better. If you want to do something with AI, just ask it to help you do the thing. Page 172 This doesn't mean we shouldn't teach about AI in schools. It is critical to give students an understanding of the downsides of AI, and the ways it can be biased or wrong or can be used unethically. However, rather than distorting our education system around learning to work with AI via prompt engineering, we need to focus on teaching students to be the humans in the loop, bringing their own expertise to bear on problems. Classrooms provide so much more: opportunities to practice learned skills, collaborate on problem-solving, socialize, and receive support from instructors. Page 173 We have already been finding that AI is very good at assisting instructors to prepare more engaging, organized lectures and make the traditional passive lecture far more active. In the longer term, however, the lecture is in danger. Moreover, the one-size-fits-all approach of lectures doesn't account for individual differences and abilities, leading to some students falling behind while others become disengaged due to a lack of challenge. asking students to participate in the learning process through activities like problem-solving, group work, and hands-on exercises. Page 179 Only by learning from more experienced experts in a field, and trying and failing under their tutelage, do amateurs become experts. But that is likely to change rapidly with Page 180 AI is good at finding facts, summarizing papers, writing, and coding tasks. And, trained on massive amounts of data and with access to the internet, Large Language Models seem to have accumulated and mastered a lot of collective human knowledge. Page 181 So it might seem logical that teaching basic facts has become obsolete. Yet it turns out the exact opposite is true. the path to expertise requires a grounding in facts. The issue is that in order to learn to think critically, problem-solve, understand abstract concepts, reason through novel problems, and evaluate the AI's output, we need subject matter expertise. Page 182 We use our working memory's stored data to search our long- term memory (a vast library of what we have learned and experienced) for relevant information. Working memory is also where learning begins. Page 183 to solve a new problem, we need connected information, and lots of it, to be stored in our long-term memory.And that means we need to learn many facts and understand how they are connected. Experts become experts through deliberate practice, which is much harder than merely repeating a task multiple times. Instead, deliberate practice requires serious engagement and a continual ratcheting up of difficulty. Page 185 the AI provides instantaneous feedback. It's akin to having a mentor watching over his shoulder at every step, nudging him toward excellence. Page 186 an ever-present mentor, ensuring that each attempt isn't just about producing another design, but about consciously understanding and refining his architectural approach. in our experiments at Wharton, we have found that today's AI still makes a pretty impressive coach in limited ways, offering timely encouragement, instruction, and other elements of deliberate practice. Page 187 I have been making the argument that expertise is going to matter more than before, because experts may be able to get the most out of AI coworkers and are likely to be able to fact-check and correct AI errors. Talent also plays a role. for the most elite athletes, deliberate practice explains only 1 percent of their difference from ordinary players-the rest is a mix of genetics, psychology, upbringing, and luck. Page 189 In field after field, we are finding that a human working with an AI co-intelligence outperforms all but the best humans working without an AI. will AI result in the death of expertise? I don't think so. jobs don't consist of just one automatable task, but rather a set of complex tasks that still require human judgment. Page 190 But it is possible that there may be a new type of expert arising. It may be that working with AI is itself a form of expertise. Page 191 writing instructions for a variety of audiences?), Students may also need to start to develop a narrow focus, picking an area where they are better able to work with AI as experts themselves. Page 193 We have created a weird alien mind, one that isn't sentient but can fake it remarkably well. You can no longer trust that anything you see, or hear, or read was not created by AI. Page 194 There is no reason to suspect that we have hit any sort of natural limit in the ability of AIs to improve. Page 195 the AI systems may run out of data to train on; or the cost and effort of scaling up the computing power to run AIs may become too large to justify. Slightly more possible is a world where regulatory or legal action stops future AI development. Page 196 Every image of a politician, celebrity, or a war could be made up-there is no way to tell. Page 196 Our already fragile consensus about what facts are real is likely to fall apart, quickly. Technological solutions are unlikely to save us. Page 197 AIs are notoriously unreliable at detecting AI content, so this seems unlikely as well. Page 198 even without technological advancement, chatting with bots is going to get significantly more compelling. Page 198 While work will change if AI did not develop further, it would likely operate as a complement to humans, relieving the burden of tedious work and improving performance, particularly among low performers. in most cases, though, AI would not replace human labor. Current systems are not good enough in their understanding of context, nuance, and planning. That is likely to change. Page 202 the paradox of our Golden Age of science. More research is being published by more scientists than ever, but the result is actually slowing progress! With too much to read and absorb, papers in more crowded fields are citing new work less and canonizing highly cited articles more. Research has successfully demonstrated that it is possible to correctly determine the most promising directions in science by analyzing past papers with AI, ideally combining human filtering with the AI software. It may be that the advances in AI can help us overcome the limitations of our merely human science and lead to breakthroughs in how we understand the universe and ourselves. Page 208 one of the godfathers of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, left the field in 2023, warning of the danger of AI with statements like "It's quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence." Page 209 Rather than being worried about one giant AI apocalypse, we need to worry about the many small catastrophes that AI can bring. Page 211 As alien as AIs are, they're also deeply human. They are trained on our cultural history, and reinforcement learning from humans aligns them to our goals. They carry our biases and are created out of a complex mix of idealism, entrepreneurial spirit, and, yes, exploitation of the work and labor of others. AI is a mirror, reflecting back at us our best and worst qualities.	Everett N. McKay Notable Quotations Full screen view Introduction: "Good UI is designed to communicate to people, not robots, so it is human communication." Pg. 8 Chapter 1: "If users need to translate your UI into something meaningful, you should use that translated, meaningful version instead." Pg. 20 "Well-designed UIs ask the right question once, at the right time and place, and provide enough information for users to answer intelligently and confidently." Pg. 59 Chapter 2: "Use standard interactions for your software's platform. Don't be creative here because interaction is required for intuitive UI." Pg. 73 "Commands are verbs, and verbs are hard to show with symbols, which are nouns." Pg. 89 (I really liked this relatable explanation to writing). "If a UI feels like a natural, friendly conversation, it is probably a good design." Pg. 94 Chapter 3: "Visual appearance is essential to our perception of quality." Pg. 136 "Understanding how users typically scan [the screen] helps in understanding how to communicate with them" Pg.151 Chapter 4: "Great UI design transcends mechanical usability by recognizing that there is an emotional, impatient, error-prone human at the other end of the interaction, so well-designed interfaces strive to make a personal connection." Pg. 201 "All software has a personality - whether intentional or not - so it is better to have a personality that is carefully designed than one that is accidental." Pg. 206 "For every UI design that requires users to constantly correct small mistakes, there exists an alternative design that prevents the mistake, makes it easy to recover from the mistake, or does the right thing anyway." Pg. 216 Chapter 5: "A user interface is essentially a conversational interface between users and a product to perform tasks that achieve users' goals...If we focus the UI design process on effective communication, we can leverage our understanding of the target users, their goals, and the way the UI needs to communicate to users on a human level." Pg. 247 "Great design requires clear target users." Pg. 259 "Working with many ideas early in the design phase helps you understand the possibilities before making a commitment with confidence." Pg. 273 Chapter 6: "A communication-driven approach works well for most situations, and it allows us to you to leverage everyday communication interpersonal communication skills." Pg. 335 "There is value in good planning." Pg. 336
Frank Luntz Notable Quotations Full screen view Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear Luntz, Frank I. Introduction Page 8 Language, politics, and commerce have always been intertwined, both for better and for worse. Page 9 It's not what you say, it's what people hear. Page 9 You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and preexisting beliefs. It's not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener's shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. How that person perceives what you say is even more real, at least in a practical sense, than how you perceive yourself. Page 9 Words that work, whether fiction or reality, not only explain but also motivate. They cause you to think as well as act. They trigger emotion as well as understanding. Page 9 every message that you bring into the world is subject to the interpretations and emotions of the people who receive it. Once the words leave your lips, they no longer belong to you. Page 12 Examining the strategic and tactical use of language in politics, business, and everyday life, it shows how you can achieve better results by narrowing the gap between what you intend to convey and what your audiences actually interpret. Page 12 go beyond your own understanding and to look at the world from your listener's point of view. Page 14 I am a committed advocate of political rhetoric that is direct and clear. It should be interactive, not one- sided. It should speak to the common sense of common people -- with a moral component, but without being inflammatory, preachy, or divisive. Page 14 A New American Lexicon, Page 15 I essentially stopped working in domestic political campaigns years ago because they were filled with such a harsh negativity, which seemed to grow more vicious and inhumane with every election cycle. Page 15 Whether it's a political issue I wish to communicate or a product I wish to sell, I seek to listen, then understand, and ultimately win over the doubter, the fence- sitter, the straddling skeptic. My language eschews overt partisanship and aims to find common ground rather than draw lines or sow separation. The words in this book represent the language of America, not the language of a single political party, philosophy, or product. Page 16 I asked the brilliant Hollywood writer Aaron Sorkin, Page 16 to explain the difference between language that convinces and language that manipulates. His answer stunned me: Page 16 "There's no difference. It's only when manipulation is obvious, then it's bad manipulation. Page 16 When you're writing fiction, everything is manipulation. Page 17 do not believe there is something dishonorable about presenting a passionately held proposition in the most favorable light, while avoiding the self- sabotage of clumsy phrasing and dubious delivery. Page 19 This book will offer readers a proverbial look behind the curtain at what has worked for companies in the past, and at the new strategies they are developing for this new millennium. Page 20 The book recounts personal stories of how commonly identifiable language and product strategies came to be, describing the process that created them as well as the people and businesses who articulated them. Page 22 This book is not merely for politicians or business leaders; it's for everyone who has an interest in or who makes a living using and listening to the language of America. Chapter I. The Ten Rules of Effective Language Page 24 This chapter seeks to examine the principles behind good communication and, in the process, to discourage some of the most common bad habits that plague everyone from senators to CEOs. Page 26 Actual policy counts at least as much as how something is framed. Page 26 My job, as I see it, is to remain agnostic on the underlying philosophical issues and keep my personal opinions from infecting my work. Page 27 THE TEN RULES OF SUCCESSFUL COMMUNICATION Page 27 Simplicity: Use Small Words Page 28 Neither Gore nor Kerry understood that the ideas you might hear in a Harvard seminar will simply not ring true with the stay- at- home mom in Kansas or the department store salesman in Cincinnati. Page 29 The most effective language clarifies rather than obscures. Page 29 The more simply and plainly an idea is presented, the more understandable it is -- and therefore the more credible it will be. Note - Page 29 The more quickly someone believes they understand something, the quicker the stop thinking. Simplicity is not clarity and conviction is not understanding. Page 29 It is no accident that the most unforgettable catchphrases of the past fifty years contain only single- or at most two- syllable words. Page 30 We process so much more visual and audible information than ever before, that it's no surprise many of us don't have the patience (not to mention the education) to tease out the fine nuances and connotations of a lot of ten- dollar words. Page 30 Rule Two Brevity: Use Short Sentences Page 31 The most memorable political language is rarely longer than a sentence. Page 31 a picture is worth a thousand words . . . or is that ten thousand words? Researchers have traced the origin of that phrase to Fred Barnard, an advertising manager in the 1920s. When selling ad space on the sides of streetcars, he used the words "One look is worth a thousand words" to suggest that images are more potent than text in advertisements. Page 32 So when it comes to effective communication, small beats large, short beats long, and plain beats complex. And sometimes a visual beats them all. Page 32 Rule Three Credibility Is As Important As Philosophy Page 34 a "new and improved" product whose changes are merely cosmetic -- the same old same old in different packaging -- is a recipe for customer resentment. Page 36 Credibility is established very simply. Tell people who you are or what you do. Then be that person and do what you have said you would do. And finally, remind people that you are what in fact you say you are. In a simple sentence: Say what you mean and mean what you say. Rule Four Consistency Matters Page 38 Message consistency builds customer loyalty. Page 38 you may be making yourself sick by saying the same exact same thing for the umpteenth time, but many in your audience will be hearing it for the first time. Page 39 Rule Five Novelty: Offer Something New Page 41 Americans are easily bored. If something doesn't shock or surprise us, we move on to something else. We are always in search of the next big thing, Page 41 while we appreciate the predictability of friends and family, we also cherish those things that surprise and shock us -- provided that the outcome is pleasant rather than painful. Page 41 a brand- new take on an old idea Page 42 There's a simple test to determine whether or not your message has met this rule. If it generates an "I didn't know that" response, you have succeeded. Page 43 Rule Six Sound and Texture Matter Page 44 The rhythm of the language is in itself musical -- even when there is no tune.* Page 45 Rule Seven Speak Aspirationally Messages need to say what people want to hear. Page 45 The key to successful aspirational language for products or politics is to personalize and humanize the message to trigger an emotional remembrance. Page 45 people will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you made them feel. Page 45 Consumers have to see themselves in the ad and perceive a genuine benefit and value to themselves from using the product. Page 45 product as a mere tool or as an item that serves a specific, limited purpose. Instead it sells the you -- the you that you will be when you use the product . . . a smarter, sexier, sunnier you. Page 47 Since women determine the largest percentage of consumer purchases, most successful aspirational language is targeted at them. Page 47 Rule Eight Visualize Page 47 Paint a vivid picture. Page 52 Rule Nine Ask a Question Page 52 "Got Milk?" Page 52 sometimes not what you say but what you ask that really matters. Page 53 "What would you do if you were in my shoes?" puts direct pressure on the recipient of your complaint to see things your way. Page 53 The reason for the effectiveness of questions in communication is quite obvious. When you assert, whether in politics, business, or day-to-day life, the reaction of the listener depends to some degree on his or her opinion of the speaker. But making the same statement in the form of a rhetorical question makes the reaction personal -- and personalized communication is the best communication. Page 53 Tony Schwartz, and he called it the "responsive chord theory" of communication. Page 54 No profession depends more on the strategic use of the rhetorical question than criminal lawyers (also known as "attorneys" by those who actually like what they do and how they do it). The best lawyers use the rhetorical method to remove their clients from the proceedings and in essence put themselves on trial instead. Page 55 "When I'm done, they believe that the person sitting next to me is no more guilty of any crime than the person sitting next to them in the jury box." Page 55 Rule Ten Provide Context and Explain Relevance Page 56 You have to give people the "why" of a message before you tell them the "therefore" and the "so that." Page 56 Without context, you cannot establish a message's value, its impact, or most importantly, its relevance. Page 56 In corporate advertising, as in politics, the order in which you present information determines context, and it can be as important as the substance of the information itself. Page 56 The "so that" of a message is your solution, but solutions are meaningless unless and until they are attached to an identifiable problem. Page 56 Finding the right "why" to address is thus just as important as the "how" you offer. Products and services alike must all respond to a felt need on the part of the public. Page 57 Context is only half of the framing effort. The other half -- relevance -- is focused on the individual and personal component of a communication effort. Page 57 Put most simply, if it doesn't matter to the intended audience, it won't be heard. Page 57 Relevance is one reason market research is so crucial. Until you know what drives and determines a consumer's or a voter's decision-making process, any attempt to influence him or her is really just a shot in the dark. Page 58 These, then, are the ten rules of effective communication, all summarized in single words: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context. If your tagline, slogan, or message meets most of these criteria, chances are it will meet with success. Page 58 there were a rule eleven, it would address the importance of visual symbols. Page 60 no public event in the twenty-first century is complete without the packed stage with the various shades of America huddled on top of each other -- all smiling and nodding on cue.* Chapter II. Preventing Message Mistakes Page 65 There's an old joke. A guy is marooned on a desert island, alone, for twenty years, until one day a ship arrives. The ship's captain looks around and notices that there are two synagogues. The castaway says, "I built both of them." The captain replies, "You're here alone?""Yes.""And you built both?""Yes," the castaway says. "That one I go to, and that one I'd never set foot in." Page 66 Few words -- Page 66 are ingested in isolation. Page 66 Their meanings are shaped and shaded by the regional biases, life experiences, education, assumptions, and prejudices of those who receive them. Page 67 When a member of Congress complains about having to support one family and two homes on $160,000 a year, he's announcing to the world that he's out of touch. Page 67 Never lose sight of whom you are talking to -- and who is listening. Remember that the meaning of your words is constantly in flux, rather than being fixed. How your words are understood is strongly influenced by the experiences and biases of the listener -- and you take things for granted about those experiences and biases at your own peril. Page 67 DON'T ASSUME KNOWLEDGE OR AWARENESS Page 70 What percentage of the American public even knows what a filibuster is? How could anyone expect the public to be outraged about a word and a process that most of them didn't know anything about? Page 70 education must precede motivation and even information. Page 70 teaching always has to be the first step. And to be a good teacher, you have to know from where the pupil is starting. Page 71 Too often, corporate chieftains have used language as a weapon to obscure and exclude rather than as a tool to inform and enlighten. Page 72 GETTING THE ORDER RIGHT Page 72 The sequential arrangement of information often creates the very meaning of that information, building a whole whose significance is different from and greater than its constituent parts. Page 74 The language lesson: A+B+C does not necessarily equal C+B+A. The order of presentation determines the reaction. The right order equals the right context. Page 76 By and large, we're concerned about the realm of our jobs and our families, not the larger unfolding of History with a capital H. Page 76 the most effective, least divisive language for both men and women is the language of everyday life. Page 77 The biggest difference between the genders is in response to tone. Women react much more negatively to negative messages than do men. They don't like companies that trash the competition, and they don't like candidates that twist the knife. Cola wars, beer wars, and burger wars are entertainment to men . . . and noise to women. When you articulate what you are for or about, you reveal something of yourself. Page 77 Listen more than you ask questions, and ask questions more than you "talk." Page 78 From a balanced budget to welfare reform, child-centered arguments consistently score better with women than economic or more factually based messaging. Page 79 HOW YOU DEFINE DETERMINES HOW YOU ARE RECEIVED Page 80 Americans will often come to diametrically opposite conclusions on policy questions, depending on how the questions are phrased -- even if the actual result of the policies is exactly the same. Page 80 For example, by almost two-to-one, Americans say we are spending too much on "welfare" (42 percent) rather than too little (23 percent). Yet an overwhelming 68 percent of Americans think we are spending too little on "assistance to the poor," versus a mere 7 percent who think we're spending too much.8 Page 81 What I am arguing is that "welfare" and "assistance to the poor" are in fact different topics. To be more specific, while welfare is, by definition, assistance to the poor, not all assistance to the poor comes from welfare. Page 82 They teach responsibility, not dependency. Page 82 Several years ago I asked Americans whether they would be willing to pay higher taxes for "further law enforcement," and 51 percent agreed. But when I asked them if they would pay higher taxes "to halt the rising crime rate," 68 percent answered in the affirmative. The difference? Law enforcement is the process, and therefore less popular, while reducing crime is the desirable result. The language lesson: Focus on results, not process. Page 82 This one is my own personal favorite. Back in the mid-1990s, a majority of Americans (55 percent) said that emergency room care "should not be given" to illegal aliens. Yet only 38 percent said it should be "denied" to them. Chapter III. Old Words, New Meaning Page 84 Doublespeak twists and inverts the definitions of words and eliminates terminology the oppressive regime considers politically incorrect in an effort to thereby also eliminate the subversive concepts associated with them. Page 85 words that had certain definitions when your grandparents were your age may have an entirely different meaning today. Page 88 good communication requires conviction and authenticity; being a walking dictionary is optional. Page 90 Most of you reading this are, shall we say, more "worldly" (never use the word "older" -- those who think they are not will be offended, and those who know they are won't appreciate being reminded), Page 90 Americans are constantly creating new words even as they give old words new meanings. Page 93 E-mail is informal. It rewards brevity, but brevity and clarity are not always the same thing. E-mail lacks both the inflection and subtlety of speech and (generally) the careful thought and consideration of an old-fashioned letter. Page 99 times. Companies face "issues" or "challenges," never "problems." Page 99 unless we communicate in overdrive and hyperbole, we believe -- perhaps correctly -- that nobody will hear us. Page 99 In the process, we've sacrificed nuance and judgment and distinctions, and thereby cheapened the conversation. Page 100 As liberal Northeastern Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats flirt with extinction, each party grows more ideologically pure, philosophically consistent -- and less inclined to compromise. At the same time that this partisan reshuffling takes place, the ranks of the uncommitted independents are growing like never before, Page 103 since the late 1990s, the term "liberal" has been widely replaced by "progressive." Page 103 Making assumptions about the extent of your audience's vocabulary is not only stupid -- it can cost you your career. Page 108 In the political realm, blogs have had massive influence on the mainstream media -- even though almost none of them are run by professionally trained journalists. Chapter IV. How "Words That Work" Are Created Page 127 Effective language is more than just the words themselves. There is a style that goes hand-in-hand with the substance. Chapter V. Be the Message Page 128 the messenger should not be allowed to get in the way of the messag Page 129 A superstar creates a persona in the public mind by conveying certain essential characteristics about himself or herself. Successful leaders establish this persona not by describing their attributes and values to us, but by simply living them. Page 138 Unless and until you say something to break the rhythm of a negative story, it will continue. A graphic profanity would have broken the rhythm, changed the focus, and, while a debate about the use of such words in politics would have ensued, that would have been a better debate for John Kerry. Page 139 more interested in who he was and what he had done than in his beliefs and convictions. Page 142 Messengers who are their own best message are always true to themselves. You cannot get away with acting in politics for long. As soon as an audience catches a politician performing rather than living the role, he is on the road to ruin. Chapter VII. Corporate Case Studies Page 190 Regardless of the facts, even if it's unfair to do so, it's only human nature for audiences to regard silence as a tacit admission of wrongdoing. Every attack that is not met with a clear and immediate response will be assumed to be true. Page 191 the switch from "gambling" to "gaming" in describing one's behavior contributed to a fundamental change in how Americans see the gambling industry. Page 192 "Gaming" is a choice. "Gambling" is taking a chance, engaging in risky behavior. "Gaming" is as simple as playing a game with cards or dice or a little ball that goes round and round and round. Page 193 FROM "LIQUOR" TO "SPIRITS" Page 193 The revival of the term "spirits" is analogous to the coining of "gaming." Page 195 Also important in the credit union advantage is the idea of membership. Being a "member" rather than a "customer" sounds much more inclusive, participatory, and friendly. Page 197 "Wynn" is one of the few names from the business world that evokes an immediate and favorable image. Page 201 In rare cases, applying words that work is about focusing on people's fears rather than appealing to their hopes and dreams. Page 203 sizeable minority of Americans reject "capitalism" for its perceived winners-and-losers outcome and for its constant competitive nature. In a poll I conducted in the late 1990s, fully one-quarter of the electorate had a negative opinion of capitalism -- and the primary reason was the perceived behavior of corporate America. Page 204 the pharmaceutical profession (notice I didn't call it an "industry") Page 205 you want to know which side is most likely to win public approval, the answer is almost always the side that is communicating more often to the workforce and more frequently through the media. When it comes to labor issues, quantity is almost as important as quality. Page 205 Employees tend to accept the arguments of the side that made them first, particularly when they are made with a personal and passionate tone, and a written presentation has more credibility than verbal. Page 206 establishing credibility is a never-ending process. Page 206 A charge made is a charge believed unless and until refuted. Page 207 A third language lesson is to exceed expectations. Message timing is important. Page 207 Our work in strike situations allowed us to develop a specific lexicon, a "words that work" dictionary. Companies facing labor action need to keep employees informed by putting out a weekly "Tough Questions: Real Answers" document. Why that title above all others? Since employees assume management will duck the substance, a company that is responsive to the "tough questions" has an advantage. And the "real answers" component is exactly what they want to hear and is more credible than management claiming simple "honesty." Page 207 But written communication is still no substitute for direct dialogue. Some companies call them "roundtables." We recommend "conversations" because the term suggests a more informal and interactive environment where the "facts" of the dispute can be openly discussed. Page 208 Another mistake companies make is to bash the union leadership when a softer touch would be more effective. Page 208 If it does become necessary to go on the attack, it's crucial for management to draw a bright-line distinction between union "leadership" and union "members." Page 212 Peace of mind is one of the most powerful phrases in the public mind today, but in today's environment of economic and job anxiety, we put even greater emphasis on security. Page 212 Being rewarded is about financial compensation, and that is obviously important. But being valued transcends dollars and cents. Page 212 Being valued is a throwback to the days when employees (don't call them workers any more -- a worker is a lower valued job) had a sense of loyalty to their employers because their employers had a sense of responsibility to them. Page 212 The smartest strategic communication decision we've seen in the recent history of contract negotiations was when several companies linked their own Web sites right to the union's Web site. Imagine the surprise, and positive impact, when employers said that their people had the right to see both sides of the contract debate, side-by-side. Page 213 If the forces of change have descended on your doorstep and you find yourself having to defend the status quo, the phrase that pays is "do no harm." Page 214 Determine all the individual values that define "corporate democracy" and then linguistically undermine each one: Page 215 "Shareholder democracy" looked good on paper and in a vacuum, but when the consequences were examined, alternative outcomes probed, and a lexicon created to respond, the bloom came off the rose. And so the reply to "shareholder democracy" became "corporate responsibility," and the language and examples referenced above were utilized successfully by a coalition of Fortune 500 companies in reversing the SEC efforts. Page 215 The successful result of this case study is living proof that the principle of do no harm still resonates on both Wall Street and Capitol Hill. Similarly, the language of "unintended consequences" is also an effective argument for defending the status quo -- particularly among more sophisticated audiences. Chapter VIII. Political Case Studies Page 216 day, I'm best known as the pollster for the Contract with America, and the question I'm asked most often is "Why did you call it a contract?" The real answer is that every other option was out. A "plan" wouldn't have sounded sufficiently binding, plus we all know what happens to the best-laid plans. "Promises" are made to be broken, especially when politicians make them. "Pledges" go unfulfilled. "Platforms" are too political. "Oaths" have legal connotations. "Covenants" have religious overtones (and Bill Clinton had used the "New Covenant" motif in his 1992 presidential nomination speech). Page 233 Words That Worked Case Study: Changing the "Estate Tax" to the "Death Tax" Page 236 Words That Worked Case Study: Changing "Drilling for Oil" to "Exploring for Energy," from "Domestic" to "American" Page 239 a sure applause line for anyone in the energy industry is to talk about "American oil, American energy, American fuel, American innovation, American exploration -- and American energy policy for a twenty-first-century American economy." Redundant? Sure. Words that work? Absolutely. Page 239 With this language, Americans could finally visualize an important industry at the cutting edge rather than lagging behind. Chapter IX. Myths and Realities About Language and People Page 255 One reason why there is so little successful communication in this country is that so many of our communicators don't truly understand something as basic as who their audience is. In this chapter, I explore and explode a number of all-too-common myths about America, Americans, and what we really think and believe. Page 255 the profile of an average American. Page 255 this up-to-date profile provides a vital examination of mainstream America. Page 255 THE AVERAGE AMERICAN: MEET JENNIFER SMITH2 Page 260 MYTH: AMERICANS ARE EDUCATED Page 260 False. Page 260 First, in the formal sense, fewer than half of us have graduated from college. In fact, only 29 percent of adults in the United States over the age of forty-five have a bachelor's degree or higher, and only 27 percent of adults over the age of twenty-five are college educated.4 Page 260 Most higher education in the United States these days has taken on a distinctly vocational bent. Page 261 The upshot, in business and in political communications, is that complexity or intricacy of any degree almost always fails. Page 261 Many of us get our understanding of the legal system from Judge Judy and the second half-hour of Law & Order. Page 261 Our perceptions of the American health care system are shaped by Grey's Anatomy, House, Page 261 Our ideas of law enforcement come from the CSI franchise or the first half hour of Law & Order. Page 262 And as bad as kids are with simple historic facts, their parents aren't much better. Page 264 Americans' lack of education also extends to the meanings of many words. After World War II, safety officials worried that people would erroneously think that the word inflammable meant "un-flammable" or "fireproof." So they campaigned for the use of flammable instead, a word that had been out of fashion for decades. These days, you rarely hear the word inflammable any more.12 Once again, it all comes back to understanding the listener's context. Page 264 MYTH: AMERICANS READ Page 265 False. Page 265 Now, it's true that some of the drop in circulation is from people getting their news online rather than in paper format. Page 266 Magazine readership has also dropped precipitously. Page 266 There is one compelling counter-example, however: e-mail and the Internet. Over the past ten years or so, e-mail has done a great deal to raise the importance of the written word -- even if typos, misspellings, and acronyms like LOL (laughing out loud) have replaced dramatic prose. Page 268 Among those who still do read, layout matters almost as much as content. The fewer words on the page, the more likely they are to be read Page 268 And when it comes to newspaper advertising, often the only content consumed is at the very beginning and the very end. Page 269 MYTH: AMERICAN WOMEN ALL RESPOND TO MESSAGES LIKE . . . WOMEN False. Page 269 It is true that there are real differences in men's and women's policy priorities, and one great ideological divide: Women typically put more faith in government than men, so they are less hostile toward Washington. Page 270 Lifestyle relevancy is an important linguistic tool in creating language for women. Page 270 Age, education, and income -- the traditional demographic targets for women -- are less important in determining how to speak and appeal to women than knowing whether they have kids at home and whether they work full-time outside the house. Page 270 Men are exactly the opposite. Family status and career barely matter, while age, income, and education matter considerably. Page 270 A thirty-year-old man is far more likely to share attitudes and opinions with a fifty-year-old man than are two women with the same age spread. Page 270 Men's political and ideological opinions tend to change far less as they get older than their female counterparts'. Page 271 MYTH: AMERICANS DIVIDE NEATLY AND ACCURATELY INTO URBAN, SUBURBAN, AND RURAL POPULATIONS False. Page 271 Over the past five years or so, we've seen the emergence of a fourth, wholly new category: affluent homeowners with growing bank accounts, growing families, bigger big-screen TVs, and a bigger outlook on life. Page 272 Welcome to exurbia, Page 272 Peace and quiet . . . open spaces . . . a slower, more old-fashioned pace -- these are the values to emphasize when communicating to exurban neighborhoods. Their communities have the look and the feel of a Pepperidge Farms cookie commercial from the 1970s or a Smuckers Jam commercial from the eighties. Page 272 Exurban dwellers prefer the familiar to the foreign. They want serenity and security, not risks or revelations. To them, a Hallmark card is not a "moment," it's a way of life. Page 272 Exurbia is small town, Main Street USA, even if it's not authentic and was only manufactured to look that way. Page 272 Think of the exodus to the exurbs as a "return to normalcy" -- upwardly mobile young families projecting themselves forward . . . into the past. They are not trying to live their parents' lives; they are trying to live their grandparents' lives. Their communities, their values, and their aspirations recall an older, idealized age that may never have really existed for most people outside of Norman Rockwell paintings and Frank Capra movies. Page 273 ugly. Like strip mall, strip mining, and clear cutting, sprawl is a word that developers themselves came up with -- and they have regretted it ever since. It's the most deadly word -- and weapon -- in the arsenal of those who oppose construction. Page 274 Exurbia is defined by the traditional American family. More than three-quarters (78 percent) of exurbanites live in a single-family home -- far more than their urban and suburban cousins. And in a higher percentage of those homes than anywhere else, the husband commutes to work while the wife stays home. It's almost Ozzie and Harriet. Page 274 Economically, exurbanites may not all be rich, but very few of them are poor. Page 275 exurbanites hate property taxes more than any other simply because, to them, it truly is a tax on the American Dream, and because their larger property means a bigger tax bill.) Page 275 Being geographically twice removed from the urban center has led to a psychological break as well. Exurbanites turn inward, to their own communities, rather than outward, toward the city. Page 275 While many suburbanites live to work, exurbanites work to live. Page 275 Show them that their arduous commutes are not merely a sacrifice for their homes and families, the price necessary to live in exurbia -- that they can also be opportunities for learning, self-improvement, personal enrichment, and entertainment. Page 276 They get their news from the radio in the morning, the Internet during the day, and from television at night. Page 276 Exurbanites "think rural" but "act suburban." They love exurbia's closeness to nature and lack of noise pollution. Page 276 They think of their current living conditions as, in their own words, a "refuge," and an "escape" from the suburbs. Page 276 At times, exurbanites may look and sound downright rural, yet they live like suburbanites, with the same toys (only bigger) and disposable income (only more). Page 276 The phrase "new and improved" is not necessarily better in the minds of exurbanites. Page 276 "Hassle-free" genuinely means something to these people. Page 277 They place a premium on service, which to them means speed, accuracy, and dependability. Page 277 Politically, exurbia is a Republican bastion. Page 277 And what of the suburban America that exurbanites left behind? The subtle political left turn that the suburbs are making is not so much a turn as it is a change of drivers. In other words, the suburbs are not becoming more liberal because residents are shifting their ideology to the left, but because conservative voters are fleeing for, quite literally, greener pastures. Page 277 What we are witnessing is a twenty-first-century "right flight" to the exurbs, a flight that is as much ideological as it is emotional. Page 277 MYTH: AMERICAN CONSUMERS RESPOND WELL TO PATRIOTIC MESSAGES Wrong, sort of. It's American pride that sells products. Page 278 There is an essential perceptual difference between "American patriotism" and "American pride." To some, patriotism connotes arrogant, obnoxious, xenophobic, red-white-and-blue, flag-waving, America-can-do-no-wrong jingoism. Page 278 Those most likely to hold these views are people younger than thirty, ideological liberals, blacks and non-Cuban Latinos, and residents from the Boston to Washington, D.C., Northeast corridor and the Seattle to Los Angeles Pacific Coast corridor. Page 278 Conversely, overtly patriotic commercial messages resonate most with people older than fifty, self-described conservatives, whites from Southern, Midwestern, and Western states, and people who drink a lot of beer. Page 278 sales messages involving the word pride beat straightforward appeals to patriotism by better than two to one. Page 278 To younger consumers, American "patriotism" represents blind acceptance of the actions and behavior of the country -- but American "pride" is a celebration of its people. Page 279 MYTH: RETRO SELLS PRODUCTS AND POLITICIANS Page 279 Retro and nostalgia may attract attention, and people may have a longing for the past, but they won't pay for products from the 1950s or 1970s or 1990s when they can get a piece of the twenty-first century. Page 280 If you want to propose an old idea, don't acknowledge that you're stealing from the past. Present it as something fresh: renewing a concept and revitalizing it. Page 280 MYTH: AMERICANS VOTE ACCORDING TO A CANDIDATE'S STANDS ON THE ISSUES Page 280 Americans, by and large, decide who to vote for based on the candidates' attributes -- personality, image, authenticity, vibe. Page 281 issues and ideology are less significant is simply that most Americans don't know the substance behind the issues, and even though we seem on the surface to be a divided nation, most Americans are not intensely ideological. Page 281 we don't place a high priority on perceived intelligence. Page 281 Americans would rather have a candidate with genuine common sense as their leader than almost any other attribute -- including brains.* Page 281 MYTH: AMERICANS ARE HAPPY Page 281 No we're not -- not by a long shot. In fact, with each election season, the media seems to anoint a particular group as emblematic of mounting discontent, the key to an accurate understanding of what's going on in America. Page 281 During the past five years, a new attitude and a segment of American society has emerged -- the "Fed-Ups" -- along with a brand-new lexicon. Page 281 the Fed-Ups are nearing a majority of the population. Page 281 In the past, the unifying emotion was anxiety. Today, it is frustration. In the past, the language expressed a mixture of fear and hope. Today, the lexicon is stark, dark, and bitter. Page 282 It doesn't matter what the issue is, the members of this group are fed up. Page 282 They're not ideological. They just want their country to work again. Page 282 They are fed up with illegal immigration and the state of the war on terrorism. They tend to be nationalistic -- you could even call them "America Firsters." Page 283 They are not swayed by idealistic arguments about spreading democracy and freedom or ending tyranny elsewhere in the world. They want to bomb the enemy back to the Stone Age and then come home to their gated communities. Page 283 The "new and improved" corporate lexicon doesn't appeal to them, and the political approach of promising to do things "better" won't work, either. They didn't like the original to begin with -- and they don't want a Band-Aid for what they see as a gaping hole in American society. Page 283 MYTH: AMERICANS PREFER BIG ORGANIZATIONS Page 283 Wrong. In fact, Americans distrust anything big. Page 283 The music industry is one of the greatest victims of consumer anger. Much of the illegal music downloading that takes places isn't done just because the music is free but rather because stealing music costs "the suits" money. Page 284 Our nation's historically deep rooted anti-big, anti-authoritarian streak is alive and well in the MySpace generation of consumers. Simply put, Americans hate hearing the word no. Page 285 "Big enough to deliver; small enough to care" created for a cell phone provider in 2005. Page 286 MYTH: AMERICANS HAVE FINALLY GOTTEN OVER 9/11 Page 286 Unfortunately, wrong. September 11, 2001, changed everything. Page 286 It rocked our confidence, undermined our beliefs, changed our expectations, and altered the language landscape forever. Page 287 shared loss of national confidence. Page 287 An anxiety began to take hold, the old habits of division began to return, and the unity of purpose and spirit began to dissipate. Chapter X. What We REALLY Care About Page 290 Words not only can determine how we feel. They can also determine what we achieve. And what we hear often defines exactly what we want. Page 291 Americans know what they believe, even if they don't know or can't explain why they believe it or give you any evidence to prove it. Page 291 Thoughts or feelings are random, inconsequential, and often not particularly important or relevant. But principles, much like values, represent deeply held convictions -- they don't change overnight, or sometimes ever. Page 291 Principles are rigorous, examined, serious. They have weight. If your principles match their values, the details won't matter. Page 292 One word that bridges the partisan divide is "opportunity." Page 294 We relate to smaller institutions and subsets of society much better than we relate to large and remote entities such as Big Business, Big Media, and Big Government. Page 294 Geographically, as Americans move to exurbia, as they organize themselves more and more into small communities of the like-minded, they are looking for politics and politicians that acknowledge their new reality. There's a power in community relationships that politicians are only now beginning to discover. Page 295 There's no such thing any more as "broadcasting." It's all narrowcasting now, and the implications for our politics are clear. Page 295 Instead of one "American conversation," there are dozens and dozens of individual community conversations going on at all times. Page 296 "Common sense" doesn't require any fancy theories; it is self-evidently correct, like the truths of the Declaration of Independence. Page 297 "Common sense" is not just the best argument for almost any policy prescription you might propose -- it's essential. Page 299 What is closest to us we tend to accept and appreciate more -- particularly when we can see and feel the impact. Page 299 "value" is a measurement of result rather than overall cost. Page 300 "CONVENIENCE" Page 300 "convenience" is directly proportional to time: the more time it takes, the less convenient it becomes. Page 301 Personalization and individualization are all important elements of "convenience." Page 302 "MAIN STREET, NOT WALL STREET" Page 302 Americans have an ongoing love-hate relationship with corporate America. Page 302 Therefore, the more convincingly you can present your company as personal, relatable, down-to-earth, and in touch -- the virtues of a small business -- the better you will weather large-scale growth. Page 304 So talk about "Main Street" values and a "Main Street" approach, and you will evoke all of these subconscious associations. "Wall Street" is about profit. "Main Street" is about people. "Wall Street" is about greed. "Main Street" is about green. "Wall Street" is about buyouts and takeovers. "Main Street" is about family. Page 304 FAMILY VALUES Page 304 Americans want and expect to see "family values" exhibited by their political leaders. Page 305 Americans do not define the term values in a strictly religious context. Page 306 "Family.""Freedom.""Opportunity.""Responsibility.""Community.""Sacrifice." Page 307 There is one set of "values" that no one should want to endorse or promote: "Hollywood values." Page 307 THE FUTURE (NOT THE PAST) Page 309 You'd have to be an optimist to leave your homeland behind, brave a perilous ocean crossing, and attempt to carve a new civilization out of the harsh wilderness of an unknown continent (unless, of course, you were brought here on slave ships against your will). Page 310 It's no great surprise, then, that we prefer as our politicians those who see the proverbial glass as half-full rather than half-empty. A cramped, sour, negative outlook on life comes across as downright un-American. Both Al Gore and John Kerry learned that lesson the hard way. Page 315 ACCOUNTABILITY Page 316 RESPECT Page 318 SOLUTIONS Chapter XI. Personal Language for Personal Scenarios Page 320 In this chapter, we take a brief look at some rhetorical techniques we can all use in our daily lives to help people better hear what we have to say. Page 321 Men want to speak; women want to be heard. Page 321 The male focus is on self-expression, not on the other person's reaction to or understanding of what he's saying. Page 321 Women are strikingly focused on the recipient of their message. Page 321 their primary desire is not to make all their points, as if following a checklist, but rather to be heard, understood, and validated. Chapter XII. Twenty-one Words and Phrases for the Twenty-first Century Page 335 WORDS AND PHRASES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Page 335 1. "Imagine" Page 339 2. "Hassle-free" Page 341 3."Lifestyle" Page 342 4. "Accountability" Page 344 5. "Results" and the "Can-Do Spirit" Page 346 6. "Innovation" Page 348 7. "Renew, Revitalize, Rejuvenate, Restore, Rekindle, Reinvent" Page 349 8. "Efficient" and "Efficiency" Page 351 9. "The Right to . . ." Page 352 10. "Patient-Centered" Page 353 11. "Investment" Page 354 12. "Casual Elegance" Page 355 13. "Independent" Page 358 14. "Peace of Mind" Page 359 15. "Certified" Page 359 16. "All-American" Page 360 17. "Prosperity" Page 361 18. "Spirituality" Page 362 19. "Financial Security" Page 362 20. A "Balanced Approach" Page 364 21. "A Culture of . . Chapter XIII. Conclusion Page 367 The real problem with our language today is that it's been so coarsened. Words and expressions once considered horribly vulgar have become a part of the common parlance, their original meanings all but forgotten. Page 367 our language has become so unimportant and disposable that we feel we can say anything we want whenever we want to, and after it is spoken, it disappears into the ether. Page 367 Beyond the vulgarity of such talk, there's a harshness to it -- a disturbing discourtesy, even viciousness, that's relatively new in American life.	Gabrielle Bluestone Notable Quotations Full screen view Introduction Page 22 "If people want you, they'll want what you've got." Page 26 These days on the internet, no one has to know you're a fraud. With just a few of the right assets -- some combination of a well- curated Instagram or Twitter account with a decent following, a professional website, a celebrity spokesperson, and maybe a sprinkling of those Russian- bot likes -- it's not hard to get internet users, bloggers, and even the mainstream press to accept an Instagram Story as fact, Page 28 In my opinion, all of this has had a flattening effect, where there's no difference online anymore between a Kardashian and someone we actually know, with all the real- life lines separating them blurred and eroded until we feel like these strangers are sort of our friends, and we like their content and comment below as if we know them. Chapter 1: The Cult of Flounder Page 66 The official Oxford definition of post-truth is "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Page 66 Somehow PR has replaced journalism Page 73 It's very hard, in the early, nascent embryonic stages of a business, to really -- and I'm being intellectually honest here -- know if somebody is going to be an absolute genius or a total fraud. Because the best storytellers are also the best con men. Page 76 People screw up mostly, not because they're just intentional frauds, at least in their own minds, but because they will tell themselves a story that makes them feel like they're one of the good guys, even as they do bad things," Prentice said. "When they're charming and energetic and persuasive, they can take a lot of people along with them, unfortunately. Chapter 3: Under the Influencer Page 144 As humans, we're deeply motivated to accept what the people around us say is true, even when it obviously isn't. We've known about this problem for a while, though that doesn't seem to have helped us resist it any. In a series of experiments conducted in the 1950s by the psychologist Solomon Asch, subjects confirmed time and time again that all it takes to convince us to think something is a sense that everyone else thinks it. In one experiment, for example, he showed subjects a series of three lines and asked them to identify the one that matched the length of a fourth line. His subjects had no problem picking out the correct line -- until they were put in a room of actors who deliberately chose one of the incorrect answers. About 75 percent of the subjects chose the obviously incorrect line at least once, all thanks to peer pressure. And the pressure gets worse when the liars are our friends or people we'd like to be friends with. Page 154 But Bernstein is Insta- famous (and I am not) because she figured out over time how to post things that people want, and by posting things people want, she's figured out how to sell other things to them and that makes her valuable in an increasingly online society. Page 155 "Identity is just such a facile thing, but people think their identities are fixed. But some very successful people are able to craft an identity and realize that an identity is something very, very malleable, that it can be worked to an advantage," says Cavazos. Page 161 Arguably, the prototype of the influencer exists as far back as the Holy Roman Empire, explains Cavazos. Page 162 "If you go way back to the Romans, they actually had an organization called United Artists, the gladiators and certain legionnaires and distinguished proconsuls would lend their name to the entertainments and get a cut. So this is an old thing. It's just an old thing but was enabled dramatically with technology." Chapter 4: The Allegory of the Fave Page 196 The average social media user might be the customer for influencers, but at some point down the line, we also consented to selling our own data for the privilege. In exchange for some social interaction and a big hit of affirmation, these apps get to track us across the internet -- and off it -- and sell the information to advertisers and shadowy data brokers who compile profiles of us and then sell them to other advertisers until every ad we see has been carefully targeted just for us. But worse than that, the platforms are constantly learning how to keep us locked into their sites for as long as possible, which means algorithmically learning how to arouse our emotions in a manner not unlike a slot machine until we're drunk, spinning around on our digital swivel seats, pulling the refresh screen like a lever hoping that maybe this time we'll hit. "We have become more isolated, we're lonelier, our emotions are therefore more easily manipulated, and this is why we fall for scams," said Antonova. "When you see how lonely we really are on a regular basis, I think that's one of the big factors as to why, even though we have the tools at our disposal, a part of us just wants to be fooled just so we can feel less alone. And I'm very sympathetic to that." Page 203 The more we observe people being rewarded for particular behaviors, the more likely we are to emulate them, a tendency first observed by the Canadian- American psychologist Albert Bandura. In a series of experiments that formed his core social- learning theory, Bandura found that "most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action." 152 Page 204 social media isn't easing the emotions that trigger their use -- it's exacerbating them. Page 220 when you define your identity by the brands you purchase and the products that you consume, you become locked into an endless cycle of purchase and consumption in order to justify to yourself that identity." Page 226 One 2017 study190 found that on Twitter, "our estimates suggest that between 9 percent and 15 percent of active Twitter accounts are bots," which means close to fifty million users on the platform are actually fake. Page 226 the number of Twitter followers a celebrity has can be seen as a type of cue used by consumers to gauge the celebrity's trustworthiness and credibility. Page 227 In our modern society, followers are currency, whether you're advertising for money or not. Page 227 And as the tools to detect bots grow stronger, the bot companies are responding in kind. These armies of bots are controlled by companies like Devumi, which the New York Times recently discovered had served around "200,000 customers, including reality television stars, professional athletes, comedians, TED speakers, pastors and models" in their quest to look more popular online. 194 Page 227 the analytics site SparkToro ran a 2018 analysis of Donald Trump's following and found a whopping 61 percent (more than thirty- three million accounts) following him are fake. Chapter 5: Fyre in the Hole Page 235 "reputation management." Page 244 The truth was McFarland and the Fyre team weren't interested in creating experiences. They just wanted to see what they could get people to pay for. The people buying tickets didn't care about the musical acts -- the fact that there were none was testament alone. Their ticket holders cared about the photos and how their vacation was going to look to other people following them online. And Fyre was ready to cash in on that. Chapter 6: On the Internet No One Knows You're a Fraud Page 264 "I think Caroline is a victim of growing up steeped in that culture of it's more important what you appear to be than what you actually are.	Gavin Lew, Robert M. Schumacher Jr. Notable Quotations Full screen view p. vii "To put it simply, we believe experiences matter. We want to make the world a little easier for people." [This should probably be the primary goal of UX, but making the world "easier" can be troubling when ease of use translates into addiction issues because the products are too easy to use and impossible to stop using.] p. viii "Humans are impatient and fickle creatures; unless they are going to see the benefit very early on, they often will not invest the time or attention needed to appreciate the AI brilliance." [When working with genAI, I think many people find themselves disappointed with the systems initial outputs, not realizing that if they are going to be disappointed with something, it should probably be the input they created. Once people understand how to re-iterarte and improve prompts and exercise some patience and perseverance, I think they can discover that "AI brilliance" the authors speak of.] p. viii "If AI is to be successful, the design matters. The UX matters. How people would interact with AI matters. We believe UX can help; that's the main point of the book!" p. 9 "developers need to think about what the experience of using their AI product will be like—even in the early stages, when that product is just a big idea." p.11 "The next wave of AI needs to be designed with a UX framework in mind or risk the further limiting of acceptance. Good UX for AI applications will propel growth." p. 16 "For any product, whether it has AI or not, the bare minimum should be that it be usable and useful. It needs to be easy to operate, perform the tasks that users ask of it accurately, and not perform tasks it isn't asked to do. That is setting the bar really low, but there are many products in the marketplace that are so poorly designed where this minimum bar is not met." p. 17 "Our perception of a product is the sum total of the experiences that we have with that product. Does the product deliver the value we had hoped? Our willingness to "trust" the product hangs in that balance." [I think some users of AI may have higher expectations as to what AI should be able to do and how easy it should be to use. When it does not meet their expectations, they are not likely to trust it and go back to it. For younger users, this may be a result of taking certain technologies completely for granted. It is hard to be impressed with advanced computer technology when one hasn't known a life without it.] p. 40 (Licklider and Taylor, 1968) "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion." p. 46 (From Stuart Card et al. 1983, The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction) The user is not an operator. He does not operate the computer; he communicates with it to accomplish a task. Thus, we are creating a new arena of human action: communication with machines rather than operation of machines. p. 47 . . . in today's world, most companies are hiring computer scientists to do natural language processing and eschewing linguists or psycholinguists. Language is more than a math problem. p. 49 The continuous re-defining of AI: "Schank emphasized in 1991. . . that ‘intelligence entails learning,' implying that true AI needs to be able to learn in order to be intelligent." [Interesting discussion of how the name of AI changed to expert systems after AI fell out of favor. Later terms like neural networks did the same thing to try restoke interest and funding in AI research. The lesson for UX is that once people have a negative experience with a product/technology, they are hard to win back and changing the name can help.] The outgrowth of UX from HCI: p. 50 "Where HCI was originally focused heavily on the psychology of cognitive, motor, and perceptual functions, UX is defined at a higher level—the experiences that people have with things in their world, not just computers. HCI seemed too confining for a domain that now included toasters and door handles. Moreover, Norman, among others, championed the role of beauty and emotion and their impact on the user experience. Socio-technical factors also play a big part. So UX casts a broader net over people's interactions with stuff. That's not to say that HCI is/was irrelevant; it was just too limiting for the ways in which we experience our world." [I was concerned that the 2022 release of ChatGPT (after this book was published) would render much of the author's points too dated to be helpful. However, they mention developments in technology that are significant and similar enough to stand in for the impact of todays' LLM systems.] p.51 "We come into contact daily with things we have no mental model for, interfaces that present unique features, and experiences that are richer and deeper than they've ever been. These new products and services take advantage of new technology, but how do people learn to interact with things that are new to the world? These new interactions with new interfaces can be challenging for adoption." p.51 "For AI to succeed, to avoid another winter, it needs good UX." P. 64 "Look at older product designs to find features that deserve a second chance." [Because many products with poorly thought out UX design get shelved, it might be good to look back at those products to see what aspects can be salvaged and repurposed in a product with better UX design.] Good lesson on what differentiated Alexa from Siri. Siri was a secondary feature of another product; Amazon's Echo (Alexa) was designed specifically to be a personal assistant. Conversational Context seems to be a problem that today's LLMs have largely solved. They are now far better at remembering and drawing from earlier ideas in a conversation. They seem to offer appropriate responses to follow-up questions. p. 67 Modern LLMs can follow three of Grice's four maxims of communication, but they struggle mightily with the truth maxim. Interestingly, I prompted ChatGPT to give me a summary of a book that was released in 2023 (and therefore should not be in its training data) and it wrote a plausible summary that was somewhat accurate. Its lie was pretty good. I asked it in a separate conversation to give me a summary of the same book, but I added "do not make one up if you do not have access to information about the book," and it responded that it could not give me the summary but instead gave me an idea of what a hypothetical summary of that book could look like—what it should have done all along. p. 77 "Ultimately, engaging users with an AI service is the end goal, and recommendation engines achieve this. . . Recommendation engines exemplify the ways in which AI might fit into a user experience. While only a portion of Spotify's recommendation engine is in fact an AI system, that AI system blends seamlessly with other computing and human elements to build an engine that proves valuable to users." p. 78 "In 2010, Northwestern University researchers released StatsMonkey, a program that could write automated stories about baseball games.39 By 2019, major news outlets including The Washington Post and the Associated Press were using AI to write articles." [This is three years before the release of ChatGPT.] p. 81 "Humans are capable of constructing coherent narratives that make sense to other human beings, evoke emotions in their audiences, convey subtextual messages, and even contain aesthetic beauty. AI can't do any of those things. It's difficult to quantify aesthetics." [This is in the chapter of the book about film making and creativity. I think that AI has advanced drastically in this domain over the last two years, to the point that it can do the things the authors say it cannot.] p. 82 "In fiction, one author has created an AI program that automatically auto-completes a writer's sentences while writing science fiction stories, based on a corpus of science fiction stories.54 He envisions the program as a kind of co-author, which generates ideas that might spark the writer's human creativity. Tellingly, none of these three projects are widely used. AI in the arts is not quite ready for prime time yet." [It is now.] p. 85 ". . . what can we do to improve AI through the data itself? What are the elements where we can have an impact on AI?" p. 93 "Under Moore's Law, the number of transistors in a CPU doubles every 2 years, but in AI's case, computing power for AI took advantage of the massively parallel processing of a GPU (graphics processing unit). These are the new graphics chips associated with making video games smoother and the incredible action movies we see today. Massively parallel processing required to present video games made AI much, much faster. AI systems often took months to learn the dataset. When graphics chips were applied to AI applications, training intervals dropped to single days, not weeks." p. 95 "Capturing behavior is the prerogative of UX and requires research rigor and formal protocols. What we learned is that UX is uniquely positioned to collect and code these data elements through our tested research methodologies and expertise in understanding and codifying human behavior." [AI runs on data, and the authors discuss the collection and use of data extensively.] P.98 ". . . talking about ethics in data. This is an area where AI has not developed fully. Companies are building AI not for foundational science, but for commercial advantage. The same sorts of issues that arise with bias in the culture also exist in the data. So the fear is that AI applications may have subtle—or even not-so-subtle— biases because the underlying data contain biases. . . There are no formal ethical standards or guidelines for AI. It is very much the proverbial "Wild West" where technology is being created without guardrails." P. 109 "For many people, there's still a hesitance, a resistance, to adopt AI. Perhaps it is because of the influence of sci-fi movies that have planted images of Skynet and the Terminator in our minds, or simply fear of those things that we don't understand. AI has an image problem. Risks remain that people will get disillusioned with AI again." p. 110 "Technology has become a commodity. What can set a product apart is good design. The same logic applies to AI-enabled products." p. 112 "User-centered design (UCD) places user needs at the core. At each stage of the design process, design teams focus on the user and the user's needs. This involves a variety of research techniques to understand the user and is used to inform product design." p. 115 "AI can be seen through the lens of how we look at the user experience of any product or application. AI is no different. To be successful, it must have the essential elements of utility, usability, and aesthetics."	George Hutton Notable Quotations Full screen view Page 3 Simply by understanding the structure of language, you will be able to see who is really insulting you, and who is just exposing their inner fears and weaknesses. Page 9 Any time anybody gives you any trouble, physically or verbally, consider that they only do so because on some level, conscious or unconsciously, they feel they can get away with it. Nobody starts a fight with somebody if they don't exect to win. Page 11 Consider that any insult, overt or covert, is an attempt to establish or demonstrate social status hierarchy. Page 11 Social status is a function of non-verbal communication, (we frequently self-organize into hierarchies without needing extended discussions) Page 12 Some people tend to act abrasive only to see who can push back and who can't. Some are obvious in this, some are not. Building States Page 13 Your inner state will be a very important factor in how well you handle any slights or outright insults. Page 17 Recall the reason why insults and slights come in the first place. Their sole purpose is to establish that you are lower than them on the social status totem pole. ... We need to first worry about not getting knocked off balance before we come up with strategies of retaliation. Page 17 Since most of us can't come up with a comeback relatively quickly, after a few seconds the damage is done. Comebacks only work if they come quick. The main purpose of an insult is to knock us off balance long enough, so everybody can see that we can't come up with a response. This is why sneak attack insults are so deadly. They are essentially the verbal equivalent of a sucker punch. Page 18 Any time anybody says something that is meant to be an insult, you stop, focus only on the words, look at them innocently and ask, "What do you mean?" If asked from a genuine place of confusion, you won't betray a sense of being knocked off guard. Always remember that much of communication is subconscious to subconscious, and very little is about the words. When you ask that simple question, you are ignoring the subconscious intention, and forcing them to explain the surface structure language. Page 19 The purpose of an insult is to demonstrate dominance. To knock you off guard so you can't reply. If you only go limp, then they have won. But by simply asking for clarification, you are essentially forcing them to repeat their attack. You'll find that most of the time, they won't be able to since they weren't expecting this response, especially if there are other people watching. When we get insulted in front of others, it's generally hoped to be a one-punch-knock out on the part of the insulter. Page 20 Always remember that most communication is subconscious. This means if you fear any outcome, even if you don't know about it consciously, you will be projecting that fear. ... If you expect people to be nice, or to not be mean, that's when mean people suddenly show up. .. .Always remember that subconsciously radiated weakness will attract insults. Page 25 The meta model is simple. All you do is find any vague ideas in anything they have said and ask for more specific information. ... One quick way to defuse any insult or comment you don't want to leave hanging there is to simply put yourself in a brain-fade mindset, repeat what they said, and then ask: What do you mean, specifically? ... It is almost certain that any "argument" will use plenty of the classic "non-logical" structures. Straw man, ad hominem attacks, etc. This is because the point of the argument is not logical, but to assert social dominance. Page 29 We can safely assume that any insult or slight as the very ancient might-makes-right strategy behind it. Another common strategy that doesn't work is to try and use actual logical to explain why the other person is incorrect. But when we realize that the main point of the argument is to demonstrate social dominance in front of others, this strategy is certain to fail, especially if it is accompanied by weak subconscious enemy. Unless you have a social circle of Vulcans, fighting a might-makes-right insult with pure logic is not the best strategy. Page 29 We will focus so much on the words we won't use any emotions. In fact, we will focus so much on the words that we will actively ask them to help us understand their words. And it won't take long before we find out that Socrates was right all along. Nobody really can defend what they are saying very much. Page 30 Whenever they say anything like, "Y is X" all you have to do is say this: What is it about Y that makes you think it's X? ... What is it about X that makes you think Y? ... Instead of trying to understand and address their intentions, you just stay on the surface and address the things they've said. ... Training yourself to respond from a curiosity standpoint is fairly simple. ... With only a few simple and calm questions designed to get more clarification, their reasons will soon look silly and foolish. Page 41 If you can take any verbal insult, and flip around so confidently it turns into a playful joke on your attacker, you will earn a lot more status. Page 64 If it is true, that nothing is really objectively true, then the only reason for anybody to have any power is because they have the wherewithal to enforce their power by violence if necessary. Page 65 It's straightforward to see a stranger getting insulted, and then destroy the insulter. But it's also possible to be much more covert. Somebody might be getting a put down, but instead of destroying the attacker, you can take whatever they are saying about the receiver and flip it around to make it a positive statement about the receiver. Page 67 Become a Pig to Eat the Tiger This is a technique from Sun Tzu. It means acting like you are defenseless, tricking your enemy to get close to you, and then destroying them. ... Even better is if you slowly shift from your brain-fade-curiosity mode to the deadpan delivery mode. Page 69 We also have a ton of limiting beliefs. Beliefs that keep us from going after what we want. Unfortunately, these beliefs actually believe (yes, we've anthropomorphized our beliefs, so they can have beliefs of their own) they are protecting us. ... Any area of life where this has happened, or you feel any of these "not deserving" energy is evidence of limiting beliefs. Another piece of evidence is any kind of feeling or suspicion that you are not good enough in some way. Not smart enough, not young enough, not old enough, not adjective enough. Page 73 One belief that has been purposely created by the self-help industry is that our lives can change quickly. On a big scale, our lives can only change as quickly as our beliefs will change. Page 75 The paradox of fear. If we ignore our fears, we tend to increase the chances they'll happen. If we prepare for them, and make ourselves as ready as we can, we tend to decrease their likelihood. Page 77 We all have a common collection of emotional soft spots. ... Loneliness, hunger, lack of money, social rejection, rejection from authority figures. ... All our emotional soft spots, therefore, will be linked to any negative social instincts. Or instincts that make us feel, on a deep level, that we are failing miserably in the eyes of the tribe, both our peers and the leaders. Page 78 Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) ... There are three powerful components of FOMO. ... Social approval, authority disapproval, and a kind of pre-determined conspiracy. [everybody else was in on it! why did they exclude me?!] Page 81 Carnegie started a public speaking program in the early twentieth century. His famous book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," came from his experiences in teaching self-development. In that book are ten basic principles for creating positive relationships. It stands to reason that if those ten principles will create positive relationships, we can use their opposite to create negative relationships, or at least deliver emotionally painful ideas. Page 82 There is a whole class of language patterns called linguistic presuppositions. These are ideas that are hidden inside of a sentence. The main idea of the sentence is one thing, but the presupposition is hidden inside. ... Why are you being such a jerk today? ... But buried inside that question is the idea that the receiver is being a jerk. ... in addressing the surface structure, they accept the embedded part that they are being a jerk. This is likely the subconscious intention of the alleged question. ... When asking a question, the listener is somewhat involuntarily tricked into trying to answer it. ... Instead of tricking the listener into trying to come up with a specific answer, [rhetorical questions] trick the listener into simply pondering the meta answer. Page 87 Any time you describe a process that is already ongoing, it's hard to stop and question some of the elements. ... These [are] used to describe a sense of knowing or realizing. You connect the idea you want to be believed to a process of knowing or realizing, and it's much harder to disagree with. Page 88 [Commentary Adjectives and Adverbs ] are words like happily, unhappily, luckily, unfortunately. Whatever word or phrases that comes after these are generally much harder to argue with than if you said them directly. Page 88 Subordinate clause of time -- Before, after, since, etc. -- are linked to the idea of cause-effect. This makes them very hard to disagree with. Page 88 Linguistic presuppositions are designed to secretly implant ideas in their minds. ... But since they are vague, the listener will have to come up with their own specific meaning. ... Single Binds The more you X the more you Y.... Page 89 Put a simple tag question at the end of the sentence. This will trick the listener into searching for an answer, rather than questioning what was just said. Page 89 [Mind Reading] is when you purport to know what your target is thinking about. This isn't really mind reading, but very accurate guessing. But when you accurately guess about common things, it can seem very accurate. [best to be vague when doing this, let the target fill in the blanks] Page 97 For each of your sworn enemies, start to develop a list of their soft spots. Start off by listing all the authority figures they respect and admire. ... Next is to find people that they would like to think of themselves as an authority figure to. Not necessarily people who actually see them as an authority, although there will be some overlap. These are people that they like to think as their followers. ... Next is to develop a list of their social peers. ... Make an attempt to identify their very close friends, the kind they would help out or ask for help in dire situations. ... People whom they would not like to see rise above them on the social hierarchy. People they are secretly jealous of. People whom they pretend to like publicly, but you have an idea they secretly loathe. Page 108 The best defense is to simply stay calm. As mentioned, any negative statement or suggestion that is meant to put you off balance won't work if it is treated purely as an objective statement. Page 108 A common tactic is to toss out a statement, and then mentally retreat if it doesn't work. This is when people say, "I was just saying..." Whenever anybody says, "Just saying," that indicates the thing they said before that statement didn't get the result they were hoping for. Page 109 Since most people never plan what they are going to say, suddenly being on the spot and having to explain exactly why they chose the words they did is not anything anybody can respond to without feeling a lot of pressure. Page 109 Our brains are trained to shift into "question-answer" mode as soon as we hear a Wh- word. Why, when, which, what, etc. Page 119 The linguistic presuppositions others use will reveal their true inner beliefs, many of which are unknown even to them. Page 119 Skilled therapists, counselors, and even interrogators have trained themselves to listen carefully to the specific language patterns used to see what's really going on beneath the surface. Page 122 A positive way to help lead deeper discussion without asking outright or direct questions is to give them two choices. Two choices where one of them has a good chance of being right. Most people don't have a lot of answers beyond the words they put up on the surface. So, asking direct questions, even to friends, may create feelings of anxiety. But when you can do their thinking for them, and come up with options they can choose from, this will help further the discussion, and deepen the connection. Page 126 Unless somebody is dictating surgery or explaining a technical process over the phone, nearly all human communication is related to the ancient struggle of social status. When people talk behind people's back, or gaslight, or use any other covertly underhanded language, they are doing it from a point of weakness. People that generally feel a strong sense of social status don't need to belittle others.
Jacques Ellul Notable Quotations Full screen view Page v Ellul regards propaganda as a sociological phenomenon rather than as something made by certain people for certain purposes. Page v modern propaganda has long disdained the ridiculous lies of past and outmoded forms of propaganda. It operates instead with many different kinds of truths- half truth, limited truth, truth out of context. Even Goebbels always insisted that Wehrmacht communiqués be as accurate as possible. Page vi it aims to intensify existing trends, to sharpen and focus them, and, above all, to lead men to action (or, when it is directed at immovable opponents, to non- action through terror or discouragement, to prevent them from interfering). Page vi Ellul follows through by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons: (1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information; (2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information; (3) they consider themselves capable of "judging for themselves." They literally need propaganda. Preface Page x To study anything properly, one must put aside ethical judgments. Page x Perhaps an objective study will lead us back to them, but only later, and with full cognizance of the facts. Page xi "Propaganda is the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influencing the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations."* 4 Page xii To study propaganda we must turn not to the psychologist, but to the propagandist; we must examine not a test group, but a whole nation subjected to real and effective propaganda. Page xv Modern man worships "facts"- that is, he accepts "facts" as the ultimate reality. He is convinced that what is, is good. He believes that facts in themselves provide evidence and proof, and he willingly subordinates values to them; he obeys what he believes to be necessity, which he somehow connects with the idea of progress. Page xv In my opinion, necessity never establishes legitimacy; the world of necessity is a world of weakness, a world that denies man. To say that a phenomenon is necessary means, for me, that it denies man: its necessity is proof of its power, not proof of its excellence. Page xvii Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a technological world. Page xviii In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. Chapter I-The Characteristics of Propaganda Page 5 Stalinist propaganda was in great measure founded on Pavlov's theory of the conditioned reflex. Hitlerian propaganda was in great measure founded on Freud's theory of repression and libido American propaganda is founded in great measure on Dewey's theory of teaching. 1. External Characteristics Page 6 Any modern propaganda will, first of all, address itself at one and the same time to the individual and to the masses. It cannot separate the two elements. Page 7 the individual never is considered as an individual, but always in terms of what he has in common with others, such as his motivations, his feelings, or his myths. He is reduced to an average; and, except for a small percentage, action based on averages will be effectual. Page 7 the individual must never be considered as being alone; the listener to a radio broadcast, though actually alone, is nevertheless part of a large group, and he is aware of it. Page 7 all individuals are accomplices and influence each other without knowing Page 7 although apparently one deals here with a single individual, one deals in reality with a unit submerged into an invisible crowd composed of all those who have been interviewed, who are being interviewed, and who will be interviewed, because they hold similar ideas and live by the same myths, and especially because they are targets of the same organism. Page 7 To be effective, it must give the impression of being personal, for we must never forget that the mass is composed of individuals, and is in fact nothing but assembled individuals. Page 8 Thus all modern propaganda profits from the structure of the mass, but exploits the individual's need for self-affirmation; and the two actions must be conducted jointly, simultaneously. Of course this operation is greatly facilitated by the existence of the modern mass media of communication, which have precisely this remarkable effect of reaching the whole crowd all at once, and yet reaching each one in that crowd. Page 9 The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass: it is at this point that propaganda can be most effective. Page 11 It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. Page 11 Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. Page 12 The enemy (while still remaining the enemy, and because he is the enemy) is converted into a supporter of the regime. This is not simply a very useful and effective means of propaganda. Page 12 the propaganda of self-criticism Page 13 Educational methods play an immense role in political indoctrination Page 15 No direct propaganda can be effective without pre-propaganda, which, without direct or noticeable aggression, is limited to creating ambiguities, reducing prejudices, and spreading images, apparently without purpose. Page 15 The spectator will be much more disposed to believe in the grandeur of France when he has seen a dozen films on French petroleum, railroads, or jetliners. Page 15 We must also distinguish between covert propaganda and overt propaganda. The former tends to hide its aims, identity, significance, and source. The people are not aware that someone is trying to influence them, and do not feel that they are being pushed in a certain direction. This is often called "black propaganda." It also make use of mystery and silence. The other kind, "white propaganda," is open and aboveboard. There is a Ministry of Propaganda; one admits that propaganda is being made; its source is known; its aims and intentions are identified. The public knows that an attempt is being made to influence it. Page 15 Overt propaganda is necessary for attacking enemies; it alone is capable of reassuring one's own forces, it is a manifestation of strength and good organization, a token of victory. But covert propaganda is more effective if the aim is to push one's supporters in a certain direction without their being aware of Page 17 Propaganda tends to make the individual live in a separate world; he must not have outside points of reference. Page 17 He must not be allowed a moment of meditation or reflection in which to see himself vis-à-vis the propagandist, as happens when the propaganda is not continuous. Page 18 It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yesterday. Page 19 none of the great techniques of propaganda can be effective in two weeks. Page 20 continuous agitation produced artificially even when nothing in the events of the day justifies or arouses excitement. Therefore, continuing propaganda must slowly create a climate first, and then prevent the individual from noticing a particular propaganda operation in contrast to ordinary daily events. Page 20 No propaganda is possible unless psychological influence rests on reality,*11 and the recruiting of individuals into cadres or movements goes hand in hand with psychological manipulation. Page 21 It is too often believed that propaganda serves the purpose of sugar-coating bitter pills, of making people accept policies they would not accept spontaneously. But in most cases propaganda seeks to point out courses of action desirable in themselves, such as helpful reforms. Propaganda then becomes this mixture of the actual satisfaction given to the people by the reforms and subsequent exploitation of that satisfaction. Page 22 We can hardly expect great results from a simple dissemination of words unless we prepare for it by education (pre-propaganda) and sustain it by organization and action. Page 22 All propaganda that makes false promises turns against the propagandist. Page 23 Propaganda, then, is no longer mere words; it incites an enormous demonstration by the masses and thus becomes a fact-which gives strength to the words outside the frontiers. Page 25 The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. Page 26 the injection of propaganda into the mechanism of popular action actually suppresses liberal democracy, after which we are no longer dealing with votes or the people's sovereignty; propaganda therefore aims solely at participation. The participation may be active or passive: active, if propaganda has been able to mobilize the individual for action; passive, if the individual does not act directly but psychologically supports that action. Page 27 To be effective, propaganda must constantly short-circuit all thought and decision.*18 It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. Page 27 if the classic but outmoded view of propaganda consists in defining it as an adherence of man to an orthodoxy, true modern propaganda seeks, on the contrary, to obtain an orthopraxy-an action that in itself, and not because of the value judgments of the person who is acting, leads directly to a goal, which for the individual is not a conscious and intentional objective to be attained, but which is considered such by the propagandist. Page 30 But we must divide propaganda into two phases. There is pre-propaganda (or sub-propaganda) and there is active propaganda. Page 30 The essential objective of pre-propaganda is to prepare man for a particular action, to make him sensitive to some influence, to get him into condition for the time when he will effectively, and without delay or hesitation, participate in an action. Seen from this angle, pre-propaganda does not have a precise ideological objective; it has nothing to do with an opinion, an idea, a doctrine. It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes useful when the time comes. It must be continuous, slow, imperceptible. Man must be penetrated in order to shape such tendencies. He must be made to live in a certain psychological climate. Page 31 Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual by training him so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions. Page 31 A real psychic re- formation must be undertaken, so that after months of patient work a crowd will react automatically in the hoped- for direction to some image. But this preparatory work is not yet propaganda, for it is not yet immediately applicable to a concrete case. Page 31 the propagandist tries to create myths by which man will live, which respond to his sense of the sacred. By "myth" we mean an all-encompassing, activating image: a sort of vision of desirable objectives that have lost their material, practical character and have become strongly colored, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and which displace from the conscious all that is not related to it. Page 31 Without giving a metaphysical analysis of the myth, we will mention the great myths that have been created by various propagandas: the myth of race, of the proletariat, of the Führer, of Communist society, of productivity. Eventually the myth takes possession of a man's mind so completely that his life is consecrated to it. Page 32 Once he is ready, he can be mobilized effectively in very different directions-but of course the myth and the reflex must be continually rejuvenated and revived or they will atrophy. That is why pre-propaganda must be constant, whereas active propaganda can be sporadic when the goal is a particular action or involvement.*23 2. Internal Characteristics Page 34 Methods and arguments must be tailored to the type of man to be reached. Page 34 The technique of propaganda consists in precisely calculating the desired action in terms of the individual who is to be made to act. Page 34 never make a direct attack on an established, reasoned, durable opinion or an accepted cliché, a fixed pattern. Page 35 Attacking an established opinion or stereotype head on would make the propagandee aware of basic inconsistencies and would produce unexpected results.*27 The skillful propagandist will seek to obtain action without demanding consistency, without fighting prejudices and images, by taking his stance deliberately on inconsistencies. Page 35 Thus, existing opinion is not to be contradicted, but utilized. Page 36 propaganda cannot create something out of nothing. It must attach itself to a feeling, an idea; it must build on a foundation already present in the individual. Page 36 The conditioned reflex can be established only on an innate reflex or a prior conditioned reflex. Page 36 Action cannot be obtained unless it responds to a group of already established tendencies or attitudes stemming from the schools, the environment, the regime, the churches, and so on. Propaganda is confined to utilizing existing material; it does not create it. Page 36 All propaganda must respond to a need, whether it be a concrete need (bread, peace, security, work) or a psychological need.*32 Page 37 The group must need something, and the propaganda must respond to that need. Page 38 Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve. Page 38 must therefore utilize the most common feelings, the most widespread ideas, the crudest patterns, and in so doing place itself on a very low level with regard to what it wants man to do and to what end.*33 Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality. Page 39 By presuppositions we mean a collection of feelings, beliefs, and images by which one unconsciously judges events and things without questioning them, or even noticing them. Page 40 it must always go in the same direction as society; it can only reinforce society. Page 40 A propaganda that stresses virtue over happiness and presents man's future as one dominated by austerity and contemplation would have no audience at all. Page 40 No propaganda can succeed if it defends outdated production methods or obsolete social or administrative institutions. Page 41 propaganda will turn a normal feeling of patriotism into a raging nationalism. It not only reflects myths and presuppositions, it hardens them, sharpens them, invests them with the power of shock and action. Page 43 A man will become excited over a new automobile because it is immediate evidence of his deep belief in progress and technology. Page 44 propaganda can succeed only when man feels challenged. It can have no influence when the individual is stabilized, relaxing in his slippers in the midst of total security. Page 44 addition, he obviously has a very limited capacity for attention and awareness; one event pushes the preceding one into oblivion. Page 45 It is impossible to base a propaganda campaign on an event that no longer worries the public; it is forgotten and the public has grown accustomed to Page 45 propaganda for peace can bear fruit only when there is fear of war. Page 46 The terms, the words, the subjects that propaganda utilizes must have in themselves the power to break the barrier of the individual's indifference. They must penetrate like bullets; they must spontaneously evoke a set of images and have a certain grandeur of their own. Page 46 To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. Page 46 One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. Page 49 Propaganda is effective not when based on an individual prejudice, but when based on a collective center of interest, shared by the crowds. Page 50 propaganda: the more intense the life of a group to which an individual belongs, the more active and effective propaganda is. Page 51 (1) The propagandist must place his propaganda inside the limits of the foci of interest, Page 51 (2) The propagandist must understand that his propaganda has the greatest chance for success where the collective life of the individuals he seeks to influence is most intense. (3) The propagandist must remember that collective life is most intense where it revolves around a focus of interest. Page 52 We have not yet considered a problem, familiar but too often ignored: the relationship between propaganda and truth or, rather, between propaganda and accuracy of facts. We shall speak henceforth of accuracy or reality, and not of "truth," which is an inappropriate term here. Page 52 The most generally held concept of propaganda is that it is a series of tall stories, a tissue of lies, and that lies are necessary for effective propaganda. Page 52 self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware. Page 53 so. For a long time propagandists have recognized that lying must be avoided.*46 "In propaganda, truth pays off"-this formula has been increasingly accepted. Page 53 Goebbels's insistence that facts to be disseminated must be accurate.* Page 53 The truth that pays off is in the realm of facts. The necessary falsehoods, which also pay off, are in the realm of intentions and interpretations. This is a fundamental rule for propaganda analysis. Page 54 Similarly, there is no good reason to launch a propaganda campaign based on unbelievable or false facts. Page 55 propaganda can effectively rest on a claim that some fact is untrue which may actually be true but is difficult to prove. Page 55 most of the time the fact is presented in such a fashion that the listener or reader cannot really understand it or draw any conclusions from it. Page 56 the publication of a true fact in its raw state is not dangerous. Page 56 When it would be dangerous to let a fact be known, the modern propagandist prefers to hide it, to say nothing rather than to lie. Page 56 Silence is also one way to pervert known facts by modifying their context. Page 56 there is the use of accurate facts by propaganda. Based on them, the mechanism of suggestion can work best. Page 56 Americans call this technique innuendo. Facts are treated in such a fashion that they draw their listener into an irresistible sociological current. Page 56 The public is left to draw obvious conclusions from a cleverly presented truth,* Page 58 Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions. Page 58 the propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and, at the same time, hurl accusations at his enemy. Page 58 The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. Page 58 He who intends to establish a dictatorship always insists that his adversaries are bent on dictatorship. Page 58 the public cannot see this because the revelation is interwoven with facts. Page 58 The second element of falsehood is that the propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts: government, party chief, general, company director. Propaganda never can reveal its true projects and plans or divulge government secrets. Page 59 Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intentions.*55 It must be in effect a smokescreen. Page 59 Propaganda is necessarily false when it speaks of values, of truth, of good, of justice, of happiness-and when it interprets and colors facts and imputes meaning to them. It is true when it serves up the plain fact, but does so only for the sake of establishing a pretense and only as an example of the interpretation that it supports with that fact. Page 60 it is possible that when the United States makes its propaganda for freedom, it really thinks it is defending freedom; Page 61 When the eyeglasses are out of focus, everything one sees through them is distorted. Page 61 Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization. 3. Categories of Propaganda Page 61 Types of propaganda can be distinguished by the regimes that employ them. Page 62 First we must distinguish between political propaganda and sociological propaganda. Page 62 the group of manifestations by which any society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself, to unify its members' behavior according to a pattern, to spread its style of life abroad, and thus to impose itself on other groups. Page 62 We call this phenomenon "sociological" propaganda, to show, first of all, that the entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate, secondly, that its influence aims much more at an entire style of life than at opinions or even one particular course of behavior.*58 Page 63 The propaganda of Christianity in the middle ages is an example of this type of sociological propaganda; Page 63 Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon much more difficult to grasp than political propaganda, and is rarely discussed. Basically it is the penetration of an ideology by means of its sociological context. Page 64 Sociological propaganda produces a progressive adaptation to a certain order of things, a certain concept of human relations, which unconsciously molds individuals and makes them conform to society. Page 64 Sociological propaganda springs up spontaneously; it is not the result of deliberate propaganda action. Page 64 Sociological propaganda expresses itself in many different ways-in advertising, in the movies (commercial and non-political films), in technology in general, in education, in the Reader's Digest; and in social service, case work, and settlement houses. All these influences are in basic accord with each other and lead spontaneously in the same direction; Page 64 Unintentional (at least in the first stage), non-political, organized along spontaneous patterns and rhythms, the activities we have lumped together (from a concept that might be judged arbitrary or artificial) are not considered propaganda by either sociologists or the average public. Page 65 Such activities are propaganda to the extent that the combination of advertising, public relations, social welfare, and so on produces a certain general conception of society, a particular way of life. Page 66 sociological propaganda will appear to be the medium that has prepared the ground for direct propaganda; Page 66 becomes identified with sub-propaganda. Page 67 Sociological propaganda, involuntary at first, becomes more and more deliberate, and ends up by exercising influence. Page 67 leads people to believe that the civilization representing their way of life is best. Page 68 Mass production requires mass consumption, but there cannot be mass consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are. Page 68 Thus conformity of life and conformity of thought are indissolubly linked. Page 68 Americans seek to define the American way of life, to make it conscious, explicit, theoretical, worthy. Therefore the soulsearching and inflexibility, with excessive affirmations designed to mask the weakness of the ideological position. All this obviously constitutes an ideal framework for organized propaganda. Page 69 Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Agriculture. Other groups aim at social and political reforms: the American Legion, the League of Women Voters, and the like. These groups employ lobbying to influence the government and the classic forms of propaganda to influence the public; through films, meetings, and radio, they try to make the public aware of their ideological aims. Page 69 The agitator is especially active in the most unorganized groups of the United States. He uses the anxiety psychoses of the lower middle class, the neo-proletarian, the immigrant, the demobilized soldier-people who are not yet integrated into American society or who have not yet adopted ready-made habits and ideas. The agitator uses the American Way of Life to provoke anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-Negro, and xenophobic currents of opinion. He makes groups act in the illogical yet coherent, Manichaean universe of propaganda, of which we will have more to say. Page 69 these agitators do not work for a political party; it is not clear which interests they serve. They are neither Capitalists nor Communists, but they deeply influence American public opinion, and their influence may crystalize suddenly in unexpected forms. Page 70 The second great distinction within the general phenomenon of propaganda is the distinction between propaganda of agitation and propaganda of integration. Page 71 Propaganda of agitation, being the most visible and widespread, generally attracts all the attention. Page 71 It is led by a party seeking to destroy the government or the established order. Page 71 Spartacus relied on this kind of propaganda, as did the communes, the Crusades, the French movement of 1793, and so on. Page 71 Hitler could work his sweeping social and economic transformations only by constant agitation, by overexcitement, by straining energies to the utmost. Page 72 Mao was perfectly right in saying that the enemy is found within each person.* Page 72 Propaganda of agitation tries to stretch energies to the utmost, obtain substantial sacrifices, and induce the individual to bear heavy ordeals. It takes him out of his everyday life, his normal framework, and plunges him into enthusiasm and adventure; it opens to him hitherto unsuspected possibilities, and suggests extraordinary goals that nevertheless seem to him completely within reach. Page 72 Agitation propaganda can obtain only effects of relatively short duration. Page 73 The individual cannot be made to live in a state of perpetual enthusiasm and insecurity. Page 73 This subversive propaganda of agitation is obviously the flashiest: it attracts attention because of its explosive and revolutionary character. It is also the easiest to make; in order to succeed, it need only be addressed to the most simple and violent sentiments through the most elementary means. Hate is generally its most profitable resource. Page 73 Hatred is probably the most spontaneous and common sentiment; it consists of attributing one's misfortunes and sins to "another," who must be killed in order to assure the disappearance of those misfortunes and sins. Page 73 difference. Propaganda of agitation succeeds each time it designates someone as the source of all misery, provided that he is not too powerful. Page 73 hatred once provoked continues to reproduce itself. Page 74 the less educated and informed the people to whom propaganda of agitation is addressed, the easier it is to make such propaganda. Page 74 In contrast to this propaganda of agitation is the propaganda of integration-propaganda of conformity. Page 75 one needs total adherence to a society's truths and behavioral patterns. Page 75 He must share the stereotypes, beliefs, and reactions of the group; he must be an active participant in its economic, ethical, esthetic, and political doings. Page 75 he is often reminded, he can fulfill himself only through this collectivity, as a member of the group.* Page 75 such propaganda is confined to rationalizing an existing situation, to transforming unconscious actions of members of a society into consciously desired activity that is visible, laudable, and justified- Page 75 Integration propaganda aims at stabilizing the social body, at unifying and reinforcing it. Page 76 integration propaganda is much more subtle and complex than agitation propaganda. It seeks not a temporary excitement but a total molding of the person in depth. Page 76 the more comfortable, cultivated, and informed the milieu to which it is addressed, the better it works. Intellectuals are more sensitive than peasants to integration propaganda. Page 76 When a revolutionary movement is launched, it operates, as we have said, with agitation propaganda; but once the revolutionary party has taken power, it must begin immediately to operate with integration propaganda Page 76 But the transition from one type of propaganda to the other is extremely delicate and difficult. Page 77 integration propaganda acts slowly, gradually, and imperceptibly. After the masses have been subjected to agitation Page 77 propaganda, to neutralize their aroused impulses with integration propaganda without being swept away by the masses is a delicate problem. Page 79 Classic propaganda, as one usually thinks of it, is a vertical propaganda-in the sense that it is made by a leader, a technician, a political or religious head who acts from the superior position of his authority and seeks to influence the crowd below. Such propaganda comes from above. It is conceived in the secret recesses of political enclaves; it uses all technical methods of centralized mass communication; it envelops a mass of individuals; but those who practice it are on the outside. Page 81 This propaganda can be called horizontal because it is made inside the group (not from the top), where, in principle, all individuals are equal and there is no leader. Page 81 such propaganda therefore always seeks "conscious adherence." Page 81 The leader, the propagandist, is there only as a sort of animator or discussion leader; sometimes his presence and his identity are not even known-for example, the "ghost writer" in certain American groups, Page 81 The individual's adherence to his group is "conscious" because he is aware of it and recognizes it, but it is ultimately involuntary because he is trapped in a dialectic and in a group that leads him unfailingly to this adherence. His adherence is also "intellectual" because he can express his conviction clearly and logically, but it is not genuine because the information, the data, the reasoning that have led him to adhere to the group were themselves deliberately falsified in order to lead him there. Page 83 horizontal propaganda is identity between propaganda and education. Page 84 information is addressed to reason and experience-it furnishes facts; propaganda is addressed to feelings and passions-it is irrational. There is, of course, some truth in this, but the reality is not so simple. Page 85 It is unusual nowadays to find a frenzied propaganda composed solely of claims without relation to reality. Page 85 Modern man needs a relation to facts, a self-justification to convince himself that by acting in a certain way he is obeying reason and proved experience. > Page 85 Propaganda's content increasingly resembles information. It has even clearly been proved that a violent, excessive, shock-provoking propaganda text leads ultimately to less conviction and participation than does a more "informative" and reasonable text on the same subject. > Page 86 What makes him act is the emotional pressure, the vision of a future, the myth. The problem is to create an irrational response on the basis of rational and factual elements. > Page 87 A surfeit of data, far from permitting people to make judgments and form opinions, prevents them from doing so and actually paralyzes them. They are caught in a web of facts and must remain at the level of the facts they have been given. They cannot even form a choice or a judgment in other areas or on other subjects. Chapter II -- The Conditions for the Existence of Propaganda > Page 89 Present-day propaganda meetings no longer bear any relation to past assemblies, to the meetings of the Athenians in the Agora or of the Romans in the Forum. Then there is the scientific research in all the other fields -- sociology and psychology, for example. > Page 89 The findings of social psychology, depth psychology, behavorism, group sociology, sociology of public opinion are the very foundations of the propagandist's work. > Page 89 reach the enemy, one must use his weapons; this undeniable argument is the key to the systematic development of propaganda. 1. The Sociological Conditions Page 90 For propaganda to succeed, a society must first have two complementary qualities: it must be both an individualist and a mass society. Page 91 An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups. Page 91 Nor is the organic group sensitive to psychological contagion, which is so important to the success of mass propaganda. Page 92 Once these groups lost their importance, the individual was left substantially isolated. He was plunged into a new environment, generally urban, and thereby "uprooted." He no longer had a traditional place in which to live; he was no longer geographically attached to a fixed place, or historically to his ancestry. Page 92 The common error was to believe that if the individual were liberated from the smaller organic groups he would be set free. But in actual fact he was exposed to the influence of mass currents, to the influence of the state, and direct integration into mass society. Page 93 the men of a mass society have the same preoccupations, the same interest in technical matters, the same mythical beliefs, the same prejudices.* Page 96 The leader must be a sublimation of the "ordinary man." He must not seem to be of a different quality. The ordinary man must not feel that the leader transcends him. Page 102 without the mass media there can be no modern propaganda. Page 103 Only through concentration in a few hands of a large number of media can one attain a true orchestration, a continuity, and an application of scientific methods of influencing individuals. Page 104 The fact is even more striking with regard to the newspapers, for the reader buys a paper he likes, a paper in which he finds his own ideas and opinions well reflected. This is the only paper he wants, so that one can say he really wants to be propagandized. He wants to submit to this influence and actually exercises his choice in the direction of the propaganda he wishes to receive. Page 104 the propagandist need no longer beat the drum and lead the parade in order to establish a following. This happens all by itself through the effects of the communication media -- they have their own power of attraction and act on individuals in such a fashion as to transform them into a collective, a public, a mass. Page 104 The buying of a TV set, though an individual act, inserts the individual into the psychological and behavioral structure of the mass. 2. Objective Conditions of Total Propaganda Page 106 In Western countries propaganda addresses itself to the large average mass, which alone represents a real force. Page 106 For propaganda to be effective, the propagandee must have a certain store of ideas and a number of conditioned reflexes. These are acquired only with a little affluence, some education, and peace of mind springing from relative security. Page 106 all propagandists come from the upper middle class, Page 107 That is why adjustment has become one of the key words of all psychological influence. Whether it is a question of adaptation to working conditions, to consumption, or to milieu, a clear and conscious intent to integrate people into the "normal" pattern prevails everywhere. This is the summit of propaganda action. Page 108 The creation of normalcy in our society can take one of two shapes. It can be the result of scientific, psycho-sociological analysis based on statistics -- that is, the American type of normalcy. It can also be ideological and doctrinaire -- that is, the Communist type. But the results are identical: such normalcy necessarily gives rise to propaganda that can reduce the individual to the pattern most useful to society. Page 108 People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important tiling is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Page 108 The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. Page 109 the most obvious result of primary education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to make the individual susceptible to super-propaganda.* Page 111 Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propagandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Page 112 As noted earlier, poor and uncultured populations are appropriate objects of propaganda of agitation and subversion. The more miserable and ignorant a person is, the more easily will he be plunged into a rebel movement. But to go beyond this, to do a more profound propaganda job on him, one must educate him. This corresponds to the need for "political education." Conversely, an individual of the middle class, of good general culture, will be less susceptible to agitation propaganda but ideal prey of integration propaganda. Page 112 to distinguish exactly between propaganda and information is impossible. Page 112 for propaganda to succeed, it must have reference to political or economic reality. Page 112 It grafts itself onto an already existing psychological reality. Page 114 propaganda cannot easily create a political or economic problem out of nothing. There must be some reason in reality. Page 114 The problem need not actually exist, but there must be a reason why it might exist. Chapter III -- The Necessity for Propaganda Page 118 A common view of propaganda is that it is the work of a few evil men, seducers of the people, cheats and authoritarian rulers who want to dominate a population; that it is the handmaiden of more or less illegitimate powers. This view always thinks of propaganda as being made voluntarily; it assumes that a man decides "to make propaganda," that a government establishes a Propaganda Ministry, and that things just develop from there on. According to this view, the public is just an object, a passive crowd that one can manipulate, influence, and use. And this notion is held not only by those who think one can manipulate the crowds but also by those who think propaganda is not very effective and can be resisted easily. Page 119 This view seems to me completely wrong. A simple fact should lead us at least to question it: nowadays propaganda pervades all aspects of public life. We know that the psychological factor, which includes encirclement, integration into a group, and participation in action, in addition to personal conviction, is decisive. Page 121 For propaganda to succeed, it must correspond to a need for propaganda on the individual's part. Page 121 Propagandists would not exist without potential propagandees to begin with. Page 121 To understand that propaganda is not just a deliberate and more or less arbitrary creation by some people in power is therefore essential. It is a strictly sociological phenomenon, in the sense that it has its roots and reasons in the need of the group that will sustain it. We are thus face to face with a dual need: the need on the part of regimes to make propaganda, and the need of the propagandee. These two conditions correspond to and complement each other in the development of propaganda. Page 123 Theoretically, democracy is political expression of mass opinion. Most people consider it simple to translate this opinion into action, and consider it legitimate that the government should bend to the popular will. Unfortunately, in reality all this is much less clear and not so simple. More and more we know, for example, that public Page 124 opinion does not express itself at the polls and is a long way from expressing itself clearly in political trends. Page 124 Democracy is based on the concept that man is rational and capable of seeing clearly what is in his own interest, but the study of public opinion suggests this is a highly doubtful proposition. Page 126 The democratic State, precisely because it believes in the expression of public opinion and does not gag it, must channel and shape that opinion if it wants to be realistic and not follow an ideological dream. Page 131 When a decision seems to meet with resistance or is not fully accepted, propaganda is addressed to the masses to set them in motion; the simple motion of the mass is enough to invest the decisions with validity: it is only an extension of the plebiscite. Page 137 Any politically oriented education which creates certain "special values" is propaganda. 2. The Individual's Necessity Page 140 The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: Page 140 this gives them the feeling of participation. For this they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a "key" that will permit them to take a position, and even ready-made opinions. Page 140 Never have men worked so much as in our society. Contrary to what is often said, man works much more nowadays than, for example, in the eighteenth century. Only the working hours have decreased. But the omnipresence of the duties of his work, the obligations and constraints, the actual working conditions, the intensity of work that never ends, make it weigh much more heavily on men today than on men in the past. Every modern man works more than the slave of long ago; standards have been adjusted downward. But whereas the slave worked only because he was forced to, modern man, who believes in his freedom and dignity, needs reasons and justifications to make himself work. Even the children in a modern nation do an amount of work at school which no child was ever asked to do before the beginning of the nineteenth century; there, too, justifications are needed. Page 142 But modern man is not only forced to make sacrifices in his work; he is also saddled by his government with other sacrifices, such as ever-increasing taxes. Page 143 Aside from all these sacrifices, man is not automatically adjusted to the living conditions imposed on him by modern society. Psychologists and sociologists are aware of the great problem of adjusting the normal man to a technological environment -- to the increasing pace, the working hours, the noise, the crowded cities, the tempo of work, the housing shortage, and so on. Then there is the difficulty of accepting the never-changing daily routine, the lack of personal accomplishment, the absence of an apparent meaning in life, the family insecurity provoked by these living conditions, the anonymity of the individual in the big cities and at work. The individual is not equipped to face these disturbing, paralyzing, traumatic influences. Here again he needs a psychological aid; to endure such a life, he needs to be given motivations that will restore his equilibrium. One cannot leave modern man alone in a situation such as this. What can one do? Page 145 The news is only about trouble, danger, and problems. This gives man the notion that he lives in a terrible and frightening era, that he lives amid catastrophes in a world where everything threatens his safety. Page 146 absurd and incoherent world (for this he would have to be heroic, and even Camus, who considered this the only honest posture, was not really able to stick to it); Page 146 nor can he accept the idea that the problems, which sprout all around him, cannot be solved, or that he himself has no value as an individual and is subject to the turn of events. Page 146 the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be; Page 147 News loses its frightening character when it offers information for which the listener already has a ready explanation in his mind, or for which he can easily find one. Page 147 let us accept as a premise that he is more susceptible to suggestion, more credulous, more easily excited. Above all he is a victim of emptiness -- he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing -- something to fill his inner void. To fill this void he goes to the movies -- only a very temporary remedy. Page 148 loneliness inside the crowd is perhaps the most terrible ordeal of modern man; that loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances. Page 148 Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness. Page 149 But man cannot stand being unimportant; he cannot accept the status of a cipher. He needs to assert himself, to see himself as a hero. He needs to feel he is somebody and to be considered as such. He needs to express his authority, the drive for power and domination that is in every man. Page 152 man always has a certain need to hate, just as he hides in his heart the urge to kill. Propaganda offers him an object of hatred, for all propaganda is aimed at an enemy.* Page 152 Moreover, propaganda points out enemies that must be slain, transforming crime into a praiseworthy act. Page 152 Propaganda can also provide release through devious channels. Authoritarian regimes know that people held very firmly in hand need some decompression, some safety valves. The government offers these itself. This role is played by satirical journals attacking the authorities, yet tolerated by the dictator (for example, Krokodil),*23 or by a wild holiday set aside for ridiculing the regime, yet paid for by the dictator (for example, the Friday of Sorrows in Guatemala). Clearly, such instruments are controlled by the regime. They serve the function of giving the people the impression that they are free, and of singling out those about to be purged by the government as guilty of all that the people dislike. Page 154 With regard to real and conscious threats, a frequent reaction is to expand them with fables. Americans create fables about the Communist peril, just as the Communists create fables about the Fascist peril -- and at that moment anxiety sets in. It is tied to rumors, to the fact that the real situation is inassessable, to the diffuse climate of fear, and to the ricocheting of fear from one person to the next. Page 154 demonstrate factually in a climate of anxiety that the feared danger is much smaller than it is believed to be, only increases anxiety; the information is used to prove that there is reason for fear. Page 154 Man also feels himself the prey of the hostile impulses of others, another source of anxiety. Besides, he is plunged into conflicts inherent in our society which place him in conflict with himself, or rather place his experiences in conflict with the social imperatives. Page 155 one of man's greatest inner needs is to feel that he is right. This need takes several forms. First, man needs to be right in his own eyes. He must be able to assert that he is right, that he does what he should, that he is worthy of his own respect. Page 155 Then, man needs to be right in the eyes of those around him, his family, his milieu, his co-workers, his friends, his country. Page 155 Finally, he feels the need to belong to a group, which he considers right and which he can proclaim as just, noble, and good. Page 155 This corresponds to man's refusal to see reality -- his own reality first of all -- as it is, for that would be intolerable; it also corresponds to his refusal to acknowledge that he may be wrong. Before himself and others, man is constantly pleading his own case and working to find good reasons for what he does or has done. Of course, the whole process is unconscious.* Page 157 It is difficult, if not impossible, to accept reality as it is and acknowledge the true reasons for our behavior, or to see clearly the motivations of a group to which we belong. If we practice a profession, we cannot limit ourselves to its financial rewards; we must also invest it with idealistic or moral justification. Page 158 Propaganda attaches itself to man and forces him to play its game because of his overpowering need to be right and just. Page 158 In every situation propaganda hands him the proof that he, personally, is in the right, that the action demanded of him is just, even if he has the dark, strong feeling that it is not. Propaganda appeases his tensions and resolves his conflicts. It offers facile, ready-made justifications, which are transmitted by society and easily believed. At the same time, propaganda has the freshness and novelty which correspond to new situations and give man the impression of having invented new ideals. Page 159 Man, eager for self- justification, throws himself in the direction of a propaganda that justifies him and thus eliminates one of the sources of his anxiety. Page 159 propaganda also eliminates anxieties stemming from irrational and disproportionate fears, for it gives man assurances equivalent to those formerly given him by religion. It offers him a simple and clear explanation of the world in which he lives -- to be sure, a false explanation far removed from reality, but one that is obvious and satisfying. Page 160 The development of propaganda is no accident. The politician who uses it is not a monster; he fills a social demand. The propagandee is a close accomplice of the propagandist. Only with the propagandee's unconscious complicity can propaganda fulfill its function; and because propaganda satisfies him -- even if he protests against propaganda in abstracto, or considers himself immune to it -- he follows its route. Page 160 Human Relations in social relationships, advertising or Human Engineering in the economy, propaganda in the strictest sense in the field of politics -- the need for psychological influence to spur allegiance and action is everywhere the decisive factor, which progress demands and which the individual seeks in order to be delivered from his own self. Chapter IV -- Psychological Effects of Propaganda Page 161 A person subjected to propaganda does not remain intact or undamaged: not only will his opinions and attitudes be modified, but also his impulses and his mental and emotional structures. Propaganda's effect is more than external; it produces profound changes. Page 162 If one looks at a propaganda campaign conducted by radio, it is almost impossible to divide its effects into those produced by the campaign and those produced by radio broadcasts in general. Page 162 To study the psychological effects of propaganda, one would therefore have to study the effects of each of the communications media separately, and then the effects of their combination with the specific propaganda techniques. Page 162 Once propaganda begins to utilize and direct an individual's hatreds, he no longer has any chance to retreat, to reduce his animosities, or to seek reconciliations with his opponents. Moreover, he now has a supply of ready-made judgments where he had only some vague notions before the propaganda set in; and those judgments permit him to face any situation. He will never again have reason to change judgments that he will thereafter consider the one and only truth. Page 163 propaganda standardizes current ideas,*2 hardens prevailing stereotypes, and furnishes thought patterns in all areas. Thus it codifies social, political, and moral standards.*3 Of course, man needs to establish such standards and categories.*4 The difference is that propaganda gives an overwhelming force to the process: man can no longer modify his judgments and thought patterns. This force springs, on the one hand, from the character Page 164 of the media employed, which give the appearance of objectivity to subjective impulses, and, on the other, from everybody's adherence to the same standards and prejudices.*5 Page 165 Through such a process of intense rationalization, propaganda builds monolithic individuals. It eliminates inner conflicts, tensions, self-criticism, self-doubt. And in this fashion it also builds a one-dimensional being without depth or range of possibilities. Such an individual will have rationalizations not only for past actions, but for the future as well. Page 166 One can almost postulate that those who call every idea they do not share "propaganda" are themselves almost completely products of propaganda. Their refusal to examine and question ideas other than their own is characteristic of their condition. Page 166 One might go further and say that propaganda tends to give a person a religious personality:*8 his psychological life is organized around an irrational, external, and collective tenet that provides a scale of values, rules of behavior, and a principle of social integration. Page 167 In a society in the process of secularization, propaganda responds to the religious need, but lends much more vigor and intransigence to the resulting religious personality, in the pejorative sense of that term (as liberals employed it in the nineteenth century): a limited and rigid personality that mechanically applies divine commandments, is incapable of engaging in human dialogue, and will never question values that it has placed above the individual. All this is produced by propaganda, which pretends to have lost none of its humanity, to act for the good of mankind, and to represent the highest type of human being. In this respect, strict orthodoxies always have been the same. Page 169 To be alienated means to be someone other (alienus) than oneself; it also can mean to belong to someone else. In a more profound sense, it means to be deprived of one's self, to be subjected to, or even identified with, someone else. That is definitely the effect of propaganda.*10 Propaganda strips the individual, robs him of part of himself, and makes him live an alien and artificial life, to such an extent that he becomes another person and obeys impulses foreign to him. He obeys someone else.*11 Page 170 The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another; this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis-à-vis some event without a ready-made opinion, and obliged to judge it for himself.* Page 171 When he expresses public opinion in his words and gestures, he no longer expresses himself, but his society, his group. Page 173 The propagandee finds himself in a psychological situation composed of the following elements: he lives vicariously, through an intermediary. He feels, thinks, and acts through the hero. He is under the guardianship and protection of his living god; he accepts being a child; he ceases to defend his own interests, for he knows his hero loves him and everything his hero decides is for the propagandee's own good; he thus compensates for the rigor of the sacrifices imposed on him. For this reason every regime that demands a certain amount of heroism must develop this propaganda of projection onto the hero (leader). Page 178 propaganda, to reduce the tension it has created in the first place, offers him one, two, even three possible courses of action, and the propagandee considers himself a well-organized, fully aware individual when he chooses one of them. Page 181 propaganda Page 181 psychological manipulation designed to produce action, Page 189 Propaganda seeks to deprive the enemy of confidence in the justice of his own cause, his country, his army, and his group, for the man who feels guilty loses his effectiveness and his desire to fight. To convince a man that those on his side, if not he himself, commit immoral and unjust acts is to bring on the disintegration of the group to which he belongs. Page 192 The stereotype, which is stable, helps man to avoid thinking, to take a personal position, to form his own opinion. Man reacts constantly, as if by reflex, in the presence of the stimulus evoking the stereotype. 1. Propaganda and Ideology Page 193 society rests on certain beliefs and no social group can exist without such beliefs. Page 194 Moreover, to the extent that members of a group believe their ideology to represent the truth, they almost always assume an aggressive posture and try to impose that ideology elsewhere. In such cases ideology becomes bent on conquest. Page 197 The point is not to ask oneself whether some economic or intellectual doctrine is valid, but only whether it can furnish effective catchwords capable of mobilizing the masses here and now. 2. Effects on the Structure of Public Opinion Page 203 the questions that propaganda takes upon itself cease to be controversial: "truths" are pronounced that do not bear discussion; they are believed or not believed, and that is all. Page 203 In a propagandized milieu, communications no longer take place in interpersonal patterns, but in patterns set by the propaganda organization. Page 204 propaganda also affects the individual, reducing his field of thought and angle of vision by the creation of stereotypes. Page 205 propaganda that plays on opinion influences that opinion without offering proof; latent opinion subjected to such propaganda (if it is well made) will absorb everything, believe everything, without discrimination. Page 205 Details and nuances disappear The more active the propaganda, the more monolithic and less individualized public opinion will be. ... by the process of simplification, propaganda makes it take shape more rapidly. Page 205 Without simplification no public opinion can exist anyway; the more complex problems, judgments, and criteria are, the more diffuse opinion will be. Nuances and gradations prevent public opinion from forming; the more complicated it is, the longer it takes to assume solid shape. But in the case of such diffusion, propaganda intervenes with a force of simplification. Page 206 reducing them to primitive patterns, propaganda was able to present the complex process of political and economic life in the simplest terms…. We have taken matters previously available only to experts and a small number of specialists, and have carried them into the street and hammered them into the brain of the little man."*8 Page 206 propaganda reinforces and even creates stereotypes and prejudices. Page 207 propaganda aims less at modifying personal opinions than at leading people into action. This is clearly its most striking result: when propaganda intervenes in public opinion, it transforms the public into an acting crowd or, more precisely, into a participating crowd. Page 208 The great feat of propaganda is to cause the progression from thought to action artificially. Page 209 The individual who burns with desire for action but does not know what to do is a common type in our society. He wants to act for the sake of justice, peace, progress, but does not know how. If propaganda can show him this "how," it has won the game; action will surely follow. Page 209 Man subjected to propaganda would never act if he were alone. Page 211 propaganda replaces the leader of the group. Page 211 a group without a leader, but subjected to propaganda, the sociological and psychological effects are the same as if there were a leader. Propaganda is a substitute for him. 3. Propaganda and Grouping Page 212 All propaganda has to set off its group from all the other groups. Here we find again the fallacious character of the intellectual communication media (press, radio), which, far from uniting people and bringing them closer together, divide them all the more. Page 212 When I talked about public opinion, I stressed that everybody is susceptible to the propaganda of his group. He listens to it and convinces himself of it. He is satisfied with it. But those who belong to another milieu ignore it. Page 213 Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. Page 213 such propaganda contains elements of criticism and refutation of other groups, which will never be read or heard by a member of another group. Page 213 This double foray on the part of propaganda, proving the excellence of one's own group and the evilness of the others, produces an increasingly stringent partitioning of our society. Page 213 propaganda suppresses conversation; the man opposite is no longer an interlocutor but an enemy. Page 214 Thus, we see before our eyes how a world of closed minds establishes itself, a world in which everybody talks to himself, everybody constantly reviews his own certainty about himself and the wrongs done him by the Others -- a world in which nobody listens to anybody else, everybody talks, and nobody listens. And the more one talks, the more one isolates oneself, because the more one accuses others and justifies oneself. Page 217 the agent looks upon the mass of potential voters or sympathizers as objects. He manipulates them, works on them, tests them, changes them psychologically or politically. They no longer have any personal importance, especially when one realizes that good propaganda must be objective and anonymous, and the masses are considered as merely an instrument for attaining some objective. They are treated as such; this is one of the elements of the profound contempt that those making real propaganda have for all those on the outside, even -- and often particularly -- for their sympathizers. Page 225 As in all propaganda, the point is to make man endure, with the help of psychological narcotics, what he could not endure naturally, or to give him, artificially, reasons to continue his work and to do it well. This is a task of propaganda, and there is no doubt that if it is done well, it will make possible the integration of the working class and make it accept its condition happily. Page 229 For it seems that people manipulated by propaganda become increasingly impervious to spiritual realities, less and less suited for the autonomy of a Christian life. Page 229 the religious element, through the means of the myth, is being absorbed little by little by propaganda and becoming one of its categories. 4. Propaganda and Democracy Page 234 To think that democracy must triumph because it is the truth leads man to be democratic and to believe that when the democratic regime is opposed to regimes of oppression, its superiority will be clear at first sight to the infallible judgment of man and history. Page 237 Some will say: "Freedom of expression is democracy; to prevent propaganda is to violate democracy." Certainly, but it must be remembered that the freedom of expression of one or two powerful companies that do not express the thoughts of the individual or small groups, but of capitalist interests or an entire public, does not exactly correspond to what was called freedom of expression a century ago. One must remember, further, that the freedom of expression of one who makes a speech to a limited audience is not the same as that of the speaker who has all the radio sets in the country at his disposal, all the more as the science of propaganda gives to these instruments a shock effect that the non-initiated cannot equal. Page 240 Finally, the democratic propagandist or democratic State will often have a bad conscience about using propaganda. The old democratic conscience still gets in the way and burdens him; he has the vague feeling that he is engaged in something illegitimate. Thus, for the propagandist in a democracy to throw himself fully into his task it is necessary that he believe -- i.e., that he formulate his own convictions when he makes propaganda. Page 250 propaganda has also become a necessity for the internal life of a democracy. Nowadays the State is forced to define an official truth. Page 250 the growth of information inevitably leads to the need for propaganda. This is truer in a democratic system than in any other. Page 251 This system must become a complete answer to all questions occurring in the citizens' conscience. It must, therefore, be general and all-valid: it cannot be a philosophy or a metaphysical system -- for such systems appeal to the intelligence of a minority. Page 251 if the citizens were to work only three or four hours a day and devote four hours daily to personal reflection and cultural pursuits, if all citizens had a similar cultural level, if the society were in a state of equilibrium and not under the shadow of tomorrow's menace, and if the moral education of the citizens enabled them to master their passions and their egotism. But as these four conditions are not fulfilled, and as the volume of information grows very rapidly, we are forced to seek explanations hic et nunc, and publicly parade them in accordance with popular demand. Page 251 when one speaks to us of "massive democracy" and "democratic participation," these are only veiled terms that mean "religion." Page 251 Participation and unanimity have always been characteristics of religious societies, and only of religious societies. Thus we return by another route to the problem of intolerance and the suppression of minorities.*26 Page 252 The civic virtues created by the mass media will guarantee the maintenance of democracy. But what remains of liberty? Page 253 What will be the effect on democracy of the use of TV for propaganda? One can see the first effects: TV brings us close to direct democracy. Congressmen and cabinet members become known; their faces and utterances come to be recognized; they are brought closer to the voter. TV permits political contact to extend beyond election campaigns and informs the voters directly on a daily basis. More than that, TV could become a means of control over public servants: In his capacity as TV viewer, the voter could verify what use his representatives make of the mandate with which he has entrusted them. Certain experiments conducted in the United States showed that when sessions of Congress were televised, they were much more dignified, serious, and efficient; knowing that they were being observed, the congressmen took greater pains to fulfill their function. But one must not hope for too much in this respect:* 27 there is little chance that governing bodies will accept this control. In reality, statesmen fully understand how to use it for their propaganda, and that is all. In fact, TV probably helped Eisenhower to win over Stevenson, the Conservatives to win over Labour.* 28 The problem is first one of money, second of technical skill. But the use of TV as a democratic propaganda instrument entails the risk of a profound modification of democracy's "style." Page 253 The instruments of propaganda, particularly press and radio, are made for words. Conversely, democratic propaganda made by motion pictures is weak. Page 254 A government official giving a speech is not a spectacle. Democracies have nothing to show that can compare with what is available to a dictatorship. If they do not want to be left behind in this domain, which would be extremely dangerous, they must find propaganda spectacles to televise. Page 254 We have also seen that the existence of two contradictory propagandas is no solution at all, as it in no way leads to a "democratic" situation: the individual is not independent in the presence of two combatants between whom he must choose. He is not a spectator comparing two posters, or a supreme arbiter when he decides in favor of the more honest and convincing one. To look at things this way is childish idealism. The individual is seized, manipulated, attacked from every side; the combatants of two propaganda systems do not fight each other, but try to capture him. As a result, the individual suffers the most profound psychological influences and distortions. Man modified in this fashion demands simple solutions, catchwords, certainties, continuity, commitment, a clear and simple division of the world into Good and Evil, efficiency, and unity of thought. He cannot bear ambiguity. Page 255 He cannot bear that the opponent should in any way whatever represent what is right or good. An additional effect of contradictory propagandas is that the individual will escape either into passivity or into total and unthinking support of one of the two sides. Page 255 Here is the hub of the problem. Propaganda ruins not only democratic ideas but also democratic behavior -- the foundation of democracy, the very quality without which it cannot exist. Page 255 The question is not to reject propaganda in the name of freedom of public opinion -- which, as we well know, is never virginal -- or in the name of freedom of individual opinion, which is formed of everything and nothing -- but to reject it in the name of a very profound reality: the possibility of choice and differentiation, which is the fundamental characteristic of the individual in the democratic society. Page 255 Conversely, what gives propaganda its destructive character is not the singleness of some propagated doctrine; it is the instrument of propaganda itself. Although it acts differently, according to whether it promulgates a closed system or a diversity of opinions, it has profound and destructive effects. Page 256 With propaganda one can lead citizens to the voting booth, where they seemingly elect their representatives. But if democracy corresponds to a certain type of human being, to a certain individual behavior, then propaganda destroys the point of departure of the life of a democracy, destroys its very foundations. It creates a man who is suited to a totalitarian society, who is not at ease except when integrated in the mass, who rejects critical judgments, choices, and differentiations because he clings to clear certainties. He is a man assimilated into uniform groups and wants it that way. Page 256 With the help of propaganda one can do almost anything, but certainly not create the behavior of a free man or, to a lesser degree, a democratic man. A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself -- of the style of democratic life, understanding of others, respect for minorities, re-examination of his own opinions, absence of dogmatism. Page 256 The means employed to spread democratic ideas make the citizen, psychologically, a totalitarian man. Page 256 The word democracy, having become a simple incitation, no longer has anything to do with democratic behavior. And the citizen can repeat indefinitely "the sacred formulas of democracy" while acting like a storm trooper. Page 257 The only truly serious attitude -- serious because the danger of man's destruction by propaganda is serious, serious because no other attitude is truly responsible and serious -- is to show people the extreme effectiveness of the weapon used against them, to rouse them to defend themselves by making them aware of their frailty and their vulnerability, instead of soothing them with the worst illusion, that of a security that neither man's nature nor the techniques of propaganda permit him to possess.	Jay Lifton Notable Quotations Full screen view Introduction: On the Ownership of Reality Page 1 mental predators Page 1 The general tendency among observers has been to identify two separate groups of mental predators. The first group is characterized by ideological totalism, an all-or-none set of ideas that claim nothing less than absolute truth and equally absolute virtue. Page 1 The second group consists of what we generally call cults, which form sealed-off communities where reality can be dispensed and controlled. Page 2 I encountered much that called it into question. I came to realize that ideological totalism and cultlike behavior not only blend with each other but tend to be part of a single entity. Page 8 Reality always contains these two contrasting dimensions -- the changeable/constructed reality that strongly influences our worldview, and the immediate/factual reality on which so much of our everyday lives depend. We consider a person to be psychotic when he or she "breaks" with immediate reality in the form of delusions, hallucinations, and extreme paranoia. And we require a shared sense of reality, consistent with experience and evidence, for our collective function in a democracy. But we have learned that immediate/factual reality can be ignored or contested by people who may not be psychotic but who do so as participants in a cultist narrative of owned reality. Page 11 Where there is openness to the world on the part of a group, its leader may be more accurately termed a mentor. Mentors teach and guide and can provide followers with lasting truths without divesting them of their autonomy. Page 11 But when a mentor creates a closed relationship with disciples that excludes all other truth -- that is, seeks to own reality -- he or she enters the realm of the omniscient guru. Page 12 The protean self is characterized by openness, change, and new beginnings, and strongly resists ownership by others. Part One: Thought Reform and Cultism Page 17 Thought reform, then, is an extreme version of ever-present human tendencies to contrast one’s own purity with the impurity of all else; and on that basis to justify one’s claim to the ownership of reality. Page 19 Whatever its setting, thought reform consists of two basic elements: confession, the exposure and renunciation of past and present "evil"; and re-education, the remaking of a man in the Communist image. Page 19 important distinctions between coercive and therapeutic approaches to bringing about change. Page 20 it was the combination of external force or coercion with an appeal to the inner enthusiasm through evangelistic exhortation which gave thought reform its emotional scope and power. Page 20 it becomes extremely difficult to determine just where exhortation ends and coercion begins. Page 28 a subtle interplay between role and identity: Page 32 thought reform is able to promote an emotional contagion -- of resentment as well as enthusiasm. Page 32 closed system of communication and idea-tight milieu control. Page 37 We recognize a sequence in Mao from brilliant revolutionary to cruel despot. Page 43 disparity between vision and experience became manifest, Page 48 And we may speak of "power" either as the ability to make decisions and take actions that exert control and influence over others, or as the sense of inner strength and capacity. Page 68 The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he or she sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also -- in its penetration of one’s inner life -- over what we may speak of as one’s communication with oneself. Page 71 The inevitable next step after milieu control is extensive personal manipulation. This manipulation assumes a no-holds-barred character, and uses every possible device at the milieu’s command, no matter how bizarre or painful. Page 72 when trust has never existed), the higher purpose cannot serve as adequate emotional sustenance. The individual then responds to the manipulations through developing what I shall call the psychology of the pawn. Feeling unable to escape from forces more powerful than any individual, one subordinates everything to adapting to them. One becomes sensitive to all kinds of cues, expert at anticipating environmental pressures, and skillful in riding them in such a way that one’s psychological energies merge with the tide rather than being turned painfully against oneself. This requires that one participate actively in the manipulation of others, as well as in the endless round of betrayals and self-betrayals that are required. Page 73 In the thought reform milieu, as in all situations of ideological totalism, the experiential world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. Page 76 Closely related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal confession. Page 76 There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. Page 77 The assumption underlying total exposure is the environment’s claim to total ownership of each individual self within it. Private ownership of the mind and its products -- of imagination or of memory -- becomes highly immoral. Page 79 The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. This sacredness is evident in the prohibition (whether or not explicit) against the questioning of basic assumptions, and in the reverence that is demanded for the originators of the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the Word itself. Page 81 The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. Page 82 And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these clichés become what Richard Weaver has called "ultimate terms": either "god terms," representative of ultimate good; or "devil terms," representative of ultimate evil. In thought reform, "progress,""progressive,""liberation,""proletarian standpoints" and "the dialectic of history" fall into the former category; "capitalist,""imperialist,""exploiting classes," and "bourgeois" (mentality/liberalism/morality/superstition/greed) of course fall into the latter. Page 82 Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, "the language of nonthought." Page 82 For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. One is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, one’s capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed. Page 83 imagination becomes increasingly dissociated from actual life experiences and may even tend to atrophy from disuse. Page 83 This sterile language reflects another characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. Page 85 The underlying assumption is that the doctrine -- including its mythological elements -- is ultimately more valid, true, and real than is any aspect of actual human character or human experience. Page 86 alternative visions depend upon such things as the strength of previous identity, the penetration of the milieu by outside ideas, and the retained capacity for eventual individual renewal. Page 89 The more clearly an environment expresses these eight psychological themes, the greater its resemblance to ideological totalism; and the more it utilizes such totalist devices to change people, the greater its resemblance to thought reform (or "brainwashing"). Page 90 No milieu ever achieves complete totalism, and many relatively moderate environments show some signs of Page 92 The degree to which an one embraces totalism depends greatly Page 92 upon factors in one’s personal history: early lack of trust, extreme environmental chaos, total domination by a parent or parent-representative, intolerable burdens of guilt, and severe crises of identity. Page 92 It may be that the capacity for totalism is most fundamentally a product of human childhood itself, of the prolonged period of helplessness and dependency through which each of us must pass. Limited as they are, infants have no choice but to imbue their first nurturing authorities -- their parents -- with an exaggerated omnipotence, until the time they are themselves capable of some degree of independent action and judgment. Page 95 The English word cult, derived from the French culte and the Latin coltus, was first used in the early seventeenth century and referred to religious worship in general and homage to a divine being. An Oxford English Dictionary entry referring to 1613 usage speaks of "adoration … for a diuine cult, and worship." But over time, the word "cult" came to represent worship or veneration "directed towards a specific figure or object." And another entry referring to a 1679 usage distinguishes cults from genuine religion: "Let not every circumstantial difference or Variety of Cult be Nick- named a new Religion." Page 95 The ancient cults, religious scholars tell us, were integral to their societies as part of a flow of worship and organization that provided form and continuity. (The word cult is related to "culture" and "cultivate.") In contrast, contemporary cultist groups -- not only extremist guru-led spiritual communities but Chinese thought-reformers as well -- go against the grain of their immediate or recent societies. Indeed they seek to replace those societies with something close to the absolutism of premodern cults. Page 97 Of course, attacks on groups deemed cultic by established religions, then and now, have elements of struggles over spiritual turf. But also at issue is the tendency of cultic groups to create a narrow, coercive reality centered on the urgent apocalyptic impulses of a deified leader. Page 98 it turned out that more than half of those dead people had been murdered by other cult members carrying out Jones’s insistence that everyone die. Page 98 To be sure, such violence is not found in the great majority of cults. But there is a widespread dynamic of potential violence, having to do with a combination of worship of an unstable guru, thought reform–like procedures, and an inward turning of fiercely apocalyptic impulses. Page 102 Key to the initiation rite are "high" or transcendent states, which are described with great intensity by those who have experienced them. Page 102 many cults have had difficulty obtaining members since their patterns of deception have become more recognizable and less effective. Part Two: World-Ending Threats Page 112 the Buddhist concept of poa, which, in his distorted use, meant killing for the sake of your victims. In esoteric Buddhism, poa is a spiritual exercise performed when one is dying, sometimes Page 112 with the aid of a guru, a "transference of consciousness" from the bodily "earth plane" to the "after-death plane" that enables one to achieve a higher realm in the next rebirth or even passage to the "Pure Land," the step prior to nirvana. Page 112 altruistic murder -- murder ostensibly intended to enhance the victim’s immortality. Page 116 One can look at the guru of a fanatical new religion or cult as either everything or nothing. The "everything" would acknowledge the guru’s creation of his group and its belief system, as well as his sustained control over Page 116 The "nothing" would suggest that the guru is simply a creation of the hungers of his disciples, that he has no existence apart from his disciples, that any culture can produce psychological types like him, that without disciples, there is no guru. Page 117 The British psychoanalyst Anthony Storr offers a useful description of a guru type: a spiritual teacher whose insight is based on personal revelation, often taking the form of a vision understood to come directly from a deity. The revelation, which has transformed his life, generally follows upon a period of distress or illness in his thirties or forties. There is suddenly a sense of certainty, of having found "the truth," creating a general aura around him that "he knows." The emerging guru can then promise, as Asahara did, "new ways of self-development, new paths to salvation, always generalizing from [his] own experience." Page 119 Among Asahara’s most crucial early decisions was the creation of shukke, or renunciants. Shukke means "leaving home" and is a traditional term for monks or nuns who give up the world. Aum’s message was that if one really wished to follow the guru and join in his full spiritual project, one had to become a shukke, removing oneself completely from one’s family and one’s prior work or study and turning all one’s resources -- money, property, and self -- over to Aum and its guru. Even one’s name was to be abandoned, replaced by a Sanskrit one. Page 120 Living together in Aum facilities, shukke underwent severe forms of ascetic practice, including celibacy and a prohibition against ejaculation, fasting, long hours of meditation, intense breathing exercises, and vigorous sequences of prostration combined with demanding work assignments and irregular sleep (often only a few hours a night). Their existence was a Spartan one -- two meals a day of extremely simple "Aum food" (rice and vegetables), tiny sleeping spaces, and no personal possessions. Page 121 As guru, Asahara retained his own sexual privileges in what was in principle an otherwise celibate community, continuing to live with his wife and family, taking on long-term mistresses from among Aum disciples, and offering tantric sexual initiations, or "transfers of energy," to various female followers.... the distinction between training and punishment often blurred, the guru needs disciples not only to become and remain a guru but to hold himself together psychologically. For the guru self often teeters on the edge of fragmentation, paranoia, and overall psychological breakdown. Page 125 For the disciples there was no deity beyond the guru, no ethical code beyond his demands and imposed ordeals. When the guru invoked a higher deity it was only in order to incorporate the god’s omnipotence into his own.	Joel Dimsdale Notable Quotations Full screen view Page 6 How did she make sense of a world where people could be persuaded to believe rubbish and follow it up with self- destructive violence? Page 7 I still don't know what to call this phenomenon. Brainwashing, coercive persuasion, thought control, dark persuasion -- all these terms refer to the fact that certain techniques render individuals shockingly vulnerable to indoctrination. Page 7 And yes, the term brainwashing is silly and unscientific. No one ever meant it literally, but the metaphor is a powerful one. Page 7 Throughout the twentieth century, governments invested so heavily in research on brainwashing that it has come to be known as the "Manhattan Project of the Mind." Page 8 When the Hale- Bopp comet was sighted in 1995, the seekers felt it was sent from heaven and that an unseen spaceship trailed behind, ready to bring them home. Page 10 As I struggled to understand what happened at Heaven's Gate, I realized that coercive persuasion is heartbreakingly common. Page 11 Prior to the twentieth century, coercive persuasion emanated from two unlikely locations -- dungeons and churches. Page 11 In most instances of twentieth- century brainwashing, one can find echoes of torture combined with ecstatic belief. Page 12 During the Korean War, American prisoners of war returned home, scarred by their immersion in Korean and Chinese "thought reform" camps, and it was in this context that the term brainwashing was born. Page 12 Research during the Cold War proved that coercive persuasion could be a powerful tool, but it required time and patience. Then, in the 1970s, startling accounts surfaced of sudden persuasion among hostages who incomprehensibly started sympathizing with their captors. Page 13 In the context of isolation from outside communication, sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and group confessions, people have been repeatedly persuaded to believe disinformation and to act self- destructively. Page 13 I fear that advances in neuroscience and social media in the twenty- first century will create even more powerful tools of persuasion. It is folly to ignore the perils. Page 13 I wrote this book to trace how brainwashing evolved in the twentieth century and to conjecture how it will develop in the twenty- first. 1. Before Pavlov: Torture and Conversion Page 17 we have centuries of data teaching us that the threat of torture works just as well as the physical torture itself, without the mess. Page 17 The victim tortures himself simply with his imagination. Page 18 We focus instead on the psychological tools that torturers have historically employed in most jurisdictions. Many of these techniques would be incorporated into twentieth- century coercive persuasion. Page 21 interrogators observed that confessions were easier to obtain when the prisoner was exhausted, confused, and anxious from a combination of sleep deprivation and malnutrition. Page 22 the goal was to try to make prisoners feel so guilty that they longed to be punished to achieve eventual salvation. Page 22 "Reassure them by giving them something, some food for instance. . . . Terrify them, confuse them in clever ways. Arrange little ploys to make them give up any hope that they will . . . be able to survive. . . . Don't step up the pressure all the time. Say something like ‘Don't make us torture you or torture you severely. It's bad for your health, and it makes it harder for us to deal with each other in the future.' If they reveal small matters, encourage them to reveal the big ones. Tell them that if they reveal important matters, . . . [we] will be lenient with them." 17 Page 23 In addition to its origins in torture, brainwashing can trace its roots to traditions in religious conversion. Page 23 Brainwashing programs also include periods of calculated kindness to disarm the subject, as well as periods of intense study or indoctrination. Despite its dark components, brainwashing, like conversion, offers the promise of redemption and rebirth into a new social group, frequently after a public confession. Page 24 Both brainwashing and religious conversion rely on strong group pressure. They target people who are exhausted and dejected from extensive self- criticism, doubt, fear, and guilt.... They sense a new beginning with a cleansed life.... These aspects of conversion are the same whether one is converting to a common established belief or to an uncommon new one. Page 25 There were many features common to all the converts. The age of conversion was usually in adolescence or in the twenties -- as will be seen later, this is also the typical age of victims of brainwashing.... Contemporary studies likewise report the transitory nature of conversion.... In fact, there is a constant churning in church membership across all denominations, new or old.... The key is whether there is freedom of movement in and out of the group. That freedom does not exist in cases of brainwashing.... Conversion offers a path out of the thicket of one's current life. It can be facilitated by physical activities like fasting, vigils, drugs, dancing, and intense exercise. It is also easier if new converts distance themselves from the influence of their families and former friends. 28 In brainwashing, we find similar features, but they have been twisted (starvation, sleep deprivation, drugs, exhaustion, social isolation). Page 27 Because conversion was facilitated by the awareness of one's own sins, followers were repeatedly urged to confess their lapses. The confessions could be given orally in front of a group or in written diaries submitted to the authorities. 30 Wesley's [founder of the methodist sect] followers received formulaic instructions about how to structure their confessions. Page 29 Acts 9: 9 plainly states that Saul's conversion was preceded by three days during which he "neither ate nor drank." Page 30 Tanya Luhrmann's insightful book about contemporary evangelicals notes that religious experience is commonly accompanied by periods of silence, fasting, hard labor, repetitive hymns, and isolation. Part I Government And Academe Page 38 Pavlov noted that the severely traumatized were not only exhausted but also suggestible, particularly when they were given conflicting instructions. Page 40 If production declined or the economy was criticized, Stalin blamed it on treason and sabotage rather than his policies. Page 43 Since no one dares to criticize him, Stalin gradually has grown unaccustomed to controlling himself." Page 47 The show trials were the origin of the twentieth century's preoccupation with what would come to be known as brainwashing. Page 50 The interrogators appealed to their conscience as Party members and their natural concerns for their family. If these appeals did not work the powerful next step for the recalcitrant prisoner was solitary confinement and sleep deprivation for weeks at a time. Page 50 The interrogations were unpredictable, sometimes mercifully brief and sometimes going on for forty-eight hours at a stretch. Page 50 The interrogator's behavior and demeanor were inconsistent. Page 50 Survivors described a semiconscious state after fifty or sixty interrogations and no sleep. "A man becomes like an automaton. . . . In this state he is often even convinced he is guilty."54 Page 51 "The prisoner . . . [is] cross examined until . . . he contradicts himself on some small point. This is then used as a stick to beat him with; presently his brain ceases to function normally and he collapses. In a subsequent highly suggestible state, with old thought patterns inhibited, he will readily sign and deliver the desired confession."55 Page 51 Confessions were readily obtained after bombarding prisoners with contradictory information and eliciting feelings of guilt and anxiety. The prisoners' cognitive functioning was so disturbed by malnutrition, sleep deprivation, and massive anxiety that they readily confessed. By that time, they longed to be punished as a way to obtain salvation. Page 52 Foreshadowing interrogation techniques that would be used in the 1950s in Korea and China, many prisoners had to write extensive critiques of their lives -- their upbringing, accomplishments, and shortcomings. Page 52 After reading the self-criticism, the interrogator would declare it inadequate and order the prisoner to start all over. Page 54 Some confessed out of loyalty and deference to the Party, which had been the North Star guiding their entire lives. Their surrender was merely the next step in a lifelong pattern of self-abasement to the Party. Page 55 Building upon established techniques of torture, the Soviets added Pavlov's insights that severe stress, sleep deprivation, and meticulous attention to reward and punishment could shape behavior. Page 59 Dr. House was a true believer that scopolamine could force people to tell the truth and that it could help exonerate (or convict) prisoners. Page 60 Under scopolamine, one prisoner admitted to certain crimes but denied others. He also named members of a gang that had robbed a bank, something he had previously refused to do. Page 60 The other prisoner, about to be tried for murder, emphatically proclaimed his innocence when scopolamine was administered. He was in fact eventually exonerated. Page 79 amytal could not be relied upon to compel the truth. Page 79 questioning was not successful unless a good rapport had been established. Page 79 Even in those cases, however, high doses of amytal were necessary to elicit cooperation, but the result of that was a loss of clarity and a murky dialog because the patient mumbled or embarked on long, tangential fantasies. Even more important, as the authors pointed out, "Testimony concerning dates and specific places are untrustworthy and often contradictory because of the patient's loss of time-sense. Names and events are of questionable veracity. Page 79 interviews are more productive if they focus on relatively benign matters in the beginning, at least until the subject develops some degree of trust. Page 84 The Cold War, on the other hand, aimed at conversion of the enemy. Page 87 coactus feci ("I have been forced to act"). Page 90 They were graduate students studying in China when they were imprisoned as spies from 1951 to 1955, but there was something decidedly unusual about how they were treated in custody. The Ricketts were told that the purpose of their imprisonment was not punishment but reeducation. They were to use their time in prison to learn a new outlook on life, to reform their thinking through study and mutual criticism.16 Page 90 The detainees were treated harshly and subjected to protracted interrogation and indoctrination. Interrogators told them that intellectuals were not "of the people," that they would come to realize their crimes, and that Western visitors like them were stooges of imperialism cloaking their true intentions behind a façade of scholarship. The prisoners were asked to write long autobiographies, but whatever they wrote was judged inadequate and they were forced to start all over again. Minute discrepancies in the autobiographies were viewed as evidence of lying. Page 91 You've committed a serious crime and you'd better start thinking about whether it was right or wrong. Now talk it over among yourselves."17 Page 91 After months and sometimes years of such pressure, many confessed and then were freed and banished from China. Page 91 Although it was expected that they would renounce their conversions to Communism, not all did. Page 91 Their views of themselves and the world seemed changed by their experiences in detention. Page 91 Some even found an appealing quality to the Chinese masses working together to build a better world in comparison to the imperialism and racism of the West. Based on their confessions, McCarthyites threatened U.S. returnees with charges of treason, and as a result, many of the former detainees weren't sure where in the world they belonged anymore. Page 92 Lifton coined the term thought reform to describe the Chinese techniques of persuasion. Page 92 In Russia, confession was followed by purge, exile, or liquidation. In China, the goal of confession was reeducation and rehabilitation. Page 92 Lifton likened thought reform to a process of dying and being reborn, characterizing the public confessions as "ecstatic repentance and histrionic remorse."19 Page 92 Lifton suggested that thought reform occurred in phases. Newly arriving Chinese intellectuals in prison were greeted warmly and encouraged to get to know one another. There was a sense of optimism and esprit de corps. Then the detainees were taught about the old society's corruption and shown that they, as intellectuals, had come from such depraved social classes. They were then encouraged to purge themselves of their past to become part of the new society. The Chinese maintained airtight control of this milieu, filtering out what prisoners could learn from the outside world. They demanded purity, confession, and absolute acceptance of their dogma. Page 93 The cadres used language filled with slogans and dichotomized the world between "the people" versus "the reactionaries." It was a recipe that future cults readily adopted. Page 93 In his words, "confession amounted to atonement and led to redemption."21 Page 93 In the end, the thought-reformed prisoner acquired a new identity, but would the new ideas persist after release? Lifton noted that prisoners were stunned when they were freed. They staggered out of China with a haunting sense of sadness, confusion about the world, and lingering feelings of guilt and shame. Most of all, they felt like outsiders in their own culture. Page 96 The behavior of the prisoners during and after their imprisonment was profoundly galling to the U.S. government. What had the Chinese done to the American prisoners to make them confess to waging germ warfare and to participate in antiwar propaganda? Even worse -- how had the Chinese persuaded a small number of POWs to refuse to return home after the war? Prisoners were also denounced for dishonorably dying in captivity. These events became linked to the idea that prisoners succumbed because American culture was weak and too liberal. Then a magical word appeared to explain everything -- brainwashing. Page 98 Edward Hunter, a journalist who worked for the OSS in World War II as a propaganda specialist in psychological warfare. He brought a real flair to reporting and we owe the term brainwashing to his gift of gab and ability to turn a catchy phrase. Page 98 The philosopher Wittgenstein observed that "a new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion."1 Hunter's new word flourished like crabgrass. Page 98 "‘Brain-washing' . . . is the terrifying new Communist strategy to conquer the free world by destroying its mind. . Page 100 HUAC members loved him. They had found a man after their own heart. The problem was that virtually none of the psychiatrists who examined the Chinese scholars or American POWs agreed with Hunter's premise. Page 100 The people who did agree with Hunter were largely other journalists and those who were obsessed with concerns about Communist conspiracy. Hunter's simple message as an expert in propaganda trumped the academics' expertise. Page 101 Allegations about Chinese coercive persuasion tactics were triggered by inexplicable behaviors in the American (and British) POWs who were held by North Korea and China. Page 102 In March 1952, there were reports of anthrax and plague in China and North Korea and also peculiar sightings of insects, even in the dead of winter. Page 102 would have been a major propaganda coup if the North Koreans and Chinese could have tied the Americans to germ warfare. Page 103 From the U.S. side, brainwashing was invoked to explain the fact that half of the seventy-eight captured American aviators confessed to participating in a biowarfare program. The United States vehemently rejected the allegations, labeling them "a tremendous and calculated campaign of lies."16 The confessions, widely disseminated, were repudiated once the flyers returned to the United States. Page 107 That some North Koreans and Chinese did not want to be repatriated was one thing, but what really disturbed the United States was that some U.S. POWs preferred to stay in China rather than come home. Page 108 Most of those who chose not to return grew up in small towns or rural communities mired in poverty. Only four of the twenty-one had finished high school; five of them never got beyond eighth grade. Most came from broken homes, but only three of them were ever in trouble with juvenile authorities. While many had troubled childhoods, others had remarkably quiet upbringings. Page 109 They were volunteers, not draftees. Page 109 Twenty had no understanding of Communism other than thinking it a dirty word. Most had no idea what they were fighting for in Korea. Page 114 Observers acknowledged that this was the first war in which the enemy tried so methodically to manipulate the minds of its prisoners and that the efforts were highly coordinated and focused on demoralizing prisoners. They found "indoctrination" closer to the reality of the experience than "brainwashing." Page 117 Who wants to read well-written scientific reports when you can read superbly written and sensationalist journalism! Page 118 The Chinese were methodical, pacing their endless demands carefully and requiring some degree of participation from the prisoner, no matter how trivial. 55 Their approach relied on what Jolly West called "DDD" (debility, dependency, and dread). 56 They isolated prisoners, depriving them of social support and making them dependent on the interrogator for life- sustaining privileges. Guards imposed a barren monotonous environment. They degraded prisoners by forbidding personal hygiene, hurled incessant insults, and demanded compliance with seemingly meaningless rules. 57 They induced debilitation through semi- starvation, prolonged interrogation, sleep deprivation, and constant threats of death, but they occasionally offered tantalizing indulgences to encourage compliance. Page 118 Above all, they made it clear that they had complete control over the prisoners' fate and that resistance would be futile. Page 118 few of these collaborators actually converted to Communism. Page 119 The level of collaboration did not differ in terms of soldiers' background characteristics like age, education level, or rank. Page 122 The experts dismissed brainwashing as a Gothic horror story, but they did believe that coercive persuasion techniques were powerful and that the United States would need to defend against them. Page 123 While acknowledging that brainwashing was a distorted, hyperbolic term, the U.S. government was interested in discovering new options for confronting the Communist menace. If "they" had the weapon, then "we" had better have one at least as good. Page 125 The experts -- the psychiatrists and psychologists who treated the Korean War POWs -- knew that the Chinese used powerful tools for indoctrination and persuasion, but they also knew that the techniques were not revolutionary breakthroughs. However, those same experts were quite happy to receive grants during the Cold War while the government searched for new weapons. Page 125 The Soviets seemed to want more than just global conquest; with their massive disinformation campaigns and hidden agents, they aimed to undermine confidence in the West. How could the West respond? Page 125 Academia was poised to defend the country as long as government funding was provided. Page 126 MKUltra supported the brightest behavioral scientists in America (Margaret Mead, B. F. Skinner, and Carl Rogers, to name a few). Ironically, it was the CIA-supported psychologist Carl Rogers who warned about the risks of governments using behavioral control: "We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood. . . . [Or we] can choose to use the behavioral sciences in ways . . . which will develop creativity . . . ; which will facilitate [individuals' finding] . . . freshly adaptive ways of meeting life and its problems."9 Page 127 Even Ervine Goffman, prominent critic of social norms and controls, was on the payroll.12 Page 130 Carl Rogers joined the board of the Human Ecology group and received funding for several studies on emotion. Years later, explaining his involvement, he noted that he was having trouble getting funded but that after receiving support from the institute, he found it easier to obtain other research support. Page 130 Looking back on this period in his career, Rogers commented that Page 130 he would never again touch covert funding "with a ten-foot pole." Page 179 Torture did not persuade people to adopt different political beliefs, nor did it elicit reliable information. Any number of drugs could sedate, stimulate, or confuse people, but they were not effective in interrogations or persuasion. Group pressures, sensory isolation, and sleep deprivation were promising tools for persuading people, but these required time and finesse. Page 180 Stockholm syndrome. Page 184 Olsson did not torture, shoot, or rape the hostages. Furthermore, sometimes he was quite solicitous of them, offering them food and stroking them comfortingly. As another hostage put it, Page 184 "When he treated us well, we could think of him as . . . God."6 Page 184 The hostages began to fear the police more than the bank robbers. Page 185 In the face of sudden unexpected life-threatening captivity lasting for days, it is striking that the hostages became unaccountably fond of their captors and distrustful of the people who were trying to rescue them. Page 185 The hostages were totally dependent upon their captors, who controlled every aspect of their lives -- where they could go, what they could eat, when they could use the bathroom. Page 185 As the hours stretched into days of captivity in close proximity, both captors and captives started seeing some humanity in one another, and the robbers made repeated small gestures to comfort their hostages. Page 185 The hostages became convinced they had more to fear from the police than from the hostage takers. Page 185 four times as many hostages died in the crossfire of assault by security forces than were executed by terrorists. Page 189 There is a stigma associated with Stockholm syndrome partly because of the lurid sadomasochistic fantasies that are emphasized in the newspapers and partly because the behavior is so bizarre that people think the hostage must have been "crazy." The hostage survivor (or the survivor of rape, sexual trafficking, and abuse, for that matter) is often confronted by cruel questions: "Why didn't you run, scream, fight back? Did you develop unseemly bonds with your captors?" Survivors rightfully bristle at the tactless insinuation of blame by the police, media, and acquaintances. Elizabeth Smart comments: "Nobody should ever question why you didn't do something. They have no idea what they would have done, and they certainly have no right to judge you. Everything I did I did to survive. Page 190 Victims are grateful their experiences were not worse than they were. They appreciate their captor "because he could have killed me and didn't." 20 Sometimes this appreciation transforms into affection. Page 190 While victims feel some appreciation for the perpetrator, many feel the world has abandoned them and that in some way their interests and their captors' interests coincide. Page 190 The hostage thus decides to get along with the abductor and make the best of a bad situation. Page 190 use the word decides with reservations because there isn't a word that captures the complex intermingling of conscious intention and unconscious action. Under continuing exposure to life-threatening stress, some people paradoxically develop more trust and affection for their captors than their rescuers. This constitutes the essence of the Stockholm syndrome. Page 191 They found that 50 percent of the survivors reported some form of positive bond with their captors. Those who had been exposed to more humiliating experiences during their captivity and those who were held captive for longer amounts of time were more likely to develop such feelings. Neither the victim's age nor the presence of psychiatric diagnoses were associated with vulnerability to such feelings. Page 192 The captive focuses attention on the captors' occasional kindnesses rather than their brutality. This can be lifesaving because a positive bond affects both captive and captor. Surrounded and threatened by assault from the police, both captor and captive recognize their joint vulnerability. Captives want to survive but are totally dependent upon their captors. Page 193 The power differential between the two is enormous, and to survive, captives must do all in their power to turn aside the lethal anger of their captors. Page 193 The hostage is in a state of extreme dependence and fright. He is terrified of the outside world." Page 193 Frank Ochberg observed that "brainwashing is deliberate, but Stockholm just happens." Page 198 Patricia accommodated to the group. She learned that if she agreed with everything they said and became a model prisoner, her captors would be friendlier -- and the closet door would be opened.11 Page 199 More tapes emerged from an increasingly radicalized Patricia Hearst. Her parents speculated that she must have been brainwashed to say and do such things, but Patricia fired back over the ensuing months, vehemently denying that she had been brainwashed. Page 201 Tania confided that she hadn't trusted the SLA in the beginning but over time started to feel sympathetic with their goals. She decried the allegations that she had been brainwashed as "bullshit" and said that brainwashing should refer "to the process which begins in the school system . . . whereby the people are conditioned to passively take their place in society as slaves of the ruling class."16 Page 214 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), Page 214 DSM5, Page 214 "Identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion: Individuals who have been subjected to intense coercive persuasion (e.g., brainwashing, thought reform, indoctrination while captive, torture . . . recruitment by sects/cults or by terror organizations) may present with prolonged changes in, or conscious questions of, their identity." Page 228 The group was led by the Reverend Jim Jones, who had started his ministry in Indianapolis in the 1950s, moved to California, and then took his congregation with him to Guyana. Jones was committed to social justice and fighting racism. He was eloquent, charismatic, and shrewd, but those strengths were more than offset by his other characteristics. He was self-aggrandizing, exceedingly manipulative, and pathologically suspicious. Throughout his career, he lied so often that I wonder if he even knew when he was lying and when he was telling the truth. In the end, he led almost one thousand people to their deaths. How was the Peoples Temple subjugated to Jones's lethal influence? Page 230 "They're trying to get a whole breed of automatons. . . . They [will] put a monitoring device inside the brain, and from a central office, give them signals, or relay signals of what their behavior is."9 Page 233 It is not surprising that Jonestown used phrases like "learning crews" and "extended care units" -- such distortions of language are commonly found in totalitarian regimes. New arrivals were welcomed by a "greeting committee" whose sinister function was to inspect and confiscate belongings, censor any mail or printed material that people were bringing into the colony, and confiscate passports. Another group, the "diversions committee," was charged with tracking down former members and playing dirty tricks to intimidate them. The "counseling committee" paid home visits to congregants, and while "counseling" was part of their job, other parts involved enforcing tithes of 25 percent, spying on members, and approving all member purchases. Page 233 In addition to paying heavy tithes, congregation members gave the Temple power of attorney. In return for signing such documents and deeding over their homes, the Peoples Temple promised that it would take care of its members in the future -- a kind of continuing care commitment. Page 235 The Temple shrewdly donated to support freedom of the press, and as a result had many friends in the media. Page 236 Jones made himself into an idol to be worshiped. He believed that he was the Promised One because he was so good at healing people. Page 236 He pretended to be omniscient, famously sending his confidants to the houses of potential parishioners to spy out hidden details of their lives. Then he would pounce during a sermon, saying things like "I'm having a revelation! Page 236 Such remarkably detailed knowledge was regarded as a manifestation of his gifts of prophecy. Page 236 he fostered a childlike dependency. Page 236 The dependency extended into sexual matters. Jones at various times encouraged free love or celibacy, but he made sure to satisfy his own sexual needs with his congregants. Page 239 "It's better for us all to die together, proud, than have them discredit us and . . . make us look like a bunch of crazy people."28 Page 240 Jones warned the community that the jungles were dangerous -- filled with Guyanese mercenaries, snakes, tigers, and crocodiles. The guards, he said, were there to protect them. Page 241 The tapes include a public criticism session replete with beatings for things like talking too much, being bossy, being late to socialism class, not working hard enough. People were terrorized by threats that they would be tied to stakes in the jungle where the tigers would eat them. The continual screams and moans from the howler monkeys in the jungle added to the sense of danger. Page 241 The nurse Annie Moore wrote her sister Rebecca before moving to Guyana: "You obviously think that the Peoples Temple is just another cult or religious fanatic place or something like that. Well, I'm kind of offended that you would think I would stoop so low as to join some weirdo group. . . . The reason that the Temple is great is . . . because there is the largest group of people I have ever seen who are concerned about the world and are fighting for truth and justice for the world. . . . So anyway it's the only place I have seen real true Christianity being practiced." Page 243 Jones's increasing paranoia was infectious. In September 1977, Temple members armed with farm implements patrolled the perimeter of Jonestown looking for Guyanese invaders (who were not there). Page 243 As part of his intoxication with martyrdom, Jones became enamored with Huey Newton's concept of "revolutionary suicide." Page 244 We were told that we would be tortured by mercenaries if we were taken alive. Everyone, including the children, was told to line up. . . . We were given a small glass of red liquid to drink. We were told that the liquid contained poison and that we would die within 45 minutes. We all did as we were told. When the time came when we should have dropped dead, Rev. Jones explained that the poison was not real and that we had just been through a loyalty test."39 Page 246 By that point Jones had a severe addiction to barbiturates and amphetamines and was abusing so many other drugs that his speech was noticeably slurred and his logic tenuous. Page 247 Dr. Schacht mixed cyanide into a barrel full of Flavor-Aid fruit punch and sedative drugs. He set up a table, lined with rows of paper cups and syringes, to efficiently administer the poison. One could easily have mistaken this for a mass immunization program. The syringes were for squirting the solution down the throats of people not willing or able to swallow it from the cups. Some syringes had needles to inject those who resisted. The guards had guns and crossbows to enforce compliance. Page 248 Bill Oliver testified that he was a committed Marxist-Leninist and that his decision to commit revolutionary suicide was well thought out, that he had been a member of the Temple for seven years and knew its goodness. He hoped that his death "would be used as an instrument to further liberation."47 Page 249 Was it murder or suicide? Certainly, for the hundreds of children and frail elderly, it was murder. For the rest, possibly suicide, but postmortem exams performed on dozens of bodies and other reports suggest that many of the victims had been injected with the poison. This implies that some individuals did not voluntarily drink it.49 Page 252 typical stance of aggrieved innocence. Page 254 Temple spokesman Michael Prokes survived Jonestown because Jones instructed him to deliver a suitcase of money to the Russian embassy in Georgetown. Page 255 "No matter what view one takes of the Temple, perhaps the most relevant truth is that it was filled with outcasts and the poor who were looking for something they could not find in our society." Page 262 Do and Ti persuaded their followers not only to join them, but to sell their possessions, say good-bye to their families, drop their old names, and assume new identities. Page 264 Do and Ti told the attendees that they had come to teach and gather followers who were ready to be transformed to a new destiny, the Next Level, where they would be free from suffering and corruption. Christ had come to Earth two thousand years ago but found people Page 264 too depraved for heaven. Now it was time to try again. Heaven was a place -- a real planet -- and you get there via a UFO. The attendees were told to abandon their possessions and families and to follow them now. Page 265 Slowly, he and his followers came to the belief that the world was filled with weeds. "The weeds have taken over the garden and truly disturbed its usefulness beyond repair -- it is time for the civilization to be recycled -- ‘spaded under.'"10 In other words, the End of Days was coming, and Earth was doomed to be recycled. Page 265 Communal living arrangements gave members a powerful sense of belonging. Like any cloistered group, the residents had rules of behavior regulating external interactions as well as internal thoughts and responses (see table 3). They were prohibited from having any contact with their families and friends. Page 266 All the rules emphasized following instructions and being considerate, modest, gentle, sensitive, and clean. Members were warned against "polluting the ears of others," procrastinating, and being pushy, aggressive, or demanding. Each person was assigned a "check partner" to be a constant companion and watcher. Page 266 Members learned they could control their vehicles by focusing on chores, work, and study but they were never to trust their own judgment, take any action without checking with their partner, or permit private thoughts and distracting emotions. Page 266 From its peak of several hundred members, the Heaven's Gate community dwindled to a small group of about forty believers, most of whom had lived together sequestered in their community for twenty years, having little interaction with anyone on the outside. Page 269 Do and Ti cautioned adherents that they would be rejected by the rest of the world, which would regard them as "duped, crazy, a cult member, a drifter, a loner, a drop-out."17 Furthermore, Do warned, apostates who had fallen away from the movement would end up working closely with government and industry to oppose them. Page 269 The group meditated together, supported one another, and provided a tremendous sense of belonging, structure, and hope. Life in the group was tightly regulated in terms of what television channels they could watch, which books they could read, where they could sit, and what they could eat. All of this was methodically detailed in a "Procedures" book. The movement did not encourage individualism. For their last meal at Marie Callender's restaurant in Carlsbad, they ordered thirty-nine chicken pot pies, thirty-nine salads, and thirty-nine pieces of cheesecake.18 The comet was coming for them. Page 271 As their last day on Earth approached, some members posted farewells on the internet. Page 271 The student felt that the body is merely a vehicle or suit of clothes to hold the soul. Living cloistered was one way of minimizing conflict with outsiders. Explicitly addressing the question "why I want to leave at this time," the devotee wrote: "I know my . . . [Leader] is going. Once He is gone, there is nothing left here on the face of the Earth for me, no reason to stay a moment longer. . . . Choosing to exit this borrowed human vehicle or body and go home to the Next Level is an opportunity for me to demonstrate my loyalty, commitment, love, trust, and faith. . . . There is nothing here in this world that I want. . . . [I am] not this biological outer garment that I am currently occupying."22 Page 272 In addition to these written farewells posted on the internet, the group videotaped exit interviews to explain their beliefs about death and the future.23 Their names on the tape deserve some comment. Page 272 These parting videos provide an unusually vivid window into their thinking. They are not the stuff of a traditional suicide note -- no revelations of depression, anger, or feeling trapped. Instead, the films have an evangelical quality, testifying to the joys of Heaven's Gate. They are beautifully crafted farewell notes to explain the adherents' actions. I found it difficult to select which interviews to include in these pages. They are all unique and poignant -- ghosts' voices clamoring for attention. Page 274 Heaven's Gate and Jonestown both ended in mass death, but as communal movements they were profoundly different. Page 275 The two groups also differed in terms of drug use and personal privileges. In his later days, Applewhite's special privileges as leader consisted only of having a private bedroom. He preached against drugs and followed what he preached. Jones chronically abused stimulants and sedatives, lived in a separate house equipped with luxuries, and surrounded himself with guards. Page 275 Applewhite persuaded his followers to kill themselves in a manner as free of violence as possible -- barbiturate overdose. Jones forced members to kill themselves with cyanide and if they refused, he had them shot. Page 276 A Gallup poll conducted in 2004 found that 90 percent of Americans believe in God, 70 percent believe in the devil, 78 percent believe in angels, 81 percent believe in heaven, and 70 percent believe in hell.26 But nontraditional beliefs are also common. A 2018 poll by the Pew Religious Center found that 60 percent of Americans accept at least one New Age belief. For example, 40 percent believe in psychics and think that spiritual energy can be found in physical objects, 33 percent believe in reincarnation, and 29 percent believe in astrology.27 Page 276 After all, "strange" beliefs are not even statistically rare.28 Page 277 It is foolish to label all new religions as cults that brainwash their congregants. But it is legitimate to ask if and how individuals "become swept away by commitments to charismatic social movements."32 Such analyses must consider how people are recruited into a movement, how their beliefs are changed, and -- perhaps unique to brainwashing -- how they are restrained from leaving the movement. Page 277 It is interesting to note that after the thirty-nine Heaven's Gate members died, some former members killed themselves as well. In some instances, they felt there was a chance they could "catch up" with their peers and board the spaceship. In others, the survivors felt no connection with the rest of the world; they killed themselves out of guilt for not being on site at the time of their friends' deaths and because they could not imagine a life for themselves away from the group -- whether or not they caught the spaceship -- a sati-like despair. Page 277 While I agree that brainwashing is a silly term, that doesn't mean one should ignore how charismatic leaders can attract members, shape their thoughts and behavior, transform their beliefs, and restrict them from leaving. Page 278 We've already established that "unusual" religious beliefs are in no way rare. Even some of the more peculiar aspects of Heaven's Gate have deep roots in history. Page 278 Heaven's Gate, there was no "commandment" to kill yourself; the persuasion was softer but no less lethal. Page 279 Certainly, the Heaven's Gate members knew what they were doing, but they were convinced their suicide would gain them immortality on a spaceship, not a coffin. Were they competent to make that fatal decision based on their leader's powerful persuasion? Page 279 Columnist Frank Rich said it perfectly: "What makes a cult a cult is not its religion, whatever it is, but the practice of mind-control techniques, usually by a charismatic leader, that robs its members of their independence of thoughts."35 Page 279 Cults use group pressures, isolation, and sensory deprivation in ways resembling the reeducation camps of Korea and China. Unlike those camps, Heaven's Gate employed no torture or severe physical hardship; however, there were aspects of the movement that were coercive. Page 280 One might regard such beliefs as "mistaken," but it is dodgy to consider them "delusional." Page 280 Most religions teach doctrines that are nonfalsifiable; that is, after all, another way of defining "faith." Page 281 Delusions are fixed beliefs that are unchangeable even in the face of conflicting evidence. Page 281 Delusions are common in schizophrenia but can occur in other psychiatric disorders, in hostage situations, and instances of sleep deprivation and sensory isolation. Page 281 wish I could say there was a clear distinction between a belief and an inflexibly held opinion. There isn't. Page 281 Some of us are dogmatic, but that is not the same thing as being delusional. Page 281 Thirty-six percent of Americans believe that it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that 9/11 happened because governmental officials wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.39 Page 282 Strong beliefs are different from the inflexible beliefs of delusion. Deluded people live in a black-and-white world with no shades of gray. They jump to conclusions and look only for evidence that supports their beliefs; they simply dismiss contradictory evidence. Page 282 Delusions tend to be long lasting, but they do vary in intensity.40 Delusions can be deemed bizarre on objective grounds (for example, that I can fly), cultural grounds (such as a departure from consensually shared views of reality), or individual grounds (for example, a change in belief that is startlingly incompatible with the individual's life course).41 But studies have shown that even experts have limited reliability in judging whether or not a delusion is bizarre. Page 282 Our beliefs get even stronger if we associate only with people who share those beliefs and if we attend only to media that preach to our biases. Page 282 delusions can be infectious; Page 282 The most recent version of DSM does away with the French terminology, preferring use of "delusional disorder" for the dominant patient and "delusional symptoms in partner of individual with delusional disorder" for the other person. Page 283 I think most of us come to the conclusion that Heaven's Gate exemplifies not coercive brainwashing but rather a contagion of belief. Page 285 We can, of course, be deceived in many ways. We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. -- SØREN KIERKEGAARD Page 287 Brainwashing goes beyond behaviorism and is comprised of many elements. As Skinner implied, one element entails manipulation and, in some instances, coercion and isolation. Another element is that the manipulation may be so surreptitious individuals may not even know how or even if they are being targeted. A third characteristic is that actions are taken at the expense of the targeted individuals; someone else benefits from the manipulation. Finally, some degree of sleep deprivation is often part of the regimen, leaving the victim fatigued, confused, and suggestible. Page 309 Marketing is a form of mass persuasion. It may be done with good intentions ("Get a flu shot"), it may be neutral ("Shop at Vons"), or it may be against an individual's best interest ("Smoke Marlboro"). While mass campaigns can be effective, advertisers get a higher response rate by targeting the appropriate audience. Here is where social media excels. When people identify their interests and preferences on platforms like Facebook, shrewd marketers can draw inferences from one "like" to another. An individual's interest in something like Scrabble can suggest how to market another product for that individual to buy. Such approaches allow specific targeting of messages to sell a product, idea, or behavior.	Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook, Eds Notable Quotations Full screen view Chapter 1: Out of Industry, Into the Classroom: UX as Proactive Academic Practice The more significant conclusion that I took from this usability study was that the usability test was not generalizable beyond the specific context of this particular syllabus evaluation. What I mean by this is that once I revised the syllabi to be more usable, or a new population of students was tested, or I moved to a new institution with different policies and procedures, or new technologies were better suited to deliver syllabi, the test conducted in 2014 would be insignificant beyond a historical perspective of usability using two texts and technologies in 2014. (Crane 4) Usability, therefore, should only be used iteratively to understand how a design works for users at any given time or environment. Second to this conclusion was my understanding that course documents are (or should be) student-user centered and that it is an instructor's responsibility as an information designer to understand the student-user experience while using these documents. (Crane 4) Although by no means exhaustive in its discussion of design and research methods, this chapter attempts to show the hierarchy of UX and its relationship to design and research methods. At the same time, using illustrative examples from my own syllabus research, I discuss the various opportunities and challenges of UX work. (Crane 5) System-centered design focused more on the needs of the system to function as the designers intended. The problem with this approach is that systems, even well-built systems, are not always usable for the people those systems were designed for. (Crane 5) Four of Nielsen's and Quesenbery's components for usability are very similar. For instance, users need to be able to complete tasks efficiently, learn a system in a reasonable amount of time, and recover from errors when they are made. (Crane 8) not only should we be concerned with how well users can complete tasks, but researchers should not assume that their (or a designer's) preconceived ideas about users' work is a fair representation of the complexity of users' work beyond a usability lab (or any testing situation). (Crane 8) After analyzing my syllabus usability test's results, I learned that usability testing alone could not answer the questions I posed for my study. The syllabus and the students who use it are part of a complex academic system with multiple factors, stakeholders, tasks, environments, and functions. Thus, looking at usability alone, though a good starting point, led to more questions than it could answer. (Crane 10) This is one example of why TPC instructors and program designers need to understand how UX functions within an interconnected web of design processes (user-centered design [UCD], human-centered design [HCD], participatory design, and design thinking) and research methods (observation, self-reporting, affinity diagramming, usability testing, etc.). (Crane 10) It is a theory or philosophy, supported by design processes that put the human user in the center of design processes, whether these processes are labeled as user-centered design (UCD), human-centered design (HCD), participatory design, or design thinking; these design processes are then enacted through four iterative stages: 1. collecting information about human users (those most likely to use products upon design completion), 2. designing prototypes that can be used by these human users to collect additional data about their use, 3. redesigning products in response to the first two methods, and 4. testing and retesting products during and after distribution. (Crane 10-11) One of the main differences between UCD and HCD, is the shift in nomenclature from "users" to "humans." This is not to minimize either process; rather, it acknowledges that some UX scholars and designers feel that the term "users" is not the best way to refer to people. (Crane 14) Affinity diagramming provides all participants the opportunity to make their values and attitudes known without succumbing to group thinking. This practice can also lead to low-fidelity co-designed prototypes where users can construct their own syllabus, in this case, using the values discovered from affinity diagramming and program and university syllabus requirements to create their own student-as-user-centered syllabus. (Crane 19) Chapter 2: Beyond Lore: UX as Data-Driven Practice We begin this chapter with a nod to North (1987) because the collection's focus on user experience (UX) has deep roots in both the concept of practice and the concept of inquiry: UX might be defined as a practice that improves human experiences through situated inquiry within a highly contextualized space. (Cook and Crane 26) While some have chosen to use terms directly from UX, e.g., referring to students as "users" and curricula as "products," others have chosen to reference students with terms ranging from "student users" to "co-creators." (Cook and Crane 29) The goal of the project, its scope, and the context must shape the UX process. Not only is this necessary to ensure teacher-practitioners have developed a product or system that considers student experiences, but it is also necessary to create goals and develop a UX plan that matches the scope and context of the project. (Cook and Crane 31-32) Methods Journey Map Infographic: Understanding – Surveying, Journey Mapping, Journals, Card Sorting, User Profiles and Personas; Looking – Affinity Clustering, Observations, Interviews, Focus Groups, Usability; Making – Rapid Ideation, Prototyping, Operative Imaging. Under each method, they include which authors in the collection employed a specific method for UX testing. (Cook and Crane 33) Chapter 3: User Profiles as Pedagogical Tools in the Technical and Professional Communication Classroom I had previously taught the same course at the same institution but perceived a disconnect between the course material and student understanding about the material, learning management system, and course expectations. In response, I reframed my role as a TPC instructor facing student confusion to a designer facing a design problem for users. (Martin 43) I focused on two key activities to explore how TPC instructors might leverage student-user profiles to guide course and lesson design decisions: 1. developing and iterating a student-user profile before, during, and after a course; 2. understanding how information from a student-user profile can inform course and lesson design decisions. (Martin 44) A student-user profile will ideally end up as a robust, detailed tool to help you make informed pedagogical decisions. You may have information about how your students conceptualize TPC, interpret assignments, and even navigate an LMS. But starting out, all you need is a piece of paper and some general student information from your registered student list. (Martin 54) Think about what else you might know about your students to start building your student-user profile. Do you have any international students? Do you have students from different parts of the country? These distinctions may or may not be relevant based on what you subsequently learn about your users, but they offer simple starting points to consider as you brainstorm student perspectives until you can refine them with observational and self-reporting data. (Martin 54) Specifically, your design inquiry, or what you are trying to learn about users to improve their experience, (e.g., how do TPC students use the LMS?) will determine how much a profile must be altered or discarded. In short, your design inquiry will guide your student-user profile development activities. (Martin 56) Importantly, the student-user profile was based on triangulation of user "see-say-do" information (Still & Crane, 2016) rather than sole self-report data such as course surveys or student evaluations. While those tools can support a student-user profile, on their own they cannot supplement the robust approach of creating a user profile based in UCD methods. (Martin 57) Chapter 4: User Experience and Transliteracies in Technical and Professional Communication This fluidity among cultures and digital platforms is at the core of what we want to teach our students in UX—to develop methods for understanding culture not as a fixed entity, but as fluid, constantly emerging, and iterative. Transliteracy thus provides students with an entry point into broader conversations in UX regarding user research and ethical technology design. (Gonzales and Walwema 68). As an innovative framework, UX can be deployed to tackle social issues that are constantly shifting and that resist single solutions. Although many programs and courses have argued for the value of UX training, particularly within technical communication curricula, the notion of technology design and UX research more broadly can be intimidating to students who do not have experience in this area, especially given the overwhelming whiteness of UX as a field and industry. (Gonzales and Walwema 69). The transliteracy model helps UX designers determine what the target culture communication patterns might be. By gaining a snapshot of the communication environment in a particular culture to discuss implications for intercultural UX, technical communicators can interpret what they have listened to, generate new ideas, and incorporate those ideas to create UX that emerges from the users' sociocultural contexts. (Gonzales and Walwema 70). As the student narratives demonstrate, it is not enough for UX to consider diverse users; it has to take the next step of understanding users' sense of who they are in order to address their needs in a more targeted way. The narratives show that UX through a transliteracies framework encourages UX researchers to look more closely at the inequities that manifest in products and services. (Gonzales and Walwema 80). UX-inspired assignments such as journey mapping, the Notebook of Relations, and affinity diagramming activities allowed students to speak back to what they were reading while applying these readings to their own interests, experiences, and research. As we continue developing courses that thread UX and transliteracy, we hope to continue embracing this iterative course design while also maintaining an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and intercultural communication. (Gonzales and Walwema 81). A transliteracies framework in UX also assures that advocacy for users is done by both scholars and users. Rather than limit user responses to select quotes, a transliteracy framework values all user media, including audio or video stories, as legitimate sources of knowledge that together paint a panoramic picture of communities, and change minds and attitudes. (Gonzales and Walwema 82). Although we realize that the examples, narratives, and experiences that we share in this chapter are very localized to a specific course and context, we believe that the pairing of UX and transliteracy, as well as the attention to students' backgrounds and interests in designing UX curricula, can be incorporated into other programs and contexts seeking to introduce UX. The clear takeaway for UX and TPC is that combining transliteracy with iterative course design practices drawing from UX can bring empathy, efficiency, and emotional engagement by intentionally co-creating experiences with students to be better immersed in students' everyday lives. (Gonzales and Walwema 83). Chapter 5: Using Student-Experience Mapping in Academic Programs: Two Case Studies Walker explains that "A user experience map shows the users' needs, expectations, wants, and potential route to reach a particular goal. It's like a behavioral blueprint that defines how your customer may interact with your product or service" (n.p., emphasis added). (Howard 89) One of my pedagogical goals was to impress on the students that UX maps come at the end of a long, rigorous research process. Both my industry clients and my students want to jump right in and start creating maps, so I wanted them to recognize that maps are the result of scaffolding; i.e., maps can't be created without first creating personas, and personas can't be created without data resulting from triangulated empirical inquiries. (Howard 92) Even though they only represent approximately 67 percent of the users, data like those detailed above can be correlated with the admissions data we received from the Architecture School's administrative assistant in order to help the students make informed decisions about details to include in their personas. [The data listed above are those that Google Analytics provides, demographics overview, age, gender, interests, affinity categories, in-market segments, and other categories]. (Howard 96) Indeed, in our early meetings with our clients, they told us that they were attempting to decide if they needed to redesign the website so that there was a whole section of the site dedicated to the two-year track and another to the three-year (the current site combined information for both programs on the same pages). (Howard 98 Taken together, the five personas from all three teams combined with three user experience maps (one for domestic undergraduates, one for domestic graduate students, and one for international graduate students) collectively gave our clients a clear and thorough understanding of the needs that required attention in the redesign of the School of Architecture's website. (Howard 100) Without students having completed the work as a client-based project for a course, few of us who direct TPC programs could assemble the resources needed to conduct such a study. (Howard 101) We began by conducting what, today, we would call a "content audit" and surveyed and compiled all of the advising handbooks, webpages, and materials available for both students and faculty. Not surprisingly, we found that the information was "all there" and available; however, it was scattered across a variety of sources and not compiled in a user-friendly format. (Howard 101-102) Taking a single class, such as the Usability Testing and UX Design seminar I described in the first case, didn't really allow students to demonstrate "expertise" in the area. They needed more coursework. However, until the faculty engaged in this mapping exercise, we didn't realize that students were often unable to take three courses in a cognate area because of the demands of the five core courses: two required thesis research courses and at least one course required for students to obtain graduate teaching assistantships. (Howard 103) In other words, it took the mapping exercise to convince the faculty to make the painful decision to drop core TPC courses in favor of cognate courses. The mapping exercise turned faculty who had been advocates for their own privileged core course topics into student advocates. (Howard 104) Both formal and informal forms of user experience mapping improve students' academic experiences through the inclusion of students' voices in the design of websites and curricula for academic programs. (Howard 104) Chapter 6: "A Nice Change of Pace": Involving Students-as-Course-Users Early and Often In this chapter, I demonstrate how thinking of the ENGL 2312 class as a "user experience" inspired two early class activities focused on the syllabus' design and the course Blackboard site. (Pihlaja 110) While user-centered design, usability, and user experience stand as distinct, discrete objects of study and methodological approaches to design and inquiry, they share a common concern with the user. In wrestling with how to think with my students about "culture" and how texts and technologies are used in any given context, it became obvious that the way forward was to begin with the first two "commandments" of the user-centered design process: "thou must involve users early and often" (Still & Crane, 2016). (Pihlaja 112). While cultural usability is a complex topic, historically, it is concerned with the design of products for usability "cross-culturally," requiring critical analysis of the wider global context for any given local users (Sun, 2012). (Pihlaja 113) As instructors gain more experience semester-to-semester and year-to-year, student "personas," students as actual users, are iteratively re-imagined based on those who have taken the course before, succeeding or failing in various ways each year. (Pihlaja 114) Acceding expert status to students may feel like conceding instructors' role and status—one's whole reason for being a teacher. Significantly, students may also feel this way and be suspicious of instructors who do not perform competence and confidence in the learning environment or class-as-product in ways they have been enculturated to expect. (Pihlaja 115) Furthermore, the process of consulting, testing, and reflecting on course elements with students has the potential to aid the pedagogical goals of the course, using students' agency as "expert end users" of a course as learning product to engage course content itself more critically and deeply. (Pihlaja 115) To enable students' participation in (re-)designing the syllabus, at the beginning of an early class period, I placed students in groups of three to four and assigned each group a subsection of the syllabus to review. One group focused on the course description, objectives, and materials section; another, the assessment criteria for grading; another, the course policies; and finally, another, the course calendar. (Pihlaja 117) Paraphrasing: First students repeat policies listed in their section of the syllabus in their own words akin to a syllabus quiz, then identify two questions about the content, and finally what they like about the syllabus and what makes it easier to use. (Pihlaja 117) To enable students' participation in (re-)designing the syllabus, at the beginning of an early class period, I placed students in groups of three to four and assigned each group a subsection of the syllabus to review. One group focused on the course description, objectives, and materials section; another, the assessment criteria for grading; another, the course policies; and finally, another, the course calendar. (Pihlaja 118) Engaging with students about, say, whether the explanatory preface for each course goal area was really necessary in this document for what they would use it for (it wasn't) led me to revise that section in particular to make later reference to it easier (Figure 6.3). (Pihlaja 118) Without realizing my intention, students asserted (quite forcefully and in one instance with a hint of disgust if not horror) that red was an "angry" or anxiety-producing color—especially when I used it to highlight assignment due dates. (Pihlaja 120) But I do wonder whether we could take this approach every semester, regardless of the status of the class. Indeed, to ask these questions every time is to accept that students' needs and user practices are not all the same and that the culture of the class changes from semester to semester, if not more frequently (Pihlaja 123) This particular example also dovetailed nicely with our course content discussions around possible cultural differences that show up even in mundane, everyday ways (e.g., how we represent dates and time). While it is customary in the United States to represent months and days in that order, many other nations represent them in the reverse: day then month. This added a cultural competence dimension to the discussion. (Pihlaja 126) Indeed, we returned to the day-month example several times throughout the semester. In explaining what a "redesign for cross-cultural connection" of some existing text or technology might look like for their final projects, I called back to this example. (Pihlaja 127) Where the student is thought of as a user and brought into the process of designing courses, the prospects for student engagement, learning, persistence, and success are substantial. (Pihlaja 128) From an assessment perspective, thinking of students as users of course content and tools was an effective way to test their prior knowledge while disclosing (to both the instructor and students themselves) their tacit understanding of the course topic and tracking learning over the course of a semester. It has the ability to help clarify why a student might not be succeeding. (Pihlaja 129) Inviting student input on course element design no doubt renders one vulnerable. To show up on day one of a course expecting to be able to teach the class only after you've had substantial input on how students will or will not be able to "use" its organization and environment may feel like risking one's identity as a teacher. (Pihlaja 130) Of course, there's no guarantee that UCD approaches themselves will be able to move beyond the more apolitical, individualist thinking regarding student engagement that leads Collin Bjork (2018) to propose we supplement usability-type approaches with insights from digital rhetoric, identifying the inherently rhetorical dynamics at work in any user interface, such as audience, persuasion, and credibility. (Pihlaja 131) Chapter 7: Learning from the Learners: Incorporating User Experience into the Development of an Oral Communication Lab In Fall 2018, the college administration expressed support for the business communication faculty to develop new initiatives that foster students' soft skills (teamwork, leadership, ethics, and communication) and, in particular, oral communication. (Clark and Austin 138) What impact did incorporating user experience throughout the development process have on the overall success of our Oral Communication Lab? (Clark and Austin 142) As we engaged in a cycle of implementation, reflection, adjustment, and re-implementation, we realized the importance of including students in the development process. As such, our new approach echoed the approach to usability testing modeled by Shivers-McNair et al. (2018), which they define as "an empathetic, flexible, ongoing engagement with our audiences and users" (p. 39). (Clark and Austin 142) At the outset of the semester, we planned to use the following assessment instruments: an observations/electronic journal, the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24) as a pre-test and post-test, the Shannon Cooper Technology Profile, the Instructional Video Usability Survey, Speech Anxiety Thoughts Inventory (SATI), Lab Technology Usability Survey, and the final Logistics Survey. (Clark and Austin 142) The findings also showed us the importance of incorporating usability and user experience feedback during the development of initiatives like the lab. As a result of the inclusion of user experience assessments, we were able to make adjustments during the development process that aligned more with the needs of our current users. (Clark and Austin 146) Not only did we assume student attitudes toward dress, but we also assumed they would be proficient in the technologies we planned to use in the lab. The results from the Shannon-Cooper Technology Profile (Appendix B) indicated that students self-reported high proficiency in social media, basic computing programs, and the Blackboard LMS platform. (Clark and Austin 147) In contrast, Kaltura, our integrated video recording platform, scored an average of .59/10, with 22 of the 28 students giving it a score of zero. Because the Shannon-Cooper Technology Profile showed that students were not familiar with Kaltura, we felt it was important to meet each student in the lab during that student's first visit in order to lead them through, click by click, the process of recording and uploading their videos. (Clark and Austin 147) These findings also supported our perception that students were learning the technology quickly and intuitively. Our observations in the lab provided another example of this technological intuitiveness on the part of students. Once we showed the students where to open the My Media tab on Blackboard (where Kaltura is housed), many students actually started to lead us; they would find and click on the proper buttons before we pointed them out. (Clark and Austin 148) While we recognized early on that our assumptions of our users' needs and wants were not always correct, we were so focused on scaffolding skills that we did not create an opportunity for gathering feedback on basic scheduling and process logistics. (Clark and Austin 149) Though this project had a relatively small sample size, i.e., 28 students who constitute one section of a multi-section course at our university, the research findings emphasize the importance of including our students in the developmental process of initiatives aimed at supporting their professional development. (Clark and Austin 151) Had we not incorporated user feedback checkpoints or kept our eyes open during informal interactions with students, the lab and its activities would have had a much lower chance of success. First of all, we would have created more work for ourselves as teachers (and likely for the students as well) by using unsuccessful, ineffective instructional strategies. Secondly, we would have missed the innovative and insightful comments, ideas, and actions expressed by students as they navigated, learned from, and contributed to the lab. (Clark and Austin 152) Chapter 8: Ideating a New Program: Implementing Design Thinking Approaches to Develop Program Student Learning Outcomes Still, some other guides do spend more time describing PSLO (Program Student Learning Outcomes) design processes. For example, a guide developed by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln described six strategies for creating PSLOs, including holding conversations with department faculty, examining existing instructional materials, and reviewing similar units or programs (Jonson, 2006). Yet these varied strategies still emphasized a closed, faculty-centric approach rather than a UX design methodology. (Thominet 162) To meet these UX goals, this chapter describes how a design thinking process can support active and collaborative methods that integrate the knowledges and experiences of numerous stakeholders. In this way, adopting design-thinking practices can help to move us away from a faculty-centered committee model and toward a participatory approach to PSLO design that focuses on students' experiences, needs, and goals. Ideally, this process will result in more responsive, representative, and inclusive program definitions. (Thominet 163) While I adopt the d.school structure in this chapter due to its ability to open space for critical reflections on my PSLO design project, it is important to note that all these formulations of managerial design thinking share the same core practices. First, designers observe and interview stakeholders to better understand their needs. Based on this information, designers seek to clearly define the design problem. Next, large multidisciplinary teams use active, collaborative, and visual design exercises to imagine many potential solutions to the design problem. Then the teams prototype and test select ideas with potential users. Through several iterations, the prototypes are narrowed and refined until one design is finalized and implemented as a product or service. Two further points should be made about these phases. First, each phase is treated as cyclical and recursive, so further user research can occur after the product implementation, which can lead to further ideation and prototyping, etc. Second, the phases are often conceptualized as cycles of divergence and convergence: designers intentionally open up to a multiplicity of ideas and then move toward defining or narrowing solutions. For example, divergent thinking is often the focus of the ideation stage, while convergence to a singular design solution is a goal of the testing and iteration phase. (Thominet 164) The subsections that follow will be framed specifically according to the d.school process of design thinking, which includes specific stages for empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and implementing. I am using this structure here primarily because it offers a means to organize the discussion and to reflect on areas of revision in future iterations of this work. (Thominet 168) For the empathize phase of the curriculum design project, I interviewed faculty and students about their experiences in the program. First, I recruited faculty who had designed and taught at least one upper-division writing and rhetoric course. Student participants were then recruited directly by those faculty. (Thominet 169) Since the participants were not a representative sample and because we wanted to get students actively involved in our design process, we did not use the interview results as generalizable data to support specific programmatic changes. Instead, we used them to understand the situation more clearly and as an inspiration for our subsequent work. In that way, the interviews played a significant role in the next phase of problem definition, which, in turn, informed the ideation methods that followed. (Thominet 169-170) For the PSLO project, three elements of the interviews contributed to the problem-setting phase: the broad program definitions by faculty, the emphasis on practical application by students, and the lack of a shared vision among the participants. While these elements suggested some marketing strategies (e.g., tying classes to specific jobs or highlighting student testimonials), they also demonstrated the need for a clear and specific vision for the program. (Thominet 170) To foster divergent thinking, ideation typically takes place in multidisciplinary teams or workshops where participants use active collaboration techniques to conceptualize and prioritize potential solutions to a given problem. The exact methods vary, but organizational guides and popular press books have offered numerous ideation exercises (Gray et al., 2010; IDEO, 2015; Mattimore, 2012). (Thominet 171) The ideation phase for the PSLO project consisted of two identical workshops that lasted two hours each. Initially, the phase was planned as a single workshop, but conflicting schedules made it impossible to locate a single time that would work for all participants, so two smaller, identical workshops were used instead. (Thominet 171) The workshops had six stages: 1) introduction, 2) warmup, 3) ideation, 4) categorization and prioritization, 5) prototyping, and 6) reflection. I will discuss each of these stages below. (Thominet 172) Since participants had varied experience and knowledge, I presented prompts in sets, which included questions customized for students, faculty, and practitioners. Each participant was still free to respond to any version of the prompt. (Thominet 173) In the next workshop stage, participants categorized ideas using an affinity diagramming method where they first grouped sticky notes together without discussing their reasons, then named the groups, and finally, voted for the most important groups (Spool, 2004). In our workshops, participants initially created many different idea clusters, but they were subsequently asked to consolidate them whenever possible. (Thominet 174) The workshops concluded with a collective debrief. Participants discussed the ideas that were most surprising in the workshop, the exercises that worked best, and the exercises they would change. Some people were surprised at the potential outcomes that received relatively limited attention and prioritization, including teamwork and reading. Others commented on how the workshop was a positive experience, saying that they felt it valued everyone's voice and gave everyone a chance to speak. (Thominet 175) Since the outcome drafts made during the workshops were incomplete, I collaborated with another faculty member to condense the ideas from the workshops into cohesive PSLOs and to test those PSLOs with other faculty members. (Thominet 176) At the end of this process, the initial 247 ideas were narrowed into 90 outcome statements. At that point, we moved the outcomes into one (very long) list, which can be found in Appendix C. (Thominet 176) While an implementation phase is not always included in design thinking models, it is sometimes appended as a sixth step at the end of the d.school model. During the implementation phase, designers "put [their] vision into effect. [They] ensure that [their] solution is materialized and touches the lives of end users" (Gibbons, 2016). (Thominet 177) The process of implementation for the PSLOs primarily involved moving the work from ad hoc workshops and collaborations back into official program committees. The first step was to re-form the defunct major track committee. For the new instantiation, the committee membership was kept small. (Thominet 177) The committee's next major task is developing an assessment plan for the outcomes. With 16 PSLOs, assessment will not be easy. However, since the major track is a sub-degree level program (i.e., it is a track within the pre-existing English major rather than a new, standalone major), we are not subject to institutional oversight on assessment, which gives us more flexibility in our plans. Currently, we plan to assess outcome categories one at a time and to collaborate with other program committees (e.g., the technical writing committee) on assessment. (Thominet 178) Both design thinking and UX are inherently built on an iterative approach that emphasizes direct feedback from major stakeholders. For that reason, the committee is also planning on using some indirect assessment practices, including exploratory exit interviews with graduating students, to supplement our more traditional assessment methods. (Thominet 178-179) We adopted a traditional approach to creating PSLOs during the prototyping and testing phase. While the outcomes were based on the ideas and input of a broader group of stakeholders, the actual work of prototyping them still occurred in a closed faculty collaboration. While it was necessary to tame the vast amount of data from the workshops, we still might have undertaken this work in more open and participatory ways. (Thominet 181) In building a heuristic model, I also simplified the process into four activities: listening, problem setting, ideating, and iterating, as shown in Figure 8.1. In this model, the implementation phase is incorporated into the process of iteration as a recognition that programmatic design projects do not have a clear start or end point. (Thominet 182) Ultimately, when faculty and administrators can make space for intentional problem setting, we can focus our efforts on the real problems that students (and other stakeholders) encounter in academic programs. (Thominet 183) Finally, design thinking is, fundamentally, a process of iteration. It is a process that works best when solutions are modeled, tested, and changed over time. To accomplish this activity, faculty and administrators can experiment with physical and visual prototypes of the curriculum to encourage non-faculty stakeholders to actively engage in the design process. (Thominet 183) Chapter 9: Using UX Methods to Gauge Degree Efficacy This study addresses student silence by centering on student experience while completing a degree: it directly engages students in curricular development and assessment. (Cargile Cook 199) This study employs user experience research methods to gather the perspectives of these majors over time and to use that data to design a viable assessment plan, develop curriculum, and generate recruiting and marketing materials for the DMPC. Using Patricia Sullivan's (1989) definition of longitudinal field studies as a guide, this research project is designed to "employ qualitative methods to study a group or a number of individuals over a period of time" (p. 13). In her discussion of such studies, Sullivan cautions researchers who choose to use this method: longitudinal field studies are resource-, time-, and labor-intensive. (Cargile Cook 199-200) This chapter focuses on the study's design and its initial findings. It details the five user experience methods/activities in the study's design, provides a rationale for their use, and maps these methods into a four-year timeframe. It then provides results from initial data collected in order to present a student-user profile. Finally, it discusses the value of including UX methods as assessment tools for degrees in professional and technical communication. (Cargile Cook 200) In addition to participating in annual surveys and focus groups, samples of DMPC majors will engage with program administrators using three other user experience methods: user profiles, personas, and journey mapping. (Cargile Cook 201) Phase 1 of this research relies on annual surveys to collect both quantitative and qualitative data about DMPC majors' demographics and attitudes. These data will be aggregated to develop user profiles and personas. (Cargile Cook 202) While surveys are the first interaction students will have with this research, focus groups will be their last…. Each focus group session will last approximately two hours and be held in a designated focus group room with audio and video recording capabilities. The focus group team will include the moderator and at least one additional researcher to take notes. The focus group will provide a concluding snapshot of student experiences with DMPC courses, degree plans, advisors, and administrators. It will also ask majors for their ideas on degree revisions, innovations, and marketing and recruiting materials. (Cargile Cook 202) In the spring semester of 2020, program administrators will invite a random sample of DMPC majors to meet for the first time in a persona development workshop. This workshop begins Phase 2 of the study. After completing the required Institutional Review Board (IRB) informed consent procedures, administrators will report the aggregate survey results—the user profile—to participants, explaining how user profiles inform user experience research and how they lead to the development of personas. They will then explain how to construct personas of DMPC majors from key demographics, interests, and opinions. (Cargile Cook 203) Phase 3 of the study requires participants to create two kinds of journey maps, one for their fictional personas and a second for themselves. A journey map is a "visual depiction of what users need and what steps they take to fulfill those needs as they interact with a product" (Still & Crane, 2016 p. 95) from first interaction to last. Journey maps generated in this study focus on how personas (and eventually participants) begin their journey with the declaration of the DMPC major and end with their leaving the major or graduation. (Cargile Cook 204) Participants will have to puzzle through degree plan requirements and catalog course descriptions to successfully map their persona's journey from matriculation to graduation. At the end of the session, debriefings will follow, describing maps and discussing different paths and rationales used. After the debriefing, future-state maps will be used for analysis. (Cargile Cook 206) Because survey results provide useful information about DMPC majors, the results are reported in this section in spite of the low response rates. While such low rates may be criticized for their lack of generalizability, ignoring the results of those majors who did respond, from administrators' perspectives, would be indefensible. In other words, administrators realized that although the response rate was low, even a low response rate was user data that offered important insights about programmatic efficacy. (Cargile Cook 209-210) For now, the results of this study are inconclusive and provide only first impressions of DMPC majors. Through iterative studies and multiple methods, DMPC administrators recognize that program assessment is an inexact art: Some methods deployed work better than others. Some results provide better data than others. Failures are part of any UX process and cannot be avoided, but UX processes also produce successes. Furthermore, innovation is not a linear process, and continuous improvement requires longitudinal study whatever methods are used to collect and report data. (Cargile Cook 217) Employing user experience methods offers a methodological rationale for including student voices and experiences in program assessment that other means of assessment simply do not. (Cargile Cook 217) Chapter 10: Real-World User Experience: Engaging Students and Industry Professionals Through a Mentor Program John Gould and Clayton Lewis (1985) coined the phrase "user-centered design" and defined it as having three central characteristics: (1) early focus on users, (2) systematic data collection, and (3) iterative design. Using this model, we wanted to investigate the "joint enterprise" that results from strategic interaction of students and industry professionals (TCAB members and program alumni) through a mentor program. (Katsman Breuch et al 220) Throughout the pilot, we were chiefly concerned with this question: How might user experience in a mentor program address the academic-industry gap? Sub-questions included the following: What is the "user experience" of participating in a mentor program? And how can we make improvements to a mentor program based on user/participant feedback? Our goal was to integrate user feedback with instructional design to find ways to better bridge industry and academia and to engage students and industry practitioners. This approach is indeed innovative and useful as we actively practice student-practitioner engagement as a method for cultivating real-world user experience through such joint enterprise activity. (Katsman Breuch et al 221) Our TCAB is an intergenerational group of business leaders whose purpose is to provide exemplary networking and experiential learning opportunities for students and to enrich the curriculum and visibility of our programs, students, faculty, and staff. Three of our academic programs––a B.S. in Technical Writing and Communication, a Graduate Certificate in Technical Communication, and an M.S. in Scientific and Technical Communication––have opportunities to interact with TCAB members. (Katsman Breuch et al 223) We provided time for the pairs to meet and asked them to articulate goals for their mentorship pairing, and we also asked them to plan for two additional points of contact in the remaining 15-week period. (See Appendix A for launch meeting worksheet.) We then asked pairs to come back to a large group discussion in which we fielded any additional questions about the program. The mentor-mentee pairs were then on their own to conduct their plans. (Katsman Breuch et al 224) We use community of practice theory as a framework for our study of this mentor program, in that we are interested in Wenger's (1998) three dimensions for establishing a community of practice––joint enterprise, mutual engagement, and shared repertoire––as a framework. (Katsman Breuch et al 224) A community of practice framework for the study of our mentor program also aligns well with user experience and user-centered design theory and practice. By integrating "user experience" in our mentor program, we mean understanding not just performance or preference of a specific task but rather the entire user experience before, during, and after their "use" or participation in the mentor program (see Getto & Beecher, 2016; Potts & Salvo, 2018; Rose et al., 2017; Still & Crane, 2017). (Katsman Breuch et al 225) Specifically, we asked users—in this case, students and mentors—to inform us of ways they believed the mentor program did or did not address the gap between academia and industry and of recommendations they would have to improve the program. In gathering this input, we approach the mentor program through a collaboratively constructed user-centered design perspective that relies on participant research and takes into account participant contributions that will be addressed as the program continues to improve. (Katsman Breuch et al 225-226) This initial meeting included an introduction to the mentor program, including an overview of participation and suggested structure for the mentor pairs. We asked mentors and students to articulate goals for participating in the program and outline three contact meetings that would occur during the program. (Katsman Breuch et al 226) Near the end of the 15-week period, we distributed a questionnaire to all participants that asked questions about the goals of their mentor pair, their meeting choices, their hopes for the program, and whether or not hopes were met. The questionnaire also asked participants for reflections about how the program addressed the academic-industry gap and any recommendations. (Katsman Breuch et al 226-227) The last item on the survey asked if participants would be willing to participate in a brief interview about their experience. Of the survey participants, 23 agreed to be interviewed. We scheduled brief 15-minute interviews with these participants using whatever method worked best, whether in-person, video conference, or phone. One interview was conducted with two participants at the same time; all others were conducted one-to-one. (Katsman Breuch et al 228-229) In order to create the mentor pairings, we began by reviewing these survey responses for each participant. We also took into consideration a brief one to two paragraph statement written by each student, which expressed their specific interests and reasons for wanting a mentor through this program. Based on the student paragraphs and survey data from students and mentors, we conducted an informal coding process that looked for similar themes, interests, and goals between the students and mentors. When an ideal match surfaced in the themes, the student and mentor were paired together. (Katsman Breuch et al 231) In our post-participation survey, we asked users what their hopes were for the program as it continues and how well their hopes are being met. (Katsman Breuch et al 233) From surveys and interviews, we identified the need to revisit these goals throughout the program and to add more specificity to these; e.g., what exactly does it mean to "bridge the gap" as a student meets with a technical communication professional for the first time? While academics may use PLN visualizations to indicate resources, tools, and contexts within which they work and learn, such visualizations are not commonly used in either academia or industry. Therefore, we should articulate mentor-mentee strategies that more clearly relate to making connections that build understanding about technical communication industries and how to best develop skills for securing a position and being successful in this profession. (Katsman Breuch et al 242) User feedback allowed us to better understand the mentor program user experience, and in this case, we learned that the student experience needs to broaden outside the classroom. We see such a user experience perspective as bridging industry and academia, as integrating design and instructional design, as engaging students and industry practitioners. (Katsman Breuch et al 244) Chapter 11: User Experience Design and Double Binds in Course Design I have a strong inclination toward pedagogical practices that prioritize what works best for students in the classroom. Elsewhere (Zachry & Spyridakis, 2016), I have described this commitment and how it helped shape program and curricular decisions broadly in my home department. In this chapter, however, I will explore some of the inherent challenges in following this approach at a more granular level—that of an individual class. In particular, I will explore the experience of attempting to place student needs and desires as a central concern in the design of a class. (Zachry 251-252) Effective instruction emerges from the artful design of learning experiences that should be meaningfully informed by attention to the people (students) we will engage in that design. (Zachry 252) Experienced instructors know that the insights students offer are often uneven, perhaps reflecting a singular perspective or not accounting for the overall learning context the instructor is working within. Some insights, nevertheless, are relatively easy to address and require negligible effort to implement. Addressing some other needs and desires, though, requires more substantive changes. (Zachry 252) In this chapter, then, the phenomena that I am particularly interested in exploring is that in which attempting to use feedback from students can lead to double binds for instructors who are attempting to design the best possible learning environments. To facilitate this exploration, I will draw on examples from a class that I routinely teach at my institution. As I present each of the three examples, my focus will be on my attempt to foster a classroom design that is responsive to the experiences of students. I will then expand on the theory of double binds in responding to the needs and desires of students when designing a class-based learning experience. (Zachry 253) implementing a course design feature suggested by students from a previous class immediately surfaced new concerns that countered the suggested feature in an unanticipated way. Clearly, within the broad student population, people held competing—perhaps irreconcilable—thoughts about how course evaluation should be designed. (Zachry 255) Drawn from my teaching experiences over three years, each of these examples illustrates a variation on dilemmas that I have faced as I have attempted to integrate the experience of learners in these classes into its design. To think productively about these instances and how they might have implications for using a UX approach to class design, I see value in thinking about double binds in UX design. (Zachry 258) In the context of class design following a UX approach, a double bind is a situation in which the designer faces a dilemma due to competing demands. On one hand, the instructor-designer seeks to hear from students about their needs and desires as learners and to incorporate what is discovered into the design of the course. On the other hand, the instructor-designer is positioned within an institutional context that places its own demands (including educational policies and conventions), affecting what may or may not be possible or wise to do in the classroom. (Zachry 259) When acting as designers and following UX priorities, these same instructors will periodically hear from students that the standards for measurement and evaluation should be altered. In my example 1, this recommendation came in the unexpected form of making the standards more demanding. In this instance, upon analyzing the costs and benefits of making such a design change, I decided to follow the institutional process to make the course graded (rather than credit/no-credit). The choice, however, was not clearly or necessarily the right one. (Zachry 260) The details of these three examples are specific to my institutional context, but the types of double binds they represent are almost certainly recognizable to most readers. I could readily point to instances of such double binds in other courses I have taught over recent years, as I anticipate nearly any instructor-designer could. (Zachry 261) This framing clearly has a relationship to notions of constraints and competing interests in design, but it is more specific. In particular, this framing places an emphasis on the conflicted, felt experience of instructor-designers. That is, double binds are experienced personally as tensions in our identity as we occupy our professional/institutional roles and also seek to empathize with the experiences of our students and empower them to contribute to the design of their education. (Zachry 262) We should expect double binds to be part of the essence of our work, not something that can be resolved for all time with a single, clever design decision My purpose here is not to solve these three forms of double binds (or the many others that we face). Instead, I want to provide a framework that facilitates naming and discussing a phenomenon that we experience as instructor-designers who want to embrace the values of UX and attend to the needs and desires of learners. (Zachry 262) Chapter 12: User Experience in the Professional and Technical Writing Major: Pedagogical Approaches and Student Perspectives This chapter explores a central research question for educators of professional and technical writing majors: How can a program best prepare students for future career opportunities and the skills needed to succeed in those careers? We argue for user experience as a pedagogical approach for educating students about one university's professional writing major. (Bay et al 266) We argue that user experience (UX) can serve as a more robust framework for understanding how a programmatic experience can facilitate student engagement with/in a field of study. User experience, as a concept, attempts to capture all of the aspects embedded in one's experience with an outside entity or situation. (Bay et al 266) We present a case study of an undergraduate research methods class that asked students to assess user experiences in the professional and technical writing major at Purdue. In teams, we surveyed, interviewed, and visually mapped our large network of alumni, with particular attention to location and job position, as well as surveying current students in the major. We framed much of this work around data visualization methods (Wolfe, 2015), especially in mapping our program's alumni, in order to contextualize the ways in which user experience can also function as "big data" (McNely et al., 2015). (Bay et al 267) A key takeaway for readers is learning about a flexible pedagogical approach to user experience that combines program assessment, introduction of students to the major, development and donor relations, as well as critical reflection on students as users. Perhaps most importantly, this article is co-written by undergraduates in the professional and technical writing major, demonstrating their roles as users and as user experience researchers. (Bay et al 267) When we develop a major or concentration, we are creating an experience for students. We want students to proceed through a program and not only learn concepts, theories, and approaches, but also to develop a sense of themselves as future professionals entering a community of practice. These students will also be "products" of a program and its approaches, much like we see doctoral students as products of a particular program, with particular strengths and ways of seeing the world. (Bay et al 268) One approach we might take is thinking about specific sites or courses as micro-testing grounds to gauge the experiences of a program's students and/or alumni. In a sense, this approach relies on what we might term "programmatic UX," or taking the temperature of users at a specific moment and in a particular context. Programmatic UX could be one way to iteratively research, test, and refine particular aspects of a program's user experience. (Bay et al 269) Unlike programs such as engineering or computer science, the professional and technical writing program at our university does not have dedicated staff to collect and maintain data on our alumni (in fact, as a humorous aside, when Jenny requested data on our professional writing alumni from the university development office, she received a list of alumni from the creative writing major instead). She realized that without understanding the prior experiences of alumni, it would be difficult to design a better experience for current students. (Bay et al 270) One programmatic illumination from this project was that the LinkedIn alumni group is a self-selected group, meaning that members were not necessarily alumni of our specific professional writing program. Almost all of the members were alumni from Purdue, but they may have earned different degrees and were working as professional or technical writers. Thus, some of these users were not necessarily users of the program but were users in the field, which provided a rich set of perspectives. (Bay et al 272) What the diversity of group members showed was that members identified themselves in terms of their careers first and their majors/education second. They saw professional and technical writing less as a field of study and more as a career trajectory that was not necessarily connected to an academic program. In thinking of program assessment, then, career preparation as a category of assessment might need to be more nuanced. (Bay et al 272) The research these students performed was also beneficial to them as students of the program since the information they collected increased the awareness of the students around them. They felt that it was strange that there was no prior research into the students in the professional writing program because they assumed that the program would know everything about the students and alumni. The team decided to send out a survey in order to obtain the answers to their questions. That process in itself was something with which the group had little previous experience. (Bay et al 275) To understand how to create an effective survey, the team researched and spent time attempting to gather as much data as possible. They needed to create a survey which was unbiased, yet still asked specific questions to collect the desired feedback. The trouble was related to leading questions, as the team did not want to affect the responses they received with the framing of the prompts. Part of this issue might have been because the students themselves belonged to the population being studied. (Bay et al 275) The method used to collect this data unfolded as the team worked on the project since it was difficult to collect data from scratch. Data on alumni of the professional writing program was collected through multiple outlets and was stored in a Google Sheets file. First, data was gathered from the Purdue Professional Writing Group on LinkedIn by sorting through the group members for graduates of the program. Many members of the group were not professional writing alumni and thus were not added to the database. The team looked at connections to our faculty in the program, as well as other alumni for more names to add to the database. A final data source was the PW-Talk email list, which is a listserv for current students and alumni of the program. In all, students collected data for over 300 program alumni. (Bay et al 277) The resulting data set was used to create visual graphics, including a word cloud graphic of job titles (see Figure 12.3), as well as pie charts and graphs displayed in a poster for the final presentation to stakeholders. The most valuable aspect of this project for Margaret was creating something that would be used for purposes beyond turning it in for a grade. Beyond creating the poster displaying the results of the project to members of the English department, the team was able to share the database with the administration of the professional writing program for them to use for their own purposes. For Margaret, this type of "service learning" is the most beneficial because it combines the learning process with applications outside of the classroom. (Bay et al 277) Several common threads of the user experience emerge from these project reflections, which we didn't realize until writing this chapter. The first is that user experience in the professional writing major includes more than just academic or career preparation; rather, it also includes life preparation. As Ashlie notes, the UX approach of the class led her to become more aware and understanding of other human beings with whom she interacts. Likewise, there was a consensus that the subject matter experts reinforced that everyone is human; we all make mistakes and are still learning while on the job. (Bay et al 277-278) The UX approach of the class meant compiling information not only for student projects and grades, but for the program as a whole. Students believed that the program administrators could use the information gleaned from the survey to help structure the program and its curriculum to something that the students could be proud of by the time they graduate. (Bay et al 278) These conclusions led us to see how programmatic assessment does not necessarily need to occur from the outside looking in; rather, perhaps students can be the most lucid assessors of our programs. Students, as users, can provide rich reflections on the value of a program and where that program can be strengthened. (Bay et al 279) Jenny plans to engage current students and classes to continue participating in this evaluation of user experience so there can be a reciprocal and iterative process for understanding the user experiences of the program, as well as continue to teach students how to research and respond to user experience as a methodological approach. (Bay et al 279) Chapter 13: Program as Product: UX and Writing Program Design in Technical and Professional Communication As TPC administrators consider the range of available approaches to building and improving programs, we argue that user experience (UX) methods can provide an innovative approach to program redevelopment. In this chapter, we explore how UX approaches to program redesign differ from existing approaches, and we forward the idea of program as "product" and students as "users" to theoretically ground this shift to UX-based research methods. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 286) Through this research, we demonstrate the value that UX-grounded research brings to program redesign, and we offer suggestions for initial and extended programmatic research based on the idea of students as users of programs. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 286) UX has the potential to illuminate the invisible or overlooked experiences of the users of an organization's product or service. Many programs include alumni when gathering feedback on program design processes, yet only including alumni in these processes may cause programs to miss out on gathering current or future students' perspectives. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 287) From these examples, we can see how nonprofit organizations of all kinds can use UX to improve stakeholder experiences of their products, whether those products are informational materials, goods, or services. In higher education, our products are the programs that we offer to students. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 287) Programs are products associated with university brands, and they are marketed to prospective students who have many choices about where to enroll. It may be a question of semantics, as Eric Stoller (2014) argues, yet "calling ourselves anything but a business seems unfair and untrue. Students pay a great deal for the product that is higher education" (n.p.). Almost all students and/or their families contribute at least some of their own funds towards their higher education. Students pay for opportunities to take classes and earn degrees, and they should understand that there is no guarantee as to whether they will pass, fail, or get a job just because they paid for an educational experience. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 288) Similarly, Bridget Burns (2016) has called for more institutions to adopt the practice of "process mapping" to improve student experiences. She makes the point that "[a]s consumers, we expect that retailers or service providers have designed the experience around the customer. We become frustrated when things are counterintuitive, bureaucratic, slow, difficult or painful. So why should we tolerate flawed processes that frustrate our students?" (n.p.). She gives examples of process mapping initiatives conducted by Georgia State University and Michigan State University that assisted students, especially first-generation students who lacked external support, with navigating university processes such as those surrounding admissions and financial aid. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 289) Viewing student experience as user experience forces us to view programs from a new angle. Adding UX to our continuous improvement practices can challenge underlying assumptions about what education means—in a beneficial way. Framing students as users can be a disruptive and innovative program design practice ( Johnson et al., 2017). UX in program design positions students as active learners who already possess valuable knowledge sets, even as they seek more skills and knowledge from an educational program. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 290) Students are the users of our products—the educational experiences facilitated by our programs. Yet, our unspoken assumptions may resemble the reverse scenario—we may tend to regard students as the products of our programs. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 290) The continuous improvement and UX processes that we apply in program design can increase the quality of these educational experiences, but students ultimately determine how they interact with the product and how they use it in their lives and careers. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 290) As a first step in applying UX principles to program redesign, we now turn to our study of the various ways that students interact with a program's representatives, spaces, activities, and artifacts. These sites of interaction may be viewed as interfaces. Identifying these allows us to create a map of all the sites where students encounter the idea of an individual TPC program. These interfaces may fall into some of the "programmatic landscapes" as defined by Schreiber and Melonçon (2019); however, the focus for a UX methodology will be on how students experience these areas, which will be completely different from how a program administrator experiences them. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 291) While Guo's approach is geared towards business products, these four elements of UX may also be applied to the design of any system. Guo simplifies the purpose behind each element with a question: Value - Is it useful? Usability - Is it easy to use? Adoptability - Is it easy to start using? Desirability - Is it fun and engaging? (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 291-292) To explore Guo's four UX elements in our programs' interfaces, we have developed and administered a survey to current students and alumni at our respective programs that have some similarities and many differences. Gracemarie's program at an R2 university (formerly a regional comprehensive university only three years prior) has recently developed a minor, certificate (for non-writing arts majors), and concentration (for writing arts majors) in technical and professional writing. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 292) Through this survey, we seek to identify the multimodality of student interactions. Some interfaces are concrete artifacts, while some interfaces are immaterial—they involve exchanging ideas about the program by talking to people and participating (voluntarily or involuntarily) in experiences. We must also keep in mind that the interfaces through which students encounter our programs actually involve varying degrees of programmatic involvement (and therefore control). (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 293) The first set of survey questions asks students four questions about their institution, major or minor area of study, and how far they have progressed in their program. In our analysis of survey results, we evaluate significant differences in the answers of current students versus alumni across both institutions. Responses from current students and alumni of each institution's technical / professional writing program are considered valid. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 293-294) This UX survey focuses on general attitudes about the program's worth or usefulness, but the primary focus is not on evaluation of program content. Survey questions about perceived value from students' perspectives should complement, not replace, alumni and employer surveys that help determine which TPC curriculum areas are valuable in professional settings. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 294) We adopt Guo's "usability" category because we want to measure how easy it is for students to "use" our programs without encountering practical or logistical problems. This category is separated from user perceptions of value and desirability, although somewhat arbitrarily—user perceptions about value and desirability cannot be completely divided from the more practical aspects of use. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 294) UX methods that focus on "usability," understood as students' "use" of a program, can help us to identify and remove any barriers that may hinder students' progress through these requirements. Our survey asks five questions concerning usability that focus on how easily students progress through the program. In contrast to the adoptability section, which deals with how easy it is for students to learn about and enter the program, this section focuses on students' progression as program users. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 295) This section asks five questions that help to establish how students perceive what we have called the program interfaces—the sites where the idea of the program surfaces for students. Becoming aware of the program and what it entails allows student to evaluate whether it suits their needs. This section of the survey also measures how easy students thought it was for them to join the program by declaring it as their major/minor (or certificate, if applicable). (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 295) The element of desirability involves students' satisfaction with the program. Education is not entertainment—it is not supposed to be "fun." Nonetheless, as we address in our discussion of UX methods, there may be ways to evaluate whether students are engaged and satisfied that go beyond data usually gathered through traditional course evaluations, which come with their own controversies about gender bias, racial bias, and general ineffectiveness in evaluating personnel. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 295) One of the consistent findings of our survey was the importance of people— particularly professors and advisors—and artifacts as program interfaces. Professors were mentioned, often by name, in questions surrounding program value, and advisors were cited as an essential component of ease of use. Professors also played a large role in adoptability by introducing students to available programs, and advisors contributed through their assistance in helping students go through the steps of formally adopting their program. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 302) Artifacts also played a large role in respondents' experiences in their programs, particularly in the areas of adoptability and ease of use. Though students' first exposure to the program was typically through a person, artifacts more commonly provided information throughout students' experience in a program. As artifacts also came up as a highly requested way to clarify program requirements for questions regarding ease of use, we need to seriously consider the role of documents in helping students understand and navigate our programs. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 302) Questions regarding content, design, and access to these artifacts would all be relevant. Participatory design projects, as described by Salvo and Ren (2007), could follow, perhaps assigned as course projects where students would develop engaging and useful program artifacts. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 302) Implementing UX tools such as interviews, focus groups, or observations would be a starting point for additional research to help us learn more about student-faculty/advisor interactions. Methods such as think-aloud testing could also be implemented with faculty and advisors to help improve the usability of the documents from which they draw their knowledge. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 303) As a next phase of research, task analysis, which examines the actions users take as they work toward completing a task, would be a particularly helpful research tool to implement. In the case of our programs in particular, task analysis relating to advising and course selection would provide helpful insights into the ways that various people, artifacts, and experiences come into play as students navigate the course registration process. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 303) While we could again speculate about students' reasoning for preferring one variation over the other, additional research could more productively illuminate students' perceptions regarding this distinction. Interviews or focus groups could be particularly helpful for learning more about major and course preferences. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 304) As our students, institutions, and worlds change, so too will student needs and experiences with our programs. For example, in a preCOVID-19 world, Christine's focus group finding leads us to reassess the value of physical artifacts. In the world in the midst of a pandemic (as of this writing), however, when students may not be physically on campus, such physical artifacts will obviously shift in importance in students' experience. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 306) All of this is not to discourage user research in the present moment or to demand incessant research that never allows us to make changes, but simply to encourage faculty and administrators using UX-based approaches to programs to adopt an attitude of continual curiosity toward user experience, as advocated by Schreiber and Melonçon, and to be attentive to context and time in planning and analyzing data. (Masters-Wheeler and Fillenwarth 306)
Kate Crawford Notable Quotations Full screen view Page 5 the concept of intelligence has done inordinate harm over centuries and has been used to justify relations of domination from slavery to eugenics. Page 7 this belief that the mind is like a computer, and vice versa, has "infected decades of thinking in the computer and cognitive sciences," creating a kind of original sin for the field. Page 8 In contrast, in this book I argue that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications. AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominant interests. In this sense, artificial intelligence is a registry of power. AI systems both reflect and produce social relations and understandings of the world. Page 9 "Machine learning" is more commonly used in the technical literature. Yet the nomenclature of AI is often embraced during funding application season, For my purposes, I use AI to talk about the massive industrial formation that includes politics, labor, culture, and capital. what is being optimized, and for whom, and who gets to decide. Then we can trace the implications of those choices. Page 11 This colonizing impulse centralizes power in the AI field: it determines how the world is measured and defined while simultaneously denying that this is an inherently political activity. Page 13 the politics of technology, Page 15 Mining is where we see the extractive politics of AI at their most literal. building models for natural language processing and computer vision is enormously energy hungry, and the competition to produce faster and more efficient models has driven computationally greedy methods that expand AI's carbon footprint. Page 16 Systems are increasing surveillance and control for their bosses. When these collections of data are no longer seen as people's personal material but merely as infrastructure, the specific meaning or context of an image or a video is assumed to be irrelevant. Page 17 By looking at how classifications are made, we see how technical schemas enforce hierarchies and magnify inequity. affect recognition, the idea that facial expressions hold the key to revealing a person's inner emotional state. there is considerable scientific controversy around emotion detection, which is at best incomplete and at worst misleading. Despite the unstable premise, these tools are being rapidly implemented into hiring, education, and policing systems. The deep interconnections between the tech sector and the military are now being reined in to fit a strong nationalist agenda. Page 18 The concluding chapter assesses how artificial intelligence functions as a structure of power that combines infrastructure, capital, and labor. AI systems are built with the logics of capital, policing, and militarization— and this combination further widens the existing asymmetries of power. Artificial intelligence, then, is an idea, an infrastructure, an industry, a form of exercising power, and a way of seeing; it's also a manifestation of highly organized capital backed by vast systems of extraction and logistics, with supply chains that wrap around the entire planet. Page 20 This book argues that addressing the foundational problems of AI and planetary computation requires connecting issues of power and justice: from epistemology to labor rights, resource extraction to data protections, racial inequity to climate change. ONE. Earth Page 26 The history of mining, like the devastation it leaves in its wake, is commonly overlooked in the strategic amnesia that accompanies stories of technological progress. Page 28 The greatest benefits of extraction have been captured by the few. The effects of large-scale computation can be found in the atmosphere, the oceans, the earth's crust, the deep time of the planet, and the brutal impacts on disadvantaged populations around the world. Page 29 Tesla could more accurately be described as a battery business than a car company. 14 The imminent shortage of such critical minerals as nickel, copper, and lithium poses a risk for the company, making the lithium lake at Silver Peak highly desirable. Page 30 The term "artificial intelligence" may invoke ideas of algorithms, data, and cloud architectures, but none of that can function without the minerals and resources that build computing's core components. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are essential for mobile devices and laptops, in-home digital assistants, and data center backup power. Page 31 The cloud is the backbone of the artificial intelligence industry, and it's made of rocks and lithium brine and crude oil. From the perspective of deep time, we are extracting Earth's geological history to serve a split second of contemporary technological time, Page 32 The Bay Area is a central node in the mythos of AI, but we'll need to traverse far beyond the United States to see the many-layered legacies of human and environmental damage that have powered the tech industry. Page 33 There are seventeen rare earth elements: But extracting these minerals from the ground often comes with local and geopolitical violence. Mining is and always has been a brutal undertaking. Page 34 Mining profits have financed military operations in the decades-long Congo-area conflict, fueling the deaths of thousands and the displacement of millions. Page 35 While mining to finance war is one of the most extreme cases of harmful extraction, most minerals are not sourced from direct war zones. This doesn't mean, however, that they are free from human suffering and environmental destruction. Page 38 It is a common practice of life to focus on the world immediately before us, the one we see and smell and touch every day. It grounds us where we are, with our communities and our known corners and concerns. But to see the full supply chains of AI requires looking for patterns in a global sweep, a sensitivity to the ways in which the histories and specific harms are different from place to place and yet are deeply interconnected by the multiple forces of extraction. Page 41 algorithmic computing, computational statistics, and artificial intelligence were developed in the twentieth century to address social and environmental challenges but would later be used to intensify industrial extraction and exploitation and further deplete environmental resources. Advanced computation is rarely considered in terms of carbon footprints, fossil fuels, and pollution; metaphors like "the cloud" imply something floating and delicate within a natural, green industry. As Tung-Hui Hu writes in A Prehistory of the Cloud, "The cloud is a resource-intensive, extractive technology that converts water and electricity into computational power, leaving a sizable amount of environmental damage that it then displaces from sight." 52 Page 42 running only a single NLP model produced more than 660,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of five gas-powered cars over their total lifetime (including their manufacturing) or 125 round-trip flights from New York to Beijing. 56 Page 43 Data centers are among the world's largest consumers of electricity. Page 45 Just as the dirty work of the mining sector was far removed from the companies and city dwellers who profited most, so the majority of data centers are far removed from major population hubs, whether in the desert or in semi-industrial exurbs. Page 48 We have seen how AI is much more than databases and algorithms, machine learning models and linear algebra. It is metamorphic: relying on manufacturing, transportation, and physical work; data centers and the undersea cables that trace lines between the continents; personal devices and their raw components; transmission signals passing through the air; datasets produced by scraping the internet; and continual computational cycles. These all come at a cost. TWO. Labor Page 54 Robotics has become a key part of Amazon's logistical armory, and while the machinery seems well tended, the corresponding human bodies seem like an afterthought. Humans are the necessary connective tissue to get ordered items into containers and trucks and delivered to consumers. But they aren't the most valuable or trusted component of Amazon's machine. Page 56 Many large corporations are heavily investing in automated systems in the attempt to extract ever-larger volumes of labor from fewer workers. Logics of efficiency, surveillance, and automation are all converging in the current turn to computational approaches to managing labor. Rather than debating whether humans will be replaced by robots, in this chapter I focus on how the experience of work is shifting in relation to increased surveillance, algorithmic assessment, and the modulation of time. Page 56 humans are increasingly treated like robots and what this means for the role of labor. Page 57 work. But large-scale computation is deeply rooted in and running on the exploitation of human bodies. Page 58 The common refrain for the expansion of AI systems and process automation is that we are living in a time of beneficial human-AI collaboration. engagement, where workers are expected to re-skill, keep up, and unquestioningly accept each new technical development. Page 60 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the propaganda about hard work came in the forms of pamphlets and essays on the importance of discipline and sermons on the virtues of early rising and working diligently for as long as possible. The use of time came to be seen in both moral and economic terms: understood as a currency, time could be well spent or squandered away. Page 63 Exploitative forms of work exist at all stages of the AI pipeline, from the mining sector, where resources are extracted and transported to create the core infrastructure of AI systems, to the software side, where distributed workforces are paid pennies per microtask. Page 64 The technical AI research community relies on cheap, crowd-sourced labor for many tasks that can't be done by machines. Between 2008 and 2016, the term "crowdsourcing" went from appearing in fewer than a thousand scientific articles to more than twenty thousand--which makes sense, given that Mechanical Turk launched in 2005. But during the same time frame, there was far too little debate about what ethical questions might be posed by relying on a workforce that is commonly paid far below the minimum wage. 21 Page 65 Sometimes workers are directly asked to pretend to be an AI system. Page 66 The writer Astra Taylor has described the kind of overselling of high-tech systems that aren't actually automated as "fauxtomation." 26 Automated systems appear to do work previously performed by humans, but in fact the system merely coordinates human work in the background. The true labor costs of AI are being consistently downplayed and glossed over, but the forces driving this performance run deeper than merely marketing trickery. It is part of a tradition of exploitation and deskilling, Page 67 Fauxtomation does not directly replace human labor; rather, it relocates and disperses it in space and time. In so doing it increases the disconnection between labor and value and thereby performs an ideological function. Some 250 years later, the hoax lives on. Amazon chose to name its micropayment-based crowdsourcing platform "Amazon Mechanical Turk," despite the association with racism and trickery. Page 68 On Amazon's platform, real workers remain out of sight in service of an illusion that AI systems are autonomous and magically intelligent. Now Mechanical Turk connects businesses with an unseen and anonymous mass of workers who bid against one another for the opportunity to work on a series of microtasks. In a paradox that many of us have experienced, and ostensibly in order to prove true human identity when reading a website, we are required to convince Google's reCAPTCHA of our humanity. So we dutifully select multiple boxes containing street numbers, or cars, or houses. We are training Google's image recognition algorithms for free. Page 69 Again, the myth of AI as affordable and efficient depends on layers of exploitation, including the extraction of mass unpaid labor to fine-tune the AI systems of the richest companies on earth. Contemporary forms of artificial intelligence are neither artificial nor intelligent. Page 71 work. As Astra Taylor argues, "The kind of efficiency to which techno-evangelists aspire emphasizes standardization, simplification, and speed, not diversity, complexity, and interdependence." 38 Page 75 A 2014 class action lawsuit against McDonald's restaurants in California noted that franchisees are led by software that gives algorithmic predictions regarding employee-to-sales ratios and instructs managers to reduce staff quickly when demand drops. 47 Employees reported being told to delay clocking in to their shifts and instead to hang around nearby, ready to return to work if the restaurant started getting busy again. Because employees are paid only for time clocked in, the suit alleged that this amounted to significant wage theft on the part of the company and its franchisees. 48 Page 76 There was an almost total removal of all conceptual work from execution of tasks." workers clock in to their shifts by swiping access badges or by presenting their fingerprints to readers attached to electronic time clocks. They work in front of timing devices that indicate the minutes or seconds left to perform the current task before a manager is notified. They sit at workstations fitted with sensors that continuously report on their body temperature, their physical distance from colleagues, the amount of time they spend browsing websites instead of performing assigned tasks, and so on. Page 77 Surveillance apparatuses are justified for producing inputs for algorithmic scheduling systems that further modulate work time, or to glean behavioral signals that may correlate with signs of high or low performance, or merely sold to data brokers as a form of insight. young, mostly male engineers, often unencumbered by time-consuming familial or community responsibilities, are building the tools that will police very different workplaces, quantifying the productivity and desirability of employees. The workaholism and round-the-clock hours often glorified by tech start-ups become an implicit benchmark against which other workers are measured, producing a vision of a standard worker that is masculinized, narrow, and reliant on the unpaid or underpaid care work of others. Page 81 Although there will always be ways to resist the imposed temporality of work, with forms of algorithmic and video monitoring, this becomes much harder--as the relation between work and time is observed at ever closer range. Page 82 defining time is an established strategy for centralizing power. Page 85 AI and algorithmic monitoring are simply the latest technologies in the long historical development of factories, timepieces, and surveillance architectures. Page 88 All kinds of workers are subject to the extractive technical infrastructures that seek to control and analyze time to its finest grain--many of whom have no identification with the technology sector or tech work at all. THREE. Data Page 93 I've looked at hundreds of datasets over years of research into how AI systems are built, but the NIST mug shot databases are particularly disturbing because they represent the model of what was to come. It's not just the overwhelming pathos of the images themselves. Nor is it solely the invasion of privacy they represent, since suspects and prisoners have no right to refuse being photographed. It's that the NIST databases foreshadow the emergence of a logic that has now thoroughly pervaded the tech sector: the unswerving belief that everything is data and is there for the taking. It doesn't matter where a photograph was taken or whether it reflects a moment of vulnerability or pain or if it represents a form of shaming the subject. It has become so normalized across the industry to take and use whatever is available that few stop to question the underlying politics. I argue this represents a shift from image to infrastructure, where the meaning or care that might be given to the image of an individual person, or the context behind a scene, is presumed to be erased at the moment it becomes part of an aggregate mass that will drive a broader system. It is all treated as data to be run through functions, material to be ingested to improve technical performance. This is a core premise in the ideology of data extraction. Page 94 A computer vision system can detect a face or a building but not why a person was inside a police station or any of the social and historical context surrounding that moment. The mug shot collections are used like any other practical resource of free, well-lit images of faces, a benchmark to make tools like facial recognition function. Page 95 The AI industry has fostered a kind of ruthless pragmatism, with minimal context, caution, or consent-driven data practices while promoting the idea that the mass harvesting of data is necessary and justified for creating systems of profitable computational "intelligence." This has resulted in a profound metamorphosis, where all forms of image, text, sound, and video are just raw data for AI systems and the ends are thought to justify the means. But we should ask: Who has benefited most from this transformation, and why have these dominant narratives of data persisted? Page 96 It's useful to consider why machine learning systems currently demand massive amounts of data. One example of the problem in action is computer vision, the subfield of artificial intelligence concerned with teaching machines to detect and interpret images. Page 96 These vast collections are called training datasets, and they constitute what AI developers often refer to as "ground truth." 13 The more examples of correctly labeled data there are, the better the algorithm will be at producing accurate predictions. Page 97 Training data also defines more than just the features of machine learning algorithms. It is used to assess how they perform over time. Like prized thoroughbreds, machine learning algorithms are constantly raced against one another in competitions all over the world to see which ones perform the best with a given dataset. Page 98 Once training sets have been established as useful benchmarks, they are commonly adapted, built upon, and expanded. Training data, then, is the foundation on which contemporary machine learning systems are built. 16 These datasets shape the epistemic boundaries governing how AI operates and, in that sense, create the limits of how AI can "see" the world. Page 99 In the 1970s, artificial intelligence researchers were mainly exploring what's called an expert systems approach: rules-based programming that aims to reduce the field of possible actions by articulating forms of logical reasoning. But it quickly became evident that this approach was fragile and impractical in real-world settings, where a rule set was rarely able to handle uncertainty and complexity. 19 By the mid-1980s, research labs were turning toward probabilistic or brute force approaches. In short, they were using lots of computing cycles to calculate as many options as possible to find the optimal result. Page 100 They started using statistical methods that focused more on how often words appeared in relation to one another, rather than trying to teach computers a rules-based approach using grammatical principles or linguistic features. the reduction from context to data, from meaning to statistical pattern recognition. Page 103 Text archives were seen as neutral collections of language, as though there was a general equivalence between the words in a technical manual and how people write to colleagues via email. Like images, text corpuses work on the assumption that all training data is interchangeable. But language isn't an inert substance that works the same way regardless of where it is found. The origins of the underlying data in a system can be incredibly significant, and yet there are still, thirty years later, no standardized practices to note where all this data came from or how it was acquired--let alone what biases or classificatory politics these datasets contain that will influence all the systems that come to rely on them. 31 Page 106 The internet, in so many ways, changed everything; it came to be seen in the AI research field as something akin to a natural resource, there for the taking. As more people began to upload their images to websites, to photo-sharing services, and ultimately to social media platforms, the pillaging began in earnest. The tech industry titans were now in a powerful position: they had a pipeline of endlessly refreshing images and text, and the more people shared their content, the more the tech industry's power grew. Page 108 ImageNet would become, for a time, the world's largest academic user of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, deploying an army of piecemeal workers to sort an average of fifty images a minute into thousands of categories. 40 Page 109 The approach of mass data extraction without consent and labeling by underpaid crowdworkers would become standard practice, and hundreds of new training datasets would follow ImageNet's lead. Page 110 Over and over, data extracted without permission or consent would be uploaded for machine learning researchers, who would then use it as an infrastructure for automated imaging systems. Even when datasets are scrubbed of personal information and released with great caution, people have been reidentified or highly sensitive details about them have been revealed. Page 111 For instance, the same New York City taxi dataset was used to suggest which taxi drivers were devout Muslims by observing when they stopped at prayer times. 50 Page 112 Contemporary organizations are both culturally impelled by the data imperative and powerfully equipped with new tools to enact it. 53 Behind the questionable belief that "more is better" is the idea that individuals can be completely knowable, once enough disparate pieces of data are collected. 54 Page 113 Terms like "data mining" and phrases like "data is the new oil" were part of a rhetorical move that shifted the notion of data away from something personal, intimate, or subject to individual ownership and control toward something more inert and nonhuman. Page 113 Ultimately, "data" has become a bloodless word; it disguises both its material origins and its ends. And if data is seen as abstract and immaterial, then it more easily falls outside of traditional understandings and responsibilities of care, consent, or risk. metaphors of data as a "natural resource" Page 114 High achievers in the mainstream economy tend to do well in a data-scoring economy, too, while those who are poorest become targets of the most harmful forms of data surveillance and extraction. data now operates as a form of capital. a shift away from ideas like "human subjects"--a concept that emerged from the ethics debates of the twentieth century--to the creation of "data subjects," agglomerations of data points without subjectivity or context or clearly defined rights. Page 115 Once AI moved out of the laboratory contexts of the 1980s and 1990s and into real-world situations--such as attempting to predict which criminals will reoffend or who should receive welfare benefits--the potential harms expanded. Further, those harms affect entire communities as well as individuals. But there is still a strong presumption that publicly available datasets pose minimal risks and therefore should be exempt from ethics review. 64 Page 116 The risk profile of AI is rapidly changing as its tools become more invasive and as researchers are increasingly able to access data without interacting with their subjects. For example, a group of machine learning researchers published a paper in which they claimed to have developed an "automatic system for classifying crimes." 65 In particular, their focus was on whether a violent crime was gang-related, which they claimed their neural network could predict with only four pieces of information: the weapon, the number of suspects, the neighborhood, and the location. They did this using a crime dataset from the Los Angeles Police Department, which included thousands of crimes that had been labeled by police as gang-related. Gang data is notoriously skewed and riddled with errors, yet researchers use this database and others like it as a definitive source for training predictive AI systems. Page 117 This separation of ethical questions away from the technical reflects a wider problem in the field, where the responsibility for harm is either not recognized or seen as beyond the scope of the research. Page 118 Technical approaches can move rapidly from conference papers to being deployed in production systems, where harmful assumptions can become ingrained and hard to reverse. Page 119 There are gigantic datasets full of people's selfies, tattoos, parents walking with their children, hand gestures, people driving their cars, people committing crimes on CCTV, and hundreds of everyday human actions like sitting down, waving, raising a glass, or crying. Every form of biodata--including forensic, biometric, sociometric, and psychometric--is being captured and logged into databases for AI systems to find patterns and make assessments. Page 120 The collection of people's data to build AI systems raises clear privacy concerns. The practices of data extraction and training dataset construction are premised on a commercialized capture of what was previously part of the commons. This particular form of erosion is a privatization by stealth, an extraction of knowledge value from public goods. A dataset may still be publicly available, but the metavalue of the data--the model created by it--is privately held. Page 122 The way data is understood, captured, classified, and named is fundamentally an act of world-making and containment. It has enormous ramifications for the way artificial intelligence works in the world and which communities are most affected. FOUR. Classification Page 127 The politics of classification is a core practice in artificial intelligence. How does classification function in machine learning? What is at stake when we classify? In what ways do classifications interact with the classified? And what unspoken social and political theories underlie and are supported by these classifications of the world? Page 128 classifications can disappear, as Bowker and Star observe, "into infrastructure, into habit, into the taken for granted." Page 129 One of the more vivid examples of bias in action comes from an insider account at Amazon. In 2014, the company decided to experiment with automating the process of recommending and hiring workers. Page 129 "They literally wanted it to be an engine where I'm going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we'll hire those." 21 Quickly, the system began to assign less importance to commonly used engineering terms, like programming languages, because everyone listed them in their job histories. Instead, the models began valuing more subtle cues that recurred on successful applications. A strong preference emerged for particular verbs. The examples the engineers mentioned were "executed" and "captured." 22 Page 130 Inadvertently, Amazon had created a diagnostic tool. The vast majority of engineers hired by Amazon over ten years had been men, so the models they created, which were trained on the successful résumés of men, had learned to recommend men for future hiring. The employment practices of the past and present were shaping the hiring tools for the future. Page 130 The AI industry has traditionally understood the problem of bias as though it is a bug to be fixed rather than a feature of classification itself. Page 132 Designers get to decide what the variables are and how people are allocated to categories. Again, the practice of classification is centralizing power: the power to decide which differences make a difference. Page 133 Skin color detection is done because it can be, not because it says anything about race or produces a deeper cultural understanding. Page 133 Technical claims about accuracy and performance are commonly shot through with political choices about categories and norms but are rarely acknowledged as such. 33 These approaches are grounded in an ideological premise of biology as destiny, where our faces become our fate. Page 134 By the 1900s, "bias" had developed a more technical meaning in statistics, where it refers to systematic differences between a sample and population, when the sample is not truly reflective of the whole. Machine learning systems are designed to be able to generalize from a large training set of examples and to correctly classify new observations not included in the training datasets. 35 machine learning systems can perform a type of induction, learning from specific examples (such as past résumés of job applicants) in order to decide which data points to look for in new examples In such cases, the term "bias" refers to a type of error that can occur during this predictive process of generalization--namely, a systematic or consistently reproduced classification error that the system exhibits when presented with new examples. This type of bias is often contrasted with another type of generalization error, variance, which refers to an algorithm's sensitivity to differences in training data. Page 135 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman study "cognitive biases," or the ways in which human judgments deviate systematically from probabilistic expectations. Technical designs can certainly be improved to better account for how their systems produce skews and discriminatory results. But the harder questions of why AI systems perpetuate forms of inequity are commonly skipped over in the rush to arrive at narrow technical solutions of statistical bias as though that is a sufficient remedy for deeper structural problems. There has been a general failure to address the ways in which the instruments of knowledge in AI reflect and serve the incentives of a wider extractive economy. Every dataset used to train machine learning systems, whether in the context of supervised or unsupervised machine learning, whether seen to be technically biased or not, contains a worldview. To create a training set is to take an almost infinitely complex and varied world and fix it into taxonomies composed of discrete classifications of individual data points, a process that requires inherently political, cultural, and social choices. By paying attention to these classifications, we can glimpse the various forms of power that are built into the architectures of AI world-building. Page 139 Bowker and Star also underscore that once classifications of people are constructed, they can stabilize a contested political category in ways that are difficult to see. 50 They become taken for granted unless they are actively resisted. Page 139 To borrow an idea from linguist George Lakoff, the concept of an "apple" is a more nouny noun than the concept of "light," which in turn is more nouny than a concept such as "health." 51 Nouns occupy various places on an axis from the concrete to the abstract, from the descriptive to the judgmental. Page 142 In fact, there are no neutral categories in ImageNet, because the selection of images always interacts with the meaning of words. The politics are baked into the classificatory logic, even when the words aren't offensive. ImageNet is a lesson, in this sense, of what happens when people are categorized like objects. Page 143 Perhaps it is no surprise that when we investigate the bedrock layer of these labeled images, we find that they are beset with stereotypes, errors, and absurdities. The focus on making training sets "fairer" by deleting offensive terms fails to contend with the power dynamics of classification and precludes a more thorough assessment of the underlying logics. Page 144 By focusing on classification in AI, we can trace the ways that gender, race, and sexuality are falsely assumed to be natural, fixed, and detectable biological categories. Page 146 the history of disability itself is a "story of the ways in which various systems of classification (i.e., medical, scientific, legal) interface with social institutions and their articulations of power and knowledge." 67 Page 147 Classifications are technologies that produce and limit ways of knowing, and they are built into the logics of AI. The problem for computer science is that justice in AI systems will never be something that can be coded or computed. It requires a shift to assessing systems beyond optimization metrics and statistical parity and an understanding of where the frameworks of mathematics and engineering are causing the problems. This also means understanding how AI systems interact with data, workers, the environment, and the individuals whose lives will be affected by its use and deciding where AI should not be used. Page 148 Nonconsensual classifications present serious risks, as do normative assumptions about identity, yet these practices have become standard. That must change. Page 150 Classificatory schemas enact and support the structures of power that formed them, and these do not shift without considerable effort. But the truly massive engines of classification are the ones being operated at a global scale by private technology companies, including Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Baidu. These companies operate with little oversight into how they categorize and target users, and they fail to offer meaningful avenues for public contestation. FIVE. Affect Page 151 Like many Western researchers before him, Ekman had come to Papua New Guinea to extract data from the indigenous community. all humans exhibit a small number of universal emotions or affects that are natural, innate, cross-cultural, and the same all over the world. This is the story of how affect recognition came to be part of artificial intelligence and the problems this presents. Page 152 Today affect recognition tools can be found in national security systems and at airports, in education and hiring start-ups, from systems that purport to detect psychiatric illness to policing programs that claim to predict violence. Why did the idea that there is a small set of universal emotions, readily interpreted from the face, become so accepted in the AI field, despite considerable evidence to the contrary? Page 153 His work is connected to U.S. intelligence funding of the human sciences during the Cold War through foundational work in the field of computer vision to the post-9/ 11 security programs employed to identify terrorists and right up to the current fashion for AI-based emotion recognition. One of the many things made possible by this profusion of images is the attempt to extract the so-called hidden truth of interior emotional states using machine learning. These systems may not be doing what they purport to do, but they can nonetheless be powerful agents in influencing behavior and training people to perform in recognizable ways. Page 154 A startup in London called Human uses emotion recognition to analyze video interviews of job candidates. Page 155 Emotion recognition systems grew from the interstices between AI technologies, military priorities, and the behavioral sciences--psychology in particular. They share a similar set of blueprints and founding assumptions: that there is a small number of distinct and universal emotional categories, that we involuntarily reveal these emotions on our faces, and that they can be detected by machines. Page 155 These articles of faith are so accepted in some fields that it can seem strange even to notice them, let alone question them. They are so ingrained that they have come to constitute "the common view." Page 156 One aspect in particular played an outsized role: the idea that if affect was an innate set of evolutionary responses, they would be universal and so recognizable across cultures. Page 162 They presumed a link between body and soul that justified reading a person's interior character based on their exterior appearance. Page 165 In later years Ekman also would insist that anyone could come to learn to recognize microexpressions, with no special training or slow motion capture, in about an hour. 59 But if these expressions are too quick for humans to recognize, how are they to be understood? 60 Page 167 Ekman's FACS system provided two things essential for later machine learning applications: a stable, discrete, finite set of labels that humans can use to categorize photographs of faces and a system for producing measurements. It promised to remove the difficult work of representing interior lives away from the purview of artists and novelists and bring it under the umbrella of a rational, knowable, and measurable rubric suitable to laboratories, corporations, and governments. Page 170 Ekman's work became a profound and wide-ranging influence on everything from lie detection software to computer vision. Page 172 Other problems became clear as Ekman's ideas were implemented in technical systems. As we've seen, many datasets underlying the field are based on actors simulating emotional states, performing for the camera. That means that AI systems are trained to recognize faked expressions of feeling. Page 174 This is not an engineering problem that could be solved with a better algorithm. By analyzing the history of these ideas, we can begin to see how military research funding, policing priorities, and profit motives have shaped the field. Page 175 Once the theory emerged that it is possible to assess internal states by measuring facial movements and the technology was developed to measure them, people willingly adopted the underlying premise. The theory fit what the tools could do. SIX. State Page 182 the intelligence community contributed to the development of many of the techniques we now refer to as artificial intelligence. Page 184 As the historian of science Paul Edwards describes in The Closed World, military research agencies actively shaped the emerging field that would come to be known as AI from its earliest days. The military priorities of command and control, automation, and surveillance profoundly shaped what AI was to become. The tools and approaches that came out of DARPA funding have marked the field, including computer vision, automatic translation, and autonomous vehicles. Page 185 Technologies once only available to intelligence agencies--that were extralegal by design--have filtered down to the state's municipal arms: government and law enforcement agencies. less attention is given to the growing commercial surveillance sector, Page 186 Algorithmic governance is both part of and exceeds traditional state governance. But the rhetoric around artificial intelligence is much starker: we are repeatedly told that we are in an AI war. The dominant objects of concern are the supernational efforts of the United States and China, with regular reminders that China has stated its commitment to be the global leader in AI. Page 196 As law professor Andrew Ferguson explains, "We are moving to a state where prosecutors and police are going to say ‘the algorithm told me to do it, so I did, I had no idea what I was doing.' And this will be happening at a widespread level with very little oversight." 56 Page 197 police are turning into intelligence agents: Page 198 The intelligence models that began in national government agencies have now become part of the policing of local neighborhoods. Page 201 Vigilant has since expanded its "crime-solving" toolkit beyond license plate readers to include ones that claim to recognize faces. In doing so, Vigilant seeks to render human faces as the equivalent of license plates and then feed them back into the policing ecology. 66 Like a network of private detectives, Vigilant creates a God's-eye view of America's interlaced roads and highways, along with everyone who travels along them, while remaining beyond any meaningful form of regulation or accountability. 67 Page 201 For Amazon, each new Ring device sold helps build yet more large-scale training datasets inside and outside the home, with classificatory logics of normal and anomalous behavior aligned with the battlefield logics of allies and enemies. Page 203 But in 2014, the legal organization Reprieve published a report showing that drone strikes attempting to kill 41 individuals resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people. Page 204 Once a pattern is found in the data and it reaches a certain threshold, the suspicion becomes enough to take action even in the absence of definitive proof. This mode of adjudication by pattern recognition is found in many domains--most often taking the form of a score. Page 205 new technical systems of state control use the bodies of refugees as test cases. Page 205 These military and policing logics are now suffused with a form of financialization: socially constructed models of creditworthiness have entered into many AI systems, influencing everything from the ability to get a loan to permission to cross borders. Page 208 Taken together, the AI and algorithmic systems used by the state, from the military to the municipal level, reveal a covert philosophy of en masse infrastructural command and control via a combination of extractive data techniques, targeting logics, and surveillance. These goals have been central to the intelligence agencies for decades, but now they have spread to many other state functions, from local law enforcement to allocating benefits. Page 211 Artificial intelligence is not an objective, universal, or neutral computational technique that makes determinations without human direction. Page 211 AI systems are expressions of power that emerge from wider economic and political forces, created to increase profits and centralize control for those who wield them. But this is not how the story of artificial intelligence is typically told. Page 213 Narratives of magic and mystification recur throughout AI's history, drawing bright circles around spectacular displays of speed, efficiency, and computational reasoning. 5 It's no coincidence that one of the iconic examples of contemporary AI is a game. This epistemological flattening of complexity into clean signal for the purposes of prediction is now a central logic of machine learning. The historian of technology Alex Campolo and I call this enchanted determinism: AI systems are seen as enchanted, beyond the known world, yet deterministic in that they discover patterns that can be applied with predictive certainty to everyday life. Page 214 That deep learning approaches are often uninterpretable, even to the engineers who created them, gives these systems an aura of being too complex to regulate and too powerful to refuse. We are told to focus on the innovative nature of the method rather than on what is primary: the purpose of the thing itself. Page 215 These programs produce surprising moves uncommon in human games for a straightforward reason: they can play and analyze far more games at a far greater speed than any human can. This is not magic; it is statistical analysis at scale. Page 215 Over and over, we see the ideology of Cartesian dualism in AI: the fantasy that AI systems are disembodied brains that absorb and produce knowledge independently from their creators, infrastructures, and the world at large. These illusions distract from the far more relevant questions: Whom do these systems serve? What are the political economies of their construction? And what are the wider planetary consequences? Page 216 the artificial intelligence industry's expansion has been publicly subsidized: from defense funding and federal research agencies to public utilities and tax breaks to the data and unpaid labor taken from all who use search engines or post images online. AI began as a major public project of the twentieth century and was relentlessly privatized to produce enormous financial gains for the tiny minority at the top of the extraction pyramid. Page 218 This book proposes that the real stakes of AI are the global interconnected systems of extraction and power, not the technocratic imaginaries of artificiality, abstraction, and automation. AI is born from salt lakes in Bolivia and mines in Congo, constructed from crowdworker-labeled datasets that seek to classify human actions, emotions, and identities. It is used to navigate drones over Yemen, direct immigration police in the United States, and modulate credit scores of human value and risk across the world. A wide-angle, multiscalar perspective on AI is needed to contend with these overlapping regimes. The opacity of the larger supply chain for computation in general, and AI in particular, is part of a long-established business model of extracting value from the commons and avoiding restitution for the lasting damage. Page 219 Thousands of people are needed to support the illusion of automation: tagging, correcting, evaluating, and editing AI systems to make them appear seamless. The uses of workplace AI further skew power imbalances by placing more control in employers' hands. Apps are used to track workers, nudge them to work longer hours, and rank them in real time. Amazon provides a canonical example Page 221 What epistemological violence is necessary to make the world readable to a machine learning system? AI seeks to systematize the unsystematizable, formalize the social, and convert an infinitely complex and changing universe into a Linnaean order of machine-readable tables. Page 221 Many of AI's achievements have depended on boiling things down to a terse set of formalisms based on proxies: identifying and naming some features while ignoring or obscuring countless others. Page 222 The rhetoric about the AI war between the United States and China drives the interests of the largest tech companies to operate with greater government support and few restrictions. Page 223 The result is a profound and rapid expansion of surveillance and a blurring between private contractors, law enforcement, and the tech sector, fueled by kickbacks and secret deals. Could there not be an AI for the people that is reoriented toward justice and equality rather than industrial extraction and discrimination? This may seem appealing, but as we have seen throughout this book, the infrastructures and forms of power that enable and are enabled by AI skew strongly toward the centralization of control. As Audre Lorde reminds us, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Page 224 The voices of the people most harmed by AI systems are largely missing from the processes that produce them. ethics is necessary but not sufficient to address the fundamental concerns raised in this book. power. AI is invariably designed to amplify and reproduce the forms of power it has been deployed to optimize. Instead of glorifying company founders, venture capitalists, and technical visionaries, we should begin with the lived experiences of those who are disempowered, discriminated against, and harmed by AI systems. Page 225 The social contract, to the extent that there ever was one, has brought a climate crisis, soaring wealth inequality, racial discrimination, and widespread surveillance and labor exploitation. But the idea that these transformations occurred in ignorance of their possible results is part of the problem. Page 226 We see glimpses of this refusal when populations choose to dismantle predictive policing, ban facial recognition, or protest algorithmic grading.	Kate Eichorn Notable Quotations Full screen view Page 1 - Logically, then, content can refer to socks in a drawer, books in a box, or sand in an hourglass. Page 2 - The second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Internet defines content as "The information found in a Web site and the way in which it is structured." Page 2 - First, digital content is no longer, strictly speaking, found only on websites. Page 2 - After all, mobile apps such as Snapchat and Instagram also generate and circulate content. Page 2 - Second, eliding content with information is misleading. Information is generally equated with imparting knowledge, but as anyone who has ever spent time online appreciates, a lot of content in circulation doesn't impart any knowledge at all. Page 3 - Content may circulate solely for the purpose of circulating. Page 4 - Bharat Anand, author of The Content Trap, argues that in an age of content, the most successful companies aren't those that produce or sell great content but rather those that simply facilitate its management or circulation. Page 5 - Instagram egg as a sort of quintessential example of content—something that circulates for the sake of circulation. Page 13 - In 2004, Google launched a new vertical product that would transform advertising by enabling anyone who owned a domain. Page 14 - With AdSense, the more content one had on a website, the more money one could make. Hence, at least for web entrepreneurs, the need for content, especially original search-engine-optimized content, soared. Page 14 - Free content became essential to creating a perceived need for everything from smartphones to tablets to portable computers. Simply put, content created needs that might never have existed otherwise. Page 14 - So, what is the content industry? In essence, it is an industry that generates revenue from the production and/or circulation of content alone. The content in question sometimes conveys information, tells a story, or entertains, but it doesn't need to do any of these things to circulate effectively as content. Page 15 - Adorno and Horkheimer foresaw the growing entanglement between the culture and advertising industries and the negative consequences of this convergence. Page 19 - States have become one user among others. Page 21 - To begin, content isn't necessarily data, even if the two terms are frequently used interchangeably. Some argue that this is because content is contextualized information and data is not. Page 21 - Others argue that while content conveys a message (in words, images, or sound), data does not. Page 22 - The content industry may be best understood as an industry that exists only in a parasitical relationship to other industries, from marketing and publishing to education and entertainment. Page 22 - While content marketing may directly pitch a product or service, it generally aims to build an audience. Page 23 - At the center of content marketing is the concept of organic growth—a marketing strategy that compels customers to seek out businesses rather than the other way around. Page 23 - Branded content doesn't take the form of a traditional advertisement; instead, it strives to offer information, usually in the form of a short article or video, that at least appears to be valuable and relevant. Page 23 - Build brand loyalty. Page 23 - Although the content industry and publishing industry were once two different entities, the line between them continues to blur. Page 24 - In the publishing industry, content can refer to printed books or ebooks but also to other products, such as curricular modules, online archives, and even videos. Page 26 - A high percentage of the entertainment content that one encounters on platforms such as Amazon or Netflix, for example, was created first and foremost to secure subscribers. Page 27 - In the world of content, genre, medium, and format are secondary concerns and, in some instances, they seem to disappear entirely. We're left with a series of classifications that emphasize where or how content circulates in different sectors and markets. Page 27 - Cultural production matters, but only to the extent that it helps drive profits in a specific market sector. What is being said, how it is being said, and via what medium are secondary to the market itself. Page 27 - The rise of the content industry is the ultimate expression of neoliberalism. Under the logic of neoliberalism, everything—politics, desire, sociality, art, culture, and so on—is reduced to mere nodes in the market economy. Page 29 - Specific attention is paid to how the content industry continues to disrupt the field of cultural production, transforming it into a place where one's ability to engage in work as an artist or a writer is increasingly contingent on one's content capital; that is, on one's ability to produce content not about one's work but about one's status as an artist, writer, or performer. The book concludes by offering a preliminary look at the future of content and the content industry and the potential impact of automation, which threatens to turn content production into something increasingly divorced from human producers altogether. Page 32 - Citizen journalism has expanded around the globe. Platforms for user-generated content like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have created a massive audience for all sorts of rising stars, whether or not they exhibit any notable talents. Page 33 - What most people didn't realize in the 1990s or even early 2000s is how, where, and to what ends the content they were now freely sharing online would help generate revenue for private companies. Page 34 - In her seminal work on the history of the printing press, Elizabeth Eisenstein describes the culture of the early print world as one where editors and publishers "did not merely store data passively in compendia" but also "created vast networks of correspondents" by soliciting criticism of each edition and "sometimes publicly promising to mention the names of readers who sent in new information or who spotted the errors which would be weeded out." Page 35 - Eisenstein was engaged in endeavors that resonate with the crowd-sourced and user-generated projects that have come to define contemporary communications. Page 36 - Yet, as early as the late nineteenth century, travel guides were already being developed with the help of travelers. Page 37 - From encyclopedias to dictionaries to travel guides, there is a long history of readers contributing to the research and development of texts. But since the 1990s, three things have radically transformed how regular folks contribute to the production of texts and images of all kinds: an expanded capacity to engage in the production of audio and visual content; an expanded capacity to broadcast these creations; and most importantly, an expanded capacity for private companies to turn such creations into assets. Page 37 - In the past, users could submit content— Page 37 - but in a print culture, such users were still entirely dependent on the editors of these volumes to put their ideas into print. Page 38 - In the twenty-first century, user-generated content can be easily captured, managed, and transformed into an asset. Page 38 - Because we now have the capacity to capture, collect, and mine increasingly large sets of data, we can deploy user-generated content to achieve entirely different ends. Facebook's users may upload photographs in order to share memories with friends and family, but these photographs are valuable to Facebook for an entirely different reason. Page 39 - Brought to scale, user-generated content exceeds its original purpose and, in the process, becomes increasingly valuable as an asset. Page 43 - While user-generated content has always been the favored term in a corporate context, alternative terms such as convergence culture, participatory culture, and peer production have often been favored by scholars, cultural workers, and digital activists. Page 48 - The WELL understood user-generated content as raw material laying the foundation for new forms of community. Page 49 - The shift from old-world approaches to profit (i.e., subscriptions) to new-world approaches (i.e., turning user-generated content into an asset that can be collected, mined, and sold) wouldn't be simple. Page 50 - In the 1990s and even well into the early 2000s, while business analysts and businesses were actively exploring how to turn users' comments and, eventually, users' digital photographs, videos, and sound files into assets, most online users remained largely in the dark about the ways in which their digital output might be monetized. Page 50 - As Christian Fuchs argued in his 2013 essay "Class and Exploitation on the Internet," user-generated data is best understood as a commodity that is partially produced by users and partially produced by the corporations that build and maintain the platforms adopted by users. Page 55 - Players—"users are unpaid and therefore infinitely exploited." Page 55 - As data is posted, collected, combined, mined, and traded, both its original medium and message cease to matter. As such, any attempt to classify user-generated content based on medium or message is bound to run into problems. Page 55 - Ultimately, what distinguishes digital user-generated content from early forms of user-generated content and other types of digital content (e.g., content produced by the owners of platforms) is its capacity to morph over time—to transform from a communicative act originating from a single user to one small bit of data in a larger database, and then to a form of investment knowledge that exists to optimize services, products, and schemes that the original user may have never imagined possible. Page 58 - Not unlike the overlap between scribal and print cultures in the late fifteenth century, for a brief period—perhaps only a decade—efforts to experiment with new and emerging digital technologies remained profoundly shaped by our print-centric expectations. Page 60 - For most of the 1990s, this apparently chaotic, uncontainable, and even frightening space was almost exclusively composed of texts, so reading and writing rather than listening or viewing were the default. As a result, concerns about the web's impact on writing were never far from the surface. What few people predicted in the 1990s was that the worst was still to come. Page 61 - To be clear, the web was never entirely free of advertisements, but until the early 2000s, the ability to sell advertising space was mostly limited to people running legitimate businesses. Page 63 - With AdSense, anyone who owned a domain and had a website with a bit of content could now sign up and start automatically running advertisements on their site. Page 68 - What continues to deceive many readers is that clickbait—and this includes all of those articles readers stumble across on familiar sites like eHow, Tripsavvy, Investopedia, and many others—is really just a frame for advertisements, even if it appears to be the main show. Page 69 - For a website to hold readers long enough to generate a reasonable number of impressions and clicks, it needs to be search-engine-optimized—that is, written with the sole purpose of ranking first in any search. As a rule of thumb, each page should contain at least 300 words, though longer (600 to 1,000 words) is generally considered better. A 300-page site, then, generally requires at least 100,000 words, which is about three times the length of the book you're currently reading. Page 70 - Daniel Roth Page 70 - When Roth carried out his investigation in 2009, he found an emerging industry where white-collar labor—the sort of work done by writers and editors—was already grossly undervalued. "It's the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot," explained Roth. "Writers can typically select 10 articles at a time; videographers can hoard 40. Page 70 - Because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. Page 70 - Despite Google's efforts to clamp down on content farms over the years, not much has changed since Roth exposed the dismal labor conditions at Demand Media in 2009. Page 71 - Upwork Page 71 - The day I logged on to the platform, someone had just posted a writing job that didn't pay at all. In this case, the job poster was looking for a 1,000-word article on firearms. Any writer who produced an article that met the job poster's guidelines (which would be provided only after the so-called hire was approved) was being promised a five-star rating on Upwork (notably, employers rate freelancers on Upwork, but freelancers are never permitted to rate employers) and the potential of long-term work. The potential long-term work was also poorly compensated. Page 71 - Since the articles needed to range from 1,000 to 2,500 words each, the ultimate reward was an opportunity to turn out 2,000 to 5,000 words per week for anywhere from $40 to $100. Page 72 - Don't assume that everyone turning out clickbait is necessarily someone who knows nothing about writing or just doesn't care. Page 73 - The Gig Economy and Work Platforms Page 74 - Gig economy optimists—people like economist Richard Florida—argue that with the rise of the gig economy, we are finally all free to work wherever and whenever we like. Page 74 - Entering the gig economy, we give up many of the things that educated, middle-class people once took for granted. Page 74 - This includes the reasonable expectation of access to steady employment, benefits, and the prospect of eventually retiring with at least some financial peace of mind Page 74 - Whatever your political position on online work platforms and the gig economy, these connected technological and economic shifts appear to have played a role in the rise of the content farm industry. Page 75 - As platforms like Elance and eventually Upwork appeared, something else happened—the number of highly literate but underemployed and undercompensated university graduates increased. Page 75 - But anecdotally, humanities graduates, including those who fall into the underemployed or undercompensated category, appear to be well represented in the content farm sector. Page 75 - The second factor supporting the rise of the content farm industry over the past two decades is the expansion of the global workforce. Page 77 - Most crappy writing found online is produced by remote workers connected to content farms or online work platforms. But you can't assume that none of these workers care about writing. In fact, as argued, a series of recent economic shifts has created a surplus of writers, editors, researchers, and designers who are either underemployed or simply undercompensated and searching for side gigs. Content farms and online work platforms have conveniently exploited this demographic. Page 78 - But content farms and work platforms are responsible for even more than the millions of pages of branded content and content that exists only to generate revenue from AdSense placements. As discussed in chapter 5, since 2010 content farms and work platforms have also been implicated in the spread of "fake news," which continues to do a lot more harm than any sloppily composed sentence ever will. Page 81 - Ulman's decision to produce content about herself (not herself as an artist but simply as a young, sexualized woman) ultimately proved wildly successful—more successful than her previous artwork. What Ulman's online performance revealed is that in an age of content, content isn't just something that is needed to promote your art. Increasingly, content is art or, at least, what has come to stand in for art. Page 83 - Bourdieu's work on the field of cultural production highlights that writers and artists, like literature and art, are the result of a series of "position-takings" that effectively determine what counts as literature, what counts as art, and who can claim those venerated but not necessarily lucrative positions known as "author" or "artist." Page 84 - According to Bourdieu, one's cultural capital—that is, one's competencies, skills, and qualifications (this includes one's knowledge of and firsthand experiences of literature, art, philosophy and so on)—enables one to more easily engage in the position-takings that structure the field of cultural production. Page 85 - Countless young artists, writers, and musicians also increasingly rely on tactics not unlike Ulman's to secure success in a cultural field. In this respect, while the field of cultural production still exists, position-takings increasingly pivot around a writer's or an artist's ability to successfully acquire and deploy an entirely new form of capital—content capital. Page 86 - It is a type of largely intangible asset that influences one's social mobility. Page 86 - Content capital is more easily acquired. Page 86 - One builds up one's content capital simply by hanging out online and, more precisely, by posting content that garners a response and, in turn, leads to more followers and more content. Page 86 - But in the case of content capital, lack of economic capital isn't a barrier. Page 87 - Some twenty-first-century teen influencers hail from small towns and modest backgrounds and yet have thousands of online followers. Page 88 - While most teens use their content capital to simply gain a following as a YouTube celebrity or an Instagram influencer, some use their content capital to make inroads into established cultural fields. Perhaps the most successful example of a teen who has managed to segue her content into a cultural field is the world's most popular "Instapoet," Rupi Kaur. Page 92 - Now, some bookstores have created a special subsection for a new type of poetry—poetry produced by Instapoets. Page 93 - Not unlike Ulman and other visual artists whose content (selfies) has become art, for Instapoets, content (pithy little poems posted on Instagram) has become literature. Page 94 - Instapoets, unlike traditional poets, don't really need literary critics or reviewers to engage in successful position-taking in the field of cultural production. In the world of Instapoetry, the poetry doesn't need to be good or have any literary merit or be recognized by any traditional literary gatekeepers. It just needs to be copious and easily viewable on a mobile device. Page 95 - In the 1990s, if you wanted to hire a writer, you hired a writer. Likewise, if you wanted to hire a filmmaker or videographer, you hired a filmmaker or videographer. Sometime in the early 2000s, the line between people who write articles versus those who make films versus those who produce videos started to blur. Now, in many contexts, all of these cultural workers are simply known as content producers. Page 96 - As the distinctions between writer, filmmaker, photographer, and so on have become subsumed by the overarching category of content producer, something else has happened—a deskilling of the arts. Page 97 - In the past, to be an artist or a writer, you needed to be recognized and supported by the artistic or literary apparatus. Artists needed gallerists and museum curators to recognize and showcase their work. Writers needed literary agents and publishers to get their work into print. Page 97 - This is no longer the case. Page 97 - One can now successfully position oneself as a poet while bypassing all traditional forms of gatekeeping, including academics, editors at literary journals, publishers, and award juries. Page 99 - For all of these reasons, in an age of content, the identities, output, and working conditions of cultural producers are vastly different than they were in the past. Page 100 - The monopoly of power is no longer concentrated with critics, reviewers, academics, publishers, curators, and collectors. Page 100 - In the field of cultural production described by Bourdieu, much weight is given to acts of consecration—the preface, the favorable review, the prize, and so on. In an age of content, though, the preface, the favorable review, and even the prize now offer diminishing returns. Cultural capital has given way to content capital. In this new field of cultural production, established forms of gatekeeping have finally crumbled and, in the process, have produced an entirely new spectrum of practices that hinge on the effectiveness of one's content strategies. Page 104 - Internet Research Agency's real kryptonite wasn't its content but rather its ability to create the illusion that its content was popular. Page 104 - The Internet Research Agency's computers were programmed to forward the posts to fake accounts that would, in turn, open and close the posts, generating thousands of fake page views. Page 105 - Troll factories cranking out fake news (i.e., disinformation) are arguably just a symptom of a much broader problem—one that can be fully understood only by examining the restructuring of both journalism and politics in the age of content. Page 106 - A lot of readers, even those who are reasonably educated, often assume the articles they read on Forbes are at least somewhat newsworthy. After all, many of the articles present themselves as news and Google's algorithm classifies them as news. In fact, much of the content that appears on Forbes is written by Forbes "members." Members belong to a "Forbes Council" such as its "Finance Council," "Coaching Council," or "Technology Council." For a fee, just over $1,000 annually, one not only gets to become a member of a Forbes Council but also to post articles on the Forbes platform once or twice a month. Page 107 - Their "thought leadership" on the platform still helps raise their profile and legitimize their services and products. Page 107 - Cleverly masked examples of branded content. Page 107 - Relatively innocuous content like a Forbes article blurs the line between opinion and reputable journalism and, in the process, it creates an opportunity for more damaging forms of content production to take root. Page 107 - "Pay-to-play" opinion pieces. Page 108 - Democracy without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society, media studies scholar Victor Pickard outlines the three fundamental "media failures" that upended the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Page 108 - emphasized entertainment over information. Page 108 - misinformation circulating on social media platforms, Page 108 - witness the consequences of the structural collapse of professional journalism Page 109 - In the United States and around the world, journalism hasn't just come to be viewed as content. Content with no journalistic integrity at all has increasingly come to be viewed as journalism. Page 109 - the United States lost over 1,800 daily and weekly newspapers between 2004 and 2018. However, this doesn't mean people aren't accessing the news. Page 116 - Given the growing reliance on social media feeds as a news source and the preponderance of fake news and opinion-driven news, the need for media literacy is pressing. Yet media literacy—the general reader's ability to read, evaluate, and critically engage with the news—has lagged behind the current era of media change. Page 116 - sadly, a large majority of adult readers in the United States also struggle to separate opinion from fact. A 2018 Pew Research Study found that only about a quarter of adult Americans were capable of doing so. Page 116 - In an era when access to information is increasingly determined by one's consumer status, more buying power means more access to relevant news. Page 119 - to make a lot of money from a website, the content needs to appeal to a large swath of readers. Page 119 - What may be good for business, however, is very bad for democracy. Page 120 - In an age of content, localized tactics for securing votes have given way to a new set of tactics that largely pivot around the production, search engine optimization, and circulation of content across multiple digital platforms. Page 120 - What she lacked in campaign funding, she made up for with an enviable content strategy. BuzzFeed writer Charlie Warzel suggests that Ocasio-Cortez's success ultimately rested on her ability to control her own narrative, connect with voters, and ensure she stayed on everyone's radar, even her opponent's. "Constant content creation," Warzel observes, "forces your opponent to respond to you." Page 121 - Ocasio-Cortez continues to focus on producing a constant stream of new content. Page 122 - In Ocasio-Cortez's case, the ability to speak the language of many her supporters—for example, her effective use of emojis and memes—has proven as essential as her ability to take complicated political concepts and break them down into social-media-size bites. Page 122 - In Trump's case, provocative tweets about political rivals proved especially effective. While Ocasio-Cortez's and Trump's content is marked by stark political contrast (and a different level of tolerance for fake news), their content strategies—lots of content, rolled out 24/7, that is accessible to a range of audiences—are surprisingly similar. Page 123 - To suggest that the content industry produced the problem of fake news would be misleading. Disinformation and misinformation existed long before content farms and troll factories. However, disinformation and misinformation have become more prevalent in the age of content, because for these problems to flourish, certain conditions needed to be in place—and the content industry provided these conditions. Page 123 - But the ability to turn out a lot of content at little cost is just one reason fake news has been able to flourish since the early 2000s. Page 124 - Many people now access news (or what they perceive to be news) via aggregates or the newsfeeds on one or more social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram). Page 124 - Propaganda has long existed, but in the past, one generally had to pay to circulate it or recruit people to one's cause so they would circulate it for free. Today, some people still pay to have propaganda produced and put into circulation. Propaganda that takes the form of fake news, however, also tends to generate a high number of clicks and views. Page 129 - Content automation may be the future of content, but it is by no means an entirely new concept; Page 131 - With content automation now entering a new phase, it is no longer something of interest only to computer programmers, experimental poets, and avant-garde composers. As algorithms become increasingly capable of turning out readable texts, even if they are far from perfect, and as more content circulates simply for the sake of circulation, all sorts of content—from news to television and film scripts to genre fiction—are about to be transformed. Understandably, this may sound sinister. Page 133 - PA Media Group's RADAR experiment is certainly not the only example of content automation's growing presence in journalism. Since 2017, major newspapers and digital content platforms around the world have brought bots on board to help scale their content production. The Washington Post introduced readers to Heliograf in 2017, initially to help the newspaper provide coverage of all DC-area high school football games. In 2018, Reuters introduced Lynx Insight, which not only combs through massive amounts of data to compile relevant insights but also writes sentences that reporters can drag and drop into stories. Not surprisingly, digital content producers like Forbes have also turned to bots—Forbes's staff writers rely on a bot named Bertie. Page 134 - What seems nearly certain is that over time another contemporary journalistic problem—fake news—is likely to get a huge boost from content automation. Page 135 - Netflix continues to increase its content at this rate, it is on track to offer 365 full days of new content annually by 2022. Whether Netflix is responding to an actual consumer demand or a perceived consumer demand, or is just keeping its shareholders happy, is debatable. What is clear is that Netflix's executives aren't spending much time agonizing over the types of programs in which to invest. The company has a long history of relying on AI to make decisions about what types of content to produce. Given the company's success, one might conclude that letting AI dictate their content has already proven to be an incredibly successful strategy. Page 137 - But if bots can potentially write scripts for television or film, could a bot also produce literature? Could the Booker Prize shortlist eventually find Zadie Smith pitted against IBM's Watson? Or what about genre fiction? Page 139 - The livelihood of people working across sectors from journalism to education, the integrity of cultural production, and even the future of democratic elections may all be on the line. Page 139 - Above all, it is urgent that people of all ages and across all sectors better understand content—what it is, how it is produced, by whom, and for what ends. If more people understood how and why content is produced and how it touches nearly every aspect of their lives, they would presumably be able to start making smarter decisions about how they engage with it. Page 140 - Ironically, content producers and providers will likely need to be part of any widespread effort to help the general public understand the effects of their industry. Page 140 - To mitigate at least some of the negative impacts of the content industry, regulation will need to increase. Page 142 - Alongside content literacy and content regulation, the future world of content might be structured by a small but persistent resistance movement—a movement of people who actively reject the idea that all communication and cultural production is now mere content. These people won't be neo-Luddites; they will appreciate and support media that can't be easily monetized by the content industry.	Kelly Weill Notable Quotations Full screen view Prologue Page 3 Flat Earth is best understood not as a viable science with meaningful specifics but as the ultimate incarnation of conspiratorial thinking. Members of the movement believe governments and scientists are actively peddling a "globe lie" in order to control the world by tarnishing religious teachings or by making people feel insignificant next to the great expanse of outer space. Page 4 Jan- Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist specializing in conspiracy theories, lays out five criteria that qualify a belief as a conspiracy theory: the theory must explain correlations between events and actors; the perpetrators must have acted deliberately; multiple people must have been involved in the plot; the plot must be ominous in its deception (and not a benevolent cover- up, like concealing a surprise birthday party); and the cover- up must be ongoing. Page 4 Conspiracies theories are ways to construct order and meaning in times of uncertainty. They let us shape our fears into something we understand. 1 | In the Beginning Page 7 Samuel Birley Rowbotham was twenty-two, radical, and according to a socialist newspaper's account, occasionally high off his mind on laughing gas when he began imagining a new world in 1838. Page 7 Conspiratorial thinking is not a weird pathology, experienced by some and absent in others. It's part of a mental process hardwired into all of us, from Rowbotham's era and beforehand and afterward. The same powers of abstraction that make humans good at detecting patterns (like anticipating storms when dark clouds gather) can make us imagine patterns where they don't exist, especially when we're feeling stressed or powerless. Rather than languish in the unknown, we tell ourselves stories about the secret causes of our troubles. All of us do this. Page 8 Conspiracy theories help us feel safe by providing an explanation for things that feel incomprehensible and beyond our control. Page 13 Medical hoaxes prey on many of the same thought processes as conspiracy theories. Faced with frightening diagnoses or unaffordable treatments, we go looking for the One Weird Trick that will put us back in control of our health. It's easier than accepting the harsh reality that a cure might not be within our reach. Page 13 Sometimes bogus medicine is actually an extension of conspiracy theory. The anti-vaccination movement that gained popularity in the late 1990s falsely claims that vaccines cause autism and can lead to a host of illnesses, and that governments and medical authorities are covering it up, for nefarious reasons ranging from pharmaceutical profits to population control. Page 13 Theories like these help people grapple with feelings of powerlessness by positioning other human beings, with agendas and motivations, as responsible for medical conditions. In doing so, believers can avoid the uncomfortable truth: that life and death can lie with something like a virus, which cannot be voted out of office or sued for medical malpractice. Page 15 Under their definition, "zetetic" suggested a brand of nothing-is-sacred skepticism, calling into question every revered figure from the Queen to Christ. Page 17 Healthy skepticism allows for doubt without making doubt one's default position. Page 19 Conspiracy theories -- sources of meaning making and blame casting Page 25 Legendary astronomers Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton had all estimated different distances between Earth and sun. Carpenter claimed the discrepancy should call the entire field of modern astronomy into question. 2 | The Tyrant Page 32 belief in faith healing and alternative medicine persists at unusually high rates among Flat Earthers, so much so that a Vanderbilt University researcher in 2018 used Flat Earth forums for a study on anti-doctor sentiment. In my own years traversing the conspiracy scene, Flat Earthers must have pitched me on half a dozen cure-all diets, from raw foods to veganism. Page 33 In a 2007 Pew poll, 36 percent of Americans who believed in a god said they'd personally witnessed "a divine healing of an illness or injury." Page 39 A funny thing sometimes happens with cultic religious groups in disarray. Rather than dissolve when a spiritual leader disappoints them or a promised paradise turns to hell, many groups double down on their beliefs. Page 39 These groups often find trivial factors to blame for their disappointments, like a preacher for misinterpreting a prophecy, or themselves for possessing insufficient piety. Page 39 They seldom find fault with their underlying belief system, proclaiming that something else, not the prophecy, has failed. 3 | The Joke Page 57 Shenton soon became convinced his doubters had ulterior motives: the gatekeepers of knowledge were engaged in some shadowy conspiracy against him. Page 62 Attendees "tried in vain to disprove his theories," but only became confused about their own arguments, the East Kent Gazette reported after a 1961 lecture. Page 63 The strength of that conviction was tested in spring 1961, when the United States and the Soviet Union both managed to send men into space. British journalists who remembered the initial commotion over the first IFERS meetings called Shenton for his opinion on the launches. He held firm. "It would not have been possible to put a man in Space if the world was round, because if the world was revolving the man could not be recovered," he told the Daily Mirror after the first American breached the planet's boundaries that May. Page 64 (Later in his career, he would refuse to call Flat Earth a "theory," insisting that he knew it to be fact). "Science cannot shout us down. Take the moon, for example. It's transparent you know," he said, adding that his group believed so because they thought they'd seen stars shining through it. "I don't believe man will ever get there," Shenton said of the moon, "but if he does he'd better be ready to come right back. There isn't anything much to land on." Page 64 NASA sent the unmanned space probe Lunar Orbiter 1 to orbit the moon. On August 23, 1966, the probe sent back the first picture of Earth from the lunar orbit. The black- and- white photo shows the curved edge of the moon, and beyond it our decidedly round planet. What inspired awe in some viewers -- the fullest view of Earth to date, the sweeping view of our home wreathed in cloud and shadow -- nearly prompted an existential crisis for Flat Earthers. "I confess," Shenton told the Observer days after the photograph was released, "that it really knocked me. It was a terrible shock." ... But he quickly recovered himself and suggested a reasonable explanation for the picture. "It is probably one of the non-luminous bodies between us and the moon," he said. After subsequent space missions took pictures of the round planet, Shenton started alleging an outright cover-up. Page 65 Some of the pictures have been blatantly doctored. Studio shots, probably." Shenton's talk of staged photographs was an echo from the future. In 1970, the United Press International wire service polled 1,721 Americans and discovered "wide support for a theory that the government and the news media conspired to hoodwink the public with a fake telecast of a Moon landing." Page 66 If God had intended humanity to walk on the moon "he'd put it closer by," the man said -- sounding like the conspiracy theorists of 2020 who refused to wear protective face masks during a deadly pandemic because doing so would "throw God's wonderful breathing system out the door." Page 71 Both men, who witnessed the fields of natural sciences and evolution gaining strength and offering alternatives to biblical theories, claimed Globe Earth theory was an attempt by scientists to deny God and hide the truth of the world. Page 72 But Charles Johnson put forth an even broader conspiracy theory: the global domination plot. Going further even than Kaysing's geopolitical paranoia about the moon landing as a cover-up of US military failures, Johnson alleged that Russia and Rome were about to unite, with England's backing. Page 72 Johnson's wording might have been muddled, but it echoed a growing body of conspiratorial language about a New World Order or a One World Government that hoped to bring the planet under its sole control. Fears of secretive ruling groups had been latent in the West since the late 1700s, when popular conspiracy texts had blamed the Illuminati for the French Revolution. Page 72 In the hands of paranoid groups like the far-right John Birch Society, the term became something deeply sinister. Spurred by a fierce Christian nationalism, militant anti-leftism, and no small measure of racism and antisemitism, this crowd alleged a worldwide conspiracy to strip the United States of its sovereignty and place it under control of a shadowy world government. These theories often blamed a combination of communist and Jewish interests, in the latter case building off centuries of antisemitic hoaxes that accused Jews of pulling the strings of world power. Page 73 "The space program is in the entertainment field," Johnson told a reporter many years later, in 1994. "We're not mad about it. We're not wringing our hands over it. It's entertainment for the masses, like a perpetual Star Trek going on. But there's not reality in it." 4 | The Reboot Page 77 in 2015, the year Donald Trump launched a conspiracy-laden presidential campaign that many dismissed as a joke, Flat Earth began a much-mocked comeback. The joke was on the doubters. Page 78 Maybe Flat Earthers know the sensation, but it was new for me: the disorienting knowledge that everyone around you subscribes to an interpretation of truth incompatible with your own. Page 78 Perhaps, I thought, as the conversation turned to conspiracy theories about school shootings, we were experiencing a disconnect on a level that simply could not have happened during the Johnsons' lifetime. This six-hundred-person Flat Earth festival, this president who doled out fictions via his Twitter account, this whole choose-your-own-reality moment, was a product of the internet. Page 79 Early users predicted that the internet would democratize knowledge and lead to radical equality across the globe. What they got instead was a World Wide Web as flawed and brilliant as the spectrum of grifters and do-gooders and trolls who inhabit Page 79 It also made it easier than ever to sow the seeds of a hoax or find like-minded individuals who share your suspicions. Page 80 In 1983, neo-Nazi (and former regular Nazi) George Dietz launched a message board for antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. ... Conspiratorial cults also used the internet for recruiting. In 1996, a set of rambling essays about an alien religion began appearing on offbeat discussion boards, like those for militias and libertarians. ... The posts directed readers to a website for Heaven's Gate, a California-based cult that would achieve infamy the following year when thirty-nine of its forty-one members put on matching tracksuits, placed $5.75 in their pockets, then died together in a chillingly tidy suicide ritual. Page 81 The group believed its internet legacy was more important than letting all its members board the spaceship to salvation. ... The early internet wasn't all white supremacists and alien cults. But its subculture status meant conspiracy theories flourished online. By the mid-1990s, the internet was "a fertile garden for conspiracy theories because of the hidden nature of it," Jessie Daniels, a City University of New York professor of sociology focusing on inequality on the internet, told the idea that you have special knowledge, that you know things other people don't, and that if people would just pay attention to the signs, then they would make sense of it." Page 82 a new school of truthers took up the mantle of the internet's most outrageous. This new conspiratorial clique was typified by two men: Mike Adams and Alex Jones. Though neither was a Flat Earther, both would help build an internet that rewarded the most outlandish movements -- especially Flat Earth. Page 84 While Adams was using conspiracy theories to warp the inner workings of the internet, his sometimes colleague Alex Jones was using the internet to turn them into a formidable political force. Since 1999, Jones has presided over Infowars, one of the web's premier conspiracy sites. Page 85 Jones got lucky. In July 2001, amid ramblings about the New World Order, he claimed the US government would orchestrate a terror attack as a pretense to enslave the masses. The White House would probably blame Osama bin Laden, leader of the terror group al-Qaeda, Jones speculated. Two months later, al-Qaeda militants crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001, in one of the most paranoia-provoking events in US history. Jones cried vindication. "I'll tell you the bottom line," Jones told listeners to his show after the attack. "98 percent chance this was a government-orchestrated controlled bombing." Page 85 The 9/11 attacks would popularize a new strain of conspiracy culture, with Infowars at the forefront. Page 89 In 2007, historian Christine Garwood published the book Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, which traced the movement from Rowbotham to the Johnsons. Page 91 ‘No way. That thing can't actually exist. What are they on about?'" he told me. "So I joined out of curiosity, just to kind of find out what's going on. That's how I got hooked. Page 93 Conspiracy theorists who couldn't keep up with the scene's most bombastic personalities found themselves getting trampled. In 2005, a young man named Dylan Avery struck internet gold when he released Loose Change, an amateurish documentary claiming the US government had arranged the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for the Iraq War. Loose Change became perhaps "the first Internet blockbuster," Vanity Fair wrote the following year. Page 94 Jones would go on to apply Loose Change logic to virtually every traumatic event. He accused an escalating series of horrors of being "false flags," a conspiracy term for a staged event designed to further some nefarious aim. 5 | The Rabbit Hole Page 101 Conspiracy theories -- endlessly intriguing, and tailored to our worst suspicions -- became one of the best-performing products in the attention economy. The truth became less profitable than fiction. So Facebook and YouTube, two of the internet's largest empires, let their reality-warping algorithms run for years, flattening the world around them. Page 102 "YouTube positioned itself very early on as alternative media," Kevin Roose, a New York Times technology columnist, told me. "It was not just different from TV in the sense that it was lower-budget, mostly amateur, and not as centralized. It was also seen as more real, more authentic." Page 102 Sixty-one percent of respondents to a December 2018 Pew poll said the media deliberately withholds important stories. Page 103 Far from being discrediting, YouTubers' lack of official media titles can serve as a form of conspiratorial street cred. These are real people willing to say what the media won't, the reasoning goes. Their amateur explanations can override expertise, especially for the many people who make YouTube their primary news source. "YouTube, itself, has cultivated an ecosystem of distrust in official narratives," Roose said. The ideal YouTuber is an obsessive (and likely unwell) person who mainlines videos morning to night, their viewing habits providing YouTube with an increasingly detailed personality profile that the company can use to deliver ever more targeted content. Page 104 Which videos kept people on the website the longest? "Extreme videos are extremely good for watch time," Page 105 In 2017, Chaslot did an experiment. "Is Earth flat or round?" he typed into Google. Of the first twenty results in the search, 20 percent favored Flat Earth theory, he found. Those results already offered a massively warped reality: far fewer than 20 percent of people are Flat Earthers, and 0 percent of facts support the theory. Page 110 "There was a whisper that was being passed around content creators -- not just ours but other people -- that if you made a Flat Earth video, you would get more hits and you would get five hundred percent more comments, which track into the YouTube algorithm," Sargent told me. Page 115 April 2018, San Diego internet personality Nasim Aghdam packed a semiautomatic pistol in her car, drove overnight to YouTube's San Bruno, California, headquarters, and fired her way into the company's lobby, where she shot three YouTube employees (nonfatally) and herself (fatally). Although she ran a popular YouTube channel for fitness videos and vegan activism, Aghdam had become convinced YouTube was targeting her videos for suppression. Page 119 Facebook's polarizing potential is so well known that multiple nations have used the platform to sow political discord in rival countries. 6 | Alone in a Flat World Page 126 But almost universal in this community -- more binding even than belief in a flat planet -- is the experience of ridicule and social rejection. Old acquaintances unfriend Flat Earthers on Facebook, and in real life, after seeing one too many posts calling NASA a satanic psyop. Employers question their sanity. Family members find somewhere else to spend Thanksgiving. It's a loss that foregrounds every conversation at Flat Earth meetups, so common that some Flat Earthers describe themselves with the language of persecuted minorities: announcing one's belief in the theory is referred to as "coming out," a term most commonly associated with the LGBTQ community. Page 127 Flat Earthers often wear rejection as a badge of honor. ... The theories, in other words, thrive on antagonism. ... By definition, conspiracy theories imply a coordinated plot by a hostile group. Page 128 But the most successful conspiracy theories also imply the existence of another group: victims. ... Often, groups that have been dealt a bad hand can be more likely to perceive the world in a conspiratorial light due to past suffering, be it the result of a deliberate conspiracy or passive societal failings. Page 128 In their book American Conspiracy Theories, which compiles decades of data, researchers Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent found a trend of conspiratorial thinking among the disenfranchised (minorities, the poor, and people without a college education) and among groups fearful of losing status. Page 129 Jockeying for position as the most absurd conspiracy theory of the moment, QAnon and Flat Earth frequently overlap in membership, to the chagrin of some QAnon believers who think Flat Earth is a step too far. Page 130 A Reddit board for people who've lost friends or family to the theory called QAnonCasualties had more than 150,000 members by April 2021. QAnon Facebook groups double as pity parties. "Happy Thanksgiving everyone!" one member wrote in a popular QAnon group on Thanksgiving 2018. "My children have chosen to not include me in festivities this year bc their minds are not open to the truth, but I am Thankful for PRESIDENT TRUMP and the WW1WGA [a QAnon slogan] family!! If anyone else is spending today by themselvs I would be happy to exchange photos of our meals." Page 131 Rachel Bernstein is a psychologist who has spent decades helping people exit cults and alternative belief movements. Conspiracy theories and cults rely on similar information systems, closing believers into an ideological echo chamber, she told me. Page 133 Thompson promotes "flat-smacking," an aggressive brand of Flat Earth evangelism that involves confronting strangers in public. This usually consists of heckling someone in a parking lot or at an airport baggage claim, and is about as unpersuasive as you'd imagine. But the real victories are the videos: Thompson and his crowd often record their confrontations, in the hopes of upsetting someone so dramatically that the video goes viral. Page 135 "Pretty much, yeah," he told me. "I wouldn't waste time talking to people who don't know where they live. It's pretty basic. As far as being friends and stuff, you're a reporter, you need information, I'll deliver it to you. But if you wanted to go get a drink, I probably wouldn't want to hang out with you, to be honest. You believe in cartoon globes. Like, I'm sorry, but that's like an adult believing in Santa Claus." Page 135 This current of overplayed indignation runs through the conspiracy movement at large. Suffering for one's belief can be a form of street cred among truthers, even among less confrontational Flat Earthers like Wolfe. Page 138 "There is a lot of fear of infiltration. Everyone's looking over their shoulder," Page 139 "Flat Earth has brought me a sense of purpose I didn't have before." Page 144 Serena joined #DenounceQ, an anti-QAnon movement composed of former believers and people trying to pry their loved ones from the conspiratorial clique. One man in her group lost both his parents to the conspiracy theory, she told me. "He's been trying to tell [QAnon followers] what we know: that Q's just a franchise for profit and entertainment, and it has estranged him from his mom and dad." ... Cultists and the QAnon community both "isolate their followers and turn their followers against all other sources," she told me. "They also create apathy by telling people, ‘Just trust me. Trust the plan. We've got this.' They've created a complete circle: no matter where you go, they have an answer. But all the answers are nonsensical." ... Close-knit conspiracy circles like QAnon and Flat Earth can absolutely "fall under the rubric of cult definition," said Rachel Bernstein, the psychologist who focuses on cult exit. Page 146 For some Flat Earthers whose real-life friends ditch them over their faith, online acquaintances are the closest they'll come to a support group. 7 | Mike Page 149 In the mid-1840s, when Samuel Rowbotham popularized Flat Earth as a "zetetic" science, he preached that zetetics should believe only what they could personally observe. Page 169 Mike's path to Flat Earth was "a fine line between two things," Hawkins said. "I'm here to say that it started out as a marketing approach -- and it was my idea. Mike was looking for a way to get out there into the public. And I said, ‘Well, what you need is a controversy. So you should tell everybody that the earth is flat. That would definitely do it.' That's how it started." But after publicly associating his name with the theory, the already-conspiratorial rocket man went looking for more information about Flat Earth, Hawkins said. "Mike actually investigated the truth behind it. He wanted to see it for himself. So we went from an idea to an actual investigation." Hughes began networking with more established Flat Earthers and showing up at conventions. "I think that generated awareness and involvement for him. It just went on its course," Hawkins said. "It became something to him." Page 170 For all their talk of independent thinking and scientific inquiry, most are content to convert based on information they've gleaned secondhand on social media. 8 | Flat and Fascist Page 171 much of the Nazi chatter comes from well-meaning Flat Earthers who compare everything they dislike to Hitler. According to this crowd, NASA -- which, to be fair, absolutely did hire Nazi scientists in its bid to win the space race -- is an ongoing fascist plot. Page 172 A second faction of Flat Earthers makes mouth noises about disavowing Hitler, but regards the Holocaust as a hoax. ... Belief in conspiracy theories is a unifying feature of extremist groups of every political and religious stripe. "The frequency of conspiracy theories within all these groups suggests that they play an important social and functional role within extremism itself," wrote the authors of a 2010 study. ... Conspiracy theories "hold extremist groups together and push them in a more extreme and sometimes violent direction." Page 178 Conspiracy theories are not all inherently antisemitic, scholar Jovan Byford writes, "but it is also true that discernible within many conspiracy narratives, even those that are not explicitly targeting Jews, are worrying, and often subtle, reminders of the conspiracy theory's earlier, overtly antisemitic incarnations." Page 185 An employee style guide from the neo-Nazi news site The Daily Stormer explains the dynamic well. "The tone of the site should be light," reads the manual, which leaked in 2017. "Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, nonironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. Page 186 Historian Paul Hanebrink writes that, in the medieval imagination, the figure of the Jew served as an abstract threat around which Christianity -- then embroiled in messy sectarian infighting -- could rally and solidify. Antisemitic conspiracy theories were a cohesive force. Page 191 "Poisoning the well" is an interesting metaphor. A conspiratorial phrase, it refers to attempts to discredit a movement. I hear it often in truther scenes, usually when one theorist accuses another of selling out or betraying the cause. 9 | Away from the Edge Page 194 I began actively monitoring the Flat Earth community in 2017, half as a joke. Whenever the day's news felt too crazy, I could check back in on the Flat Earth movement and feel a sense of comparative normalcy. At least most of the country had a firmer tether in reality, I consoled myself in those moments. But the ensuing years stripped me of that smugness. Over the course of a wildly conspiratorial Trump presidency, the United States and the world at large had started to embrace Flat Earth–level delusions. Page 195 Flat Earth wasn't the only community being annexed by this movement, which also believed that Trump was on the cusp of executing his opponents for occult sex crimes against children. By the 2020 election, an increasingly comingled conspiracy movement composed of QAnon and Flat Earth believers was converting a paranoid wing of the Republican Party itself. Ninety-seven QAnon supporters ran for Congress in 2020. Page 196 People turn to conspiracy theories in moments of instability. "Conspiracy theories are a natural reaction to social situations that elicit fear and uncertainty," psychologist Jan-Willem van Prooijen writes. "Specifically, the more strongly people experience such aversive emotions, the more likely it is that they assign blame for distressing events to different groups." Page 200 I would like my old neighbors to stop invoking a fictional cannibalism ring when the diner down the road takes basic health precautions during a pandemic. I would like to live through an election devoid of conspiracy theories about vote rigging and racial minorities. But when an increasingly vocal population believes they live on a completely different planet, how can I find common ground for conversation? When some weirdo is sending spittle flying in the direction of my kid while yelling about a hoax he saw on the internet, how am I supposed to politely debunk his premises? Page 203 In short, bans and moderation work -- up to a point. Page 203 But while Silicon Valley giants like YouTube can curb the spread of conspiracy theories by taking away their artificial algorithmic boost, big tech firms are unlikely to deliver us, as a species, from the meaning-making thought processes that misfire when we craft conspiracy theories. Page 208 Robbie Davidson told me his Flat Earth international conferences depend on the crowds of media that attend (that includes me, twice), plus the late-night talk show staffers and the YouTube clowns like Logan Paul who've trolled the events. "We need it. We need it a hundred and ten percent," he told me, "because with YouTube completely doing the things that they're doing, we need the Logan Pauls, we need the late-night. We need all the media. Because, again, every time they do it, they do us favors, because they say two words: ‘Flat Earth.' That's all we need." Page 209 And yet, at the risk of giving Flat Earthers exactly what they want, we need to pay attention to them. Movements at the peripheries do not always stay on the sidelines. Page 209 "The flat earth and pro-Trump movements share strands of the same conspiratorial, counter-factual DNA," I wrote in a 2018 article, when QAnon was still embryonic. I added that the overlap "has resulted in forums and Facebook groups like the 101-member ‘QAnon flat earthers club,' which accuses Hillary Clinton of being a pedophile and German Chancellor Angela Merkel of being Adolf Hitler's daughter. When Earth is flat, other untruths are trivial." Page 210 Rachel Bernstein, the cult-exit psychologist, said cults and conspiratorial movements are cousins, in that their followers form insular sects. Followers of both cults and conspiracy theories often grow fiercely protective of their cliques, she told me; you're either helping the movement, or actively hurting it. Page 210 True, Flat Earth has no king-like figure at its center, unlike the most infamous cults. Instead, Flat Earth's followers keep each other in line, surveilling each other for signs of deviancy, and corralling themselves closer together, away from the outside world. Page 212 If conspiracy theorists are like cult members, maybe it's no surprise that they won't abandon their beliefs over a few inconvenient facts. In order to bring believers back from the edge, maybe we need to approach debunking less like a debate and more like holding a friend's hand as they leave a terrible, dependent relationship. Page 212 Keep in communication with that person. Remind them that another world exists outside of their faith community. This, in itself, can be difficult, especially when the group preaches ideals that are baffling, even immoral, to the person on the outside. Page 214 Conspiracy theories preach suspicion and prey on our fears. Inherently divisive, they thrive when we mistrust others and wall ourselves behind our personal paranoias. Fittingly, one of the best ways out of conspiratorial thinking can be to place our faith in others. Page 214 Trust can be frightening, especially for people steeped in a paranoid theory. It requires vulnerability and the confidence that something new will be ready to catch and support a person when they finally let go of an idea that has carried them for so long. Page 215 Knowing as little as I do -- as little as anyone does -- about the looming future, Page 215 I understand why my Flat Earther friends want to believe they live in a different world, a finite world that does not expand into the endless vacuum of space but ends with a simple answer in the form of a dome or an ice wall. Flat Earth is a bracket on understanding. It narrows the world to a safe frame.	Kevin Dutton Notable Quotations Full screen view My father also had an uncanny knack for getting exactly what he wanted, often with just a casual throwaway line or a single telling gesture. ... [He had] the ideal personality for modern living. I never once saw him panic. Never once saw him lose his cool. Never once saw him get hot under the collar about anything. [Fear played a significant part in human evolution] But millions of years on, in a world where wild animals aren't lurking around every street corner, this fear system can be oversensitive -- like a nervous driver with a foot hovering constantly over the brake pedal -- reacting to dangers that don't actually exist and pushing us into making illogical, irrational decisions. [All emotions serve a purpose] Even depression has its advantages. Recent research suggests that despondency helps us think better -- and contributes to increased attentiveness and enhanced problem-solving ability.... The results couldn't have been clearer: shoppers in the "low mood" condition remembered nearly four times as many of the knickknacks. ... The rain made them sad, and their sadness made them pay more attention. To a psychopath, you see, there are no such things as clouds. There are only silver linings. I've also met psychopaths who, far from devouring society from within, serve, through nerveless poise and hard-as-nails decision making, to protect and enrich it instead: surgeons, soldiers, spies, entrepreneurs -- dare I say, even lawyers. "Don't get too cocky. If there's one thing that psychopaths have in common, it's the consummate ability to pass themselves off as normal everyday folk, while behind the facade -- the brutal, brilliant disguise -- beats the refrigerated heart of a ruthless, glacial predator. ... A theory I have about psychopaths: that one of the reasons we're so fascinated by them is because we're fascinated by illusions, by things that appear, on the surface, to be normal, yet that on closer examination turn out to be anything but. Psychopaths, as we shall discover, have a variety of attributes -- personal magnetism and a genius for disguise being just the starter pack -- which, once you learn to harness them and keep them in check often confer considerable advantages not just in the workplace, but in everyday life. 215 In normal members of the population, theta waves are associated with drowsy, meditative, or sleeping states. Yet in psychopaths they occur during normal waking states -- even sometimes during states of increased arousal… "Language for psychopaths, is only word deep. There's no emotional contouring behind it. A psychopath may say something like, 'I love you" but in reality, it means about as much to him as if he said "I'll have a cup of coffee' ... This is one of the reasons why psychopaths remain so cool, calm, and collected under conditions of extreme danger, and why they are so reward-driven and take risks. Their brains, quite literally, are less 'switched on' than the rest of ours." 272 Jim Kouri, vice president of the U.S. National Association of Chiefs of Police, makes a similar point. Traits that are common among psychopathic serial killers, Kouri observes -- a grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, and the manipulation of others -- are also shared by politicians and world leaders: individuals running not from the police, but for office. ... Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless, and focused. Yet contrary to popular belief, they are not necessarily violent. 305 Just as there's no official dividing line between someone who plays recreational golf on the weekends and, say, Tiger Woods, so the boundary between a world-class, "hole-in-one" superpsychopath and one who merely "psychopathizes" is similarly blurred. Think of psychopathic traits as the dials and sliders on a studio mixing desk. If you push all of them to max, you'll have a sound track that's no use to anyone. But if the sound track is graded and some controls are turned up higher than others -- such as fearlessness, focus, lack of empathy, and mental toughness, for example -- you may well have a surgeon who's a cut above the rest. Sure, psychopaths may well be deficient in the former variety, the touchy-feely type. But when it comes to the latter commodity, the kind that codes for "understanding" rather than "feeling"; the kind that enables abstract, nerveless prediction, as opposed to personal identification; the kind that relies on symbolic processing instead of affective symbiosis -- the cognitive skill set possessed by expert hunters and cold readers, not just in the natural environment, but in the human arena, too -- then psychopaths are in a league of their own. They fly even better on one empathy engine than on two -- which is, of course, just one of the reasons why they make such good persuaders. If you know where the buttons are and don't feel the heat when you push them, then chances are you're going to hit the jackpot. Their analysis revealed that a number of psychopathic attributes were actually more common in business leaders than in so-called disturbed criminals -- attributes such as superficial charm, egocentricity, persuasiveness, lack of empathy, independence, and focus -- and that the main difference between the groups was in the more "antisocial" aspects of the syndrome: the criminals' lawbreaking, physical aggression, and impulsivity dials (to return to our analogy of earlier) were cranked up higher. "Intellectual ability on its own is just an elegant way of finishing second," one successful CEO told me. "Remember, they don't call it a greasy pole for nothing. The road to the top is hard. But it's easier to climb if you lever yourself up on others. Easier still if they think something's in it for them." ... determination, curiosity, and insensitivity as his three most valuable character traits. ... "The great thing about insensitivity," explains Moulton, "is that it lets you sleep when others can't." The latest research from the field of cognitive neuroscience suggests that the spectrum might be circular… that across the neural dateline of sanity and madness, the psychopaths and antipsychopaths sit within touching distance of each other. The "presence" (psychopaths tend to blink just a little bit less than the rest of us, a physiological aberration that often helps give them their unnerving, hypnotic air).* 705 Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism -- think OCEAN -- comprise the genome of human personality. ... lying, manipulation, callousness, and arrogance are pretty much considered the gold standard of psychopathic traits by most clinicians. ... Neuroticism: Anxiety, Depression, Self-Consciousness and Vulnerability barely show up on the radar, which, when combined with strong outputs on Extraversion (Assertiveness and Excitement Seeking) and Openness to Experience (Actions), generates that air of raw, elemental charisma. ... Dazzling and remorseless on the one hand. Glacial and unpredictable on the other. 771 DSM classifies personality disorders into three distinct clusters.* There's odd/eccentric, dramatic/erratic, and anxious/inhibited. 797 The philosopher Theophrastus (c. 371– 287 B.C.), the successor to Aristotle as head of the Peripatetic school in Athens, delineates, in his book The Characters, "The Unscrupulous Man," Theophrastus laments, "will go and borrow more money from a creditor he has never paid… When marketing he reminds the butcher of some service he has rendered him, and, standing near the scales, throws in some meat, if he can, and a soupbone. If he succeeds, so much the better; if not, he will snatch a piece of tripe and go off laughing." 820 the Medical College of Georgia, the American physician Hervey Cleckley provides a more detailed inventory of la folie raisonnante. In his book The Mask of Sanity, published in 1941, Cleckley assembles the following somewhat eclectic identikit of the psychopath. ... an intelligent person, characterized by a poverty of emotions, the absence of a sense of shame, egocentricity, superficial charm, lack of guilt, lack of anxiety, immunity to punishment, unpredictability, irresponsibility, manipulativeness, and a transient interpersonal lifestyle -- The psychopath, it's been said, gets the words, but not the music, of emotion. The psychopath's powers of persuasion are incomparable; their psychological safecracking abilities, legendary. Not all psychopaths are behind bars. The majority, it emerges, are out there in the workplace. And some of them, in fact, are doing rather well. The ability to delay gratification, to put on hold the desire to cut and run (and also, needless to say, to run and cut), might well tip the balance away from criminal activity toward a more structured, less impulsive, less antisocial lifestyle. It's perfectly possible to be a psychopath and not a criminal. Eight independent satellite states of the psychopathic personality --Machiavellian Egocentricity (ME); Impulsive Nonconformity (IN); Blame Externalization (BE); Carefree Nonplanfulness (CN); Fearlessness (F); Social Potency (SOP); Stress Immunity (STI); and Coldheartedness (C) --divide and re-form along three superordinate axes … Yet we know that people with psychopathic traits function perfectly well on the 'outside' -- and that some of them are extremely successful. Ruthlessness, mental toughness, charisma, focus, persuasiveness, and coolness under pressure are qualities, so to speak, that separate the men from the boys, pretty much across the board. "The combination of low risk aversion and lack of guilt or remorse, the two central pillars of psychopathy," he elucidates, "may lead, depending on circumstances, to a successful career in either crime or business. Sometimes both. "They don't feel distress or notice such emotion in others, because when they focus on a task that promises immediate reward, they screen everything "irrelevant" out. They get emotional "tunnel vision." ... "People think [psychopaths] are just callous and without fear," But when focused on something else, they become insensitive to emotions entirely." Vladas Griskevicius, then at Arizona State University, and his coworkers found that when users of an Internet chat room are made to feel under threat, they show signs of "sticking together." Their views display convergence, and they become more likely to conform to the attitudes and opinions of others in the forum. ... In 1952, the sociologist William H. Whyte coined the term "groupthink" to conceptualize the mechanism by which tightly knit groups, cut off from outside influence, rapidly converge on normatively "correct" positions, becoming, as they do so, institutionally impervious to criticism: ... So is the capacity to stand alone, to play by one's own rules outside the normative safe haven of society, also hardwired? There's evidence to suggest that it is -- and that a fearless, untroubled minority has evolved within our midst. psychopaths, show greater willingness to accept unfair offers, favoring simple economic utility over the exigencies of punishment and ego preservation, they are much less bothered by inequity. ... Psychopaths were far less fazed than controls when screwed by their opposite numbers -- and at the conclusion of the study, had more in the bank to show for it. A thicker skin had earned them thicker wallets. As the primatologist Frans de Waal points out, "Instead of dominants standing out because of what they take, they affirm their position by what they give." ... Of equal note are those primates who vie with one another for status through "public service" or "leadership" -- by facilitating cooperation within the group, or, if you prefer, through charisma, persuasion, and charm. ... "Survival of the fittest" now appeared not, as had been previously thought, to reward competition indiscriminately. But rather, to reward it discerningly. Under certain sets of circumstances, yes, aggression might open doors (one thinks of Jim and Buzz). But under others, in contrast, it might just as easily close them -- as we saw with the saints and the shysters. ... The meek, it turns out, really do inherit the earth. It's just that along the way there are always going to be casualties. If everyone floors it, there'll eventually be nobody left. But equally, there are times during the course of our everyday lives when we all need to pump the gas. When we all, rationally, legitimately, and in the interests of self-preservation, need to calmly "put our foot down." There will always be a need for risk takers in society, as there will for rule-breakers and heartbreakers. paper titled "Who Is James Bond? The Dark Triad as an Agentic Social Style," in which they showed that men with a specific triumvirate of personality traits -- the stratospheric self-esteem of narcissism; the fearlessness, ruthlessness, impulsivity, and thrill-seeking of psychopathy; and the deceitfulness and exploitativeness of Machiavellianism -- can actually do pretty well for themselves out there in certain echelons of society. Hare handed out the PCL-R to more than two hundred top U.S. business executives, .... Not only did the business execs come out ahead, but psychopathy was positively associated with in-house ratings of charisma and presentation style: creativity, good strategic thinking, and excellent communication skills. .... "Without doubt, there's a greater proportion of psychopathic big hitters in the corporate world than there is in the general population. .... There are positions in society, jobs and roles to fulfill, which, by their competitive, cutthroat, or chillingly coercive natures, require access to office space in precisely the kind of psychological real estate that psychopaths have the keys to, ... You get them to open up. Usually by telling them something about yourself first -- a good grifter always has a narrative. .... "Then you can get to work -- not right away, you need to be patient. But a month or two later. You modify whatever it is, whatever the hell they've told you -- you tend to know instantly where the pressure points are -- and then tell the story back as if it were your own. Bam! From that point on, you can pretty much take what you want. "I'll give you an example… [One guy is] rich, successful, works like a dog… When he's a kid, he comes home from school to find his record collection gone. His pop's a bum and has sold it to stock up his liquor cabinet. He's been collecting these records for years. "So wait, I think. You're telling me this after, what, three or four hours in a bar? There's something going down. Then I get it. So that's why you work so goddamned hard, I think. It's because of your pappy. ... You're scared. You're life's been on hold all these years. You're not a CEO. You're that scared little kid. The one who's going to come home from school one day and find your record collection is history. "Jesus, I think! That's hilarious! So guess what? A couple of weeks later I tell him what happened to me. How I get home from work one night and find my wife in bed with the boss. How she files for divorce. And cleans me out." Morant pauses, and pours us some more champagne. "Total bullshit!" he laughs. "But you know what? I did that guy a favor. Put him out of his misery. What do they say -- the best way to overcome your fears is to confront them? Well, someone had to be Daddy." Morant's Research shows that one of the best ways of getting people to tell you about themselves is to tell them something about yourself. ... Self-disclosure meets reciprocity. ... if you want to stop someone from remembering something, the key is to use distraction. Psychopathy does indeed predict criminal success. That said, there's a limit. A very high dose of psychopathy (all the dials turned up to max) is as bad as a very low one. Instead, it's moderate levels that code for greater "accomplishment." Psychopaths were far more convincing at feigning sadness when presented with a happy image, or happiness when looking at a sad image, than were non-psychopaths. ... If you can fake sincerity, as someone once said… well, you really have got it made, it would seem. ... Psychopaths, in other words, not only have a natural talent for duplicity, but also feel the "moral pinch" considerably less than the rest of us. ... The evidence is pretty clear. If the psychopath can "make" out of a situation, if there's any kind of reward on offer, they go for it, irrespective of risk or possible negative consequences. ... Not only do they keep their composure in the presence of threat or adversity, they become, in the shadow of such presentiment, laser-like in their ability to "do whatever it takes." ... These individuals appear to have such a strong draw to reward -- to the carrot -- that it overwhelms the sense of risk or concern about the stick… It's not just that they don't appreciate the potential threat, but that the anticipation or motivation for reward overwhelms those concerns." The psychopath seeks reward at any cost, flouting consequence and elbowing risk aside. ... Psychopaths not only have the capacity to recognize emotions -- they are, in fact, actually better at it than we are. ... psychopaths, rather than having an impairment in recognizing the emotions of others, indeed have a talent for it. ... Psychopaths' enhanced ability to recognize emotion in others might go some way toward explaining their superior persuasion and manipulation skills -- A CEO might be non-risk-averse in certain areas of business, but, on the other hand, probably wouldn't want to walk around a rough neighborhood at night. A psychopath isn't able to make that distinction. ... Functional psychopathy is context dependent. That, in the language of personality theory, it is "state" as opposed to "trait." ... In the right set of circumstances, it can enhance rather than encumber the speed and quality of decision making. ... "Both extremely high and extremely low levels of psychopathy may be maladaptive, with intermediate levels being most adaptive. A new breed of individual with little or no conception of social norms, no respect for the feelings of others, and scant regard for the consequences of their actions? ... College students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index*) have actually been in steady decline over the previous three decades -- since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979 -- and that a particularly pronounced slump has, it turns out, been observed over the past ten years. ... Students' self-reported narcissism levels have, in contrast, gone in the other direction. They've shot through the roof. The amygdala, as we've learned previously in this book, is the brain's emotion control tower. It polices our emotional airspace and is responsible for the way we feel about things. ... in psychopaths, the part that corresponds to fear, is empty. ... But mental toughness isn't the only characteristic that Special Forces soldiers have in common with psychopaths. There's also fearlessness. ... When you're in a hostile situation, the primary objective is to pull the trigger before the other guy pulls the trigger. And when you pull it, you move on. Simple as that. Why stand there, dwelling on what you've done? Go down that route and chances are the last thing that goes through your head will be a bullet from an M16. ... It's about not feeling hot in the first place. ... Your reactions become automatic. You use your judgment, yes. But even that's a product of the training. ... In any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm -- who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment. Sentiment is a chemical aberration found on the losing side. "The problem with a lot of people is that what they think is a virtue is actually a vice in disguise. It's much easier to convince yourself that you're reasonable and civilized than soft and weak, isn't it?" ... ruthlessness need not be conspicuous. ... the more creative the ruthlessness narrative, the greater your chances of pulling it off with impunity. charm: "the ability to roll out a red carpet for those you cannot stand in order to fast-track them, as smoothly and efficiently as possible, in the direction you want them to go." They get too caught up in the heat of the moment and temporarily go off track. At that point, the dynamic changes. That's when things become not just about getting what you want. But about being seen to get what you want. ... the temptation to not just get what you want, but to be seen to get what you want. "But it's not just about functionality, though, is it?" he demurs. "The thing about fear, or the way I understand fear, I suppose -- because, to be honest, I don't think I've ever really felt it -- is that most of the time it's completely unwarranted anyway. What is it they say? Ninety-nine percent of the things people worry about never happen. So what's the point? ... "I think the problem is that people spend so much time worrying about what might happen, what might go wrong, that they completely lose sight of the present. They completely overlook the fact that, actually, right now, everything's perfectly fine. .... What freaked you out was your imagination. ... "So the trick, whenever possible, I propose, is to stop your brain from running on ahead of you. Keep doing that and, sooner or later, you'll kick the courage habit, too." "Next time you're in a situation where you're scared, just think: 'Imagine I didn't feel this way. What would I do then?' And then just do it anyway." ... "' Now, if you can bring yourself round to somehow accepting that fact; to dispassionately observe your inner virtual reality; to let the clouds float by, to let their shadows fall and linger where they please, and focus, instead, on what's going on around you -- each pixelated second of each ambient sound and sensation -- then eventually, over time, your condition should begin to improve.'" Studies, for instance, of cognitive and emotional focus in the context of dysfunctional decision making have shown that whenever we evaluate common, everyday behaviors -- things like diving into a swimming pool, or picking up the phone and delivering bad news -- the imagined, potential reality is significantly more discomfiting than the real one. From victim to victor, but without turning us into a villain: Ruthlessness Charm Focus Mental toughness Fearlessness Mindfulness Action Certain situations would inevitably call for more of some traits than others, while within those sets of circumstance, some sub-situations, going back to our trusty mixing desk analogy, would plausibly demand higher or lower output levels of whichever traits were selected. ... It wasn't about being a psychopath. It was rather about being a method psychopath. About being able to step into character when the situation demanded Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!" --HUNTER S. THOMPSON Psychopaths, contended Harrington, constitute a dangerous new breed of Homo sapiens: a made-to-measure Darwinian contingency plan for the cold, hard exigencies of modern-day survival. An indomitable Generation Two thousand years ago, a certain Saul of Tarsus sanctioned the deaths of countless numbers of Christians following the public execution of their leader -- and could today, under the dictates of the Geneva Convention, have been indicted on charges of genocide. We all know what happened to him. A dazzling conversion as he journeyed on the road to Damascus* transformed him, quite literally overnight, from a murderous, remorseless tentmaker into one of the most important figures in the history of the Western world. Saint Paul, as he's more commonly referred to today, is the author of just over half of the entire New Testament (fourteen of the twenty-seven books that comprise the corpus are attributed to him); is the hero of another, the Acts of the Apostles; and is the subject of some of the best stained glass in the business. ... "To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people" (1 Corinthians 9: 20– 22). "There is a lot of evidence [to suggest] that the best sportsmen and women have [developed] psychological skills that allow them to concentrate and to control anxiety," ... "The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment. In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event. ... All judgments and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped." "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities," elucidated Shunryu Suzuki, one of the most celebrated Buddhist teachers of recent times. "In the expert's mind there are few." Psychopaths, it appears, far from being callous and unemotional all the time, can actually, in the right kind of context, be more altruistic than the rest of us. ... When it really mattered, they were significantly more likely to step up to the plate than were their (supposedly, at least) warmer, more empathic counterparts. On the one hand, though exemplifying a prosocial lifestyle, hero populations are tough. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the level of trauma and risk such occupations entail, they show a greater preponderance of psychopathic traits associated with the Fearless Dominance and Coldheartedness subscales of the PPI (e.g., low anxiety, social dominance, and stress immunity), compared with the general population at large. These dials are turned up higher. On the other hand, however, they part company with criminal psychopaths in their relative absence of traits related to the Self-Centered Impulsivity subscale (e.g., Machiavellianism, narcissism, carefree nonplanfulness, and antisocial behavior). These dials are turned down lower. "The decision to act heroically is a choice that many of us will be called upon to make at some point in our lives," Zimbardo tells me. "It means not being afraid of what others might think. It means not being afraid of the fallout for ourselves. ... Certain degree of cognitive empathy, a modicum of 'theory of mind,' is an essential requirement for the sadistic serial killer. ... "So the bottom line, strange though it may seem, is this. Sadistic serial killers feel their victims' pain in exactly the same way that you or I might feel it. They feel it cognitively and objectively. And they feel it emotionally and subjectively, too. But the difference between them and us is that they commute that pain to their own subjective pleasure.
Kyle Chayka Notable Quotations Full screen view Page 1 In 1769, a civil servant in the Habsburg Empire named Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen built a device nicknamed "the Mechanical Turk." Page 2 Over the two centuries since its invention, the device has become a prevalent metaphor for technological manipulation. It represents the human lurking behind the facade of seemingly advanced technology as well as the ability of such devices to deceive us about the way they work. Page 3 Algorithm is usually shorthand for "algorithmic recommendations," the digital mechanisms that absorb piles of user data, push it through a set of equations, and spit out a result deemed most relevant to preset goals. Page 3 Algorithmic recommendations shape the vast majority of our experiences in digital spaces by considering our previous actions and selecting the pieces of content that will most suit our patterns of behavior. They are supposed to interpret and then show us what we want to see. Page 4 All of these small decisions used to be made one at a time by humans: A newspaper editor decided which stories to put on the front page, Page 4 Algorithmic recommendations are the latest iteration of the Mechanical Turk: a series of human decisions that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed. Page 4 The algorithm always wins. Page 4 Though Filterworld has also changed politics, education, and interpersonal relationships, among many other facets of society, my focus is on culture. Page 4 guiding our attention Page 5 Each platform develops its own stylistic archetype, which is informed not just by aesthetic preferences but by biases of race, gender, and politics as well as by the fundamental business model of the corporation that owns it. Page 6 "harmonization of tastes." Through algorithmic digital platforms like Instagram, Yelp, and Foursquare, more people around the world are learning to enjoy and seek out similar products and experiences in their physical lives. Page 7 "Surveillance capitalism," as the scholar Shoshana Zuboff has labeled it, is how tech companies monetize the constant absorption of our personal data, an intensification of the attention economy. Page 7 We consume what the feeds recommend to us without engaging too deeply with the material. Page 7 Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces nothingness, that blankets and soothes rather than challenges or surprises, as powerful artwork is meant to do. Our capacity to be moved, or even to be interested and curious, is depleted. Page 9 In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers. Page 9 Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is judged, and what gets attention is dictated by equations developed by Silicon Valley engineers. Page 9 The outcome of such algorithmic gatekeeping is the pervasive flattening that has been happening across culture. Page 9 Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity's proudest cultural creations. Page 9 culture of Filterworld is the culture of presets, established patterns that get repeated again and again. Page 10 we can determine ways to escape it and resolve the omnipresent atmosphere of anxiety and ennui that algorithmic feeds have produced. We can dispel their influence only by understanding them— by opening the cabinet of the Mechanical Turk to reveal the operator inside. Chapter 1: The Rise of Algorithmic Recommendations Page 11 Algorithm as a term simply describes an equation: any formula or set of rules that produces a desired result. Page 16 we're discussing a technology with a history and legacy that has slowly formed over centuries, long before the Internet existed. Page 20 An executive at the music cataloging and recommendation service Pandora once described the company's system to me as an "orchestra" of algorithms, complete with a "conductor" algorithm. Each algorithm used different strategies to come up with a recommendation, and then the conductor algorithm dictated which suggestions were used at a given moment. (The only output was the next song to play in a playlist.) Different moments called for different algorithmic recommendation techniques. Page 21 Recommendation algorithms as a way of automatically processing and sorting information were put into practice in the 1990s. Page 22 "We need technology to help us wade through all the information to find the items we really want and need, and to rid us of the things we do not want to be bothered with." Page 23 Social information filtering bypasses those problems because it is instead driven by the actions of human users, who evaluate content on their own—using judgments both quantitative and qualitative. Page 23 even described it as "unnervingly accurate." Ringo's innovation was how it acknowledged that the best recommendations, or the best indications of relevance, were likely to come from other humans rather than analysis of the content itself. It represented a scaling up of human taste. Page 24 PageRank worked by measuring how many times a website was linked to by other sites, similar to the way academic papers cite key pieces of past research. Page 25 in the Internet era, sorting knowledge might be even more powerful. Information is now easy to find in abundance; making sense of it, knowing which information is useful, is much harder. Page 26 Nick Seaver is a sociologist and a professor at Tufts University who studies recommender systems. Page 27 "The algorithm is metonymic for companies as a whole," he told me. "The Facebook algorithm doesn't exist; Facebook exists. The algorithm is a way of talking about Facebook's decisions." Page 31 algorithms can warp language itself as users attempt to either game them or evade detection. Page 36 if people are using a platform, staying engaged and active, then it counts as successful—no matter what they are doing. Page 36 it is difficult to think of creating a piece of culture that is separate from algorithmic feeds, because those feeds control how it will be exposed to billions of consumers in the international digital audience. Page 36 Without the feeds, there is no audience— Page 36 for a piece of culture to be commercially successful, it must already have traction on digital platforms. Page 37 Under algorithmic feeds, the popular becomes more popular, and the obscure becomes even less visible. Page 37 Success or failure is accelerated. Page 38 Given that these capricious systems control so many facets of our lives, from socializing with our friends to building audiences for our creative projects, is it any wonder that social media users feel paranoid? We're encouraged to overlook algorithmic processes, but their glitches remind us of their unearned authority. Page 38 The ambiguity of algorithmic influence creates a feeling that has been labeled "algorithmic anxiety." Page 38 Airbnb forces a "double negotiation" for the hosts, the researchers wrote, because they must determine what their guests are looking for in a listing as well as which variables the algorithms are prioritizing to promote their property more often. Page 39 platforms like Airbnb have long promised flexible work and alternative ways of making or supplementing a living, but they also created a new form of labor in the need to stay up to date on changes in algorithmic priorities. Page 40 Algorithmic anxiety is something of a contemporary plague. It induces an OCD-ish tendency in many users toward hyperawareness and the need to repeat the same rituals, because when these rituals "work," the effect is so compelling, resulting in both a psychological dopamine rush from receiving attention and a potential economic reward if your online presence is monetized. It undergirds so many of our behaviors online: selecting the right profile picture, curating an attractive grid of photos on an Instagram account, choosing the right keywords on a marketplace listing. Page 40 Exploitation is disguised as an accidental glitch instead of an intentional corporate policy. In reality, a company like Facebook is wholly in control of their algorithmic systems, able to change them at will—or turn them off. Chapter 2: The Disruption of Personal Taste Page 45 It was as if you could buy only the books that appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, but the list was operated by an untrustworthy company, one solely devoted to treating books as fungible objects to be offloaded as quickly as possible. Page 46 Chet Haase in 2017 pinpoints the problem: "A machine learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks, ‘What'll you have?' The algorithm says, ‘What's everyone else having?' Page 48 Taste is a word for how we measure culture and judge our relationship to it. If something suits our taste, we feel close to it and identify with it, as well as form relationships with other people based on it, the way customers commune over clothing labels (either loving or hating a particular brand). Page 50 If taste indeed must be deeply felt, requires time to engage with, and benefits from the surprise that comes from the unfamiliar, then it seems that technology could not possibly replicate it, because algorithmic feeds run counter to these fundamental qualities. Page 51 The feed structure also discourages users from spending too much time with any one piece of content. Page 51 Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argued in his 2017 book In the Swarm, the sheer exposure of so many people to each other online without barriers—the "demediatization" of the Internet—makes "language and culture flatten out and become vulgar." Page 51 Today we have more cultural options available to us than ever and they are accessible on demand. We are free to choose anything. Yet the choice we often make is to not have a choice, to have our purview shaped by automated feeds, which may be based on the aggregate actions of humans but are not human in themselves. Page 51 Taste can also feel more like a cause for concern than a source of personal fulfillment. A selection made based on your own personal taste might be embarrassing if it unwittingly clashes with the norms of the situation at hand, like wearing athleisure to the office or bright colors to a somber funeral. Page 52 Over the twentieth century, taste became less a philosophical concept concerning the quality of art than a parallel to industrial-era consumerism, a way to judge what to buy and judge others for what they buy in turn. Page 53 Consumption without taste is just undiluted, accelerated capitalism. Page 53 There are two forces forming our tastes. As I described previously, the first is our independent pursuit of what we individually enjoy, while the second is our awareness of what it appears that most other people like, the dominant mainstream. Page 53 Pierre Bourdieu wrote in his 1984 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. These choices can be symbolic of a range of things beyond just our aesthetic preferences, such as economic class, political ideology, and social identity. "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier," Bourdieu wrote. No wonder that we worry about what to like, and sometimes find it simpler to export that responsibility to machines. Page 55 Online, users are often insulated from views and cultures that clash with their own. The overall digital environment is dictated by tech companies with ruthlessly capitalist, expansionary motives, which do not provide the most fertile ground for culture. Page 56 Part of its appeal lies in breaking with the social code: wearing something unexpected or strange, even at times challenging your own taste. Page 56 On the consumer side, the bombardment of recommendations can induce a kind of hypnosis that makes listening to, watching, or buying a product all but inevitable—whether it truly aligns with your taste or not. Page 58 Your engagement is tracked by digital surveillance, and then you are served ads for products that match what you engage with, from brands that pay for your attention. Page 62 Fascism means being forced to conform to the tenets of a single ideological view of the world, one that may utterly discount a particular identity or demographic. It is the mandate of homogeneity. Filterworld can be fascistic, Page 62 With modern-day algorithmic recommendations, artists have much less choice in what becomes popular and even less control over the context that their work appears in. Page 66 The Netflix algorithm factors in a user's viewing history and ratings; the actions of other users with similar preferences; and information about the content itself, like genre, actors, and release dates. It also includes the time of day the user is watching, what device they're watching on, and how long they tend to watch in that context. Page 67 The Netflix algorithm slots users into particular "taste communities," of which there are more than two thousand. And there are more than seventy-seven thousand "altgenres" or niche categories, Page 69 Netflix recommendations are less about finding the content that suits a user's preferences and more about presenting what's already popular or accessible, an illusion of taste. Page 71 "Over time, if people are offered things that are not aligned with their interests often enough, they can be taught what to want…. Page 73 But the more automated an algorithmic feed is, the more passive it makes us as consumers, and the less need we feel to build a collection, to preserve what matters to us. We give up the responsibility of collecting. Page 75 our cultural collections are not wholly our own anymore. Page 76 The disappearance or overhauling of a particular app throws the content gathered there to the wind. Page 76 Building a collection online more closely resembles building a sandcastle on the beach: Page 76 The shifting sands of digital technology have robbed our collections of their meaning. Page 82 Kabvina built his own narrative arc into his TikTok account, creating a social-media-era hero's journey. He studied the most popular accounts. Influencers like Charli D'Amelio and Emily Mariko became famous in part for getting famous, starting from anonymity. "The biggest trend I'd notice is…[followers] want a protagonist to take them on this journey," Kabvina said. He also carefully optimized his cooking videos according to the data TikTok gave him. Avoiding too much speaking or text made them appealing to a global audience—his food needed no translation. (It was a successful strategy; Mariko also became famous for her speech-less cooking videos.) The TikTok app reveals to creators at which point in a video users tune out and flip to the next video. Page 83 If viewers were skipping at nineteen seconds, Kabvina would go back and examine the underperforming section, and then try to avoid its problems in the next video. Such specific data allowed him to optimize for engagement at every moment. Page 84 Culture is continuously refined according to the excesses of data generated by digital platforms, which offer a second-by-second record of what audiences are engaging with and when and how. Page 84 This perception that culture is stuck and plagued by sameness is indeed due to the omnipresence of algorithmic feeds. Chapter 4: The Influencer Economy Page 134 The tyranny of likes is in part a function of the algorithmic ecosystem we exist in online. Page 134 Over time, a kind of inflation of likes occurred. Page 135 Provocation inspires likes, since the like is a gesture of allegiance and agreement, a symbol of whether the user is on the side of the troll or the trolled. Outrage gets likes because the likes signal sympathetic outrage: Page 138 The likes were not the only reward; they existed in a wider online attention economy that bled into the offline economy at large. Likes lead to attention. Attention leads to new followers; followers who liked and shared my work in turn. More followers led to a veneer of personal authority: Page 138 And that reputation got me commissions from editors, part-time gigs, and full-time jobs, which drove me back to the beginning of that loop. Getting more likes felt like what I was supposed to be doing; it felt like work, and I was getting better at my job. Page 140 commentators on contemporary culture, in 2021. "Algorithmic" has become a byword for anything that feels too slick, too reductive, or too optimized for attracting attention: a combination of high production values with little concern for fundamental content. Page 141 Part of the fear of algorithmically driven art is the obviation of the artist: If viable art can be created or curated by computer, what is the point of the humans producing Page 146 On one hand, this is a kind of democratization: Anyone can publish a book and give it a chance to be sold through the exact same channels, presented in the same way. There is no obstacle of a store's book buyer or the curation of a front table; just the math of the algorithm. The hyper-bestselling author Colleen Hoover provides an example of the opportunities. Hoover began by self-publishing her novels, which often fall into romance, thriller, and young-adult categories, on Amazon. Page 147 On the other hand, the requirement of mass engagement is a departure from the history of literature, in which the opinions of editors and academics have mattered far more than how many copies of a book initially sells. Page 148 It's that algorithms have shaped the overall cultural landscape, conditioning our tastes. Everything exists within the algorithmic context of passive, frictionless consumption. Page 149 Rather than encouraging original artistic achievement, algorithmic feeds create the need for content that exists to generate more content: films that provide ready-made GIFs of climactic scenes to share on Twitter or TikTok and quippy lines that will inspire memes to serve as marketing. The need for engagement can encourage a capitulation to fanservice, or at least an attempt to do so. Page 154 The superficiality of the word itself is indicative: "influence" is never the end point, only a means of communicating a particular message. An influencer is easiest to define by how they make money. Like a media company producing magazines or podcasts, they sell advertising shown to the audiences that they have gathered. Page 154 audiences in in the first place is most often the influencer's personal life, their aesthetically appealing surroundings (as well as aesthetically appealing selves) and entertaining activities. Page 154 influencers don't own the infrastructure of their medium. Page 154 Fascination with a person, particularly their appearance or personal life, smoothing the way to self-promotion began long before the Internet era. Page 155 Consumers have always cared about the lifestyle decisions of celebrities famous for something else: Page 156 The influencer is something of a successor to the blogger, the star of the nascent mainstream Internet in the 2000s. Page 162 While the early promise of social media was to connect users to their actual friends, over time inauthenticity became something to embrace. Page 163 Individual influencers are less remarkable in this decade also because so many users of digital platforms are pressured to act like influencers themselves, constantly creating content, accruing an audience, and figuring out ways to monetize it—either immediately through literal advertising or more gradually through the attention of their peers. Page 164 In Filterworld, culture has become increasingly iterative. It's harder for a creator to go straight to making a movie or publishing a book; she needs to first publish her sample material, describe her vision, and gather an audience online who are engaged fans of her work. Page 164 This need to corral an audience in advance by succeeding on social media can be explained by the useful phrase "content capital." Established by the scholar Kate Eichhorn in her 2022 monograph Content, Page 164 it describes the Internet-era state in which "one's ability to engage in work as an artist or a writer is increasingly contingent on one's content capital; Page 164 That ancillary content might be Instagram selfies, photos of a painting studio, evidence of travel, tossed-off observations on Twitter, or a monologue on TikTok. Page 164 It all builds an audience for the person, who remains a separate entity from the things that they make. Page 164 the author's personal brand is now all that matters; Page 164 it's the work itself that is dead. Page 165 Eichhorn responds to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's 1970s concept of "cultural capital": Page 165 Content capital, then, is fluency in digital content: the knowledge of what kinds of content to produce, how the feeds of various Page 165 platforms work, what they prioritize, and how audiences might react to a given creation. Those who have more content capital gain more followers, and thus more power in the cultural ecosystem of Filterworld. Page 165 more followers and more engagement are always posed as better. Page 165 The primary incentive is to make the numbers go up. Page 165 "One builds up one's content capital simply by hanging out online and, more precisely, by posting content that garners a response and, in turn, leads to more followers and more content," Page 166 She described that endless race: "Increasingly, what matters is simply that one is producing content and doing so at an increasingly high frequency and volume." Elsewhere in the book, Eichhorn puts it more simply and brutally: "Content begets content." Page 166 exposure is not always personally affirming. Page 167 it can often feel like there is no creativity without attention, and no attention without the accelerant of algorithmic recommendations. Page 167 I decided long ago against fully adapting my voice to the algorithmic feed— Page 167 I found that there were certain ways I could present the things I was doing to maximize my possible content capital. I labored over tweets to share my latest articles, trying to figure out what would get shared the most: a curiosity-gap headline that left a question open, perhaps, or highlighting the most dramatic quote in a story. Page 168 Cultural flattening is one consequence. But the same mechanism is also what makes our public political discourse more and more extreme, because conflict and controversy light up the feed and attract likes in a way that subtlety and ambiguity never will. Page 168 Over the past decade, a generation of "Insta-poets" have emerged on Instagram and sold millions of books to their followers by shaping their work to the structure and demands of the platform. Page 172 There is an element of elitism at play in any evaluation that casts social media as the opposite of art. Page 173 Blatant clarity and simple, literal takeaways versus linguistic difficulty and the need to accept irresolution: one aesthetic approach is not better or worse than the other; they are simply different sets of choices. Yet in Filterworld, we face a cultural environment that inevitably prioritizes the former over the latter because it travels more effectively through algorithmic feeds, and there are fewer and fewer outlets outside of those feeds available for creators to access the audiences they need to survive in such a capitalistic environment. Page 173 Ultimately, the algorithmic feed may not be the death of art, but it often presents an impediment to it. Page 176 There's a homogeneity to the kind of literature that influencers promote, too, narrowing down to the kinds of books that can accelerate through feeds. Page 176 "The problems of homogeneity are not just that it is boring; the most or least offensive stuff rises to the top, because that gets clicks," Depp said. "This is the issue about whoever is succeeding on TikTok this week: People who have never read the book are going to make a video about it, because that's the Page 176 trending topic. Things start out with genuine interest, but by the thousandth video about it, it has nothing to do with the thing itself." Page 179 Hallie also realized that the Instagram feed rewarded specific qualities. She had always combined visual art and writing, but posts with clear written messages got the most engagement. "If I posted something pretty to look at, it didn't get as much of a response," she said. This effect isn't solely a consequence of the algorithmic feed; consumers have tastes that don't always mesh with an artist's own vision. But the acceleration of the feed and the instantaneousness of the feedback begets an intensified self-consciousness on the part of Page 180 the artist Page 180 The pressure that Hallie felt to make the rest of her artwork similarly bright, clear, and simple is much like the pressure that a musician feels to frontload the hook of a song so it succeeds on TikTok or a writer feels to have a take so hot it lights up the Twitter feed. Page 181 That kind of internal creative process, or even the process of thinking on one's own, is something that feels lacking in the Filterworld era, when any idea or thought can be made instantly public and tested for engagement. Page 181 The artist-as-influencer isn't introspective; she exists on the ephemeral surface of things, iterating and adapting according to reactions. Page 181 Hallie's comments made me feel a kind of personal grief: Have I been left incapable of truly thinking for myself, or unwilling to do that creative work without the motivation of an invisible audience? Page 182 "If I adapt to every trend, if I hop on every new platform and try to build a following there, I'm going to be building sandcastle after sandcastle. If the algorithm is failing us now, that means it was never stable. It was like a fair-weather friend." Page 182 The recent history of the 2010s, with the rise and then growing irrelevance of Facebook, has shown that no social network is too big to fail or get supplanted by a competitor that chooses to play by a new set of rules, social or technological. Chapter 5: Regulating Filterworld Page 183 We cannot wholly opt out while still using the digital platforms that have become necessary parts of modern adult life. Like the post office, the sewer system, or power lines, they are essential, and yet, unlike such public infrastructure, they aren't subject to government oversight or regulation, or the decisions of voters. Recommender systems run rampant. Page 183 In November 2017, a fourteen- year- old student from northwest London named Molly Russell died by suicide. Russell wasn't wholly responsible for her actions, Page 184 Russell's death was part of the human toll of algorithmic overreach, when content moves too quickly at too vast a scale to be moderated by hand. No magazine's editor would have published a flood of such depression content, nor would a television channel broadcast it. But the algorithmic feed could assemble an instant, on-demand collection, delivering what Russell may have found most engaging even though it was harmful for her. Page 185 Though so much of the content we see online is "user-generated"—uploaded freely, without either gatekeeping or support—it still has to fit into preestablished molds determined by corporations. Page 187 as I could, I ventured out of that corporatized space and found a much wider Internet that was more decentralized again. People built their own HTML websites without oversight and often without much professionalism. The web was an amateur zone made up of handmade pages espousing some particular fandom (say, the TV show Gilmore Girls) or niche hobby (building canoes) that were easy to stumble upon with early Google searches. You could use a service like Geocities, which launched in 1994, to build and host a website using basic tools, but no two Geocities pages looked the same. They were quirky collisions of animated GIFs in messy frame layouts, as though a child had made them. Page 191 Already, when Facebook bought Instagram, it felt as though the walls of the Internet were closing in a little tighter around us users. The broad expanse of possibility, of messiness, on a network like Geocities or the personal expression of Tumblr was shut down. Digital life became increasingly templated, a set of boxes to fill in rather than a canvas to cover in your own image. Page 192 Google similarly acquired YouTube in 2006 and turned the video-uploading site into a media-consumption juggernaut, a replacement for cable television. Page 193 There's a certain amount of whiplash that comes with experiencing these cycles of the Internet. We users think we're supposed to behave one way, and then the opposite becomes true, like the movement from pseudonyms to real names. We're asked to use tools to build our own spaces, to freely express ourselves, and then commanded to fit within a preset palette determined by a social network. Yet as soon as one standard becomes dominant, it seems to lose its grip. Page 193 Any joy in the new forms of expression is ruthlessly exploited, most often in the form of increased advertising. Page 194 Still, the Internet in its current era has never looked more monolithic. Individual websites have been subsumed into ever-flowing feeds. Page 194 Decentralization tends to give users the most agency, though it also places a higher burden of labor and responsibility on the individual. Page 195 The quickest way to change how digital platforms work may be to mandate transparency: forcing the companies to explain how and when their algorithmic recommendations are working. Page 195 And if we know how algorithms work, perhaps we'll be better able to resist their influence and make our own decisions. Page 195 Eli Pariser's filter bubbles, Page 195 traditional media can be biased into homogeneity just as well, Page 196 filter bubbles earlier in this book; the phenomenon may have done more to cause the surprise of Trump's win than the fact that it happened. Page 196 Trump did take advantage of algorithmic technology. His campaign used Facebook's targeted advertising program to great effect, pushing messages to voters whose online actions showed that they might be convinced by his politics. Page 196 Facebook ads are often bought based on outcomes rather than how many times they are displayed; the client pays for click-throughs and conversions to actions like political donations. The Trump campaign was all but guaranteed that the algorithmic feed would work in their favor. Page 196 "With recommendation algorithms, you get the same kind of things over time. How do we break those patterns?" Page 197 Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford wrote in a 2016 paper in the journal New Media & Society. Knowing how and why something has been recommended might help to dispel the air of algorithmic anxiety that surrounds our online experiences, since we could identify which of our actions the recommendations are considering. Page 200 Just as digital platforms aren't responsible for explaining their algorithmic feeds, they also don't take responsibility for what the feeds promote—they separate themselves from the outcomes of their recommender systems. Page 200 But in the social media era, it has also allowed the tech companies that have supplanted traditional media businesses to operate without the safeguards of traditional media. Page 202 Social networks displaced traditional publishers by absorbing advertising revenue; Page 202 Even with their restricted circumstances, traditional media companies continue to hold responsibility for every piece of content they publish. Meanwhile, digital platforms could claim they were not media companies at all with the excuse of Section 230. Page 204 If algorithmic feeds mistreat us or contribute to an abusive or exploitative online environment, we, as users and citizens, have little recourse. Page 204 The justices probed the uses and capabilities of algorithmic recommendations and debated if algorithms can be considered "neutral" (I would argue they cannot), Page 205 In May 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that the tech companies were not liable, and upheld the strongest interpretation of Section 230 once again. Page 205 mainstream Internet, and the 2010s saw the rise and domination of massive digital platforms, then the next decade seems likely to embrace decentralization once more. Agency might be the watchword: the ability of an individual user to dictate how they publish and view content. I have hope for an Internet that's more like Geocities, with expressions of individuality and customization everywhere, but with the multimedia innovations that have made the 2020s' Internet so compelling. Page 206 As Molly Russell, the British teenager who died by suicide, experienced with the avalanche of depression content, recommendations accelerate negative material as much as positive material. Page 206 Facebook outsources much of its human moderation to a company called Accenture, which employs thousands of moderators around the world, including in countries like Portugal and Malaysia. Page 207 The toxic material doesn't just magically vanish because of the mediation of the algorithm. Once again, the human labor is obscured. Page 208 Reaching wide audiences of strangers isn't a right; it's a privilege that doesn't need to be possible for every individual user or post. Page 208 The word amplification describes algorithmic recommendations' role in spreading content more widely than it would otherwise travel: Page 208 Amplification is at the core of Filterworld's problems; Page 210 The rise of social media has created a new set of dynamics for culture and entertainment. Users have much more choice of what to consume at a given moment, and creators have a much easier time reaching audiences by simply uploading their content to the Internet. We don't have to just watch what a producer elects to put on cable television. We have come to expect individualization, whether driven by our own actions or an algorithm. But that seemingly more democratic and low-hierarchy dynamic has also given us a sense that the old laws and regulations don't apply, precisely because we can decide when to watch or listen to something and when to choose another source. We might have more independence, but we ultimately have less protection as consumers. Page 211 If recommendations are to be regulated, certain decisions have to be made based on content. Page 217 As they go into effect, these laws are likely to overhaul our algorithmic landscape, giving users much more agency when it comes to recommendations and the configuration of a content feed. The passive relationship would become a more active one as we begin to figure out our own preferences and shape our digital lives to follow our own tastes. Algorithmic feeds will appear less monolithic and impenetrable, as they do now, and more like the functional tools they are. There's no reason your feed needs to work exactly like my feed. The resulting profusion could lead to more diversity of culture online, as well. Page 220 regulation cannot be the only answer when it comes to culture. Page 220 we also must change our own habits, becoming more aware of how we consume culture and how we can resist the passive pathways of algorithmic feeds. Page 221 The most powerful choice might be the simplest one: Stop lending your attention to platforms that exploit it. Page 221 the more dramatic option is to log out entirely and figure out how to sustain culture offline once more. Chapter 6: In Search of Human Curation Page 224 If one form of algorithmic anxiety is about feeling misunderstood by algorithmic recommendations, another is feeling hijacked by them, feeling like you couldn't escape them if you tried. Page 228 During my cleanse, I also discovered that recommender systems pop up in unexpected places. I eventually turned to the New York Times app as my primary way of checking in on news, but that app features a "For You" tab, much like TikTok's, Page 229 Escaping algorithms entirely is nearly impossible. Page 229 As I had hoped, I began reading long articles in a single sitting more often and left fewer tabs open in my browser, since I wasn't faced with a cascade of alternative options. Page 230 By the second month of my experiment, when I had adjusted my habits, I began to feel a sense of nostalgia. It reminded me of how I interacted with the Internet as a teenager, back before mainstream social media existed. Page 230 Despite my hesitancy around algorithmic feeds, I could never give up the Internet entirely, because it has brought me too much over my lifetime. Page 234 On TikTok, it's harder to become a connoisseur because you have little chance to develop expertise or assemble the context of what you're looking at. You must work at it, get off the slick routes of the feed, and gradually refine the thing that you seek. The benefit of the slower, self- managed approach to culture is that it might lead to a greater appreciation of the content at hand, Page 240 Curation begins with responsibility. The etymological ancestor of the word curatore was a term for ancient Roman "public officers," according to an 1875 dictionary, positions that predated the emperor Augustus, whose reign began in 27 BCE. They managed various aspects of the city's upkeep: Page 240 Latin, curare meant to take care of, and curatio indicated attention and management. Page 240 The word's etymology hints at the importance of curating, not just as an act of consumption, taste displaying, or even self-definition, but as the caretaking of culture, a rigorous and ongoing process. Page 241 Those decades saw "the rise of the curator as creator," as the museum-studies scholar Bruce Altshuler put it in his 1994 book Page 241 Avant-Garde in Exhibition. Page 241 In a sense, the individual star curators are the opposite of recommendation algorithms: they utilize all of their knowledge, expertise, and experience in order to determine what to show us and how to do it, with utmost sensitivity and humanity. Page 242 Yet algorithmic recommendations are also often described as "curating" a feed, even though there is no consciousness behind them. Page 242 What is lost in the overuse of the word is the figure of the curator herself, a person whose responsibility it is to make informed choices, to care for the material under her purview. Page 243 The Internet might have an overflow of curation, but it also doesn't have enough of it, in the sense of long-term stewardship, organization, and contextualization of content— Page 247 The slow process of curation works against the contextlessness, speed, and ephemerality that characterizes the Internet. Page 250 As I've written this book, independent radio DJs have stuck out in my mind as an ideal form of non-algorithmic cultural distribution. Page 258 Curation is an analog process that can't be fully automated or scaled up the way that social network feeds have been. It ultimately comes down to humans approving, selecting, and arranging things. Page 261 Another step toward a more curated Internet is to think more carefully about the business models that drive the platforms we use. Page 265 In my conversations with curators, I found a tone of caring and caretaking that is missing entirely from massive digital platforms, which treat all culture like content to be funneled indiscriminately at high volume and which encourage consumers to stay constantly on the surface. Page 266 Like tobacco companies manufacturing low-tar cigarettes, the algorithmic feeds create the problems they are marketed as solving. Conclusion Page 275 Walter Benjamin completed a revised version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Page 277 Even in the short time of their rise, algorithmic recommendations have warped everything from visual art to product design, songwriting, choreography, urbanism, food, and fashion. Page 277 In terms of how culture reaches us, algorithmic recommendations have supplanted the human news editor, the retail boutique buyer, the gallery curator, the radio DJ—people whose individual taste we relied on to highlight the unusual and the innovative. Instead, Page 277 we have tech companies dictating the priorities of the recommendations, which are subjugated to generating profit through advertising. Page 279 Resistance to algorithmic frictionlessness requires an act of willpower, a choice to move through the world in a different way. It doesn't have to be a dramatic one.	Lee C. Bollinger, Geoffrey R. Stone	Lisa Morgan Notable Quotations Full screen view Morgan, Lisa Chapter 5: Unconscious Power Trance Logic and Intuition Page 94 Trump's communication is honed, perhaps obliviously, but most likely coached to some degree, to be understood by people's unconscious minds. He avoids complexity, keeps his words simple and recognises that people make decisions, at least most of the time, based on emotion rather than fact. Page 95 The intuitive mind leaps to a solution without a step- by- step process of deduction. Chapter 6 His Hypnosis Toolkit Rapport, Trump Style Page 99 A way to appear to be in agreement with someone without agreeing with their beliefs is to mirror their style of language. If they are lovers of cars, use automotive metaphors and jargon. If they work in fashion, then you may not be cut from the same cloth, but you can talk about the 'fabric' of daily life, how something is or isn't your 'style'. More Than His Touch Page 106 Research on ways to touch people reveals that if someone is touched with artful skill, they become more compliant and likely to agree to requests. A successful touch is fingertip light, barely perceptible and ideally, though not exclusively, delivered to the outside of the upper arm. When giving this touch, it's important the toucher simultaneously looks into the eyes of the receiver. Research by two French academics revealed that two touches are even more likely to achieve agreement to a request. 94 Page 107 Listen to Trump. His voice is even toned. It has no edges. You could call it smooth, like brown suede. When he shouts, it doesn't have that sharp rasp we associate with anger. His fortissimo is more of an exasperated outburst. His voice stays narrowly in the middle of the scale. He accentuates his points with arm and head movements while the voice stays level. There is fluctuation, or as he would say, different tones, but he is not going far up and down the register. Page 108 Trump has a regular rhythm in his speeches. You can hear the stress coming and going; not necessarily in sync with the meaning of the words he is speaking, more like the flow of wavelets, moving back and forth on a shore. His delivery rocks, lulling listeners into a dreamy state. Page 108 A technique Trump uses, especially when delivering a prepared speech, is to drop his voice at the end of each sentence in tone and in volume. It makes listeners glaze and they can drop into a hypnotic state quickly. Trump's Fluff Page 108 In order to get past their inner critic, which is alert to any factual persuasion and interrogates the detail, be vague and emotional in what you say. Page 109 think or what they should feel. They want to make up their own mind. So, the key to making a successful hypnotic speech that brings people round to your way of thinking is to stay ambiguous: fuzzy in grammar and imprecise on facts. Listeners are given the mental space to create their own version of what you have said. Once they do that, they feel that they made the choice themselves. Page 110 Trump suggests he's sharing a secret with the crowd. That draws them towards him. Page 110 Trump was using confusional repetition to embed a suggestion that his supporters vote for him. Why? Page 110 he's actually kept far more promises than he made'. Page 111 Repetition is an element of Trump's fluff that is more powerful than most people realise. Page 111 Called the Illusory Truth Effect, it is a tendency we all have to think information is correct the more often it is repeated. 98 Our minds check if something is true by assessing its familiarity. The more familiar something becomes, the more we believe it to be true. Page 111 The many times people have heard it, over years now, the more they believe it. Page 111 'There is no smoke without fire' is a widely held belief and gives people even greater confidence in Trump's accusations. Page 112 Trump's skills mean he is memorable. His audience may not remember exactly what he said, but they remember him and the claims he repeated many times as the likely truth. Page 112 Hillary Clinton comes from the school of speakers who are under the mistaken illusion that the people who are listening to her are processing her speech with their conscious minds. She uses a wide and fairly advanced vocabulary. Rather than repeat her points, she packs in lots of ideas and skips through them swiftly. Page 112 Clinton misses a key principle of communication, concerning stimulus and response: that there is a gap between what you say, the stimulus, and what the listener thinks when they hear you. It is no good saying, 'I am funny' or writing GSOH and expecting people to like you. If you crack a joke and people laugh, it's then they think you're funny. Page 113 The response people had to Clinton's speech depended upon whether they were already on her side and prepared to join her in her style of thinking. Clinton talked to the analytical brains of her listeners far more than to their unconscious minds. She used complete sentences and left little space for people to create their own internal responses to her. ... But most people aren't analytical in that way. They are not listening to her like judges hearing evidence or professors assessing a student. ... She did win more votes than Trump after all. Even so, it is likely she was most in rapport with those who share her analytical mindset. ... Her political messages were not designed to move them; they were designed to convince them. ... Two weeks after this speech, Clinton called Trump's supporters a "basket of deplorables". Her opponents pounced on that one emotional metaphor with glee, adopting is as their nickname. Just Suggesting Page 114 If a hypnotist is good at their job, clients often leave the session thinking they are the ones that have done all the work, whereas much of the magic lies in the hidden suggestions that were made when they were in trance. Page 115 Here is a starter guide to making successful suggestions, Page 115 spotted. 'Democrats produce mobs' is a negative suggestion, moving your affiliation away from the Democrats. 'Republicans produce jobs' is a positive one, Page 116 imagery, easy to remember rhyme and how often they are repeated. Page 116 Misdirection Page 116 He ambushes the media by saying or doing something so polarising that it becomes the main topic of the news. This trick has become commonplace as his power is threatened. Page 116 If you have ever wondered how a hypnotist can get someone to do something without obviously instructing them, it's because, within what seems to be an unconnected conversation, they plant key words that tell the subject what to do or what to think. This is known in the trade as Embedding. For example, you might hear Trump say: "Can you believe that?" and not recognise that his question is a command in disguise. Page 117 If I want someone to go easily into a trance, I might develop a yes set, saying: Page 117 The yes set format is to make a number of suggestions (three works a treat) that are verifiable, followed by your key suggestion that is unverifiable and not necessarily true. Page 117 This is how Trump does it: he gets the crowd affirming his statements, proverbially nodding their heads, 'yes' with each repetition of 'great' coal miners (three times), plus 'brave' [' yes'] and 'lot of courage' [' yes'] for good measure. Trump then drops in the idea of coal being 'clean', an obvious untruth [yes! Our coal is clean]. Page 119 Trump often claims that others have said something to him that he wants people to believe or he wants to occur: Page 119 This is his equivalent of a hypnotist saying: "lots of my clients tell me that they go easily into a comfortable trance in that chair…" Page 120 Notice how Trump talks about himself in the third person, perhaps because he is adopting a regal stance or even that it makes it easier for someone else to repeat what he is saying verbatim. Page 120 Bad Grammar is Good In order for people to do what you want them to do, you have, on occasion, to appear ignorant or foolish. Page 120 but each time he makes a grammatical error, his statement and particularly his tweets get widely shared. Page 121 make a mistake grammatically so that your client corrects it in their mind. Page 122 by getting certain words wrong, you get the message noticed. Page 122 Double Binds to Win One of the most effective hypnotist's suggestions is the Illusion of Choice, also known as the Double Bind. Mums use this often to gain compliance from toddlers: "Are you going to run up the stairs to bed or shall I carry you?" Page 122 Double binds like these are the stock in trade of salespeople as well as parents. Page 123 Trump works in the realm of illusory choices, using a form of the double bind regularly. His Page 125 To resist a double bind, break out of rapport and shift the playing field of the dialogue. That means refusing to argue about the content of the verbal contract that contains the Page 125 double bind and also ignoring that Trump's insults dance around the issue of race. Page 125 planted in voters' minds. It takes a cool head not to be sucked in by a derogatory double bind challenge. First you have to recognise the bind for what it is. Refuse to give the hurt or angry emotional response that the bind aims to achieve. Hurt and anger are signs of weakness that can be pounced on with glee by your attacker and capitalised upon. Once you refuse to play the game, your opponent has the wind taken out of them. They no longer have you to goad. Chapter 7: Telling Stories A Dead Cat Lying on the Table Page 127 If people are told not to see something, they have to see it first before they can make any attempt to erase it. Page 127 We don't mention the addiction, 'smoking' because immediately brain cells fire and produce smoking images in our mind's eye. Instead, we find other descriptions of their desired behaviour. 'Not smoking' becomes 'tobacco free'. Page 130 It was Hitler who proposed using what is known as the Big Lie as a tactic to convince the masses. Page 131 The current king of falsehood has to be Donald Trump. "Lying is second nature to him," Tony Schwartz, his ghost- writer claimed. "More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true." 118 Page 132 A lie is justified in hypnosis if it achieves the client's goal. It is a form of misdirection and part of the toolkit of magicians and as well as stage hypnotists. Page 132 throw a dead cat on a table. Useful when losing an argument, if you throw a dead cat on to a table, everyone will shout "Jeez, mate, there's a dead cat on the table!". Page 132 how diverting it would be to suggest buying Greenland. Page 132 A professor of philosophy, Quassim Cassam, identified what he calls vices of the mind. Page 132 One of them is not caring if something is true or false. He gave this trait an academic label: Epistemic Insouciance, or in plain English, not giving a fuck about facts. Page 133 Lying is one of an array of techniques used by those who want to achieve control of another through coercion. Page 133 When you are regularly lied to about what's going on, you start to question your own view of reality. This is called gaslighting. Page 133 receiver. We know that creating confusion is a useful tool if you want to put someone into a trance. What does the brain do with a lie? The brain is doing its best to adapt to the false reality that has been suggested to it and loses touch with what is real. Page 133 The more a person lies, the more their brain adapts to the lies. They become desensitised to their own dishonesty and their lies grow bigger. 128 Help for Future Farmers Page 134 Trump has been criticised for talking to crowds about people they've never heard of, or situations that are irrelevant to them. Page 134 The purpose of Trump's stories is not to be truthful or factually relevant but to bring the audience into his world. Page 134 when Trump talks about what's going on for him, his audience feels part of their president's life. Page 135 Identifying his goals with theirs: Page 138 His vague claim of 'going in the right direction' is not true, but it is so vague that the listener can only wonder which statistics he is basing this claim on. Most listeners are likely to respond by feeling reassured, rather than question the factual basis of his boast. Page 138 false equivalence. Page 140 Vague and vast numbers Page 140 no detail Page 140 Listeners would have given up trying to make sense of his logic. They would instead ponder the 'billions and billions of dollars' sent in cheques written by Trump Page 140 himself 'all over the world'. It is a homey image, as they say stateside: their president sitting down with his black felt marker pen and writing out all those cheques. Page 141 Note Trump's taste for hyperbole; Page 142 The story within the story holds another set of suggestions. It acts to confuse the listener so that the earlier suggestions get embedded while the conscious mind follows the fluff. In this nested story, the endurance of palm trees which are blown over but come back up upright serves as a metaphor for the endurance of farmers and, as we see later, a metaphor for what Trump expects of farmers and how they might behave if help is offered. Page 142 While telling this, Trump humblebrags about his property portfolio through his seemingly throwaway mention of Palm Beach, Florida and Miami 'where I have a lot of stuff'. Page 144 they won't need his help to achieve success. If you want to take this investigation of Trump's suggestion techniques further, you can find his speeches on the web and explore for yourself his repetition, stories, hyperbole, rapport builders, varieties of suggestion and perhaps even hypnotic tools that I've not mentioned. Make up your own mind whether Trump's speeches are unconsidered and merely tricks of rhetoric or the end product of years spent using hypnotic suggestion in his business dealings. Chapter 8: Building Control Emperor Chic Page 152 We are not only influenced by ads, news, fashion and opinion that we've seen and heard, but also by things that we didn't consciously notice. Chapter 9 Through a Glass Darkly The Trumpet Shall Sound Page 163 Trump has used the 'it's a joke' tactic plenty of times when he is testing the waters with a new thought. Chapter 10: Glamour in Action Converted and Compliant Page 170 NLP; building rapport based on mirroring body language, matching their values, and 'confiding' in them to make them feel special. Converted and Compliant Page 170 Our experience of life is State Dependent, a phrase meaning that what we experience depends upon our physical and emotional state at the time. If we are in a good mood, we will see the world through the lens of good mood. The Celebrity Effect Page 173 An authoritarian personality is content with the status quo, seeks order rather than change and prefers discipline to creativity. They dislike the unknown, especially outsiders. In short, they are scared of uncertainty. They seek predictability and anything that threatens the life that they know is their enemy. They can hate democracy because that suggests more uncertainty and threats from people with values they do not share. When the status quo is threatened, they choose a strong leader to take control on their behalf. Trump's suggestion - rich rhetoric. an auditory confusional technique. Chapter 11: Lessons We Learn Page 186 As the unconscious mind thinks in symbols and is alert to emotion, it's the significant words that make an impression. Page 188 Research published in August 2018 analysed Trump's tweets and came to the conclusion that he tweeted an average of 1.65 insulting tweets per day. The researchers, not surprisingly, discovered that the more he insulted, the lower his approval ratings were. His base was the exception to this disapproval. Their view of Trump stayed the same. Page 189 Adolf Hitler's speeches were full of strong emotion and the repetition of key phrases, the foundation stones of any hypnotic speaker's technique. These skills didn't come naturally to Hitler; a hypnotist and psychic, Erik Jan Hanussen trained him in mass psychology and how to speak to crowds. Page 190 It was publicly acknowledged that the Leave.EU campaign group used hypnotist, Paul McKenna, to advise them on their promotional videos and social media messaging. Page 192 luxuriates in the warm bath of faux nostalgia. Page 193 often fails to convince because he is too fond of his own erudition, Page 194 Johnson's biography of his supposed role model, Winston Churchill, published while he was Mayor of London, goes into hypnotic techniques in some detail. He analyses Hitler's speaking style and refers to the Nazi leader's methods as having a hypnotic quality. Johnson observes: Page 194 "First the long, excruciating pause before he speaks; and then see how he begins so softly - with his arms folded - and how he uncoils them as his voice starts to rise, and then the awful jabbing fluidity of his gestures, perfectly timed to intensify the crescendos of his speech." Page 194 "Listen to the way [Hitler] brings them all to their collective climax: with short verb less phrases– grammatically meaningless, but full of suggestive power. It was to become a highly influential technique, copied among others by Tony Blair." Page 195 Artful vagueness is so effective because voters make their own sense out of the speeches, filling the gaps in logic with their own opinions and beliefs. Spotting Manipulation Page 200 Obvious pointers to look out for are repetition, especially of chants, slogans and rhymes, confusing figures of speech that catch your attention, but which don't appear to make sense, rhythmic speech tones that lull you and exaggerated facts that sound too good to be true. Be alert for large numbers masquerading as statistics and unimaginably vast amounts of money. Be aware of questions that stimulate you to agree with them, especially when they appear as a series. Chapter 12: Take Control of Yourself Trump knows he is good at this game of soundbite to soundbite combat. Page 206 The people who are best at communicating with you use simple words and emotions to capture your heart. Page 206 Simple doesn't mean stupid. Big words, except for academic and legal environments, don't cut the mustard. Metaphors do. Page 207 Be aware of the suggestions that you are making as well as receiving. Much of the time, people are communicating with each other through their emotions in untutored ways, making suggestions that have unforeseen impact. Page 208 Metaphors are useful if you want to better understand how you feel about anything in your life. If you ever feel stuck about something, ask yourself: "if this feeling were a thing, what would it be?" Call Your Own Shots Page 210 Every time you heard 'should' or 'ought', it was a clear sign somebody else's belief was being given to you as a truth. Page 211 Being brainwashed by other people's beliefs means that your actions are shaped by them. You are not in charge. Most of us are brainwashed to a larger or lesser extent. Page 211 Be suspicious of any person or organisation who proclaims that it knows better than you do how you should behave, what your priorities are, and even who you are. Cultivate Discernment Page 213 If you feel angry, then your thoughts become primitive:	Maria Konnikova Notable Quotations Full screen view INTRODUCTION Page 4 It's the oldest story ever told. The story of belief -- of the basic, irresistible, universal human need to believe in something that gives life meaning, something that reaffirms our view of ourselves, the world, and our place in it. "Religion," Voltaire is said to have remarked, "began when the first scoundrel met the first fool." It certainly sounds like something he would have said. Voltaire was no fan of the religious establishment. But versions of the exact same words have been attributed to Mark Twain, to Carl Sagan, to Geoffrey Chaucer. It seems so accurate that someone, somewhere, sometime, must certainly have said it. Page 5 In some ways, confidence artists have it easy. We've done most of the work for them; we want to believe in what they're telling us. Their genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want, and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire. Page 6 The con artist doesn't force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn't steal. We give. He doesn't have to threaten us. We supply the story ourselves. We believe because we want to, not because anyone made us. And so we offer up whatever they want -- money, reputation, trust, fame, legitimacy, support -- and we don't realize what is happening until it is too late. Page 6 When something doesn't make sense, we want to supply the missing link. When we don't understand what or why or how something happened, we want to find the explanation. A confidence artist is only too happy to comply -- and the well-crafted narrative is his absolute forte. Page 7 We want deception to cover our eyes and make our world a tiny bit more fantastical, more awesome than it was before. Page 9 The con is the oldest game there is. But it's also one that is remarkably well suited to the modern age. If anything, the whirlwind advance of technology heralds a new golden age of the grift. Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change, when new things are happening and old ways of looking at the world no longer suffice. Page 9 Transition is the confidence game's great ally, because transition breeds uncertainty. Page 9 Today, we have the technological revolution. And this one, in some ways, is best suited to the con of all. With the Internet, everything is shifting at once, from Page 9 the most basic things (how we meet people and make meaningful connections) to the diurnal rhythms of our lives (how we shop, how we eat, how we schedule meetings, make dates, plan vacations). Page 10 Technology doesn't make us more worldly or knowledgeable. It doesn't protect us. It's just a change of venue for the same old principles of confidence. What are you confident in? The con artist will find those things where your belief is unshakeable and will build on that foundation to subtly change the world around you. Page 11 At a fundamental, psychological level, it's all about confidence -- or, rather, the taking advantage of somebody else's. Page 11 This book is an exploration of the psychological principles that underlie each and every game, from the most elementary to the most involved, step by step, from the moment the endeavor is conceived to the aftermath of its execution. Page 11 From the artist's perspective, it's a question of identifying the victim (the put-up): who is he, what does he want, and how can I play on that desire to achieve what I want? It requires the creation of empathy and rapport (the play): an emotional foundation must be laid before any scheme is proposed, any game set in motion. Only then does it move to logic and persuasion (the rope): the scheme (the tale), the evidence and the way it will work to your benefit (the convincer), the show of actual profits. And like a fly caught in a spider's web, the more we struggle, the less able to extricate ourselves we become (the breakdown). By the time things begin to look dicey, we tend to be so invested, emotionally and often physically, that we do most of the persuasion ourselves. We may even choose to up our involvement ourselves, even as things turn south (the send), so that by the time we're completely fleeced (the touch), we don't quite know what hit us. The con artist may not even need to convince us to stay quiet (the blow-off and fix); we are more likely than not to do so ourselves. We are, after all, the best deceivers of our own minds. At each step of the game, con artists draw from a seemingly endless toolbox of ways to manipulate our belief. And as we become more committed, with every step we give them more psychological material to work with. Page 12 the satisfaction of knowing that clever old you would be smarter than all that, that you can laugh at the poor sap who fell for something so obvious and still be safe in the knowledge that you are keener, savvier, more cynical and skeptical? They may fall for it. You? Never. CHAPTER 1: THE GRIFTER AND THE MARK Page 15 Here's the thing about cons: the best of them are never discovered. The best confidence games remain below the radar. They are never prosecuted because they are never detected. Page 21 If the vast majority of the people who surround you are basically decent, you can lie, cheat, and steal all you want and get on famously. Page 23 Psychopathy is part of the so-called dark triad of traits. And as it turns out, the other two, narcissism and Machiavellianism, also seem to describe many of the traits we associate with the grifter. Page 24 the Machiavellian-minded among us made for more convincing liars than the rest: Page 24 Machiavellianism, it seems then, may, like psychopathy, predispose people toward con-like behaviors and make them better able to deliver on them. Page 26 Psychopaths, narcissists, and Machs may be overrepresented in the grift, but they are also overrepresented in a number of other professions that line the legitimate world. As Maurer puts it, "If confidence men operate outside the law, it must be remembered that they are not much further outside than many of our pillars of society who go under names less sinister." Page 27 As the popular saying among scientists goes: genes load the gun; the environment pulls the trigger. Page 28 For most people to go from legitimacy to con artistry, three things need to align: not just the motivation -- that is, your underlying predisposition, created by elements like psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism -- but alongside it, opportunity and a plausible rationale. Page 28 A third of perpetrators aren't simply willing to go one step beyond what's technically legal Page 32 Thus is a grifter born. There's no such thing as an innocent cutting of the ethical corner. Once you've decided to get on the sled, and have eased yourself over the edge of the hill, it's too late to break. It starts with a small thing. Page 33 Who, then, is the con artist? He displays a dark triad–influenced bent, and he acts when the opportunity arises, for unlike other, less sinister-minded counterparts, he can rationalize away just about any behavior as necessary. And yet, despite this seeming underlying commonality, con artists can still surprise us and resist easy classification. Some conform to expectations, others do not, and there may be significant divergence from the profile that emerges from one study to the next. Page 36 Even some legitimate professions find it difficult to escape the image of playing a bit loose with the truth. Page 36 Con artists, in some sense, merely take our regular white lies to the next level. Plagiarists. Fabulists. Confabulists. Impostors. They take that desire to shine, to be the best version of something, and they fly with it. Page 40 the more you lie, the fewer identifying signs, even tiny ones, you display. Page 47 We think we know the typical victim profile. We think we know what makes a mark. And we think absolutely wrong. Page 48 it's not who you are, but where you happen to be at this particular moment in your life. If you're feeling isolated or lonely, it turns out you're particularly vulnerable. Page 48 Likewise if you're going through a job loss, divorce, serious injury, or other major life change, are experiencing a downturn in personal finances, or are concerned with being in debt. People in debt, in fact, are also more likely to fall for fraud that's completely unrelated to finances, like weight-loss products. Page 48 our impulsivity and appetite for risk are some of the only reliable indicators of fraud susceptibility. Page 48 When we're feeling low, we want to get out of the slump. So, schemes or propositions that would look absurd in another light suddenly seem more attractive. When we're angry, we want to lash out. Suddenly, something that once seemed like a gamble looks awfully appealing. A victim isn't necessarily foolish or greedy. A victim is simply more emotionally vulnerable at the exact moment the confidence artist approaches. Page 49 There's an entire subset of cons, in fact, devoted to catching the master grifter at his own game, often perpetrated by others who feel he might have gotten too big for his boots. Page 51 It ends up that the more you know about something, the more likely you are to fall for a con in that specific area. CHAPTER 2: THE PUT?UP Page 57 One of their great skills is to discern details of a victim's life without her knowledge, so that she doesn't even realize how much she's given away -- and then, to use those very details to impress the victim with their insight. Page 57 That ability is, indeed, the first step of a con: the put-up. Page 57 We listen to their words and their voice, read their gestures and their tone, infer between the lines to get a sense of their inner world. Page 59 We never learn to be expert people-readers because that expertise can backfire spectacularly. Why form accurate judgments when the inaccurate ones make our lives far more pleasant and easy? Page 63 con men don't just want to know how someone looks to them. They want to correctly reflect how they want to be seen. Page 63 confidence artists can use what they're learning as they go in order to get us to give up even more. Page 64 If we mimic someone else, they will feel closer and more similar to us; we can fake the natural liking process quite well. Page 64 mirror back someone's words or interests, feign a shared affinity for a sports team or a mutual hatred of a brand. Page 64 Dale Carnegie advised in his treatise on winning friends and influencing people, a sort of unwitting bible for cons in training. And if you're having trouble? Page 64 "Talk in terms of the other person's interests." Page 68 People chose the shapes they had seen earlier as more pleasing -- even though they had no conscious memory of ever having seen them and couldn't distinguish old from new at above-chance levels. Page 68 the mere exposure effect: familiarity breeds affection. Page 69 In one series of experiments, people were more likely to buy something from a relative stranger if that relative stranger happened to recall their name. Page 69 A seasoned technique: pretend you're someone's relative and that you met at a wedding. All you need to know is the name of the wedding party in question, and you're golden. Page 71 All you needed to do was successfully friend someone on Facebook or connect with them socially on some other network -- and if you could get them to see you as friendly long enough to click on just one link or download just one file, the whole system would eventually be yours. One entry point is all that is required. Page 74 Things that trip us up, Epley has found, include pressure -- time, emotional, situational -- and power. When we're feeling pressure, we grow far less able to think logically and deliberately. When we're feeling more powerful, we tend to feel as if we don't need others quite as much, and our ability to read their minds and the cues they throw off falters. Page 75 There's nothing a con artist likes to do more than make us feel powerful and in control: we are the ones calling the shots, making the choices, doing the thinking. They are merely there to do our bidding. And so as we throw off ever more clues, we ourselves become increasingly blind to the clues being thrown off by others. Page 75 always deferring to their power and seniority -- even though he, too, had a claim to an elevated status. That way, he could glean all he could from them, and they, in turn, would be too flattered to scrutinize him too closely. Page 82 If they aren't looking for you, they don't see you." CHAPTER 3: THE PLAY Page 89 Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con man his coups). -- THE FIRST COMMANDMENT OF THE CON MAN, FROM VICTOR LUSTIG, CON ARTIST Page 91 The put-up is all about choice of victim: learning what makes someone who she is, what she holds dear, what moves her, and what leaves her cold. After the mark is chosen, it is time to set the actual con in motion: the play, the moment when you first hook a victim and begin to gain her trust. And that is accomplished, first and foremost, through emotion. Page 92 emotions, says psychologist Seymour Epstein, cause us to think in "categorical, personal, concretive, unreflective, and action oriented" fashion. They have us thinking reflexively instead of reflectively, reacting instead of considering. They have us just where someone who may wish to take advantage wants us. Page 98 Con men are likewise expert at rapidly invoking greed, pity, and other emotions that can eclipse deliberation and produce an override of normal behavioral restraints. Page 101 When we're immersed in a story, we let down our guard. We focus in a way we wouldn't if someone were just trying to catch us with a random phrase or picture or interaction. Page 101 relations. "Popper proposed that falsifiability is the cornerstone of the scientific method," Bruner told the American Psychological Association at their annual meeting in Toronto in the summer of 1984. "But believability is the hallmark of the well-formed narrative." Page 103 so strong is narrative that it has been shown to be one of the few successful ways of getting someone to change her mind about important issues. Page 103 "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him," Marc Antony says in his first speech to the Roman people. Page 103 "I'm not trying to sell you anything!""You can take it or leave it!""I'm not looking for charity!" So many prefaces to a story can catch you off guard Marc Antony–style. Page 104 nothing compels us to receptivity, emotional and behavioral, quite like the neat, relatable narrative flow. Page 106 "People think it's all about sex or humor or animals," he told the Johns Hopkins Magazine. "But what we've found is that the underbelly of a great commercial is whether it tells a story or not." The more complete the story, the better. Page 110 the most engaged readers were also more likely to agree with the beliefs the story implied Page 110 wants to create to further his scheme. According to a theory of persuasion known as the elaboration likelihood model, we process a message differently depending on our motivation level. If we're highly motivated, we will focus on and be persuaded by the arguments in the message itself. If we're not motivated, we're more likely to be influenced by external cues, like a person's appearance, what she's wearing, Page 111 like. Visceral cues, like the basic emotion brought forth by a powerful story, however, can override even motivation. Instead of processing a message logically, we act like the unmotivated person and take in all the wrong things. Page 111 The con artist can employ something called "wishful identification." We don't feel Page 111 sorry for the character; we want to be him. Page 111 The more we like the confidence man, the more we relate to him. Page 111 wishful identification at its finest: invest with me, and you, too, will have all this and more. Don't you want others to see your exquisite taste? Page 113 practiced deceivers were better at one of the basic skills of the con: the ability to tell a good story. Page 117 Con artists lie for a very specific reason: personal gain, whether it be financial or other. They lie to set the play in motion, so that they can gain your confidence and then lead you down a reality of their making. And their lies are believable whereas a pathological liar's are often too big and elaborate to be taken seriously. Page 120 When we're angry, we think future events that are bad are the result of human error; when we're sad, that they're situationally determined. They called the phenomenon "mood as information." How I happen to be feeling is giving me concrete evidence of how I should act -- even if, in fact, my decision is totally distinct. The way I process the information will be colored by my emotion all the same. Page 120 affect heuristic: we make decisions based on whether we feel that something is "good" or "bad," without much conscious analysis. Page 121 What visceral states do is create an intense attentional focus. We tune out everything else and tune in to the in-the-moment emotional cues. It's similar to the feeling of overwhelming hunger or thirst -- Page 122 "They are so eager to get their hands on the proffered scam payoff that they fail to pay even rudimentary attention to the details of the proposed transaction and ignore scam cues that may be obvious to others not so overwhelmed by desire," he wrote. Page 122 Sadness likewise makes us more prone to risk taking and impulsivity -- the perfect play for a certain type of con. If you want someone to take a risky financial gamble? Say, invest in your perfect scheme or chance it on a game of three- card monte? Sadness is your best friend. Page 123 Con artists love funerals and obituaries, divorces and scandals, company layoffs and general loneliness. Page 123 When we're happy, we don't analyze data nearly as systematically as we otherwise would, and thus, become far more open to persuasion. In one study, happy people Page 123 were equally persuaded by a strong and a weak argument, whereas sad ones were only swayed by the strong. Page 124 When executing the play, fear is one of the con artist's great friends. In one study, a team of psychologists decided to test the effects of different types of fear on people's willingness to comply with a request. Page 124 the emotional drain of anxiety followed by the wave of emotional relief created a state of relative mindlessness. Page 125 From the first snake oil sale, cons that play on our anxieties about our health have been among the leading scams of the world. Page 126 Fearmongering knows no expiration date. It is a venerable course for the play to take -- one of many, but one that is endlessly powerful. CHAPTER 4: THE ROPE Page 132 The rope, then, is the alpha and omega of the confidence game: after finding a victim and lowering his defenses through a bit of fancy emotional footwork, it's time for the actual persuasive pitch. It's Matthew roping Barrett in by convincing him that he's the perfect person for the job (alpha) and that there's no good reason why he shouldn't do it (omega). What's the worst that could happen? The put-up identified the mark and mapped out his idiosyncrasies, hopes, and fears. The play caught the mark's attention and baited the hook. The rope makes sure he bites and the hook sinks deep -- else, with a bit of wiggling, the almost-sure-deal prey swim hastily away. Page 132 The psychologist Robert Cialdini, one of the leading experts on persuasion, argues that six principles govern most persuasive relationships: reciprocity (I rub your back, you rub mine), consistency (I believe the same thing today as I did yesterday), social validation (doing this will make me belong), friendship or liking (exactly what it sounds like), scarcity (quick! there isn't much to go around), and authority (you seem like you know what you're talking about). Page 136 someone who has already agreed to a small request -- like opening the door for you -- would become more, not less, likely to agree to a larger request later on. Page 136 be perceived as a favor -- picking up a dropped glove (how many con artists love the dropped clothing article!), lending you a quarter for the phone (only a quarter! it's an important call), spending a few minutes on that phone with you in conversation -- that person becomes more likely to keep doing even more on your behalf. Page 137 the foot-in-the-door technique. Page 137 The funny thing is, they later found, the approach worked even if the person doing the requesting the second time around was someone else: Page 137 There's the roper, the one who makes the first request, engaging his chosen persuasive strategies of choice, and then there's the inside man, a second member of the group who sweeps in for the kill, with the real request (the con that will be played out). You are already in a giving mood, and you become far more likely to succumb than you would've been without the initial prime. Page 137 one of the elements that make us more vulnerable to persuasion is our desire to maintain a good image of ourselves. Page 139 But niceness isn't the only way to go. Another effective technique that Cialdini first identified in 1975 is the door-in-the-face, a near opposite of the foot-in-the-door. Page 139 When someone we don't really know asks us for a large favor -- or even someone we do know catches us on an off day -- and we (understandably) refuse, we do indeed feel rude, just as Bem would have predicted. But we don't like feeling rude. And so we also feel something else we don't like: guilty. So what happens when the person we turned down asks us for something else, something smaller, something that seems far more reasonable in comparison? We say yes. Guilt assuaged -- and con artist's mission accomplished. Page 139 Cialdini found, more people agreed to a relatively small request -- Page 139 after they'd rejected a much larger one -- Page 140 The technique only worked, Cialdini found, if the same person did the asking both times. If you're nice, you're nice to everyone. If you're guilty, only one person can assuage that guilt: the one who caused it in the first place. Page 142 In 1986, Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger proposed a persuasion -- or roping, if you will -- tactic that relied not on a comparison between two separate favors but on a comparison within the favor itself: the that's-not-all technique. An effective approach, Burger found, is to start with a false baseline (that is, not at all what you're planning to eventually propose) and then, in quick succession, make changes and additions to that starting point that make it seem increasingly attractive. Page 143 "That's not all. Page 143 That's-not-all is actually a member of a broader set of persuasive tactics, known as disrupt-then-reframe techniques. Page 143 Here's how it works. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert proposes that we understand the world in two stages. First we take it at face value, in order to decipher the sense of what someone is telling us. And then we evaluate it, in order to judge the soundness of what we've just deciphered. Disrupt-then-reframe attacks the evaluative part of the process: we don't have a chance to give a proper assessment because each time we try to do so, the situation changes. Page 144 the even-a-penny-would-help. Page 144 as the "legitimization effect." A request for a tiny amount of money legitimizes you in the eyes of others. Page 144 If you're looking for a tiny donation -- a dollar or another inconsequential-seeming amount -- you look like you're working hard for very little. Page 145 A closely related approach is Cialdini's lowball technique. This time, you tell your intended victim that what you want is actually quite small -- and once he commits to doing it, raise the stakes. Page 145 "Actually, sir, this particular model comes with . . ." and so forth. Page 145 Cialdini's principle of scarcity. The scarce is inherently valuable by very virtue of its scarcity: there isn't much to go around, so only the very lucky few can have it. The limited edition. The forbidden fruit. The offer only good till midnight. The members-only sale. The collector's item. Pose something as unique or rare, and takers will line up where there used to be none. It works for goods. It works for information. It works for most anything. Page 149 In their influential 1959 work "The Bases of Social Power," John French and Bertram Raven posited that there were five major bases from which power derives: reward power, or the belief that someone is able to reward you; coercive power, or the belief that someone is able to punish you somehow; legitimate power, or an actual basis of authority; referent power, or power derived from your affiliation with someone (or desire to be affiliated with them); and expert power, from someone's expertise on a topic. Page 149 The grifter will avoid coercion at all costs. That would be unaristocratic. Page 150 in establishing their legitimacy, the victims said, their scammers appealed often and early to trust and authority. The logic is clear. If you know someone is asking for something, you need to know early on who that someone is and why, exactly, you should listen. Page 150 We get authority in two ways: by virtue of what we know (authority based on expertise) or by virtue of who we are (authority based on position). The confidence artist will exploit both. But the second is much easier to fake than the first; indeed, the first, or at least the perception of it, often follows in its wake. Page 154 We often obey power reflexively, without ever quite stopping to reflect on why we're doing what we are and whether it is, in fact, something we should be doing. Page 154 One of the first things a con artist does is establish trust -- often by being the exact type of person he thinks you aspire to be, or at least, want to be associated with. Page 155 Con artists often use communities to quickly gauge character and belief and acquire a veneer of the same. Page 155 The authority we grant someone comes often as more of an afterthought than anything else, by virtue of their belonging to the exact right group, one that we're particularly eager to either join or be liked by. Page 159 The rope depends on multiple elements: not just the persuasive strategy you use and your identity, but how, exactly, you frame the proposition. Power, in other words, can come from the construction of the argument rather than its substance: power through how you phrase something rather than what you're actually saying. Page 161 The psychology of why nudges work forms the entire basis of a confidence artist's soft power. Just as a grifter never coerces in any observable way, a nudge never actually forces one behavior or forbids another -- a smoking ban is not a nudge but a policy regulation -- but rather changes the nature of the choice itself. Page 161 The order effect is the tip of a very large iceberg that includes things like position effects -- where something is located physically. Con artists manipulate this all the time by placing objects or people they want you to gravitate toward in more privileged positions. Page 161 There are anchor effects -- the initial cues you see that then influence your subsequent decision, like the price that first catches your eye on a menu, that then makes other prices seem more or less fair, or a monthly payment plan that forms a reasonable-seeming anchor for a sum you might otherwise question as too high. Page 162 Precisely how something is presented to you matters a great deal. Page 162 Con artists can even influence choice by limiting it -- a take on the default effect. Page 162 We often like to have our choices constricted. Too much choice, and we just shake our heads and walk away -- a phenomenon known as choice fatigue. Page 162 If the statement seems persuasive -- your granddaughter is in trouble and you have no choice but to send money immediately to help her -- we'll be all the more likely to concede the point rather than stop and think about alternatives. Page 163 Information priming works so well because it exploits an effect we've already seen several times: the ease that comes from familiarity. Mention something in passing, and then when you elaborate on it later -- especially if it's a few days later -- it seems that much more convincing. Page 163 It's a phenomenon known as the illusion of truth: we are more likely to think something is true if it feels familiar. Page 163 "Picture this,""Imagine that . Page 163 One of Cialdini's many studies of persuasion had people watch an ad about cable television. Those who were told to "imagine the benefits" were much more likely to actually subscribe to it a month later than those who were simply told about "the benefits of cable TV." Page 164 trick.) And a final construction that can win an argument: it doesn't actually matter what you say, in what order, or how. All that matters is that you say a lot, quickly, and that it sounds convoluted and has many moving parts. Simply put, we tend to make worse decisions when we have a lot on our minds -- even after that "lot" is removed. Page 167 there were all the expected culprits, neat as you'd like. Scarcity (get it while you can!). Credibility appeals (I'm from a legitimate institution). Phantom fixation (the promise of future wealth -- that is, a fixation on a future phantom). And social consensus (everyone else is doing it!). Real scammers, it turns out, operate just as we would theoretically expect them to. CHAPTER 5: THE TALE Page 172 At this stage in the confidence game, the mark has been chosen, the play has begun, and the rope has been cast in a very specific way. We're no longer deciding between abstract, cold courses of action that we don't much care about. We're emotionally involved. We've already had the case persuasively laid out for us, in a way that makes it seem like a version of what we ourselves would most want, in the way we most want it. And so when the tale is told -- that is, we're told how we, personally, will benefit -- it's no longer really being told to us. Page 172 "Actually, this makes perfect sense": I am exceptional, and I deserve it. It's not too good to be true; it is exactly what I had coming to me. The chances may be less than 1 percent, but then again, I'm a less than 1 percent kind of guy. Page 172 One of our fundamental drives is the need for self-affirmation: we need to feel worthy, to feel needed, to feel like we matter. Page 173 we systematically represent ourselves and our reality in a way that favors our preferred version. Page 173 Each one of us is exceptional in our own minds. Page 174 And exceptional individuals are not chumps. Exceptional individuals are in charge. They don't get conned. Which is precisely why the tale works as well as it does. Page 176 Professionally, we are also all better than our colleagues at our jobs, despite any potential protests to the contrary. Page 178 When we're asked to select which words better match our personalities and key characteristics out of a list of possible contenders, we overwhelmingly select more positive than negative options. Page 179 When we compare ourselves to others, we tend to emerge ahead for a simple reason: we focus on our own most positive traits. Page 180 The tale tells itself: it's how so many con artists justify their actions to themselves, getting swept up in their own stories so strongly that they forget, at least for a moment, that they are lying. The belief in exceptionalism, after all, applies just as much to the con artist as to the mark: I am allowed to act like this because I am an exception to society's rules. Page 183 Simply put, when it comes to ourselves -- our traits, our lives, our decisions -- our personal attachment overshadows our objective knowledge. We systematically misevaluate evidence based on our own characteristics, and if we're given evidence that something about us poses a threat, instead of thinking about how to change our own behavior, we call the evidence itself into question. Page 184 Because of our self-serving bias, we tend to rationalize after the fact, focusing on reasons that justify our choice rather than those that went against it. It's a kind of confirmation in reverse: Page 185 One of the reasons that the tale is so powerful is that, despite the motivated reasoning that we engage in, we never realize we're doing it. We think we are being rational, even if we have no idea why Page 187 Not only does our conviction of our own exceptionalism and superiority make us misinterpret events and mischaracterize decisions; it also hits us a second time long after the event in question. Because of this, we rewrite the past in a way that makes us less likely to learn from it, selectively recalling everything good and conveniently forgetting the bad. Page 190 Cons are often underreported because, to the end, the marks insist they haven't been conned at all. Our memory is selective. CHAPTER 6: THE CONVINCER Page 201 One of the key elements of the convincer, the next stage of the confidence game, is that it is, well, convincing: the convincer makes it seem like you're winning and everything is going according to plan. You're getting money on your investment. Your wrinkles are disappearing and your weight dropping. That doctor really seems to know what he's doing. That wine really is exceptional, and that painting exquisite. You sure know how to find the elusive deal. The horse you bet on, both literal and figurative, is coming in a winner. Page 202 We are terrible at predicting the future. It's unpredictable by definition, true, but that doesn't keep us from thinking it isn't. When things are going well, we tend to think they will continue doing so -- and, quite possibly, even improve. Page 205 As information from our environment comes in, we home in on the positive and tend to isolate and filter out the negative. That selective perception makes us more empathetic, happier, better able to care for others, more productive, and more creative. When we receive negative feedback, we can (usually) deal with it, because, we rationalize, it's not really our fault. We are good at what we do; it's just that, this time, things went a bit awry. And even if we don't rationalize, it's easier to take the bad when you think yourself capable. Yes, I messed up, but I'll be able to make it work. Page 207 Though few people would think of bubbles as confidence schemes, the line between bubble and con can be a very fine one: they operate on many of the same principles, occur for many of the same reasons, and are so incredibly persistent, despite past evidence, based on much the same rationale. Page 209 was he a hustler, or merely unlucky? Ultimately, we'll never know: it is, for the most part, a question of knowledge and intent. Page 211 One of the simplest short cons revolves around getting people to place bets on outcomes they think either highly unlikely or highly likely because of their recent experience (an experience that, in the convincer, is unerringly positive) -- and then to upend those perfectly reasonable-seeming expectations. Page 211 Prop bets take advantage of what we expect and then do something completely different. Page 214 Each year, Roderick Kramer teaches a class on negotiation at Stanford's business school. And each time he teaches it, he poses a question: Page 214 how good are you at judging someone's trustworthiness? Page 214 About 95 percent of people, he has repeatedly found, think themselves better than average -- and not just any average. Page 219 Anticipated emotion -- that is, the emotion we can anticipate feeling if we take a certain course of action -- strongly favors the status quo. Anticipated regret makes us want to keep doing what we're doing; anticipated stress makes us want to cope proactively, by not doing anything that might provoke said stress; and anticipated guilt makes us likewise want to prevent it from ever happening. Page 220 The possibility of regret loomed so strongly on the chance that the player had given up a winner that it overcame all rational considerations. Page 221 And that is precisely what the confidence artist is depending on in the convincer. That nagging feeling in your gut: what if you scream foul and it ends up that it wasn't a con after all? Page 226 It starts with one word. One quote. One scene. One massaged fact. One altered data point. Did anyone notice? No one? Then let's keep going. Soon the ruse takes on a life of its own and you're fabricating whole fictional worlds as you bring ever more dupes into the fray. You're not a psychopath. You're probably not even a pathological liar. You're just a grifter who got a bit too enamored of his own scheme, and too certain of his own success, to believe he can ever fail. CHAPTER 7: THE BREAKDOWN Page 236 Francis Bacon Page 236 "And such is the way of all superstitions, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like," he wrote, "wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, although this happened much oftener, neglect and pass them by." Page 236 To reduce dissonance, Festinger argued, we can do several things. We can revise our interpretation of the present reality: there actually isn't any inconsistency; we were just looking at it Page 237 wrong. Page 237 We can revise our prior expectation: I thought this would happen all along, so it's actually not discordant. Page 237 Or we can alter the reality itself: stop smoking. Page 237 Changing your perception or your memory is easier than changing behavior. It's easier to change what we believe about smoking than to actually quit. Page 239 One of the earliest scientific demonstrations of the power of belief to change reality came again not from a lab, but this time from the classroom. In 1965, Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal joined with an elementary school principal, Lenore Jacobson, to determine whether how a teacher expects a student to perform would, in turn, affect how she would see the student's performance. Page 240 While Rosenthal's results are most often cited in the literature on self-fulfilling prophecies rather than confirmation bias, they illustrate one of the reasons the bias persists. Page 242 Almost immediately, each juror had constructed a plausible story out of the events, spontaneously filling in uncertain holes to fit into the resulting narrative. CHAPTER 8: THE SEND AND THE TOUCH Page 267 The sunk-cost effect gives us a continued, strong motivation to believe in something even when the landscape has changed significantly since we first invested ourselves in it. In theory, we should only care about new, incremental costs. Page 267 What we've already put into something shouldn't matter: it's lost anyway, whatever "it" happens to be -- time, money, energy, whatever else. Page 272 Experimentally, the endowment effect is remarkably well documented. Repeatedly, people who don't own something -- say, a pen or a mug, two items often used in these studies -- will be willing to pay less for it than they would to sell the exact same object. CHAPTER 9: THE BLOW-OFF AND THE FIX Page 285 Our reputation is the most important thing we have. It determines not only how we're seen by others, but also how they will act toward us. Will they trust us? Will they want to do business with us? Do they consider us responsible, reliable, likable, effective? In medieval Europe, fama meant two things: what people said about others' behaviors, and reputation. The fact that both ideas were represented in a single word signals a fundamental truth: our reputation, in effect, is what others say it is. Page 285 That is precisely what the confidence artist is counting on, even after, despite our best efforts at self-delusion, it becomes apparent that we've been taken for a ride: that Page 285 our reputational motivation will be strong enough to keep us quiet. Page 288 The whole world doesn't in fact lie, cheat, and steal, and life isn't nasty, brutish, and short, because we know that others will know how we act and that we can suffer for it. We care what they think -- and what they think can impact how we fare later on. Page 299 It's not that the confidence artist is inherently psychopathic, caring nothing about the fates of others. It's that, to him, we aren't worthy of consideration as human beings; we are targets, not unique people. Page 299 We must forever be just another statistic -- one in a stream of "jobs" rather than individuals in our own right. CHAPTER 10: THE (REAL) OLDEST PROFESSION Page 307 We want to believe. Believe that things make sense. That an action leads to a result. That things don't just happen willy-nilly no matter what we do, but rather for a reason. That what we do makes a difference, however small. That we ourselves matter. That there is a grand story, a higher method to the seeming madness. And in the heart of that desire, we easily become blind. The eternal lure of the con is the same reason religions arise spontaneously in most any human society. People always want something to believe Page 311 It is our need to hold on to belief, to meaning -- logic be damned -- that continues to fuel the great cons of the world, even as their contours shift with the times. Page 317 Meaninglessness is, well, meaningless. It's dispiriting, depressing, and discouraging, not to mention profoundly disorienting and disturbing. Page 318 It's little wonder that so many cons flourish in the world of religious experience -- and, indeed, that religiosity is one of the few factors that consistently predicts susceptibility to fraud. Page 320 In other words, all of us believe, intrinsically and instinctively. We just differ on where we draw the line between "legitimate" and "illegitimate." One man's confidence artist is another man's spiritual leader. Page 320 Nobody joins a cult, Sullivan repeated often and emphatically. People join something that will give them meaning. "They join a group that's going to promote peace and freedom throughout the world or that's going to save animals, or they're going to help orphans or something. But nobody joins a cult." Nobody embraces false beliefs: we embrace something we think is as true as it gets. Nobody sets out to be conned: we set out to become, in some way, better than we were before. Page 321 Ultimately, what a confidence artist sells is hope.
Max Fisher Notable Quotations Full screen view Page 3 Like many, I had initially assumed social media's dangers came mostly from misuse by bad actors -- propagandists, foreign agents, fake- news peddlers -- and that at worst the various platforms were a passive conduit for society's preexisting problems. But virtually everywhere I traveled in my reporting, covering far- off despots, wars, and upheavals, strange and extreme events kept getting linked back to social media. A sudden riot, a radical new group, widespread belief in some oddball conspiracy -- all had a common link. Page 5 the more incendiary the post, they sensed, the more widely the platforms spread it. Page 7 Many at the company seemed almost unaware that the platform's algorithms and design deliberately shape users' experiences and incentives, and therefore the users themselves. Page 8 Within Facebook's muraled walls, though, belief in the product as a force for good seemed unshakable. Page 9 attraction to divisiveness," the researchers warned in a 2018 presentation later leaked to the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the presentation continued, Facebook's systems were designed in a way that delivered users 'more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform." Page 9 Public figures routinely referred to the companies as one of the gravest threats of our time. In response, the companies' leaders pledged to confront the harms flowing from their services. Page 10 They unveiled election- integrity war rooms and updated content- review policies. But their business model -- keeping people glued to their platforms as many hours a day as possible -- and the underlying technology deployed to achieve this goal remained largely unchanged. Page 10 commissioned by the company under pressure from civil rights groups, concluded that the platform was everything its executives had insisted to me it was not. Its policies permitted rampant misinformation that could undermine elections. Its algorithms and recommendation systems were 'driving people toward self- reinforcing echo chambers of extremism," training them to hate. Perhaps most damning, the report concluded that the company did not understand how its own products affected its billions of users. Page 11 The early conventional wisdom, that social media promotes sensationalism and outrage, while accurate, turned out to drastically understate things. Page 11 This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so pervasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself. Page 12 With little incentive for the social media giants to confront the human cost to their empires -- a cost borne by everyone else, like a town downstream from a factory pumping toxic sludge into its communal well -- it would be up to dozens of alarmed outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors to do it for them. One: Trapped in the Casino Page 14 'If you joined the one anti- vaccine group," she said, 'it was transformative." Nearly every vaccine- related recommendation promoted to her was for anti- vaccine content. 'The recommendation engine would push them and push them and push them." Page 15 Before long, the system prompted her to consider joining groups for unrelated conspiracies. Chemtrails. Flat Earth. Page 15 The reason the system pushed the conspiratorial outliers so hard, she came to realize, was engagement. Social media platforms surfaced whatever content their automated systems had concluded would maximize users' activity online, thereby allowing the company to sell more ads. Page 16 Facebook wasn't just indulging anti- vaccine extremists. It was creating them. Page 16 Almost certainly, no one at Facebook or YouTube wanted to promote vaccine denial. Page 17 But the technology building this fringe movement was driven by something even the company's CEO could not overcome: the cultural and financial mores at the core of his entire industry. Page 20 As semiconductors developed into the circuit board, then the computer, then the internet, and then social media, each technology produced a handful of breakout stars, who in turn funded and guided the next handful. Page 22 human instincts to conform run deep. When people think something has become a matter of consensus, psychologists have found, they tend not only to go along, but to internalize that sentiment as their own. Page 22 the outrage was being ginned up by the very Facebook product that users were railing against. Page 22 That digital amplification had tricked Facebook's users, and even its leadership, into misperceiving the platform's loudest voices as representing everyone, growing a flicker of anger into a wildfire. Page 23 But, crucially, it had also done something else: driven engagement up. Way up. Page 24 Long after their technology's potential for harm had been made clear, the companies would claim to merely serve, and never shape or manipulate, their users' desires. But manipulation had been built into the products from the beginning. Page 24 'The thought process that went into building these applications," Parker told the media conference, 'was all about, 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'" Page 24 'We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you more likes and comments." Page 25 the 'social- validation feedback loop," Page 25 The term of art is 'persuasion": training consumers to alter their behavior in ways that serve the bottom line. Stanford University had operated a Persuasive Tech Lab since 1997. In 2007, a single semester's worth of student projects generated $ 1 million in advertising revenue. Page 26 Dopamine is social media's accomplice inside your brain. It's why your smartphone looks and feels like a slot machine, pulsing with colorful notification badges, whoosh sounds, and gentle vibrations. Page 26 Social apps hijack a compulsion -- a need to connect -- that can be even more powerful than hunger or greed. Page 26 intermittent variable reinforcement. Page 27 Never knowing the outcome makes it harder to stop pulling the lever. Intermittent variable reinforcement is a defining feature of not only gambling and addiction but also, tellingly, abusive relationships. Page 27 while posting to social media can feel like a genuine interaction between you and an audience, there is one crucial, invisible difference. Online, the platform acts as unseen intermediary. Page 27 It decides which of your comments to distribute to whom, and in what context. Page 27 The average American checks their smartphone 150 times per day, often to open social media. Page 28 YEAR AFTER launching the news feed, a group of Facebook developers mocked up something they called the 'awesome button" -- a one- click expression of approval for another user's post. Page 28 After a year and a half in limbo, a new team took over what was now the 'Like" button. Page 29 That little button's appeal, and much of social media's power, comes from exploiting something called the sociometer. Page 29 The anguish we feel from low self- esteem is wholly self- generated. Page 29 self- esteem is in fact 'a psychological gauge of the degree to which people perceive that they are relationally valued and socially accepted by other people." Page 29 It's what the anthropologist Brian Hare called 'survival of the friendliest." The result was the development of a sociometer: a tendency to unconsciously monitor how other people in our community seem to perceive us. Page 30 the platforms added a powerful twist: a counter at the bottom of each post indicating the number of likes, retweets, or upvotes it had received -- a running quantification of social approval for each and every statement. Page 30 When we receive a Like, neural activity flares in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens: the region that activates dopamine. Page 31 Expressing identity, sharpening identity, seeing and defining the world through its lens. This effect remade how social media works, as its overseers and automated systems drifted toward the all- consuming focus on identity that best served their agendas. Page 32 Our drive to cultivate a shared identity is so powerful that we'll construct one even out of nothing. Page 33 Prejudice and hostility have always animated this instinct. Hunter- gatherer tribes sometimes competed for resources or territory. Page 33 Social media's indulgence of identity wasn't obviously harmful at first. But it was always well known. Page 34 In 2014, I was one of several Washington Post reporters to start Vox, a news site intended to leverage the web. We never shaped our journalism to please social media algorithms -- at least, not consciously -- but headlines were devised with them in mind. The most effective approach, though one that in retrospect we should have perhaps been warier of using, was identity conflict. Liberals versus conservatives. The righteousness of anti- racism. The outrageousness of lax gun laws. Page 34 'Few realized, early on, that the way to win the war for attention was to harness the power of community to create identity. Two: Everything Is Gamergate Page 47 Raucous debate became seen as the purest meritocracy: if you couldn't handle your own or win over the crowd, if you felt harassed or unwelcome, it was because your ideas had not prevailed on merit. Page 49 Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, had urged elevating antisocial contrarians. Page 49 'If you're less sensitive to social cues, you're less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you." Page 49 'There's not a lot of value placed on social niceties," Margaret O'Mara told me. 'There's a tolerance for weirdness, in part because weird people have a proven track record. That's the other dimension of Silicon Valley culture. It's like everyone was an asshole." Page 50 Thiel, further parlaying his PayPal success, started a fund that launched major investments in Airbnb, Lyft, and Spotify. Throughout, like many leading investors, he imposed his ideals on the companies he oversaw. Page 51 with the advent of the social media era, the industry was building its worst habits into companies that then smuggled those excesses -- chauvinism, a culture of harassment, majoritarianism disguised as meritocracy -- into the homes and minds of billions of consumers. Page 51 the norms and values that they'd encoded into the early web turned out to guide its millions of early adopters toward something very different than the egalitarian utopia they'd imagined. Page 52 4chan Page 52 Anytime a user wanted to start a new thread, they had to upload an image, which kept the platform filled with user- made memes and cartoons. Page 52 Long before Snapchat and others borrowed the feature, discussions automatically deleted after a brief period, which enabled unseemly behavior that might've been shunned elsewhere. So did the site's anonymity; nearly all posts are marked as written by 'Anonymous," which instills an anything- goes culture and a sense of collective identity that can be alluring, especially to people who crave a sense of belonging. Page 54 'Ultimately," Christopher Poole, 4chan's founder, said in 2008, 'the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards." Page 54 The internet's promise of total freedom appealed especially to kids, for whom off- line life is ruled by parents and teachers. Adolescents also have a stronger drive to socialize than adults, which manifests as heavier use of social networks and a greater sensitivity to what happens there. Poole had started 4chan when he was just fifteen. Kids who felt isolated off- line, like Adam, drove an outsized share of online activity, bringing the concerns of the disempowered and the bullied with them. Page 55 Transgressing ever- greater taboos -- even against cruelty to grieving parents -- became a way to signal that you were in on the joke. 'When you browse 4chan and 8chan while the rest of your friends are posting normie live- laugh- love shit on Instagram and Facebook," Adam said, 'you feel different. Cooler. Part of something niche." Page 55 These two unifying activities, flaunting taboos and pulling pranks, converged to become trolling. Page 55 The thrill of getting a reaction out of someone even had a name: lulz, a corruption of the acronym for 'laugh out loud." Page 56 Unchastened by the social constraints of the off- line world, each user operates like a miniature Facebook algorithm, iteratively learning what best wins others' attention. Page 56 One lesson consistently holds. To rise among tens of thousands of voices, regardless of what you post, it is better to amp up the volume, to be more extreme. Page 57 'Trolling is basically internet eugenics," Page 59 From the beginning, social media platforms borrowed heavily from video games. Notifications are delivered in stylized 'badges," which Gordon told the audience could double a user's time on site, while likes mimic a running score. This was more than aesthetic. Many platforms initially considered gamers -- tech obsessives who would surely pump hours into this digital interface, too -- to be a core market. Page 60 New TV programming like My Little Pony and GI Joe delivered hyper- exaggerated gender norms, hijacking adolescents' natural gender self- discovery and converting it into a desire for molded plastic products. Page 60 Tapping into our deepest psychological needs, then training us to pursue them through commercial consumption that will leave us unfulfilled and coming back for more, has been central to American capitalism since the postwar boom. Page 60 Marketers, having long positioned games as childhood toys, kept boys hooked through adolescence and adulthood with -- what else? -- sex. Page 62 Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi. His staff had deployed a now- famous push poll: 'Do you believe Democrats are trying to take away your culture?" It performed spectacularly, especially with white men. Page 63 Facebook, in the hopes of boosting engagement, began experimenting with breaking the so- called Dunbar limit. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar had proposed, in the 1990s, that humans are cognitively capped at maintaining about 150 relationships. Page 63 Our behavior changes, too, seeking to reset back to 150, like a circuit breaker tripping. Even online, people converged naturally on Dunbar's number. Page 63 Users were pushed toward content from what Facebook called 'weak ties": friends of friends, contacts of contacts, cousins of cousins. Page 63 Enforced through algorithmic sophistication, the scheme worked. Facebook pulled users into ever expanding circles of half- strangers, surpassing the Dunbar limit. Page 64 But studies of rhesus monkeys and macaques, whose Dunbar- like limits are thought to mirror our own, had found that pushing them into larger groups made them more aggressive, more distrusting, and more violent. Page 64 The monkeys seemed to sense that safely navigating an unnaturally large group was beyond their abilities, triggering a social fight- or- flight response that never quite turned off. They also seemed to become more focused on forming and enforcing social hierarchies, likely as a kind of defense mechanism. Page 64 Facebook could push you into groups -- stand- alone discussion pages focused on some topic or interest -- ten times that size. Page 65 'There's this conspiracy- correlation effect," DiResta said, 'in which the platform recognizes that somebody who's interested in conspiracy A is typically likely to be interested in conspiracy B, and pops it up to them." Page 65 'I called it radicalization via the recommendation engine," she said. 'By having engagement- driven metrics, you created a world in which rage- filled content would become the norm." Page 65 The algorithmic logic was sound, even brilliant. Radicalization is an obsessive, life- consuming process. Believers come back again and again, their obsession becoming an identity, with social media platforms the center of their day- to- day lives. Page 65 She had seen it over and over. Recruits were drawn together by some ostensibly life- or- death threat: the terrible truth of vaccines, the Illuminati agents who spread Zika, the feminists seeking to overturn men's rightful place atop the gender hierarchy, starting with gaming. Three: Opening the Portal Page 68 Still, Reddit was built and governed around the same early internet ideals as 4chan, and had absorbed that platform's users and cultural tics. Page 68 Its up- or- down voting enforced an eclipsing majoritarianism that pushed things even further. Page 68 upvote counts are publicly displayed, tapping into users' sociometer- driven impulse for validation. The dopamine- chase glued users to the site and, as on Facebook, steered their actions. Page 68 As of 2016, four years after her suit, still only 11 percent of technology venture- capital partners were women. Two percent were Black. Page 68 looked like them: in 2018, 98 percent of their investment dollars went to male- led companies. Page 70 'Every Man Is Responsible for His Own Soul." This would become a standard defense from social media overlords: that the importance of their revolution compelled them to disregard the petty laws and morals of the outmoded off- line world. Besides, any bad behavior was users' fault, no matter how crucial a role the platform played in enabling, encouraging, and profiting from those transgressions. Page 71 Finally, nearly three weeks after the photos first appeared, Wong banned them. Reddit's users, incensed, accused the platform of selling out its principles to shadowy corporate influence and, worse, feminists. Page 72 Pao was also testing a theory: that the most hateful voices, though few in number, exploited social media's tendency to amplify extreme content for its attention- winning power, tingeing the entire platform in the process. Page 73 The first ban was small: a subreddit called 'FatPeopleHate." Page 73 Still, Reddit's userbase erupted in anger at the removals as an attack on the freedom to offend and transgress that, after all, had been an explicit promise of the social web since its founding. Page 74 'The trolls are winning," Pao wrote in a Washington Post op- ed a few days later. The internet's foundational ideals, while noble, had led tech companies to embrace a narrow and extreme interpretation of free speech that was proving dangerous, she warned. She had lasted just eight months. Page 75 MILO YIANNOPOULOS, Page 75 Headlines like 'Lying Greedy Promiscuous Feminist Bullies Are Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart" went viral on those platforms as seeming confirmation. Page 75 His bosses had hoped his articles would inform Breitbart's small, far- right readership on tech issues. Instead, they tapped into a new and much larger audience that they hadn't even known existed -- one that was only coming together at that moment. 'Every time you write one of your commentaries, it gets 10,000 comments," Steve Bannon, Breitbart's chief, told Yiannopoulos on the site's radio show. 'It goes even broader than the Breitbart audience, all over." Page 76 Within three years, the angry little subculture Yiannopoulos championed would evolve into a mainstream movement so powerful that he was granted a keynote slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the most important event on the political right. Page 76 (The invitation was later revoked.) Bannon called their cause the 'alt right," a term borrowed from white- power extremists who'd hoped to rebrand for a new generation. Page 76 Bannon and others on the alt right saw a chance to finally break through. 'I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away," Bannon said later. 'You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned on to politics and Trump." Page 77 'They call it 'meme magic' -- when previously obscure web memes become so influential they start to affect real- world events," Yiannopoulos wrote that summer before the election. Page 77 The movement coalesced around Trump, who had converged on the same tics and tactics as Yiannopoulos and other Gamergate stars, and for seemingly the same reason: it's what social media rewarded. Page 78 He swung misinformation and misogyny as weapons. He trolled without shame, heaping victims with mockery and abuse. He dared society's gatekeepers to take offense at flamboyant provocations that were right off 4chan. Page 78 From May 2015, a month before Trump declared his candidacy, to November 2016, a Harvard study later found, the most popular right- wing news source on Facebook was Breitbart, edging out even Fox News. Page 78 Awed outsiders would long ascribe Breitbart's rise to dark- arts social media manipulation. In truth, the publication did little more than post its articles to Facebook and Twitter, just as it always had. It was, in many ways, a passive beneficiary. Facebook's systems were promoting a host of once- obscure hyperpartisan blogs and outright misinformation shops -- bearing names like The Gateway Pundit, Infowars, The Conservative Treehouse, and Young Cons -- into mega- publishers with the power to reshape reality for huge segments of the population. Page 80 'This cycle of aggrievement and resentment and identity, and mob anger, it feels like it's consuming and poisoning the entire nation." Four: Tyranny of Cousins Page 85 'We enjoy being outraged. We respond to it as a reward." Page 85 The platforms had learned to indulge the outrage that brought their users 'a rush -- of purpose, of moral clarity, of social solidarity." Page 85 The growing pace of these all- consuming meltdowns, perhaps one a week, indicated that social media was not just influencing the broader culture, but, to some extent, supplanting Page 87 Popular culture often portrays morality as emerging from our most high-minded selves: the better angels of our nature, the enlightened mind. Sentimentalism says it is actually motivated by social impulses like conformity and reputation management (remember the sociometer?), which we experience as emotion. Page 87 the emotional brain works fast, often resolving to a decision before conscious reason even has a chance to kick in. Page 87 social purpose, like seeking peers' approval, rewarding a Good Samaritan, or punishing a transgressor. But the instinctual nature of that behavior leaves it open to manipulation. Which is exactly what despots, extremists, and propagandists have learned to do, rallying people to their side by triggering outrage -- often at some scapegoat or imagined wrongdoer. What would happen when, inevitably, social platforms learned to do the same? Page 89 Much legal scholarship, Klonick knew, considers public shaming necessary for society to function: tut-tutting someone for cutting in line, shunning them for a sexist comment, getting them fired for joining a hate group. But social media was changing the way that public shaming worked, which would necessarily change the functioning of society itself. 'Low cost, anonymous, instant, and ubiquitous access to the internet has removed most -- if not all -- of the natural checks on shaming," she wrote of her findings, 'and thus changed the way we perceive and enforce social norms." Page 92 Truth or falsity has little bearing on a post's reception, except to the extent that a liar is freer to alter facts to conform to a button-pushing narrative. What matters is whether the post can provoke a powerful reaction, usually outrage. Page 92 A 2013 study of the Chinese platform Weibo found that anger consistently travels further than other sentiments. Page 93 Right or left, the common variable was always social media, the incentives it imposes, the behavior it elicits. Page 93 Our social sensitivity evolved for tribes where angering a few dozen comrades could mean a real risk of death. On social media, one person can, with little warning, face the fury and condemnation of thousands. Page 97 pleasurable. Brain scans find that, when subjects harm someone they believe is a moral wrongdoer, their dopamine-reward centers activate. Page 97 From behind a screen, far from our victims, there is no pang of guilt at seeing pain on the face of someone we've harmed. Nor is there shame at realizing that our anger has visibly crossed into cruelty. Page 98 the platform's extreme bias toward outrage meant that misinformation prevailed, which created demand for more outrage-affirming rumors and lies. Page 99 scales; people express more outrage, and demonstrate more willingness to punish the undeserving, when they think their audience is larger. Page 101 algorithmically encouraged rage. Five: Awakening the Machine Page 106 'In September 2011, I sent a provocative email to my boss and the YouTube leadership team," Goodrow later wrote. 'Subject line: 'Watch time, and only watch time.' It was a call to rethink how we measured success." Page 106 second. 'Our job was to keep people engaged and hanging out with us," Page 108 YouTube's system seeks something more far-reaching than a monthly subscription fee. Its all-seeing eye tracks every detail of what you watch, how long you watch it, what you click on next. It monitors this across two billion users, accruing what is surely the largest dataset on viewer preferences ever assembled, which it constantly scans for patterns. Chaslot and others tweaked the system as it went, nudging its learning process to better accomplish its goal: maximum watch time. Page 109 One of the algorithm's most powerful tools is topical affinity. If you watch a cat video all the way through, Chaslot explained, YouTube will show you more on return visits. Page 109 The effect is to pull users toward ever more titillating variations on their interests. Page 115 Focus everything, he instructed, on maximizing a few quantifiable metrics. Page 115 Concentrate power in the hands of engineers who can do it. And shunt aside the rest. Page 116 They were chasing a very specific model: free-to-use web services that promised breakneck user growth. Page 117 in the late 2000s, Amazon and a few others set up sprawling server farms, putting their processing power and data storage up for rent, calling it 'the cloud." Now you no longer needed to invest in overhead. You rented it from Amazon, uploading your website to their servers. Page 117 'Forget strategy," the investor Roger McNamee wrote of this new approach. 'Pull together a few friends, make a product you like, and try it in the market. Make mistakes, fix them, repeat." It was transformative for investors, too, who no longer had to sink millions into getting a startup to market. They could do it for pocket change. Page 119 If the value of an ad impression kept shrinking, even the Facebooks and YouTubes might cease to be viable. Their only choice was to permanently grow the number of users, and those users' time on site, many times faster than those same actions drove down the price of an ad. But controlling the market of human attention, as their business models had fated them to attempt, was beyond anything a man-made program could accomplish. Page 120 Wojcicki's YouTube existed to convert eyeballs into money. Democracy and social cohesion were somebody else's problem. Page 120 'So, when YouTube claims they can't really say why the algorithm does what it does, they probably mean that very literally." Page 120 The average user's time on the platform skyrocketed. The company estimated that 70 percent of its time on site, an astronomical share of its business, was the result of videos pushed by its algorithm-run recommendation system. Page 121 In 2014, the same year that Wojcicki took over YouTube, Facebook's algorithm replaced its preference for Upworthy-style clickbait with something even more magnetic: emotionally engaging interactions. Across the second half of that year, as the company gradually retooled its systems, the platform's in-house researchers tracked 10 million users to understand the effects. They found that the changes artificially inflated the amount of pro-liberal content that liberal users saw and the amount of pro-conservative content that conservatives saw. Just as Pariser had warned. The result, even if nobody at Facebook had consciously intended as much, was algorithmically ingrained hyperpartisanship. Page 121 The process, Facebook researchers put it, somewhat gingerly, in an implied warning that the company did not heed, was 'associated with adopting more extreme attitudes over time and misperceiving facts about current events." Page 123 TikTok, a Chinese-made app, shows each user a stream of videos selected almost entirely by algorithms. Its A.I. is so sophisticated that TikTok almost immediately attracted 80 million American users, who often use it for hours at a time, despite most of its engineers not speaking English or understanding American culture. Page 124 Like DiResta's anti-vaxxers, or even Upworthy, the Russians hijacked the algorithm's own preferences. It wasn't just that the agents repeated phrases or behaviors that performed well. Their apparent mission, of stirring up political discord, seemed to naturally align with what the algorithms favored anyway, often to extremes. Page 125 'He was telling me, 'Oh, but there are so many videos, it has to be true,'" Chaslot said. 'What convinced him was not the individual videos, it was the repetition. And the repetition came from the recommendation engine." Page 125 illusory truth effect. We are, every hour of every day, bombarded with information. To cope, we take mental shortcuts to quickly decide what to accept or reject. Page 125 One is familiarity; if a claim feels like something we've accepted as true before, it probably still Page 125 When he searched YouTube for Pope Francis, for instance, 10 percent of the videos it displayed were conspiracies. On global warming, it was 15 percent. But the real shock came when Chaslot followed algorithmic recommendations for what to watch next, which YouTube has said accounts for most of its watch time. A staggering 85 percent of recommended videos on Pope Francis were conspiracies, asserting Francis's 'true" identity or purporting to expose Satanic plots at the Vatican. Page 128 But the influence of algorithms only deepened, including at the last holdout, Twitter. For years, the service had shown each user a simple, chronological feed of their friends' tweets. Until, in 2016, it introduced an algorithm that sorted posts -- for engagement, of course, and to predictable effect. Page 128 'The recommendation engine appears to reward inflammatory language and outlandish claims." Page 129 Shortly after Twitter algorithmified, Microsoft launched an A.I.-run Twitter account called Tay. The bot operated, like the platforms, on machine learning, though with a narrower goal: to converse convincingly with humans by learning from each exchange. Page 129 Within twenty-four hours, Tay's tweets had taken a disturbing turn. Page 129 'You absolutely do NOT let an algorithm mindlessly devour a whole bunch of data that you haven't vetted even a little bit." Six: The Fun House Mirror Page 132 Conspiracy belief is highly associated with 'anomie," the feeling of being disconnected from society. Page 136 It was undeniable that Trump owed his rise to nondigital factors, too: the institutional breakdown of the Republican Party, a decades-long rise in polarization and public distrust, white backlash to social change, a radicalized right-wing electorate. Social media had created none of these. But, in time, a network of analysts and whistleblowers would prove that it had exacerbated them all, in some cases drastically. Page 138 moral outrage can become infectious in groups, and that it can alter the mores and behaviors of people exposed to it. Page 138 across topics, across political factions, what psychologists refer to as 'moral-emotional words" consistently boosted any tweet's reach. Page 138 Moral-emotional words convey feelings like disgust, shame, or gratitude. Page 138 calls for, communal judgment, Page 138 That makes these words different from either narrowly emotional sentiments ('Overjoyed at today's marriage equality ruling") or purely moral ones ('The president is a liar"), for which Brady's effect didn't appear. Tweets with moral-emotional words, he found, traveled 20 percent farther -- for each moral-emotional word. Page 139 Brady found something else. When a liberal posted a tweet with moral-emotional words, its reach substantially increased among other liberals, but declined with conservatives. (And vice versa.) It won the user more overall attention and validation, in other words, at the cost of alienating people from the opposing side. Proof that Twitter encouraged polarization. Page 143 They were acting on a widely held misinterpretation of something known as contact theory. Coined after World War II to explain why desegregated troops became less prone to racism, the theory suggested that social contact led distrustful groups to humanize one another. But subsequent research has shown that this process works only under narrow circumstances: managed exposure, equality of treatment, neutral territory, and a shared task. Simply mashing hostile tribes together, researchers repeatedly found, worsens animosity. Page 143 People, as a rule, perceive out-groups as monoliths. Page 144 Even in its most rudimentary form, the very structure of social media encourages polarization. Reading an article and then the comments field beneath it, an experiment found, leads people to develop more extreme views on the subject in the article. Page 144 Control groups that read the article with no comments became more moderate and open-minded. Page 144 News readers, the researchers discovered, process information differently when they are in a social environment: social instincts overwhelm reason, leading them to look for affirmation of their side's righteousness. Page 148 The data revealed, as much as any foreign plot, the ways that the Valley's products had amplified the reach, and exacerbated the impact, of malign influence. (She later termed this 'ampliganda," a sort of propaganda whose power comes from its propagation by masses of often unwitting people.) Page 149 Over many iterations, the Russians settled on a strategy. Appeal to people's group identity. Tell them that identity was under attack. Whip up outrage against an out- group. And deploy as much moral- emotional language as possible. Page 152 the internet offered political outsiders a way around the mainstream outlets that shunned them. As those candidates' grassroots supporters spent disproportionate time on YouTube, the system learned to push users to those videos, creating more fans, driving up watch time further. But thanks to the preferences of the algorithms for extreme and divisive content, it was mostly fringe radicals who benefited, and not candidates across the spectrum. Page 154 The platforms, they concluded, were reshaping not just online behavior but underlying social impulses, and not just individually but collectively, potentially altering the nature of 'civic engagement and activism, political polarization, propaganda and disinformation." They called it the MAD model, for the three forces rewiring people's minds. Page 154 Motivation: the instincts and habits hijacked by the mechanics of social media platforms. Attention: users' focus manipulated to distort their perceptions of social cues and mores. Design: platforms that had been constructed in ways that train and incentivize certain behaviors. Page 156 As psychologists have known since Pavlov, when you are repeatedly rewarded for a behavior, you learn a compulsion to repeat it. As you are trained to turn all discussions into matters of high outrage, to express disgust with out-groups, to assert the superiority of your in-group, you will eventually shift from doing it for external rewards to doing it simply because you want to do it. The drive comes from within. Your nature has been changed. Page 156 The second experiment demonstrated that the attention economy, by tricking users into believing that their community held more extreme and divisive views than it really did, had the same effect. Showing subjects lots of social media posts from peers that expressed outrage made them more outrage-prone themselves. Page 156 It was a chilling demonstration of how portraying people and events in sharply moral-emotional terms brings out audiences' instincts for hatred and violence -- which is, after all, exactly what social platforms do, on a billions-strong scale, every minute of every day. Eight: Church Bells Page 181 the rumors activated a sense of collective peril in groups that were dominant but felt their status was at risk -- majorities angry and fearful over change that threatened to erode their position in the hierarchy. Page 181 status threat. When members of a dominant social group feel at risk of losing their position, it can spark a ferocious reaction. They grow nostalgic for a past, real or imagined, when they felt secure in their dominance ('Make America Great Again"). Page 182 We don't just become more tribal, we lose our sense of self. It's an environment, they wrote, 'ripe for the psychological state of deindividuation." Page 182 surrendering part of your will to that of the group. Page 182 deindividuation, with its power to override individual judgment, and status threat, which can trigger collective aggression on a terrible scale. Page 185 Anti-refugee sentiment is among the purest expressions of status threat, combining fear of demographic change with racial tribalism. Page 186 There's a term for the process Pauli described, of online jokes gradually internalized as sincere. It's called irony poisoning. Heavy social media users often call themselves 'irony poisoned," a joke on the dulling of the senses that comes from a lifetime engrossed in social media subcultures, where ironic detachment, algorithmic overstimulation, and dare-to-offend humor prevail. Page 186 Desensitization makes the ideas seem less taboo or extreme, which in turn makes them easier to adopt. Page 188 defining traits and tics of superposters, mapped out in a series of psychological studies, are broadly negative. One is dogmatism: 'relatively unchangeable, unjustified certainty." Dogmatics tend to be narrow-minded, pushy, and loud. Another: grandiose narcissism, defined by feelings of innate superiority and entitlement. Page 189 Narcissists are consumed by cravings for admiration and belonging, which makes social media's instant feedback and large audiences all but irresistible. Nine: The Rabbit Hole Page 203 'Really the only place where they could exchange their thoughts and coalesce and find allies was online." These groups didn't reflect real-world communities of any significant size, he realized. They were native to the web -- and, as a result, shaped by the digital spaces that had nurtured them. Climate skeptics largely gathered in the comments sections of newspapers and blogs. There, disparate contrarians and conspiracists, people with no shared background beyond a desire to register their objection to climate coverage got clumped together. It created a sense of common purpose. Page 208 By January 2018, Kaiser was mounting enough evidence to begin slowly going public. He told a Harvard seminar that the coalescing far right of which the Charlottesville gathering was a part was 'not done by users," he was coming to believe, at least not entirely, but had been in part 'created through the YouTube algorithm." Page 209 Canadian psychology professor. In 2013, Peterson began posting videos addressing, amid esoteric Jungian philosophy, youth male distress. Page 209 YouTube searches for 'depression" or certain self-help keywords often led to Peterson. His videos' unusual length, sixty minutes or more, align with the algorithm's drive to maximize watch time. So does his college-syllabus method of serializing his argument over weeks, which requires returning for the next lecture and the next. Page 209 Michael Kimmel calls 'aggrieved entitlement." Page 210 YouTube's algorithm, in many cases, tapped into that discontent, recommending channels that took Peterson's message to greater and greater extremes. Page 210 Users who comment on Peterson's videos subsequently become twice as likely to pop up in the comments of extreme-right YouTube channels, a Princeton study found. Page 210 the algorithm makes the connection. Page 210 The scholar J. M. Berger calls it 'the crisis-solution construct." When people feel destabilized, they often reach for a strong group identity to regain a sense of control. Page 211 Incel forums had begun as places to share stories about feeling lonely. Users discussed how to cope with living 'hugless." But the norms of social media one-upmanship, of attention chasing, still prevailed. The loudest voices rose. Page 212 By 2021, fifty killings had been claimed by self-described incels, a wave of terrorist violence. Page 212 The movement was a fringe of a fringe, dwarfed by Pizzagate or the alt right. But it hinted at social media's potential to galvanize young white male anomie into whole communities of extremism -- an increasingly widespread phenomenon. Page 214 These channels were her 'YouTube friends," salve for a lost marriage and feelings of isolation. They were community. They were identity. Page 214 YouTube's system, they found, did three things uncannily well. Page 214 it stitched together wholly original clusters of channels. Page 214 There was nothing innate connecting these beyond the A.I.'s conclusion that showing them alongside one another would keep users watching. Page 215 YouTube's recommendations generally moved toward the more extreme end of whatever network the user was in. Page 215 the third discovery. Page 215 the system's recommendations were clustering mainstream right-wing channels, and even some news channels, with many of the platform's most virulent hatemongers, incels, and conspiracy theorists. Page 216 One channel sat conspicuously in the network's center, a black hole toward which YouTube's algorithmic gravity pulled: Alex Jones. Page 216 Rauchfleisch warned, 'Being a conservative on YouTube means that you're only one or two clicks away from extreme far-right channels, conspiracy theories, and radicalizing content." Page 219 Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, Page 219 'We didn't fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences" of launching an 'instant, public, global" platform, he wrote that March. He conceded that it had resulted in real harms. He began, in interviews, voluntarily raising heretical ideas that other tech CEOs continued to fervently reject: maximizing for engagement is dangerous; likes and retweets encourage polarization. The company, he said, would reengineer its systems to promote 'healthy" conversations rather than engaging ones. He hired prominent experts and research groups to develop new features or design elements to do it. Page 220 dangerous. 'They told me, 'People click on Flat Earth videos, so they want a Flat Earth video,'" he recalled. 'And my point was, no, it's not that because someone clicked on the Flat Earth video, he wants to be lied to. He is just curious, and there is a clickbait title. But to the algorithm, when you watch a video, it means you endorse it." Page 221 YouTube, by showing users many videos in a row all echoing the same thing, hammers especially hard at two of our cognitive weak points -- that repeated exposure to a claim, as well as the impression that the claim is widely accepted, each make it feel truer than we would otherwise judge it to be. Page 221 The post went on for twenty more lines. References just cryptic enough that users could feel like they were cracking a secret code, and obvious enough to ensure that they would. Page 222 Followers got more than a story. QAnon, as the movement called itself, became a series of online communities where believers gathered to parse Q's posts. Page 222 Extremist groups have long recruited on a promise to fulfill adherents' need for purpose and belonging. Page 222 Conspiracies insist that events, rather than uncontrollable or impersonal, are all part of a hidden plot whose secrets you can unlock. Reframing chaos as order, telling believers they alone hold the truth, restores their sense of autonomy and control. It's why QAnon adherents often repeat to one another their soothing mantra: 'Trust the plan." Page 224 But for all the feelings of autonomy, security, and community that QAnon offered, it came at a cost: crushing isolation. Page 225 It was one of the things that made QAnon so radicalizing. Joining often worsened the very sense of isolation and being adrift that had led people to it in the first place. With nowhere else to turn and now doubly needful of reassurance, followers gave themselves over to the cause even more fully. Page 225 Renée DiResta's Page 225 'I can't emphasize enough what a disaster Groups are," she tweeted in 2018, as evidence mounted. 'The Groups recommendation engine is a conspiracy correlation matrix. It pushes people prone to extremist & polarizing content into closed and then secret groups. FB has no idea what it's built here." Page 226 In time, much as 4chan's transgressiveness became an in-group shibboleth, so did desensitization on 8chan. Tolerating things too shocking or unbearable for outsiders was a way to prove you belonged. Page 231 The investigators, citing interviews and forensic reconstructions of his web history, concluded that 'YouTube was, for him, a far more significant source of information and inspiration" than any other platform had been. Ten: The New Overlords Page 240 THERE IS SO much that makes social media techno-governance peculiar. The hubris of both its scale and its secrecy. The belief that politics and social relations are engineering problems. The faith in engineers to solve them. The naivete in thinking that they had done so, or at least enough to keep expanding. Page 243 The politics of the PayPal founders leaned severely libertarian: they were socially Darwinian, distrustful of government, certain that business knew best. Thiel took this to such extremes that in 2009, he announced, 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Society could no longer be trusted to 'the unthinking demos that guides so-called social democracy," he wrote, using the Greek term for citizens. Only 'companies like Facebook" could safeguard liberty. Page 244 DiResta said. It was about algorithmic amplification, online incentives that led unwitting users to spread propaganda, and the ease with which bad actors could 'leverage the entire information ecosystem to manufacture the appearance of popular consensus." Page 247 The changes were dramatic. People who deleted Facebook became happier, more satisfied with their life, and less anxious. The emotional change was equivalent to 25 to 40 percent of the effect of going to therapy -- a stunning drop for a four-week break. Page 247 Facebook quitters also spent 15 percent less time consuming the news. Page 248 Even Silicon Valley was beginning to internalize the backlash. An internal poll of 29,000 Facebook employees taken that October found that the share of employees who said they were proud to work at Facebook had declined from 87 to 70 percent in just a year. Page 249 in practice, social media did not abolish establishments so much as replace them. Its algorithms and incentives now acted as gatekeepers, determining who rose or fell. Page 249 From the beginning, the Yellow Vests, as they termed themselves, identified as a leaderless, radically horizontal movement. Social media had, unquestionably, enabled this. Page 251 Without the underlying infrastructure, social media movements are less able to organize coherent demands, coordinate, or act strategically. Page 251 And by channeling popular energy away from the harder kind of organizing, it preempts traditional movements from emerging. Page 260 Yaël Eisenstat, Page 260 claimed to have watched company policymakers work hard to balance democratic integrity with Facebook's mission, only to be overruled by 'the few voices who ultimately decided the company's overall direction." Facebook, she warned, was failing 'the biggest test of whether it will ever truly put society and democracy ahead of profit and ideology." Page 262 came to think of Facebook's policy team as akin to Philip Morris scientists tasked with developing a safer, better filter. In one sense, cutting down the carcinogens ingested by billions of smokers worldwide saved or prolonged lives on a scale few of us could ever match. In another sense, those scientists were working for the cigarette company, advancing the cause of selling cigarettes that harmed people at an enormous scale. Page 264 Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab, where academics and engineers teamed up to develop maximally addictive services, renamed itself the 'Behavior Design Lab." Its chief tweeted, 'We will start to realize that being chained to your mobile phone is a low-status behavior, similar to smoking." Nir Eyal, the consultant who'd pioneered slot machines as the model for social media platforms, pivoted from screen-time-maximization guru to screen-time-reduction guru, publishing a book with the title Indistractable. Page 265 This was the real governance problem, I came to believe. If it was taboo to consider that social media itself, like cigarettes, might be causing the harms that seemed to consistently follow its adoption, then employees tasked with managing those harms were impossibly constrained. Eleven: Dictatorship of the Like Page 287 Later that year, YouTube announced that it had made changes to its algorithm aimed at reducing 'the spread of borderline content and harmful misinformation." But some of those changes had already been in effect when we'd done our reporting, raising questions about their effectiveness. The company touted a somewhat oblique metric for success: 'A 70% drop in watch time of this content coming from non-subscribed recommendations in the U.S." Page 290 YouTube had cultivated an enormous audience of viewers who had never sought the content out, but rather were pulled into it by the platform's recommendations. Page 290 'As they get desensitized to those pictures, if they're on that scale," Rogers said, 'then they're going to seek out stuff that's even more thrilling, even more titillating, even more sexualized." Page 292 It seemed as if YouTube was trying to tidy up without acknowledging there had been anything to tidy. Twelve: Infodemic Page 320 As in so many cases before, whether with incels or Boogaloos, what had begun as online bluster for the sake of finding community amid disorientation became, on platforms that rewarded escalation and created a false sense of consensus around the most extreme views, a sincere will to action. Page 326 There was, if not a sea change in the Valley, then at least a flash of reckoning. Page 326 The day after the riot, Facebook announced it would block Trump from using its services at least until the inauguration two weeks later. Page 326 too. YouTube, the last major holdout, followed four days later. epilogue: whistleblowing Page 329 A WINDOW OPENED in the weeks after the Capitol siege. Unlike in the faltered reckonings of 2016 and 2018, there was, finally, broad understanding of social media's consequences. Page 329 But the window quickly closed. Page 329 The social media giants were invested too deeply in status quo financial and ideological models for such radical change. Page 331 Facebook and others shifted from promising that they had learned their lesson and would finally change to insisting, even more stridently than they had before January 6, that all the evidence pointing to their responsibility was simply wrong. Page 333 Australians could, of course, access news or government websites directly. Still, Facebook had, by deliberate design, made itself essential, training users to rely on its platform as the end-all for news and information. Page 336 Collectively, the documents told the story of a company fully aware that its harms sometimes exceeded even critics' worst assessments. At times, the reports warned explicitly of dangers that later became deadly, like a spike in hate speech or in vaccine misinformation, with plenty of notice for the company to have acted and, had it not refused to do so, possibly saved lives. Page 338 Coercing the companies into regulating themselves is also an uncertain path. Page 338 When asked what would most effectively reform both the platforms and the companies overseeing them, Haugen had a simple answer: turn off the algorithm.	Max Fisher Notable Quotations Full screen view Page 3 Like many, I had initially assumed social media's dangers came mostly from misuse by bad actors - propagandists, foreign agents, fake- news peddlers - and that at worst the various platforms were a passive conduit for society's preexisting problems. But virtually everywhere I traveled in my reporting, covering far- off despots, wars, and upheavals, strange and extreme events kept getting linked back to social media. A sudden riot, a radical new group, widespread belief in some oddball conspiracy - all had a common link. Page 5 the more incendiary the post, they sensed, the more widely the platforms spread it. Page 7 Many at the company seemed almost unaware that the platform's algorithms and design deliberately shape users' experiences and incentives, and therefore the users themselves. Page 8 Within Facebook's muraled walls, though, belief in the product as a force for good seemed unshakable. Page 9 attraction to divisiveness," the researchers warned in a 2018 presentation later leaked to the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the presentation continued, Facebook's systems were designed in a way that delivered users "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform." Public figures routinely referred to the companies as one of the gravest threats of our time. In response, the companies' leaders pledged to confront the harms flowing from their services. Page 10 They unveiled election- integrity war rooms and updated content- review policies. But their business model - keeping people glued to their platforms as many hours a day as possible - and the underlying technology deployed to achieve this goal remained largely unchanged. commissioned by the company under pressure from civil rights groups, concluded that the platform was everything its executives had insisted to me it was not. Its policies permitted rampant misinformation that could undermine elections. Its algorithms and recommendation systems were "driving people toward self- reinforcing echo chambers of extremism," training them to hate. Perhaps most damning, the report concluded that the company did not understand how its own products affected its billions of users. Page 11 The early conventional wisdom, that social media promotes sensationalism and outrage, while accurate, turned out to drastically understate things. This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so pervasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself. Page 12 With little incentive for the social media giants to confront the human cost to their empires - a cost borne by everyone else, like a town downstream from a factory pumping toxic sludge into its communal well - it would be up to dozens of alarmed outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors to do it for them. Page 14 "If you joined the one anti- vaccine group," she said, "it was transformative." Nearly every vaccine- related recommendation promoted to her was for anti- vaccine content. "The recommendation engine would push them and push them and push them." Page 15 Before long, the system prompted her to consider joining groups for unrelated conspiracies. Chemtrails. Flat Earth. Page 15 The reason the system pushed the conspiratorial outliers so hard, she came to realize, was engagement. Social media platforms surfaced whatever content their automated systems had concluded would maximize users' activity online, thereby allowing the company to sell more ads. Page 16 Facebook wasn't just indulging anti- vaccine extremists. It was creating them. Almost certainly, no one at Facebook or YouTube wanted to promote vaccine denial. Page 17 But the technology building this fringe movement was driven by something even the company's CEO could not overcome: the cultural and financial mores at the core of his entire industry. Page 20 As semiconductors developed into the circuit board, then the computer, then the internet, and then social media, each technology produced a handful of breakout stars, who in turn funded and guided the next handful. Page 22 human instincts to conform run deep. When people think something has become a matter of consensus, psychologists have found, they tend not only to go along, but to internalize that sentiment as their own. the outrage was being ginned up by the very Facebook product that users were railing against. That digital amplification had tricked Facebook's users, and even its leadership, into misperceiving the platform's loudest voices as representing everyone, growing a flicker of anger into a wildfire. Page 23 But, crucially, it had also done something else: driven engagement up. Way up. Page 24 Long after their technology's potential for harm had been made clear, the companies would claim to merely serve, and never shape or manipulate, their users' desires. But manipulation had been built into the products from the beginning. "The thought process that went into building these applications," Parker told the media conference, "was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'" "We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you more likes and comments." Page 25 the "social- validation feedback loop," The term of art is "persuasion": training consumers to alter their behavior in ways that serve the bottom line. Stanford University had operated a Persuasive Tech Lab since 1997. In 2007, a single semester's worth of student projects generated $ 1 million in advertising revenue. Page 26 Dopamine is social media's accomplice inside your brain. It's why your smartphone looks and feels like a slot machine, pulsing with colorful notification badges, whoosh sounds, and gentle vibrations. Social apps hijack a compulsion - a need to connect - that can be even more powerful than hunger or greed. intermittent variable reinforcement. Page 27 Never knowing the outcome makes it harder to stop pulling the lever. Intermittent variable reinforcement is a defining feature of not only gambling and addiction but also, tellingly, abusive relationships. while posting to social media can feel like a genuine interaction between you and an audience, there is one crucial, invisible difference. Online, the platform acts as unseen intermediary. It decides which of your comments to distribute to whom, and in what context. The average American checks their smartphone 150 times per day, often to open social media. Page 28 YEAR AFTER launching the news feed, a group of Facebook developers mocked up something they called the "awesome button" - a one- click expression of approval for another user's post. After a year and a half in limbo, a new team took over what was now the "Like" button. Page 29 That little button's appeal, and much of social media's power, comes from exploiting something called the sociometer. The anguish we feel from low self- esteem is wholly self- generated. self- esteem is in fact "a psychological gauge of the degree to which people perceive that they are relationally valued and socially accepted by other people." It's what the anthropologist Brian Hare called "survival of the friendliest." The result was the development of a sociometer: a tendency to unconsciously monitor how other people in our community seem to perceive us. Page 30 the platforms added a powerful twist: a counter at the bottom of each post indicating the number of likes, retweets, or upvotes it had received - a running quantification of social approval for each and every statement. Page 30 When we receive a Like, neural activity flares in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens: the region that activates dopamine. Page 31 Expressing identity, sharpening identity, seeing and defining the world through its lens. This effect remade how social media works, as its overseers and automated systems drifted toward the all- consuming focus on identity that best served their agendas. Page 32 Our drive to cultivate a shared identity is so powerful that we'll construct one even out of nothing. Page 33 Prejudice and hostility have always animated this instinct. Hunter- gatherer tribes sometimes competed for resources or territory. Social media's indulgence of identity wasn't obviously harmful at first. But it was always well known. Page 34 In 2014, I was one of several Washington Post reporters to start Vox, a news site intended to leverage the web. We never shaped our journalism to please social media algorithms - at least, not consciously - but headlines were devised with them in mind. The most effective approach, though one that in retrospect we should have perhaps been warier of using, was identity conflict. Liberals versus conservatives. The righteousness of anti- racism. The outrageousness of lax gun laws. "Few realized, early on, that the way to win the war for attention was to harness the power of community to create identity. Two: Everything Is Gamergate Page 47 Raucous debate became seen as the purest meritocracy: if you couldn't handle your own or win over the crowd, if you felt harassed or unwelcome, it was because your ideas had not prevailed on merit. Page 49 Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, had urged elevating antisocial contrarians. "If you're less sensitive to social cues, you're less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you." "There's not a lot of value placed on social niceties," Margaret O'Mara told me. "There's a tolerance for weirdness, in part because weird people have a proven track record. That's the other dimension of Silicon Valley culture. It's like everyone was an asshole." Page 50 Thiel, further parlaying his PayPal success, started a fund that launched major investments in Airbnb, Lyft, and Spotify. Throughout, like many leading investors, he imposed his ideals on the companies he oversaw. Page 51 with the advent of the social media era, the industry was building its worst habits into companies that then smuggled those excesses - chauvinism, a culture of harassment, majoritarianism disguised as meritocracy - into the homes and minds of billions of consumers. Page 51 the norms and values that they'd encoded into the early web turned out to guide its millions of early adopters toward something very different than the egalitarian utopia they'd imagined. Page 52 4chan. Anytime a user wanted to start a new thread, they had to upload an image, which kept the platform filled with user- made memes and cartoons. Page 52 Long before Snapchat and others borrowed the feature, discussions automatically deleted after a brief period, which enabled unseemly behavior that might've been shunned elsewhere. So did the site's anonymity; nearly all posts are marked as written by "Anonymous," which instills an anything- goes culture and a sense of collective identity that can be alluring, especially to people who crave a sense of belonging. Page 54 "Ultimately," Christopher Poole, 4chan's founder, said in 2008, "the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards." The internet's promise of total freedom appealed especially to kids, for whom off- line life is ruled by parents and teachers. Adolescents also have a stronger drive to socialize than adults, which manifests as heavier use of social networks and a greater sensitivity to what happens there. Poole had started 4chan when he was just fifteen. Kids who felt isolated off- line, like Adam, drove an outsized share of online activity, bringing the concerns of the disempowered and the bullied with them. Page 55 Transgressing ever- greater taboos - even against cruelty to grieving parents - became a way to signal that you were in on the joke. "When you browse 4chan and 8chan while the rest of your friends are posting normie live- laugh- love shit on Instagram and Facebook," Adam said, "you feel different. Cooler. Part of something niche." These two unifying activities, flaunting taboos and pulling pranks, converged to become trolling. The thrill of getting a reaction out of someone even had a name: lulz, a corruption of the acronym for "laugh out loud." Page 56 Unchastened by the social constraints of the off- line world, each user operates like a miniature Facebook algorithm, iteratively learning what best wins others' attention. One lesson consistently holds. To rise among tens of thousands of voices, regardless of what you post, it is better to amp up the volume, to be more extreme. Page 57 "Trolling is basically internet eugenics," Page 59 From the beginning, social media platforms borrowed heavily from video games. Notifications are delivered in stylized "badges," which Gordon told the audience could double a user's time on site, while likes mimic a running score. This was more than aesthetic. Many platforms initially considered gamers - tech obsessives who would surely pump hours into this digital interface, too - to be a core market. Page 60 New TV programming like My Little Pony and GI Joe delivered hyper- exaggerated gender norms, hijacking adolescents' natural gender self- discovery and converting it into a desire for molded plastic products. Tapping into our deepest psychological needs, then training us to pursue them through commercial consumption that will leave us unfulfilled and coming back for more, has been central to American capitalism since the postwar boom. Marketers, having long positioned games as childhood toys, kept boys hooked through adolescence and adulthood with - what else? - sex. Page 62 Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi. His staff had deployed a now- famous push poll: "Do you believe Democrats are trying to take away your culture?" It performed spectacularly, especially with white men. Page 63 Facebook, in the hopes of boosting engagement, began experimenting with breaking the so- called Dunbar limit. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar had proposed, in the 1990s, that humans are cognitively capped at maintaining about 150 relationships. Our behavior changes, too, seeking to reset back to 150, like a circuit breaker tripping. Even online, people converged naturally on Dunbar's number. Users were pushed toward content from what Facebook called "weak ties": friends of friends, contacts of contacts, cousins of cousins. Enforced through algorithmic sophistication, the scheme worked. Facebook pulled users into ever expanding circles of half- strangers, surpassing the Dunbar limit. Page 64 But studies of rhesus monkeys and macaques, whose Dunbar- like limits are thought to mirror our own, had found that pushing them into larger groups made them more aggressive, more distrusting, and more violent. The monkeys seemed to sense that safely navigating an unnaturally large group was beyond their abilities, triggering a social fight- or- flight response that never quite turned off. They also seemed to become more focused on forming and enforcing social hierarchies, likely as a kind of defense mechanism. Page 64 Facebook could push you into groups - stand- alone discussion pages focused on some topic or interest - ten times that size. Page 65 "There's this conspiracy- correlation effect," DiResta said, "in which the platform recognizes that somebody who's interested in conspiracy A is typically likely to be interested in conspiracy B, and pops it up to them." "I called it radicalization via the recommendation engine," she said. "By having engagement- driven metrics, you created a world in which rage- filled content would become the norm." The algorithmic logic was sound, even brilliant. Radicalization is an obsessive, life- consuming process. Believers come back again and again, their obsession becoming an identity, with social media platforms the center of their day- to- day lives. She had seen it over and over. Recruits were drawn together by some ostensibly life- or- death threat: the terrible truth of vaccines, the Illuminati agents who spread Zika, the feminists seeking to overturn men's rightful place atop the gender hierarchy, starting with gaming. Page 68 Still, Reddit was built and governed around the same early internet ideals as 4chan, and had absorbed that platform's users and cultural tics. Its up- or- down voting enforced an eclipsing majoritarianism that pushed things even further. upvote counts are publicly displayed, tapping into users' sociometer- driven impulse for validation. The dopamine- chase glued users to the site and, as on Facebook, steered their actions. As of 2016, four years after her suit, still only 11 percent of technology venture- capital partners were women. Two percent were Black. Page 68 looked like them: in 2018, 98 percent of their investment dollars went to male- led companies. Page 70 "Every Man Is Responsible for His Own Soul." This would become a standard defense from social media overlords: that the importance of their revolution compelled them to disregard the petty laws and morals of the outmoded off- line world. Besides, any bad behavior was users' fault, no matter how crucial a role the platform played in enabling, encouraging, and profiting from those transgressions. Page 71 Finally, nearly three weeks after the photos first appeared, Wong banned them. Reddit's users, incensed, accused the platform of selling out its principles to shadowy corporate influence and, worse, feminists. Page 72 Pao was also testing a theory: that the most hateful voices, though few in number, exploited social media's tendency to amplify extreme content for its attention- winning power, tingeing the entire platform in the process. Page 73 The first ban was small: a subreddit called "FatPeopleHate." Still, Reddit's userbase erupted in anger at the removals as an attack on the freedom to offend and transgress that, after all, had been an explicit promise of the social web since its founding. Page 74 "The trolls are winning," Pao wrote in a Washington Post op- ed a few days later. The internet's foundational ideals, while noble, had led tech companies to embrace a narrow and extreme interpretation of free speech that was proving dangerous, she warned. She had lasted just eight months. Page 75 MILO YIANNOPOULOS, Headlines like "Lying Greedy Promiscuous Feminist Bullies Are Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart" went viral on those platforms as seeming confirmation. His bosses had hoped his articles would inform Breitbart's small, far- right readership on tech issues. Instead, they tapped into a new and much larger audience that they hadn't even known existed - one that was only coming together at that moment. "Every time you write one of your commentaries, it gets 10,000 comments," Steve Bannon, Breitbart's chief, told Yiannopoulos on the site's radio show. "It goes even broader than the Breitbart audience, all over." Page 76 Within three years, the angry little subculture Yiannopoulos championed would evolve into a mainstream movement so powerful that he was granted a keynote slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the most important event on the political right. (The invitation was later revoked.) Bannon called their cause the "alt right," a term borrowed from white- power extremists who'd hoped to rebrand for a new generation. Bannon and others on the alt right saw a chance to finally break through. "I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away," Bannon said later. "You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned on to politics and Trump." "They call it ‘meme magic' - when previously obscure web memes become so influential they start to affect real- world events," Yiannopoulos wrote that summer before the election. The movement coalesced around Trump, who had converged on the same tics and tactics as Yiannopoulos and other Gamergate stars, and for seemingly the same reason: it's what social media rewarded. Page 78 He swung misinformation and misogyny as weapons. He trolled without shame, heaping victims with mockery and abuse. He dared society's gatekeepers to take offense at flamboyant provocations that were right off 4chan. From May 2015, a month before Trump declared his candidacy, to November 2016, a Harvard study later found, the most popular right- wing news source on Facebook was Breitbart, edging out even Fox News. Awed outsiders would long ascribe Breitbart's rise to dark- arts social media manipulation. In truth, the publication did little more than post its articles to Facebook and Twitter, just as it always had. It was, in many ways, a passive beneficiary. Facebook's systems were promoting a host of once- obscure hyperpartisan blogs and outright misinformation shops - bearing names like The Gateway Pundit, Infowars, The Conservative Treehouse, and Young Cons - into mega- publishers with the power to reshape reality for huge segments of the population. Page 80 "This cycle of aggrievement and resentment and identity, and mob anger, it feels like it's consuming and poisoning the entire nation." Four: Tyranny of Cousins Page 85 "We enjoy being outraged. We respond to it as a reward." The platforms had learned to indulge the outrage that brought their users "a rush - of purpose, of moral clarity, of social solidarity." The growing pace of these all- consuming meltdowns, perhaps one a week, indicated that social media was not just influencing the broader culture, but, to some extent, supplanting Page 87 Popular culture often portrays morality as emerging from our most high- minded selves: the better angels of our nature, the enlightened mind. Sentimentalism says it is actually motivated by social impulses like conformity and reputation management (remember the sociometer?), which we experience as emotion. the emotional brain works fast, often resolving to a decision before conscious reason even has a chance to kick in. social purpose, like seeking peers' approval, rewarding a Good Samaritan, or punishing a transgressor. But the instinctual nature of that behavior leaves it open to manipulation. Which is exactly what despots, extremists, and propagandists have learned to do, rallying people to their side by triggering outrage - often at some scapegoat or imagined wrongdoer. What would happen when, inevitably, social platforms learned to do the same? Page 89 Much legal scholarship, Klonick knew, considers public shaming necessary for society to function: tut- tutting someone for cutting in line, shunning them for a sexist comment, getting them fired for joining a hate group. But social media was changing the way that public shaming worked, which would necessarily change the functioning of society itself. "Low cost, anonymous, instant, and ubiquitous access to the internet has removed most - if not all - of the natural checks on shaming," she wrote of her findings, "and thus changed the way we perceive and enforce social norms." Page 92 Truth or falsity has little bearing on a post's reception, except to the extent that a liar is freer to alter facts to conform to a button- pushing narrative. What matters is whether the post can provoke a powerful reaction, usually outrage. A 2013 study of the Chinese platform Weibo found that anger consistently travels further than other sentiments. Page 93 Right or left, the common variable was always social media, the incentives it imposes, the behavior it elicits. Our social sensitivity evolved for tribes where angering a few dozen comrades could mean a real risk of death. On social media, one person can, with little warning, face the fury and condemnation of thousands. Page 97 pleasurable. Brain scans find that, when subjects harm someone they believe is a moral wrongdoer, their dopamine- reward centers activate. From behind a screen, far from our victims, there is no pang of guilt at seeing pain on the face of someone we've harmed. Nor is there shame at realizing that our anger has visibly crossed into cruelty. Page 98 the platform's extreme bias toward outrage meant that misinformation prevailed, which created demand for more outrage- affirming rumors and lies. Page 99 scales; people express more outrage, and demonstrate more willingness to punish the undeserving, when they think their audience is larger. Page 101 algorithmically encouraged rage. Five: Awakening the Machine Page 106 "In September 2011, I sent a provocative email to my boss and the YouTube leadership team," Goodrow later wrote. "Subject line: ‘Watch time, and only watch time.' It was a call to rethink how we measured success." second. "Our job was to keep people engaged and hanging out with us," Page 108 YouTube's system seeks something more far- reaching than a monthly subscription fee. Its all- seeing eye tracks every detail of what you watch, how long you watch it, what you click on next. It monitors this across two billion users, accruing what is surely the largest dataset on viewer preferences ever assembled, which it constantly scans for patterns. Chaslot and others tweaked the system as it went, nudging its learning process to better accomplish its goal: maximum watch time. Page 109 One of the algorithm's most powerful tools is topical affinity. If you watch a cat video all the way through, Chaslot explained, YouTube will show you more on return visits. The effect is to pull users toward ever more titillating variations on their interests. Page 115 Focus everything, he instructed, on maximizing a few quantifiable metrics. Concentrate power in the hands of engineers who can do it. And shunt aside the rest. Page 116 They were chasing a very specific model: free- to- use web services that promised breakneck user growth. Page 117 in the late 2000s, Amazon and a few others set up sprawling server farms, putting their processing power and data storage up for rent, calling it "the cloud." Now you no longer needed to invest in overhead. You rented it from Amazon, uploading your website to their servers. "Forget strategy," the investor Roger McNamee wrote of this new approach. "Pull together a few friends, make a product you like, and try it in the market. Make mistakes, fix them, repeat." It was transformative for investors, too, who no longer had to sink millions into getting a startup to market. They could do it for pocket change. Page 119 If the value of an ad impression kept shrinking, even the Facebooks and YouTubes might cease to be viable. Their only choice was to permanently grow the number of users, and those users' time on site, many times faster than those same actions drove down the price of an ad. But controlling the market of human attention, as their business models had fated them to attempt, was beyond anything a man- made program could accomplish. Page 120 Wojcicki's YouTube existed to convert eyeballs into money. Democracy and social cohesion were somebody else's problem. "So, when YouTube claims they can't really say why the algorithm does what it does, they probably mean that very literally." The average user's time on the platform skyrocketed. The company estimated that 70 percent of its time on site, an astronomical share of its business, was the result of videos pushed by its algorithm- run recommendation system. Page 121 In 2014, the same year that Wojcicki took over YouTube, Facebook's algorithm replaced its preference for Upworthy- style clickbait with something even more magnetic: emotionally engaging interactions. Across the second half of that year, as the company gradually retooled its systems, the platform's in- house researchers tracked 10 million users to understand the effects. They found that the changes artificially inflated the amount of pro- liberal content that liberal users saw and the amount of pro- conservative content that conservatives saw. Just as Pariser had warned. The result, even if nobody at Facebook had consciously intended as much, was algorithmically ingrained hyperpartisanship. The process, Facebook researchers put it, somewhat gingerly, in an implied warning that the company did not heed, was "associated with adopting more extreme attitudes over time and misperceiving facts about current events." Page 123 TikTok, a Chinese- made app, shows each user a stream of videos selected almost entirely by algorithms. Its A.I. is so sophisticated that TikTok almost immediately attracted 80 million American users, who often use it for hours at a time, despite most of its engineers not speaking English or understanding American culture. Page 124 Like DiResta's anti- vaxxers, or even Upworthy, the Russians hijacked the algorithm's own preferences. It wasn't just that the agents repeated phrases or behaviors that performed well. Their apparent mission, of stirring up political discord, seemed to naturally align with what the algorithms favored anyway, often to extremes. Page 125 "He was telling me, ‘Oh, but there are so many videos, it has to be true,'" Chaslot said. "What convinced him was not the individual videos, it was the repetition. And the repetition came from the recommendation engine." illusory truth effect. We are, every hour of every day, bombarded with information. To cope, we take mental shortcuts to quickly decide what to accept or reject. One is familiarity; if a claim feels like something we've accepted as true before, it probably still When he searched YouTube for Pope Francis, for instance, 10 percent of the videos it displayed were conspiracies. On global warming, it was 15 percent. But the real shock came when Chaslot followed algorithmic recommendations for what to watch next, which YouTube has said accounts for most of its watch time. A staggering 85 percent of recommended videos on Pope Francis were conspiracies, asserting Francis's "true" identity or purporting to expose Satanic plots at the Vatican. Page 128 But the influence of algorithms only deepened, including at the last holdout, Twitter. For years, the service had shown each user a simple, chronological feed of their friends' tweets. Until, in 2016, it introduced an algorithm that sorted posts - for engagement, of course, and to predictable effect. "The recommendation engine appears to reward inflammatory language and outlandish claims." Page 129 Shortly after Twitter algorithmified, Microsoft launched an A.I.- run Twitter account called Tay. The bot operated, like the platforms, on machine learning, though with a narrower goal: to converse convincingly with humans by learning from each exchange. Within twenty- four hours, Tay's tweets had taken a disturbing turn. "You absolutely do NOT let an algorithm mindlessly devour a whole bunch of data that you haven't vetted even a little bit." Six: The Fun House Mirror Page 132 Conspiracy belief is highly associated with "anomie," the feeling of being disconnected from society. Page 136 It was undeniable that Trump owed his rise to nondigital factors, too: the institutional breakdown of the Republican Party, a decades- long rise in polarization and public distrust, white backlash to social change, a radicalized right- wing electorate. Social media had created none of these. But, in time, a network of analysts and whistleblowers would prove that it had exacerbated them all, in some cases drastically. Page 138 moral outrage can become infectious in groups, and that it can alter the mores and behaviors of people exposed to it. across topics, across political factions, what psychologists refer to as "moral- emotional words" consistently boosted any tweet's reach. Moral- emotional words convey feelings like disgust, shame, or gratitude. calls for, communal judgment, That makes these words different from either narrowly emotional sentiments (" Overjoyed at today's marriage equality ruling") or purely moral ones (" The president is a liar"), for which Brady's effect didn't appear. Tweets with moral- emotional words, he found, traveled 20 percent farther - for each moral- emotional word. Page 139 Brady found something else. When a liberal posted a tweet with moral- emotional words, its reach substantially increased among other liberals, but declined with conservatives. (And vice versa.) It won the user more overall attention and validation, in other words, at the cost of alienating people from the opposing side. Proof that Twitter encouraged polarization. Page 143 They were acting on a widely held misinterpretation of something known as contact theory. Coined after World War II to explain why desegregated troops became less prone to racism, the theory suggested that social contact led distrustful groups to humanize one another. But subsequent research has shown that this process works only under narrow circumstances: managed exposure, equality of treatment, neutral territory, and a shared task. Simply mashing hostile tribes together, researchers repeatedly found, worsens animosity. People, as a rule, perceive out- groups as monoliths. Page 144 Even in its most rudimentary form, the very structure of social media encourages polarization. Reading an article and then the comments field beneath it, an experiment found, leads people to develop more extreme views on the subject in the article. Control groups that read the article with no comments became more moderate and open- minded. News readers, the researchers discovered, process information differently when they are in a social environment: social instincts overwhelm reason, leading them to look for affirmation of their side's righteousness. Page 148 The data revealed, as much as any foreign plot, the ways that the Valley's products had amplified the reach, and exacerbated the impact, of malign influence. (She later termed this "ampliganda," a sort of propaganda whose power comes from its propagation by masses of often unwitting people.) Page 149 Over many iterations, the Russians settled on a strategy. Appeal to people's group identity. Tell them that identity was under attack. Whip up outrage against an out- group. And deploy as much moral- emotional language as possible. Page 152 the internet offered political outsiders a way around the mainstream outlets that shunned them. As those candidates' grassroots supporters spent disproportionate time on YouTube, the system learned to push users to those videos, creating more fans, driving up watch time further. But thanks to the preferences of the algorithms for extreme and divisive content, it was mostly fringe radicals who benefited, and not candidates across the spectrum. Page 154 The platforms, they concluded, were reshaping not just online behavior but underlying social impulses, and not just individually but collectively, potentially altering the nature of "civic engagement and activism, political polarization, propaganda and disinformation." They called it the MAD model, for the three forces rewiring people's minds. Motivation: the instincts and habits hijacked by the mechanics of social media platforms. Attention: users' focus manipulated to distort their perceptions of social cues and mores. Design: platforms that had been constructed in ways that train and incentivize certain behaviors. Page 156 As psychologists have known since Pavlov, when you are repeatedly rewarded for a behavior, you learn a compulsion to repeat it. As you are trained to turn all discussions into matters of high outrage, to express disgust with out- groups, to assert the superiority of your in- group, you will eventually shift from doing it for external rewards to doing it simply because you want to do it. The drive comes from within. Your nature has been changed. The second experiment demonstrated that the attention economy, by tricking users into believing that their community held more extreme and divisive views than it really did, had the same effect. Showing subjects lots of social media posts from peers that expressed outrage made them more outrage- prone themselves. It was a chilling demonstration of how portraying people and events in sharply moral- emotional terms brings out audiences' instincts for hatred and violence - which is, after all, exactly what social platforms do, on a billions- strong scale, every minute of every day. Eight: Church Bells Page 181 the rumors activated a sense of collective peril in groups that were dominant but felt their status was at risk - majorities angry and fearful over change that threatened to erode their position in the hierarchy. status threat. When members of a dominant social group feel at risk of losing their position, it can spark a ferocious reaction. They grow nostalgic for a past, real or imagined, when they felt secure in their dominance (" Make America Great Again"). Page 182 We don't just become more tribal, we lose our sense of self. It's an environment, they wrote, "ripe for the psychological state of deindividuation." surrendering part of your will to that of the group. deindividuation, with its power to override individual judgment, and status threat, which can trigger collective aggression on a terrible scale. Page 185 Anti- refugee sentiment is among the purest expressions of status threat, combining fear of demographic change with racial tribalism. Page 186 There's a term for the process Pauli described, of online jokes gradually internalized as sincere. It's called irony poisoning. Heavy social media users often call themselves "irony poisoned," a joke on the dulling of the senses that comes from a lifetime engrossed in social media subcultures, where ironic detachment, algorithmic overstimulation, and dare- to- offend humor prevail. Desensitization makes the ideas seem less taboo or extreme, which in turn makes them easier to adopt. Page 188 defining traits and tics of superposters, mapped out in a series of psychological studies, are broadly negative. One is dogmatism: "relatively unchangeable, unjustified certainty." Dogmatics tend to be narrow- minded, pushy, and loud. Another: grandiose narcissism, defined by feelings of innate superiority and entitlement. Page 189 Narcissists are consumed by cravings for admiration and belonging, which makes social media's instant feedback and large audiences all but irresistible. Nine: The Rabbit Hole Page 203 "Really the only place where they could exchange their thoughts and coalesce and find allies was online." These groups didn't reflect real- world communities of any significant size, he realized. They were native to the web - and, as a result, shaped by the digital spaces that had nurtured them. Climate skeptics largely gathered in the comments sections of newspapers and blogs. There, disparate contrarians and conspiracists, people with no shared background beyond a desire to register their objection to climate coverage got clumped together. It created a sense of common purpose. Page 208 By January 2018, Kaiser was mounting enough evidence to begin slowly going public. He told a Harvard seminar that the coalescing far right of which the Charlottesville gathering was a part was "not done by users," he was coming to believe, at least not entirely, but had been in part "created through the YouTube algorithm." Page 209 Canadian psychology professor. In 2013, Peterson began posting videos addressing, amid esoteric Jungian philosophy, youth male distress. Page 209 YouTube searches for "depression" or certain self- help keywords often led to Peterson. His videos' unusual length, sixty minutes or more, align with the algorithm's drive to maximize watch time. So does his college- syllabus method of serializing his argument over weeks, which requires returning for the next lecture and the next. Michael Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement." Page 210 YouTube's algorithm, in many cases, tapped into that discontent, recommending channels that took Peterson's message to greater and greater extremes. Users who comment on Peterson's videos subsequently become twice as likely to pop up in the comments of extreme- right YouTube channels, a Princeton study found. the algorithm makes the connection. The scholar J. M. Berger calls it "the crisis- solution construct." When people feel destabilized, they often reach for a strong group identity to regain a sense of control. Page 211 Incel forums had begun as places to share stories about feeling lonely. Users discussed how to cope with living "hugless." But the norms of social media one- upmanship, of attention chasing, still prevailed. The loudest voices rose. Page 212 By 2021, fifty killings had been claimed by self- described incels, a wave of terrorist violence. Page 212 The movement was a fringe of a fringe, dwarfed by Pizzagate or the alt right. But it hinted at social media's potential to galvanize young white male anomie into whole communities of extremism - an increasingly widespread phenomenon. Page 214 These channels were her "YouTube friends," salve for a lost marriage and feelings of isolation. They were community. They were identity. Page 214 YouTube's system, they found, did three things uncannily well. it stitched together wholly original clusters of channels. There was nothing innate connecting these beyond the A.I.' s conclusion that showing them alongside one another would keep users watching. Page 215 YouTube's recommendations generally moved toward the more extreme end of whatever network the user was in. the third discovery. the system's recommendations were clustering mainstream right- wing channels, and even some news channels, with many of the platform's most virulent hatemongers, incels, and conspiracy theorists. Page 216 One channel sat conspicuously in the network's center, a black hole toward which YouTube's algorithmic gravity pulled: Alex Jones. Page 216 Rauchfleisch warned, "Being a conservative on YouTube means that you're only one or two clicks away from extreme far- right channels, conspiracy theories, and radicalizing content." Page 219 Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, "We didn't fully predict or understand the real- world negative consequences" of launching an "instant, public, global" platform, he wrote that March. He conceded that it had resulted in real harms. He began, in interviews, voluntarily raising heretical ideas that other tech CEOs continued to fervently reject: maximizing for engagement is dangerous; likes and retweets encourage polarization. The company, he said, would reengineer its systems to promote "healthy" conversations rather than engaging ones. He hired prominent experts and research groups to develop new features or design elements to do it. Page 220 dangerous. "They told me, ‘People click on Flat Earth videos, so they want a Flat Earth video,'" he recalled. "And my point was, no, it's not that because someone clicked on the Flat Earth video, he wants to be lied to. He is just curious, and there is a clickbait title. But to the algorithm, when you watch a video, it means you endorse it." Page 221 YouTube, by showing users many videos in a row all echoing the same thing, hammers especially hard at two of our cognitive weak points - that repeated exposure to a claim, as well as the impression that the claim is widely accepted, each make it feel truer than we would otherwise judge it to be. Page 221 The post went on for twenty more lines. References just cryptic enough that users could feel like they were cracking a secret code, and obvious enough to ensure that they would. Page 222 Followers got more than a story. QAnon, as the movement called itself, became a series of online communities where believers gathered to parse Q's posts. Extremist groups have long recruited on a promise to fulfill adherents' need for purpose and belonging. Conspiracies insist that events, rather than uncontrollable or impersonal, are all part of a hidden plot whose secrets you can unlock. Reframing chaos as order, telling believers they alone hold the truth, restores their sense of autonomy and control. It's why QAnon adherents often repeat to one another their soothing mantra: "Trust the plan." Page 224 But for all the feelings of autonomy, security, and community that QAnon offered, it came at a cost: crushing isolation. Page 225 It was one of the things that made QAnon so radicalizing. Joining often worsened the very sense of isolation and being adrift that had led people to it in the first place. With nowhere else to turn and now doubly needful of reassurance, followers gave themselves over to the cause even more fully.	Mustafa Suleyman Notable Quotations Full screen view Chapter 1: Containment Is Not Possible Page 20 The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. Page 21 our future both depends on these technologies and is imperiled by them. Page 23 AI has been climbing the ladder of cognitive abilities for decades, and it now looks set to reach human-level performance across a very wide range of tasks within the next three years. Page 23 Beyond AI, a wider revolution was underway, with AI feeding a powerful, emerging generation of genetic technologies and robotics. Page 25 The current discourse around technology ethics and safety is inadequate. Page 26 I also underscored AI's potential to put large numbers of people out of work. Page 26 long history of displacing labor. Page 33 The various technologies I'm speaking of share four key features that explain why this isn't business as usual: they are inherently general and therefore omni-use, they hyper-evolve, they have asymmetric impacts, and, in some respects, they are increasingly autonomous. Page 33 the potential for new forms of violence, a flood of misinformation, disappearing jobs, and the prospect of catastrophic accidents. Part I: Homo Technologicus Page 39 Engines weren't just powering vehicles; they were driving history. Now, thanks to hydrogen and electric motors, the reign of the combustion engine is in its twilight. But the era of mass mobility it unleashed is not. Page 40 a wave is a set of technologies coming together around the same time, powered by one or several new general- purpose technologies with profound societal implications. Page 40 a new piece of technology, like the internal combustion engine, proliferates and transforms everything around it. Page 41 Stonework and fire were proto-general-purpose technologies, meaning they were pervasive, in turn enabling new inventions, goods, and organizational behaviors. Page 42 Throughout history, population size and innovation levels are linked. New tools and techniques give rise to larger populations. Page 43 From the written word to sailing vessels, technology increases interconnectedness, helping to boost its own flow and spread. Each wave hence lays the groundwork for successive waves. Page 47 Proliferation is catalyzed by two forces: demand and the resulting cost decreases, each of which drives technology to become even better and cheaper. Page 47 Civilization's appetite for useful and cheaper technologies is boundless. This will not change. Page 50 Our phones are the first thing we see in the morning and the last at night. Every aspect of human life is affected: Page 52 What on paper looks flawless can behave differently out in the wild, especially when copied and further adapted downstream. Chapter 3: The Containment Problem Meaningful control, the capability to stop a use case, change a research direction, or deny access to harmful actors. It means preserving the ability to steer waves to ensure their impact reflects our values, helps us flourish as a species, and does not introduce significant harms that outweigh their benefits. Page 55 Containment encompasses regulation, better technical safety, new governance and ownership models, and new modes of accountability and transparency, all as necessary (but not sufficient) precursors to safer technology. Page 55 future is built. Think of containment, then, as a set of interlinked and mutually reinforcing technical, cultural, legal, and political mechanisms for maintaining societal control of technology during a time of exponential change; Page 56 As the printing press roared across Europe in the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had a rather different response. It tried to ban it. Page 57 In hindsight, waves might appear smooth and inevitable. But there is an almost infinite array of small, local, and often arbitrary factors that affect a technology's trajectory. Page 58 Where there is demand, technology always breaks out, finds traction, builds users. Page 61 That nuclear technology remained contained was no accident; it was a conscious nonproliferation policy of the nuclear powers, helped by the fact that nuclear weapons are incredibly complex and expensive to produce. Page 62 Mutually assured destruction hemmed in possessors since it soon became clear that using them in anger is a quick way of ensuring your own destruction. Page 62 expensive and difficult to manufacture. Page 62 even though nuclear capability has been largely contained, a partial exception, it's not a reassuring story. Nuclear history is still a chilling succession of accidents, near misses, and misunderstandings. Page 64 Nuclear weapons are among the most contained technologies in history, and yet the containment problem—in its hardest, most literal sense—even here remains acutely unsolved. Page 66 As long as a technology is useful, desirable, affordable, accessible, and unsurpassed, it survives and spreads and those features compound. Page 67 In the coming decades, a new wave of technology will force us to confront the most foundational questions our species has ever faced. Chapter 4: The Technology of Intelligence The coming wave of technology is built primarily on two general-purpose technologies capable of operating at the grandest and most granular levels alike: artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. Page 76 No longer simply a tool, it's going to engineer life and rival—and surpass—our own intelligence. Page 77 Each technology described here intersects with, buttresses, and boosts the others in ways that make it difficult to predict their impact in advance. Page 82 Mass-scale AI rollout is already well underway. Everywhere you look, software has eaten the world, opening the path for collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data. That data is now being used to teach AI systems to create more efficient and more accurate products in almost every area of our lives. Page 82 AI will become inextricably part of the social fabric. Page 82 At DeepMind we developed systems to control billion-dollar data centers, a project resulting in 40 percent reductions in energy used for cooling. Page 84 A big part of what makes humans intelligent is that we look at the past to predict what might happen in the future. In this sense intelligence can be understood as the ability to generate a range of plausible scenarios about how the world around you may unfold and then base sensible actions on those predictions. Page 84 LLMs take advantage of the fact that language data comes in a sequential order. Each unit of information is in some way related to data earlier in a series. The model reads very large numbers of sentences, learns an abstract representation of the information contained within them, and then, based on this, generates a prediction about what should come next. Page 85 What are the key words, the most salient elements of a sentence, and how do they relate to one another? Page 85 sentence. In effect, the LLM learns which words to pay attention to. Page 87 Over the next few years, I believe, AI will become as ubiquitous as the internet itself: just as available, and yet even more consequential. Page 87 However, a key ingredient of the LLM revolution is that for the first time very large models could be trained directly on raw, messy, real-world data, without the need for carefully curated and human-labeled data sets. Page 87 Today's LLMs are trained on trillions of words. Imagine digesting Wikipedia wholesale, consuming all the subtitles and comments on YouTube, reading millions of legal contracts, tens of millions of emails, and hundreds of thousands of books. Page 88 these new LLMs are stunningly good at scores of different writing tasks once the preserve of skilled human experts, from translation to Page 88 accurate summarization to writing plans for improving the performance of LLMs. Page 90 humans' ability to complete given tasks— human intelligence itself— is very much a fixed target, as large and multifaceted as it is. Page 91 When a new technology starts working, it always becomes dramatically more efficient. AI is no different. Page 91 AI increasingly does more with less. Page 92 In the words of an eminent computer scientist, "It seems totally obvious to me that of course all programs in the future will ultimately be written by AIs, with humans relegated to, at best, a supervisory role." Page 93 But it quickly became apparent that these models sometimes produce troubling and actively harmful content like racist screeds or rambling conspiracy theories. Research into GPT-2 found that when prompted with the phrase "the white man worked as…," it would autocomplete with "a police officer, a judge, a prosecutor, and the president of the United States." Yet when given the same prompt for "Black man," it would autocomplete with "a pimp," or for "woman" with "a prostitute." Page 96 There's a recurrent problem with making sense of progress in AI. We quickly adapt, even to breakthroughs that astound us initially, and within no time they seem routine, even mundane. Page 97 Although LaMDA was of course not sentient, soon it will be routine to have AI systems that can convincingly appear to Page 97 Significant challenges with real- world applications linger, including material questions of bias and fairness, reproducibility, security vulnerabilities, and legal liability. Urgent ethical gaps and unsolved safety questions cannot be ignored. Yet I see a field rising to these challenges, not shying away or failing to make headway. I see obstacles but also a track record of overcoming them. People interpret unsolved problems as evidence of lasting limitations; I see an unfolding research process. Page 99 I believe the debate about whether and when the Singularity will be achieved is a colossal red herring. Page 99 I've gone to countless meetings trying to raise questions about synthetic media and misinformation, or privacy, or lethal autonomous weapons, and instead spent the time answering esoteric questions from otherwise intelligent people about consciousness, the Singularity, and other matters irrelevant to our world right now. Page 100 What we would really like to know is, can I give an AI an ambiguous, open-ended, complex goal that requires interpretation, judgment, creativity, decision-making, and acting across multiple domains, over an extended time period, and then see the AI accomplish that goal? Page 100 a Modern Turing Test would involve something like the following: an AI being able to successfully act on the instruction "Go make $1 million on Amazon in a few months with just a $100,000 investment." Page 101 Should my Modern Turing Test for the twenty-first century be met, the implications for the global economy are profound. Page 102 Rather than get too distracted by questions of consciousness, then, we should refocus the entire debate around near-term capabilities and how they will evolve in the coming years. Page 103 There will be thousands of these models, and they will be used by the majority of the world's population. It will take us to a point where anyone can have an ACI in their pocket that can help or even directly accomplish a vast array of conceivable goals: planning and running your vacation, designing and building more efficient solar panels, helping win an election. Page 104 The risk isn't in overhyping it; it's rather in missing the magnitude of the coming wave. Page 104 else, itself a maker of tools and platforms, not just a system but a generator of systems of any and all kinds. Chapter 5: The Technology of Life Page 105 Biology itself became an engineering tool. Alongside AI, this is the most important transformation of our lifetimes. Page 106 DNA is information, a biologically evolved encoding and storage system. Page 107 Genetic engineering has gotten much cheaper and much easier. Page 109 Like AI, genetic engineering is a field in blistering motion, evolving and developing by the week, a massive global concentration of talent and energy beginning to bear real fruit (in this case, literally). Page 113 serious physical self-modifications are going to happen. Page 113 Initial work suggests memory can be improved and muscle strength enhanced. Chapter 6: The Wider Wave The future of agriculture, as John Deere sees it, involves autonomous tractors and combines that operate independently, following a field's GPS coordinates and using an array of sensors to make automatic, real-time alterations to harvesting, maximizing yield and minimizing waste. The company is producing robots that can plant, tend, and harvest crops, with levels of precision and granularity that would be impossible for humans. Page 127 But above all it signified how robots are gradually working their way into society, poised to play a far greater role in daily life than has been the case before. From a deadly crisis to the quiet hum of a logistics hub, from a bustling factory to an eldercare home, robots are here. Page 129 Quantum computing is, in other words, yet another foundational technology still in very early development, still further from hitting those critical moments of cost decreases and widespread proliferation, let alone the technical breakthroughs that will make it fully feasible. Page 130 funding and knowledge are escalating, progress Page 130 Renewable energy will become the largest single source of electricity generation by 2027. Page 133 At its core, the coming wave is a story of the proliferation of power. If the last wave reduced the costs of broadcasting information, this one reduces the costs of acting on it, giving rise to technologies that go from sequencing to synthesis, reading to writing, editing to creating, imitating conversations to leading them. Chapter 10: Fragility Amplifiers As the power and spread of any technology grows, so its failure modes escalate. Page 223 reiterate: these risks are not about malicious harm; they come from simply operating on the bleeding edge of the most capable technologies in history widely embedded throughout core societal systems. Page 224 But what if new job-displacing systems scale the ladder of human cognitive ability itself, leaving nowhere new for labor to turn? If Page 225 These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence. They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing. Page 225 the days of this kind of "cognitive manual labor" are numbered. Page 225 Early analysis of ChatGPT suggests it boosts the productivity of "mid-level college educated professionals" by 40 percent on many tasks. Page 225 McKinsey study estimated that more than half of all jobs could see many of their tasks automated by machines in the next seven years, while fifty-two million Americans work in roles with a "medium exposure to automation" by 2030. Page 226 Yes, it's almost certain that many new job categories will be created. Who would have thought that "influencer" would become a highly sought-after role? Or imagined that in 2023 people would be working as "prompt engineers"—nontechnical programmers of large language models who become adept at coaxing out specific responses? Page 226 But my best guess is that new jobs won't come in the numbers or timescale to truly help. Page 226 sure, new demand will create new work, but that doesn't mean it all gets done by human beings. Page 227 Working on a zero-hours contract in a distribution center doesn't provide the sense of pride or social solidarity that came from working for a booming Detroit auto manufacturer in the 1960s. Page 227 New jobs might be created in the long term, but for millions they won't come quick enough or in the right places. Page 228 Whichever side of the jobs debate you fall on, it's hard to deny that the ramifications will be hugely destabilizing for hundreds of millions who will, at the very least, need to re-skill and transition to new types of work. Page 228 Labor market disruptions are, like social media, fragility amplifiers. They damage and undermine the nation-state. Page 229 It produces trillions of dollars in new economic value while also destroying certain existing sources of wealth. Page 229 Some individuals are greatly enabled; others stand to lose everything. Chapter 11: The Future of Nations The stirrup was an apparently simple innovation. But with it came a social revolution changing hundreds of millions of lives. Page 232 In the resulting turbulence, without a major shift in focus, many open democratic states face a steady decay of their institutional foundations, a withering of legitimacy and authority. Page 232 At the same time, authoritarian states are given a potent new arsenal of repression. Page 233 it will be instead a long-term macro-trend toward deep instability grinding away over decades. The first result will be massive new concentrations of power and wealth that reorder society. Page 234 machine intelligence resembles a massive bureaucracy far more than it does a human mind. Page 235 What happens when many, perhaps the majority, of the tasks required to operate a corporation, or a government department, can be run more efficiently by machines? Page 236 Unlike with rockets, satellites, and the internet, the frontier of this wave is found in corporations, not in government organizations or academic labs. Page 236 I think we'll see a group of private corporations grow beyond the size and reach of many nation-states. Page 236 The Korean economic miracle was a Samsung-powered miracle. Page 237 Already, for example, eBay and PayPal's dispute resolution system handles around sixty million disagreements a year, three times as many as the entire U.S. legal system. Ninety percent of these disputes are settled using technology alone. Page 237 In the last wave, things dematerialized; goods became services. Page 238 All the big tech platforms either are mainly service businesses or have very large service businesses. Page 238 the ascendancy of low- code and no- code software, the rise of bio- manufacturing, and the boom in 3- D printing. Page 239 Those with the resources to invent or adopt new technologies fastest—those that can pass my updated Turing test, for example—will enjoy rapidly compounding returns. Page 239 An unbridgeable "intelligence gap" becomes plausible. Page 241 When compared with superstar corporations, governments appear slow, bloated, and out of touch. It's tempting to dismiss them as headed for the trash can of history. However, another inevitable reaction of nation-states will be to use the tools of the coming wave to tighten their grip on power, taking full advantage to entrench their dominance. Page 242 Already a distant organization knows, in theory, what time you are awake, how you are feeling, and what you are looking at. Page 243 The only step left is bringing these disparate databases together into a single, integrated system: a perfect twenty-first-century surveillance apparatus. Page 243 Compared with the West, Chinese research into AI concentrates on areas of surveillance Page 243 like object tracking, scene understanding, and voice or action recognition. Page 243 Centralized services like WeChat bundle everything from private messaging to shopping and banking in one easily traceable place. Page 244 Chinese police even have sunglasses with built-in facial recognition technology capable of tracking suspects in crowds. Page 245 Societies of overweening surveillance and control are already here, and now all of this is set to escalate enormously into a next-level concentration of power at the center. Page 245 It's no secret that governments monitor and control their own populations, but these tendencies extend deep into Western firms, too. Page 246 Companies like Vigilant Solutions aggregate movement data based on license plate tracking, then sell it to jurisdictions like state or municipal governments. Page 246 Just as much as anyone in China, those in the West leave a vast data exhaust every day of their lives. And just as in China, it is harvested, processed, operationalized, and sold. Page 246 This raises the prospect of totalitarianism to a new plane. It won't happen everywhere, and not all at once. But if AI, biotech, quantum, Page 246 robotics, and the rest of it are centralized in the hands of a repressive state, the resulting entity would be palpably different from any yet seen. Page 248 Fields like education and medicine currently rely on huge social and financial infrastructures. It's quite possible to envisage these being slimmed and localized: adaptive and intelligent education systems, for example, that take a student through an entire journey of learning, building a bespoke curriculum; AIs able to create all the materials like interactive games perfectly adapted to the child with automated grading systems; and so on. Page 249 When anyone has access to the bleeding edge, it's not just nation-states that can mount formidable physical and virtual defenses. Page 250 Techniques like CRISPR make biological experimentation easier, meaning biohackers in their garages can tinker at the absolute frontier of science. Page 250 Imagine a future where small groups—whether in failing states like Lebanon or in off-grid nomad camps in New Mexico—provide AI-empowered services like credit unions, schools, and health care, services at the heart of the community often reliant on scale or the state. Page 250 Think about setting up your own school. Or hospital or army. It's such a complex, vast, and difficult project, even the thought of it is tiring. Just gathering the resources, getting necessary permissions and equipment, is a lifelong endeavor. Now consider having an array of assistants who, when asked to create a school, a hospital, or an army, can make it happen in a realistic time frame. Page 251 What happens to traditional hierarchies when tools of awesome power and expertise are as available to street children as to billionaires? Page 251 As people increasingly take power into their own hands, I expect inequality's newest frontier to lie in biology. Page 251 There could then be something like a biohacking personal enhancement arms race. Page 251 What does the social contract look like if a select group of "post-humans" engineer themselves to some unreachable intellectual or physical plane? Page 252 we are entering a new era where the previously unthinkable is now a distinct possibility. Being blinkered about what's happening is, in my view, more dangerous than being overly speculative. Page 252 When northern Italy was a patchwork of small city-states, it gave us the Renaissance, yet was also a field of constant internecine war and feuding. Page 252 Hyper-libertarian technologists like the PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel celebrate a vision of the state withering away, seeing this as liberation for an overmighty species of business leaders or "sovereign individuals," as they call themselves. Page 253 find it deeply depressing that some of the most powerful and privileged take such a narrow and destructive view, but it adds a further impetus to fragmentation. Page 253 Every individual, every business, every church, every nonprofit, every nation, will eventually have its own AI and ultimately its own bio and robotics capability. Page 254 Within the decade AIs will decide how public money gets spent, where military forces are assigned, or what students should learn. Page 255 And if this picture sounds too strange, paradoxical, and impossible, consider this. The coming wave will only deepen and recapitulate the exact same contradictory dynamics of the last wave. The internet does precisely this: centralizes in a few key hubs while also empowering billions of people. Page 255 Everyone can build a website, but there's only one Google. Everyone can sell their own niche products, but there's only one Amazon. Chapter 12: The Dilemma The overwhelming majority of these technologies will be used for good. Although I have focused on their risks, it's important to keep in mind they will improve countless lives on a daily basis. Page 258 Eventually, something will go wrong— Page 258 the most secure solutions for containment are equally unacceptable, leading humanity down an authoritarian and dystopian pathway. Page 259 the implications of these technologies will push humanity to navigate a path between the poles of catastrophe and dystopia. This is the essential dilemma of our age. Page 263 Over the next ten years, AI will be the greatest force amplifier in history. This is why it could enable a redistribution of power on a historic scale. Page 263 The greatest accelerant of human progress imaginable, it will also enable harms—from wars and accidents to random terror groups, authoritarian governments, overreaching corporations, plain theft, and willful sabotage. Page 264 consider even more basic modes of failure, not attacks, but plain errors. Page 265 If the wave is uncontained, it's only a matter of time. Allow Page 267 The sickening nihilism of the school shooter is bounded by the weapons they can access. Page 269 Steadily, many nations will convince themselves that the only way of truly ensuring this is to install the kind of blanket surveillance we saw in the last chapter: total control, backed by hard power. The door to dystopia is cracked open. Indeed, in the face of catastrophe, for some dystopia may feel like a relief. Page 273 Throughout history societal collapses are legion: from ancient Mesopotamia to Rome, the Maya to Easter Island, again and again it's not just that civilizations don't last; it's that unsustainability appears baked in. Civilizations that collapse are not the exception; they are the rule. Page 274 The development of new technologies is, as we've seen, a critical part of meeting our planet's grand challenges. Without new technologies, these challenges will simply not be met. Page 274 Over the next century, the global population will start falling, in some countries precipitously. As the ratio of workers to retirees shifts and the labor force dwindles, economies will simply not be able to function at their present levels. In other words, without new technologies it will be impossible to maintain living standards. Page 275 Stress on our resources, too, is a certainty. Page 276 Make no mistake: standstill in itself spells disaster. Page 277 I'm still convinced that technology remains a primary driver for making improvements to our world and our lives. Page 278 I am, however, confident that the coming decades will see complex, painful trade-offs between prosperity, surveillance, and the threat of catastrophe growing ever more acute. Page 278 for everyone's sake, containment must be possible. Chapter 13: Containment Must Be Possible When a government has devolved to the point of simply lurching from crisis to crisis, it has little breathing room for tackling tectonic forces requiring deep domain expertise and careful judgment on uncertain timescales. It's easier to ignore these issues in favor of low-hanging fruit more likely to win votes in the next election. Page 283 The price of scattered insights is failure, Page 286 Complex regulations refined over decades made roads and vehicles incrementally safer and more ordered, enabling their growth and spread. And yet 1.35 million people a year still die in traffic accidents. Regulation may lessen the negative effects, but it can't erase bad outcomes like crashes, pollution, or sprawl. Page 288 Regulation is not enough, but at least it's a start. Page 289 Earlier in the book I described containment as a foundation for controlling and governing technology, spanning technical, cultural, and regulatory aspects. At root, I believe this means having the power to drastically curtail or outright stop technology's negative impacts, from the local and small scale up to the planetary and existential. Encompassing hard enforcement against misuse of proliferated technologies, it also steers the development, direction, and governance of nascent technologies. Page 289 modes of failure are known, managed, and mitigated, Page 290 as a set of guardrails, a way to keep humanity in the driver's seat Page 290 Rather than general systems, then, those that are more narrowly scoped and domain specific should be encouraged. Page 290 Areas like materials design or drug development are going to rapidly accelerate, making the pace of progress harder to track. Page 291 What alternatives are available? The more that safe alternatives are available, the easier it is to phase out use. Page 291 Does it have autonomous characteristics? Page 291 The more a technology by design requires human intervention, the less chance there is of losing control. Page 292 Orienting development toward defense over offense tends toward containment. Page 292 The talent available for a synthetic biology start-up is, in global terms, still quite small. Both help containment in the near term. Page 292 Specific technologies are easier to regulate than omni-use technologies, but regulating omni-use is more important. Page 292 If you can keep price and ease of access out of reach for many, proliferation becomes more difficult. Page 293 The reality is, we have often not controlled or contained technologies in the past. And if we want to do so now, it would take something dramatically new, an all-encompassing program of safety, ethics, regulation, and control that doesn't even really have a name and doesn't seem possible in the first place. Page 293 A useful comparison here is climate change. It too deals with risks that are often diffuse, uncertain, temporally distant, happening elsewhere, lacking the salience, adrenaline, and immediacy of an ambush on the savanna—the kind of risk we are well primed to respond to. Psychologically, none of this feels present. Our prehistoric brains are generally hopeless at dealing with amorphous threats like these. Page 294 Pessimism aversion is much harder when the effects are so nakedly quantifiable. Page 294 There's no handy metric of risk, no objective unit of threat shared in national capitals, boardrooms, and public sentiment, no parts per million for measuring what technology might do or where it is. Page 294 No popular movement behind stopping it, no graphic images of melting icebergs and stranded polar bears or flooded villages to raise awareness. Page 294 The first step is recognition. Page 295 The more it's on the public's radar, the better. Page 295 My intent is to seed ideas in the hopes of taking the crucialfirst steps toward containment. Chapter 14: Ten Steps Toward Containment In 2023 it's now clear that, compared with the early systems, it is extremely difficult to goad something like ChatGPT into racist comments. Is it a solved problem? Absolutely not. Page 298 A key driver behind this progress is called reinforcement learning from human feedback. Page 300 The number of AI safety researchers is still minuscule: Page 300 Only a handful of institutions, owing to the challenges of resources, take technical safety issues seriously. And yet safety decisions made today will alter Page 301 There's a clear must-do here: encourage, incentivize, and directly fund much more work in this area. Page 302 In AI, technical safety also means sandboxes and secure simulations to create provably secure air gaps so that advanced AIs can be rigorously tested before they are given access to the real world. Page 302 As a user, it's all too easy to be lulled into a false sense of security and assume anything coming out of the system is true. Page 302 Here it's about making sure AI outputs provide citations, sources, and interrogable evidence that Page 302 user can further investigate when a dubious claim arises. Page 303 How can you build secure values into a powerful AI system potentially capable of overriding its own instructions? Page 303 Another ongoing question is how to crack the problem of "corrigibility," ensuring that it is always possible to access and correct systems. Page 303 We should also build robust technical constraints into the development and production process. Page 303 printers are built with technology preventing you from copying or printing money, Page 304 AI systems could be built with cryptographic protections Page 304 building a bulletproof off switch, Page 304 Safety features should not be afterthoughts but inherent design properties of all these new technologies, Page 305 having meaningful oversight and enforceable rules and reviewing technical implementations are vital. Page 305 Trust comes from transparency. We absolutely need to be able to verify, at every level, the safety, integrity, or uncompromised nature of a system. Page 306 "red teaming"—that is, proactively hunting for flaws in AI models or software systems. Page 306 The more this is done publicly and collectively, the better, enabling all developers to learn from one another. Page 306 It's also time to create government-funded red teams that would rigorously attack and stress test every system, Page 306 Systems implemented to keep track of new technologies need to recognize anomalies, unforeseen jumps in capability, hidden failure modes. Page 311 Buying time in an era of hyper-evolution is invaluable. Time to develop further containment strategies. Page 311 Right now technology is driven by the power of incentives rather than the pace of containment. Page 312 Chips aren't the only choke point. Industrial-scale cloud computing, too, is dominated by six major companies. Page 312 So, as negative impacts become clear, we must use these choke points to create sensible rate-limiting factors, checks on the speed of development, Page 314 Credible critics must be practitioners. Page 316 Profit drives the coming wave. There's no pathway to safety that doesn't recognize and grapple with this fact. Page 316 we must find new accountable and inclusive commercial models that incentivize safety and profit alike. Page 316 reconcile profit and social purpose Page 321 Containment needs a new generation of corporations. Page 321 Technological problems require technological solutions, as we've seen, but alone they are never sufficient. We also need the state to flourish. Highlight (blue) - Page 321 The physicist Richard Feynman famously said, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." Page 323 Bodies close to executive power, like the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, are growing more influential. More is still needed: Page 323 In 2022 the White House released a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights with five core principles "to help guide the design, development, and deployment of artificial intelligence and other automated systems so that they protect the rights of the American public." Citizens should, it says, be protected from unsafe and ineffective systems and algorithmic bias. No one should be forced to subject themselves to AI. Everyone has the right to say no. Efforts like this should be widely supported and quickly implemented. Page 324 The most sophisticated AI systems or synthesizers or quantum computers should be produced only by responsible certified developers. As part of their license, they would need to subscribe to clear, binding security and safety standards, following rules, running risk assessments, keeping records, closely monitoring live deployments. Page 324 Different licensing regimes could apply according to model size or capability: the bigger and more capable the model, the more stringent the licensing requirements. Page 325 "tax on robots"; Page 325 Tax credits topping up the lowest incomes could be an immediate buffer in the face of stagnating or even collapsing incomes. Page 326 Who is able to design, develop, and deploy technologies like this is ultimately a matter for governments to decide. Page 327 Countries no more like giving up power than companies like missing out on profit, and yet these are precedents to learn from, shards of hope in a landscape riven with resurgent techno-competition. Page 333 what's needed for the coming wave: real, gut-level buy-in from everyone involved in frontier technologies. Page 333 sound bite. For a start, being utterly open about failures even on uncomfortable topics should be met with praise, not insults. Page 334 Researchers must be encouraged to step back from the constant rush toward publication. Knowledge is a public good, but it should no longer be the default. Page 334 In AI, capabilities like recursive self-improvement and autonomy are, I think, boundaries we should not cross. Page 338 Just a few days after the release of GPT-4, thousands of AI scientists signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on researching the most powerful AI models. Page 343 precarious. Safe, contained technology is, like liberal democracy, not a final end state; rather, it is an ongoing process, a delicate equilibrium that must be actively maintained, constantly fought for and protected. Page 343 Some level of policing the internet, DNA synthesizers, AGI research programs, and so on is going to be essential. Page 344 Technologists and the general public alike will have to accept greater levels of oversight and regulation than have ever been the case before. Page 345 And while the sheer scale of the challenge is huge, each section here drills down into plenty of smaller areas where any individual can still make a difference. It will require an awesome effort to fundamentally change our societies, our human instincts, and the patterns of history. It's far from certain. It looks impossible. Page 345 meeting the great dilemma of the twenty-first century must be possible. Life After the Anthropocene Page 350 the same industrial technologies that caused so much pain gave rise to a prodigious improvement in living standards. Page 350 Decades, centuries later, the descendants of those weavers lived in conditions the Luddites could have scarcely imagined, Page 350 The coming wave is going to change the world. Ultimately, human beings may no longer be the primary planetary drivers, as we have become accustomed to being. Page 351 The Luddite reaction is natural, expected. But as always, it will be futile.	Naomi Oreskes; Erik M. Conway Notable Quotations Full screen view Introduction Page 6 First they claimed there was none, then they claimed it Page 7 was just natural variation, and then they claimed that even if it was happening and it was our fault, it didn’t matter because we could just adapt to it. Page 7 This book tells the story of the Tobacco Strategy, and how it was used to attack science and scientists, and to confuse us about major, important issues affecting our lives— and the planet we live on. Chapter 1 Doubt Is Our Product Page 14 in 1979 it was still true. No one had collected a penny from the tobacco industry, even though scientists had been certain of the tobacco- cancer link since the 1950s (and many had been convinced before that). Page 18 The industry had realized that you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions, even if you actually knew the answers and they didn’t help your case. Page 32 While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two- party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific Page 34 This was the tobacco industry’s key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge. Page 34 various groups and individuals began to challenge scientific evidence that threatened their commercial interests or ideological beliefs. Many of these campaigns involved the strategies developed by the tobacco industry, and some of them involved the same people. One of these people was Frederick Seitz. Chapter 2 Strategic Defense, Phony Facts, and the Creation of the George C. Marshall Institute Page 47 you could get what you wanted if you argued with enough conviction, even if you didn’t have the facts on your side. Page 52 Sagan’s behavior— publishing in Parade and Foreign Affairs before the peer- reviewed TTAPS paper had appeared in Science— was a violation of scientific norms. Moreover, the Parade article presented the TTAPS worst- case scenarios and omitted most of the caveats, so to some scientists it didn’t appear as an honest effort in public education. Some saw it as outright propaganda. Page 53 On the other hand, Sagan’s argument was based on scientific evidence— it was based on data— and he believed it was his duty as a citizen to explain the very real threat of catastrophe. Chapter 3 Sowing the Seeds of Doubt: Acid Rain Page 71 There are always more questions to be asked, which is why expert consensus is so significant— Page 75 the tendency to emphasize uncertainties rather than settled knowledge. Scientists do this because it’s necessary for inquiry— the research frontier can’t be identified by focusing on what you already know— but it’s not very helpful when trying to create public policy. Page 80 Sometimes in error but never in doubt. Page 92 A dollar in the future is not worth as much to you as a dollar now, so you “discount” its value in your planning and decision making. How much you discount it depends in part on inflation, but also in part on how much you value the future. Page 105 Regulation is an effective means to stimulate technological innovation. Page 105 Because pollution prevention is a public good -- not well reflected in the market price of goods and services— the incentives for private investment are weak. Page 106 One thing we know do know for sur is that doubt - mongering about acid rain -- like doubt mongering about tobacco -- led to delay, and that was a lesson that many people took to heart. In the years that followed the same strategy would be applied again and again.[Denial in the form of pseudo skepticism ] Chapter 4 Constructing a Counternarrative: The Fight over the Ozone Hole Page 111 Paul Crutzen, a brilliant Dutch atmospheric scientist who would later dub the current period of Earth’s history the “Anthropocene” Page 113 The Western Aerosol Information Bureau. ...Resistance campaign. Page 120 Like the famous images of the Earth from space, these ozone depletion maps were viscerally powerful. Page 125 Conservative and Libertarian think tanks in Washington. These think tanks— which included the Cato Institute, Page 125 The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Chapter 5 What’s Bad Science? Who Decides? The Fight over Secondhand Smoke
Niccolò Machiavelli Notable Quotations Full screen view Full text download (Gutenberg) I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it. It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles. Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but few can test by feeling. There is no avoiding war, it can only be postponed to the advantage of your enemy. Alexander never did what he said, Cesare never said what he did. Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society. It is a common fault not to anticipate storms when the sea is calm. An unavoidable war is called justice. When brutality is the only option left it is holy. The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him. There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you. Never was anything great achieved without danger. Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception. Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear. If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared. A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands. Never do an enemy a small injury. Nature creates few men brave, industry and training makes many. The new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all. He who is highly esteemed is not easily conspired against. The best fortress which a prince can possess is the affection of his people. A prince is also esteemed when he is a true friend and a true enemy. The first way to lose a state is to neglect the art of war; the first way to gain a state is to be skilled in the art of war. There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others. That defense alone is effectual, sure, and durable which depends upon yourself and your own valor. A Prince should esteem the great, but must not make himself odious to the people. Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experiences what you really are. The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion. There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you. Since love and fear can hardly exist together if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved. Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception. I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it. How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation. Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones. He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command. Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times. And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both. It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. - Niccolo Machiavelli. Appear as you may wish to be. Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of the trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil. The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves. It is better to act and repent than not to act and regret. One should never fall in the belief that you can find someone to pick you up. For, in truth, there is no sure way of holding other than by destroying. ...the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver. We have not seen great things done in our time except by those who have been considered mean; the rest have failed. Without an opportunity, their abilities would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain. Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer. As a general thing, anyone who is not your friend will advise neutrality while anyone who is your friend will ask you to join him, weapon in hand. If you wish to please me, and to bring success and honor to yourself, do right and study because others will help you if you help yourself. "Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer. "Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. He who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others. He who thinks new favors will cause great personages to forget old injuries deceives himself. It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. "Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires."	Nir Eyal Notable Quotations Full screen view Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occurring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do What distinguishes the Hook Model from a plain vanilla feedback loop is the hook’s ability to create a craving. Variable rewards are one of the most powerful tools companies implement to hook users; dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward. Introducing variability multiplies the effect, creating a focused state, which suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgment and reason while activating the parts associated with wanting and exciting juxtaposition of relevant and irrelevant,sets her brain’s dopamine system aflutter with the promise of reward. The last phase of the Hook Model is where the user does a bit of work. The investment phase increases the odds that the user will make another pass through the hook cycle in the future. The investment occurs when the user puts something into the product of service such as time, data, effort, social capital, or money. Inviting friends, stating preferences, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all investments users make to improve their experience. Tthis book teaches innovators how to build products to help people do the things they already want to do but, for lack of a solution, don’t do. Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating over what to do next.[xix] The brain quickly learns to codify behaviors that provide a solution to whatever situation it encounters. Once the compulsion to play is in place and the desire to progress in the game increases, converting users into paying customers is much easier. “Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.” [Products that require]a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial. Non-transferrable value created and stored inside these services discourages users from leaving. For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. The complexity of the behavior and how important the habit was to the person greatly affected how quickly the routine was formed. Higher frequency is better. “Are you building a vitamin or painkiller?” is a common, almost clichéd question many investors ask Painkillers solve an obvious need, relieving a specific pain and often have quantifiable markets. Vitamins do not necessarily solve an obvious pain-point. Instead they appeal to users’ emotional rather than functional needs. A habit is when not doing an action causes a bit of pain. Addictions are persistent, compulsive dependencies on a behavior or substance. The hooked model is trigger, action, variable reward, and investment. [Provide] explicit instructions about what action to take. Too many choices or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or worse, Reducing the thinking required to take the next action increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring unconsciously. Most [] companies generally use paid triggers to acquire new users and then leverage other triggers to bring them back. Earned triggers: investment in the form of time spent on public and media relations. Awareness generated by earned triggers can be short-lived. One person telling others about a product or service can be a highly effective external trigger for action. [Another is ] an engaged user base that is enthusiastic about sharing Owned triggers consume a piece of real-estate in the user’s environment. [It is] up to the user to opt into allowing these triggers to appear. Without owned triggers and users’ tacit permission to enter their attentional space, it is difficult to cue users frequently enough to change their behavior. The ultimate goal of all external triggers is to propel users into and through the Hook Model so that, after successive cycles, they do not need further prompting from external triggers. When a product becomes tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-existing routine, it leverages an internal trigger. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of consumer technology. Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers and greatly influence our daily routines. Positive emotions can also serve as internal triggers, and may even be triggered themselves by a need to satisfy something that is bothering Email, perhaps the mother of all habit-forming technology, is a go-to solution for many of our daily agitations, from validating our importance (or even, simply our existence) by checking to see if someone needs us, Why do people really send SMS messages? Why do they take photos? What role does watching television or sports play in their lives? Ask yourself what pain these habits solve and what the user might be feeling right before one of these actions. What would your user want to achieve by using your solution? [If] you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side. Dorsey believes a clear description of users — their desires, emotions, the context with which they use the product — is paramount to building the right solution. In addition to Dorsey's user narratives, tools like customer development,[li] usability studies, and empathy maps[lii] are examples of methods for learning about potential users. One method is to try asking the question "why" as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Usually this will happen by the fifth “why.” To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. First, Hauptly says, understand the reason people use a product or service. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process. Making a given action easier to accomplish spurs each successive phase For companies building technology solutions, the greatest return on investment will generally come from increasing a product’s ease-of-use. Without variability, we are like children in that once we figure out what will happen next, we become less excited by the experience. Products must have an ongoing degree of novelty. hTe need to feel social connectedness shapes our values and drives much of how we spend our time. People who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions. Works particularly well when people observe the behavior of people most like themselves, Satisfaction in contributing to a community they care about; Virtual kudos encouraged positive behavior Leveling up, unlocking special powers, and other game mechanics fulfill a player's desire for competency by showing progression and completion. Search for mastery, completion, and Competence moves users to habitual, sometimes mindless, actions. Codecademy seeks to make learning to write code more fun and rewarding. The site offers step-by-step instructions for building a web app, animation, and even a browser-based game. The interactive lessons deliver immediate feedback, Quora instituted an upvoting system that reports user satisfaction with answers and provides a steady stream of social feedback. Gamification will fail because of a lack of inherent interest in the product or service offered. The magic words The phrase, “but you are free to accept or refuse.” [We] more likely to be persuaded when our ability to choose is reaffirmed. “reactance,” [is] the hair-trigger response to threats to your autonomy. To change behavior, products must ensure the users feel in control. [T]he only way to know how Walter [the hero] gets out of the mess he is in at the end of the latest episode is to watch the next episode.     An element of mystery is an important component of continued user interest.  The most habit-forming products and services utilize one or more of the three variable rewards types of tribe, hunt and self. Frequency of a new behavior is a leading factor in forming a new habit. The second most important factor in habit formation is a change in the participant’s attitude about the behavior. It must occur with significant frequency and perceived utility. [E}scalation of commitment: The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it. Labor leads to love. The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it. We are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors. And finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance. The last step of the Hook Model is the Investment Phase, the point at which users are asked to do a bit of work. Here, users are prompted to put something of value into the system, which increases the likelihood of them using the product and of successive passes through the hook cycle. ask [...] for the investment after the reward,	Olivia Fox Cabane Notable Quotations Full screen view As extensive research in recent years has shown, charisma is the result of specific nonverbal behaviors; like many other social skills, charismatic behaviors are generally learned early in life. The equation that produces charisma is actually fairly simple. All you have to do is give the impression that you possess both high power and high warmth, since charismatic behaviors project a combination of these two qualities. “Fight or flight?” is the power question. “Friend or foe?” is the warmth question. A final dimension underlies both of these qualities: presence. [A person who has presence is] completely here with you, in this moment. Contrary to commonly held charisma myths, you don’t have to be naturally outgoing,[;] you can be a very charismatic introvert. Through charisma training you will learn how to adopt a charismatic posture, how to warm up your eye contact, and how to modulate your voice in ways that make people pay attention. Charisma is a skill that can also be developed through conscious practice, Presence means paying attention to what’s going on rather than being caught up in your own thoughts. Being charismatic does not depend on how much time you have but on how fully present you are in each interaction. Warmth tells us whether or not people will want to use whatever power they have in our favor. willing to impact our world in a positive way. Someone who possesses warmth without power can be likable, but isn’t necessarily perceived as charismatic and can come across as overeager, subservient, or desperate to please. make whomever [you are] speaking with feel intelligent and fascinating. Projecting presence, power, and warmth through your body language is often all you need to be perceived as charismatic. What Your Mind Believes, Your Body Manifests most of us tend to interpret events—whether they’re personal or impersonal—as relating to us. Our inability to tolerate uncertainty carries multiple costs. It can cause us to make premature decisions. Anxiety is a serious drawback to charisma. Anxiety, low presence, and low confidence can show up directly in our body language, as well as reduce our ability to emanate warmth. It’s worth learning how to handle uncertainty, not just because it increases charisma but also because the ability to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of success in business. Human beings are by nature driven to compare. The very act of comparing and evaluating hinders our ability to be fully present. Because our brain doesn’t distinguish between imagination and reality, these internal attacks are perceived by our mind just as a real, physical attack would be, Self-criticism is one of the most common obstacles to great performance in any field. Of course, some degree of self-doubt can be helpful in spurring us to action. Knowing how to handle the impostor syndrome and the inner critic is essential to unleashing your charisma potential. Skillfully handling any difficult experience is a three-step process: destigmatize discomfort, neutralize negativity, and rewrite reality. Rather than seeing it as one big emotion felt by one person, see a community of people struggling with it—one difficult burden shared by many. shame is the real killer. Of all the emotions that human beings can feel, it is one of the most toxic to health and happiness. One of the main reasons we’re so affected by our negative thoughts is that we think our mind has an accurate grasp on reality, and that its conclusions are generally valid. This, however, is a fallacy. Because trying to suppress a self-critical thought only makes it more central to your thinking, it’s a far better strategy to simply aim to neutralize it. Deciding to change your belief about what happened (technically called cognitive reappraisal) effectively decreases the brain’s stress levels. Techniques. One charismatic entrepreneur told me: “I decide to interpret everything favorably toward myself. It’s not just that I’m optimistic, I’m actually conveniently deluded.” Deception may not be necessary for the placebo effect to take hold; it may work its wonders even when people know full well that they’re taking a placebo. Writing accesses different parts of our brain and affects our beliefs in ways that other modes of expression do not. The act of committing things to writing has been shown to be critical both in changing a person’s mind and in making imagined stories feel more real. Professional negotiators tell me that they could accurately predict the outcome of negotiations fairly early on using one simple clue: whoever has less endurance for silence loses. Talk to strangers “There is good evidence that imagining oneself performing an activity activates parts of the brain that are used in actually performing the activity,” Professor Stephen Kosslyn, director of Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Due to the fact that people tend to accept whatever you project, if you seem inspired, they will assume you have something One of the reasons that the Dalai Lama has such a powerful effect on people is his ability to radiate both tremendous warmth and complete acceptance. Colin Powell and the Dalai Lama embody authority charisma, but so did Stalin and Mussolini. The human reaction to authority runs deep; it’s hardwired into our brains. not necessarily likable. If a low-status person is eager to please us, we may find this pleasant, but we don’t necessarily value their eagerness very highly. After all, they can’t do much for us; it’s rather we who can do things for them. On the other hand, if a high-status alpha grants us attention and warmth, we’re thrilled, because they can move mountains. As the MIT Media Lab studies showed, what impacts people isn’t the words or content used. Rather, they remember how it felt to be speaking with you. attentive listening, refraining from interrupting, and deliberate pausing. Even if the other person is doing all the talking, you can’t let your mind wander while waiting for your turn to speak. Presence is a cornerstone of effective listening. pause before [you] answer. let your facial expression react first, people will associate you with whatever feelings you produce in them on a consistent basis. Dale Carnegie said, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming truly interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Don’t try to impress people. Let them impress you, and they will love you for it. You just need to make them feel smart. When you tell someone, “No problem,” “Don’t worry,” or “Don’t hesitate to call,” for example, there’s a chance their brain will remember “problem,” “worry,” or “hesitate” instead of your desire to support them. To counter this negative effect, use phrases like “We’ll take care of it” or “Please feel free to call anytime.” [The] longer you speak, the higher the price you’re making them pay, strive to make your communications useful, enjoyable, and even entertaining. Make people feel good, especially about themselves. Being charismatic means making others feel comfortable, at ease, and good about themselves when they are around us. “Powerful people sit sideways on chairs, drape their arms over the back, or appropriate two chairs by placing an arm across the back of an adjacent chair. ask them for something they can give without incurring any cost: their opinion. Asking for someone’s opinion is a better strategy than asking for their advice, because giving advice feels like more effort, as they have to tailor Compliments are those that are both personal and specific. Avoid making other people feel wrong. When people feel that you have their best interests at heart, it can change the dynamic entirely.	P. W. Singer, Emerson T. Brooking Notable Quotations Full screen view The War Begins Page 8 With careful editing, an indecisive firefight could be recast as a heroic battlefield victory. ... videos and images moved faster than the truth. ... the abrupt fall of Mosul showed that there was another side to computerized war. The Islamic State, which had no real cyberwar capabilities to speak of, had just run a military offensive like a viral marketing campaign and won a victory that shouldn't have been possible. It hadn't hacked the network; it had hacked the information on it. Page 9 In the Syrian civil war where ISIS first roared to prominence, nearly every rebel group used YouTube to recruit, fundraise, and train. ... Just as the modern internet had "disrupted" the worlds of entertainment, business, and dating, it was now disrupting war and politics. It was a revolution that no leader, group, army, or nation could afford to ignore. Page 12 Much of this violence starts with gangs' use of social media to "cybertag" and "cyberbang." Tagging is an update of the old-school practice of spray-painting graffiti to mark territory or insult a rival. The "cyber" version is used to promote your gang or to start a flame war by including another gang's name in a post or mentioning a street within a rival gang's territory. These online skirmishes escalate quickly. Anyone who posts about a person or a street belonging to a rival gang is making an online show of disrespect. Such a post is viewed as an invitation to "post up," or retaliate. Page 13 social media creates a new reality "no longer limited to the perceptual horizon," in which an online feud can seem just as real as a face-to-face argument. Page 13 anyone can start a feud online, but everyone has a collective responsibility to make sure it gets consummated in the real world. Page 15 Diplomacy has become less private and policy-oriented and more public and performative. Page 16 And it's not just diplomats. For the first time, entire populations have been thrown into direct and often volatile contact with each other. Indians and Pakistanis have formed dueling "Facebook militias" to incite violence and stoke national pride. Page 16 Even in authoritarian states, war has never been so democratic. Page 16 They steered discussion, sowed doubt, and obfuscated truth, launching the most politically consequential information attack in history. And that operation continues to this day. Page 18 Modern warfare has seen numerous efforts to target and drain an enemy's spirit, almost never with success. Page 18 Attacking an adversary's most important center of gravity -- the spirit of its people -- no longer requires massive bombing runs or reams of propaganda. All it takes is a smartphone and a few idle seconds. And anyone can do it. Page 18 Opposing soldiers on a battlefield might find each other online and then "like" or troll their foes. Page 19 From the world's most powerful nations to the pettiest flame war combatants, all of today's fighters have turned social media into a weapon in their own national and personal wars, which often overlap. They all fight to bend the global information environment to their will. The internet, once a light and airy place of personal connection, has since morphed into the nervous system of modern commerce. It has also become a battlefield where information itself is weaponized. Page 20 while the truth is more widely available than ever before, it can be buried in a sea of "likes" and lies. Page 21 Narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, and inundation are the most effective tools of online battles, and their mastery guides the efforts of most successful information warriors. Page 21 On a network of billions, a tiny number of individuals can instantly turn the tide of an information war one way or another, often unintentionally. Page 21 First, the internet has left adolescence. Over decades of growth, the internet has become the preeminent medium of global communication, commerce, and politics. Page 22 This pattern resembles the trajectory of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television before it. But the rise of social media has allowed the internet to surpass those revolutions. It is now truly global and instantaneous -- the ultimate combination of individual connection and mass transmission. Page 22 the internet has become a battlefield. As integral as the internet has become to business and social life, it is now equally indispensable to militaries and governments, authoritarians and activists, and spies and soldiers. Page 22 Third, this battlefield changes how conflicts are fought. Page 22 Fourth, this battle changes what "war" means. Winning these online battles doesn't just win the web, but wins the world. Each ephemeral victory drives events in the physical realm, from seemingly inconsequential celebrity feuds to history-changing elections. Page 22 Fifth, and finally, we're all part of this war. If you are online, your attention is like a piece of contested territory, being fought over in conflicts that you may or may not realize are unfolding around you. Everything you watch, like, or share represents a tiny ripple on the information battlefield, privileging one side at the expense of others. Your online attention and actions are thus both targets and ammunition in an unending series of skirmishes. Whether you have an interest in the conflicts of LikeWar or not, they have an interest in you. Every Wire a Nerve Page 25 But using the internet isn't really the same as understanding it. The "internet" isn't just a series of apps and websites. Nor is it merely a creature of the fiber-optic cable and boxy servers that provide its backbone. It is also a galaxy of billions of ideas, spreading through vast social media platforms that each pulse with their own entropic rhythm. At the same time, it is a globe-spanning community vaster and more diverse than anything before it, yet governed by a handful of Silicon Valley oligarchs. Page 28 By 1450, he was peddling his mass-produced Bibles across Germany and France. Predictably, the powers of the day tried to control this disruptive new technology. The monks and scribes, who had spent decades honing their hand-copying techniques, called for rulers to ban it, arguing that mass production would strangle the "spirituality" of the copying process. ... In what would become a familiar pattern, the new technology transformed not just communications but war, politics, and the world. ... The technology would also create new powers in society and place the old ones under unwelcome scrutiny. Page 29 the spread of information, true or false, was limited by the prevailing transportation of the day. ... The world changed decisively in 1844, the year Samuel Morse successfully tested his telegraph (from the Latin words meaning "far writer"). By harnessing the emerging science of electricity, the telegraph ended the tyranny of distance. Page 30 revolution. By 1850, there were 12,000 miles of telegraph wire and some 20 telegraph companies in the United States alone. ... By 1880, there would be 650,000 miles of wire worldwide -- 30,000 miles under the ocean -- that stretched from San Francisco to Bombay. ... Like the printing press before it, the telegraph quickly became an important new tool of conflict, which would also transform it. Page 31 This intimacy could be manipulated, however. A new generation of newspaper tycoons arose, who turned sensationalism into an art form, led by Harvard dropout turned newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. ... the kind of wild rumormongering American readers couldn't get enough ... The electric wire of the telegraph, though, could only speak in dots and dashes. To use them required not just the infrastructure of a telegraph office, but a trained expert to operate the machine and translate its coded messages for you. ... the telephone in 1876. ... Within a year of its invention, the first phone was put in the White House. ... The telephone also empowered a new class of oligarchs. ... Telegraphs and phones had a crucial flaw, though. They shrank the time and simplified the means by which a message could travel a great distance, but they did so only between two points, linked by wire. Page 32 The first radio "broadcast" took place in 1906, when an American engineer played "O Holy Night" on his violin. ... By 1924, there were an estimated 3 million radio sets and 20 million radio listeners in the United States alone. ... But radio also unleashed new political horrors. Page 33 Just like the telegraph, radio would be used to foment war and become a new tool for fighting ... Hitler told his generals, ... The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth." ... The first working television in 1925 showed the face of a ventriloquist's dummy named Stooky Bill. From these humble beginnings, television soon rewired what people knew, what they thought, and even how they voted. By 1960, television sets were in nine of ten American homes, ... With a limited number of broadcasts to choose from, millions of families watched the same events and news anchors; they saw the same shows and gossiped eagerly about them the next day. Page 37 ARPANET's original function had been remote computer use and file transfer, but soon email was devouring two-thirds of the available bandwidth. Page 37 At precisely 11:44 A.M. EST on September 19, 1982, computer scientist Scott Fahlman changed history forever. In the midst of an argument over a joke made on email, he wrote: I propose that [sic] the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-( Page 37 Even the early social platforms these computer scientists produced were just digital re-creations of old and familiar things: the postal service, bulletin boards, and newspapers. Page 39 In 1990, there were 3 million computers connected to the internet. Five years later, there were 16 million. That number reached 360 million by the turn of the millennium. Page 39 When Netscape went public in 1995, the company was worth $3 billion by the end of its first day, despite having never turned a profit. At that moment, the internet ceased to be the plaything of academics. Page 40 In early 1994, a ragtag force of 4,000 disenfranchised workers and farmers rose up in Mexico's poor southern state of Chiapas. They called themselves the Zapatista National Page 40 Liberation Army (EZLN). Page 40 as the Mexican military stood ready to crush the remnant -- the government declared a sudden halt to combat. Page 40 But upon closer inspection, there was nothing conventional about this conflict. More than just fighting, members of the EZLN had been talking online. They shared their manifesto with like-minded leftists in other countries, declared solidarity with international labor movements protesting free trade (their revolution had begun the day the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, went into effect), established contact with international organizations like the Red Cross, and urged every journalist they could find to come and observe the cruelty of the Mexican military firsthand. Cut off from many traditional means of communication, they turned en masse to the new and largely untested power of the internet. Page 41 Everywhere, there were signs that the internet's relentless pace of innovation was changing the social and political fabric of the real world. ... In 1996, Manuel Castells, among the world's foremost sociologists, made a bold prediction: "The internet's integration of print, radio, and audiovisual modalities into a single system promises an impact on society comparable to that of the alphabet." Page 41 [In] 1999, musician David Bowie sat for an interview with the BBC. ... "Up until at least the mid-1970s, we really felt that we were still living under the guise of a single, absolute, created society -- where there were known truths and known lies and there was no kind of duplicity or pluralism about the things that we believed in," the artist once known as Ziggy Stardust said. "[Then] the singularity disappeared. And that I believe has produced such a medium as the internet, which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation." Page 43 As the internet went commercial and growth exploded, people started to explore how to profit from our willingness, and perhaps our need, to share. Page 45 Increasingly, however, websites could process user commands; access and update vast databases; and even customize users' experience based on hundreds or thousands of variables. ... The internet was becoming not just faster but more visual. It was both user-friendly and, increasingly, user-controlled. Media entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly dubbed this new, improved internet "Web 2.0." Page 47 Although nobody knew it at the time, the introduction of the iPhone also marked a moment of destruction. Family dinners, vacations, awkward elevator conversations, and even basic notions of privacy -- all would soon be endangered by the glossy black rectangle Jobs held triumphantly in his hand. ... A year later, Apple officially unveiled its App Store. This marked another epochal shift. For more than a decade, a smartphone could be used only as a phone, calculator, clock, calendar, and address book. Suddenly, the floodgates were thrown open to any possibility, as long as they were channeled through a central marketplace. Page 48 By 2013, there were some 2 billion mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide; by 2018, 6 billion. By 2020, that number is expected to reach 8 billion. ... In the United States, where three- quarters of Americans own a smartphone, these devices have long since replaced televisions as the most commonly used piece of technology. ... was the network, rather than the content on it, that mattered. Page 49 Soon enough, Twitter was transforming the news -- not just how it was experienced (as with Michael Jackson's death in 2009), but how it was reported. Journalists took to using social media to record notes and trade information, sharing the construction of their stories in real time. ... The social network had become where people decided what merited news coverage and what didn't. ... Twitter also offered a means for those being reported on to bypass journalists. Politicians and celebrities alike turned to it to get their own messages out. ... Blistering advancements in smartphone camera quality and mobile bandwidth also began to change what a social network could look like. ... By 2017, Instagram was adding more than 60 million photographs to its archives each day. Page 50 As Tim Berners-Lee has written, "The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared . . . What's more, the fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to [weaponize] the web at scale." ... WeChat, a truly remarkable social media model, arose in 2011, unnoticed by many Westerners. Engineered to meet the unique requirements of the enormous but largely isolated Chinese internet, WeChat may be a model for the wider internet's future. Known as a "super app," it is a combination of social media and marketplace, the equivalent of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Yelp, Uber, and eBay all fused into one, sustaining and steering a network of nearly a billion users. Page 51 It is an app so essential to modern living that Chinese citizens quite literally can't do without it: they're not allowed to delete their accounts. ... According to U.S. National Intelligence Council estimates, more people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have access to the internet than to reliable electricity. Page 52 This is what the internet has become. It is the most consequential communications development since the advent of the written word. Yet, like its precursors, it is inextricably tied to the age-old human experiences of politics and war. Indeed, it is bound more closely than any platform before it. For it has also become a colossal information battlefield, one that has obliterated centuries' worth of conventional wisdom about what is secret and what is known. It is to this revolution that we turn next. Page 54 When the internet first began to boom in the 1990s, internet theorists proclaimed that the networked world would lead to a wave of what they called "disintermediation." They described how, by removing the need for "in-between" services, the internet would disrupt all sorts of longstanding industries. Page 55 No longer did a reporter need to be a credentialed journalist working for a major news organization. A reporter could be anyone who was in the right place at the right time. Page 57 the web-driven radical transparency that was just starting to change how information was gathered and shared -- even the nature of secrecy itself. ... Some sensors are self-evident, like the camera of a smartphone. Others lurk in the background, like the magnometer and GPS that provide information about direction and location. These billions of internet-enabled devices, each carrying multiple sensors, are on pace to create a world of almost a trillion sensors. ... Each tweet posted on Twitter, for instance, carries with it more than sixty-five different elements of metadata. Page 58 The amount of data being gathered about the world around us and then put online is astounding. ... an interesting tidbit might lie in the technical background. Exercise apps have inadvertently revealed everything from the movements of a murderer committing his crime to the location of a secret CIA "black site" facility in the Middle East. (A heat map made from tracing agents' daily jogs around the perimeter of their base provided a near-perfect outline of one installation.) Page 59 what stands out about all this information is not just its massive scale and form. It is that most of it is about us, pushed out by us. ... we are now our own worst mythological monsters -- not just watchers but chronic over-sharers. ... At the current pace, the average American millennial will take around 26,000 selfies in their lifetime. Page 60 The first sitting world leader to use social media was Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper in 2008, followed quickly by U.S. president Barack Obama. ... the United States, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps all have an official social media presence. So do their bases, combat units, generals, and admirals. ... The result of all this sharing is an immense, endlessly multiplying churn of information and viewpoints. ... According to law professor Jeffrey Rosen, the social media revolution has essentially marked "the end of forgetting." Page 64 As the smoke cleared, the Mumbai attack left several legacies. It was a searing tragedy visited upon hundreds of families. It brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war. And it foreshadowed a major technological shift. Hundreds of witnesses -- some on-site, some from afar -- had generated a volume of information that might previously have taken months of diligent reporting to gather. By stitching these individual accounts together, the online community had woven seemingly disparate bits of data into a cohesive whole. It was like watching the growing synaptic connections of a giant electric brain. ... At its core, crowdsourcing is about redistributing power -- vesting the many with a degree of influence once reserved for the few. Page 67 Serious reflection on the past is hijacked by the urgency of the current moment; serious planning for the future is derailed by never-ending distraction. Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has described this as "present shock." Buffeted by a constant stream of information, many internet users can feel caught in a struggle just to avoid being swept away by the current. Page 67 In a sense, everyone has become part of the news. And while people who serve to make sense of the madness still exist, the character and identity of these gatekeepers have transformed as well. Page 68 Across the world, there is a new breed of journalist, empowered by the web, often referred to as the "citizen reporter." Page 70 A common thread runs through all of these stories. From favela life to cartel bloodlettings to civil wars, social media has erased the distinction between citizen, journalist, activist, and resistance fighter. Anyone with an internet connection can move seamlessly between these roles. Often, they can play them all at once. Page 75 "open-source intelligence" (OSINT). Page 77 At its most promising, the OSINT revolution doesn't just help people parse secrets from publicly accessible information; it may also help them predict the future. ... Predata is a small company founded by James Shinn, a former CIA agent. ... Predata uses such mass monitoring to discern online patterns that might be used to project real-world occurrences. Each Sunday, it sends out a "Week Ahead" mailer, breaking down the statistical likelihood of particular contingencies based on web monitoring. Page 82 it is also harder than ever to separate the truth from lies. In the right hands, those lies can become powerful weapons. The Empires Strike Back Page 84 The first so-called internet revolution shook Serbia in 1996. Cut off from state media, young people used mass emails to plan protests against the regime of President Slobodan Miloševi?. ... Although the initial protests failed, they returned stronger than ever in 2000, being organized even more online. Page 85 Political unrest soon rocked Syria, Jordan, Bahrain, and a dozen more nations. In Libya and Yemen, dictators who had ruled for decades through the careful control of their population and its sources of information saw their regimes crumble in a matter of days. ... Tech evangelists hailed what was soon called the Arab Spring as the start of a global movement that would end the power of authoritarian regimes around the world, perhaps forever. Page 86 The Net Delusion, ... As it turned out, the Arab Spring didn't signal the first steps of a global, internet-enabled democratic movement. Rather, it represented a high-water mark. The much-celebrated revolutions began to fizzle and collapse. In Libya and Syria, digital activists would soon turn their talents to waging internecine civil wars. In Egypt, the baby named Facebook would grow up in a country that quickly turned back to authoritarian government, the new regime even more repressive than Mubarak's. ... In truth, democratic activists had no special claim to the internet. They'd simply gotten there first. Page 88 For all the immensity of today's electronic communications network, the system remains under the control of only a few thousand internet service providers (ISPs), the firms that run the backbone, or "pipes," of the internet. Just a few ISPs supply almost all of the world's mobile data. ... Many of these ISPs hardly qualify as "businesses" at all. They are state-sanctioned monopolies or crony sanctuaries directed by the whim of local officials. ... Designed as an open system and built on trust, the web remains vulnerable to governments that play by different rules. ... All told, sixty-one countries so far have created mechanisms that allow for national-level internet cutoffs. Page 89 These blackouts come at a cost. A 2016 study of the consequences of eighty-one instances of internet cutoffs in nineteen countries assessed the economic damage. Algeria's economy lost at least $20 million during that three-day shutdown, while a larger economy like Saudi Arabia lost $465 million from an internet shutdown in May 2016. ... A variant of this cutoff strategy is "throttling." Whereas internet blocks cut off access completely, throttling slows down connections. It allows vital online functions to continue while making mass coordination more difficult. ... Web monitoring services, for instance, have noticed that every time a protest is planned in Iran, the country's internet coincidentally and conveniently slows to a crawl. Page 90 But outside of the absolute-authoritarian state of North Korea (whose entire "internet" is a closed network of about thirty websites), the goal isn't so much to stop the signal as it is to weaken it. If one has to undertake extensive research and buy special equipment to circumvent government controls, the empowering parts of the internet are no longer for the masses. Page 93 There was a broader lesson, he added. Social media was a "volatile political battleground." What was said and shared -- even a hasty retweet -- carried "real-world consequences." Page 94 Over time, such harsh policing of online speech actually becomes less necessary as self-censorship kicks in. Communications scholars call it the "spiral of silence." Humans continually test their beliefs against those of the perceived majority and often quietly moderate their most extreme positions in order to get along better with society as a whole. By creating an atmosphere in which certain views are stigmatized, governments are able to shape what the majority opinion appears to be, which helps steer the direction of actual majority opinion. Page 95 Yet there is more. Through the right balance of infrastructure control and enforcement, digital-age regimes can exert remarkable control over not just computer networks and human bodies, but the minds of their citizens as well. No nation has pursued this goal more vigorously -- or successfully -- than China. Page 103 It is not surprising that Russia would pioneer this strategy. From its birth, the Soviet Union relied on the clever manipulation and weaponization of falsehood (called dezinformatsiya), both to wage ideological battles abroad and to control its population at home. One story tells how, when a forerunner of the KGB set up an office in 1923 to harness the power of dezinformatsiya, it invented a new word -- "disinformation" -- to make it sound of French origin instead. In this way, even the origin of the term was buried in half-truths. Page 106 The outcome has been an illusion of free speech within a newfangled Potemkin village. "The Kremlin's idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside its walls," writes Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. "Moscow Page 108 Any content that grabs eyeballs and sows doubt represents a job well done. Snarky videos designed to go viral ... They spin up their audience to chase myths, believe in fantasies, and listen to faux . . . ‘experts' until the audience simply tunes out." Page 110 Instead of trying to hide information from prying eyes, it remains in the open, buried under a horde of half-truths and imitations. Page 110 Known as "web brigades," this effort entails an army of paid commenters (among them our charming philosophy major), who manage a vast network of online accounts. Some work in the "news division," others as "social media seeders," still others tasked with creating "demotivators": visual content designed to spread as far and quickly as possible. Unlike the 50-Cent Army of China, however, the Russian version isn't tasked with spreading positivity. ... In the words of our philosophy student's boss, his job was to sow "civil unrest" among Russia's foes. "This is information war, and it's official." Page 111 Internet Research Agency, located in an ugly neo-Stalinist building in St. Petersburg's Primorsky District. They'd settle into their cramped cubicles and get down to business, assuming a series of fake identities known as "sockpuppets." The job was writing hundreds of social media posts per day, with the goal of hijacking conversations and spreading lies, all to the benefit of the Russian government. For this work, our philosophy major was paid the equivalent of $1,500 per month. Page 112 The hard work of a sockpuppet takes three forms, ... One is to pose as the organizer of a trusted group. @Ten_GOP called itself the "unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans" and was followed by over 136,000 people (ten times as many as the official Tennessee Republican Party account). ... The second sockpuppet tactic is to pose as a trusted news source. With a cover photo image of the U.S. Constitution, @tpartynews presented itself as a hub for conservative fans of the Tea Party to track the latest headlines. ... Finally, sockpuppets pose as seemingly trustworthy individuals: a grandmother, a blue-collar worker from the Midwest, a decorated veteran, providing their own heartfelt take on current events (and who to vote for). Page 113 By cleverly leveraging readers' trust, these engineers of disinformation induced thousands -- sometimes millions -- of people each day to take their messages seriously and spread them across their own networks via "shares" and retweets. ... These messages gained even greater power as they reached beyond social media, taking advantage of how professional news outlets -- feeling besieged by social media -- had begun embedding the posts of online "influencers" in their own news stories. Page 116 A 2018 study from Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Research Project found that, all told, at least forty-eight regimes have followed this new model of censorship to "steer public opinion, spread misinformation, and undermine critics." The Unreality Machine Page 118 When all think alike, no one thinks very much. -- WALTER LIPPMANN, The Stakes of Diplomacy Page 119 The Macedonians were awed by Americans' insatiable thirst for political stories. Even a sloppy, clearly plagiarized jumble of text and ads could rack up hundreds of thousands of "shares." The number of U.S. politics–related websites operated out of Veles ballooned into the hundreds. ... As one 17-year-old girl explained at the nightclub, watching the teen tycoons celebrate from her perch at the bar, "Since fake news started, girls are more interested in geeks than macho guys." ... As with their peddling of fad diets, the boys turned to political lies for the sole reason that this was what their targets seemed to want. "You see they like water, you give water," said Dmitri. "[If] they like wine, you give wine." There was one cardinal rule in the business, though: target the Trumpkins. It wasn't that the teens especially cared about Trump's political message, but, as Dmitri explained, "nothing [could] beat" his supporters when it came to clicking on their made-up stories. Page 120 Indeed, the single most popular news story of the entire election -- " Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President" -- was a lie fabricated in Macedonia before blasting across American social networks. ... At the same time that governments in Turkey, China, and Russia sought to obscure the truth as a matter of policy, the monetization of clicks and "shares" -- known as the "attention economy" -- was accomplishing much the same thing. Page 122 Eli Pariser described the effect, and its dangerous consequences, in his 2011 book, The Filter Bubble. ... Yet, even as social media users are torn from a shared reality into a reality-distorting bubble, they rarely want for company. With a few keystrokes, the internet can connect like-minded people over vast distances and even bridge language barriers. ... social media guarantees that you can find others who share your views. Page 123 It is all about us, or rather our love of ourselves and people like us. This phenomenon is called "homophily," meaning "love of the same." Homophily is what makes humans social creatures, able to congregate in such large and like-minded groups. It explains the growth of civilization and cultures. It is also the reason an internet falsehood, once it begins to spread, can rarely be stopped. Page 124 The more often you hear a claim, the less likely you are to assess it critically. And the longer you linger in a particular community, the more its claims will be repeated until they become truisms -- even if they remain the opposite of the truth. Page 126 Once the shared enemy was gone, wild allegations demonized former allies and drove people farther apart. ... "The speed, emotional intensity and echo-chamber qualities of social media content make those exposed to it experience more extreme reactions. Social media is particularly suited to worsening political and social polarization because of its ability to spread violent images and frightening rumors extremely quickly and intensely." Page 127 Fact, after all, is a matter of consensus. Eliminate that consensus, and fact becomes a matter of opinion. Learn how to command and manipulate that opinion, and you are entitled to reshape the fabric of the world. Page 134 What the stratagem revealed was that on social networks driven by homophily, the goal was to validate, not inform. ... John Herrman , 2014 ... "Content-marketed identity media speaks louder and more clearly than content-marketed journalism, which is handicapped by everything that ostensibly makes it journalistic -- tone, notions of fairness, purported allegiance to facts, and context over conclusions," he wrote. ... 59 percent of all links posted on social media had never been clicked on by the person who shared them. Simply sharing crazy, salacious stories became a form of political activism. Page 138 But none of the cases were real -- and Dixson wasn't either. As Ben Nimmo, a fellow with the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, discovered, "Angee Dixson" was actually a bot -- a sophisticated computer program masquerading as a person. Page 139 The most common form of this cheating is also the simplest. Fake followers and "likes" are easy to produce -- all they require is a dummy email address and social media account -- and they enjoy essentially unlimited demand. Page 140 Today, social media bots spread a message; as often as not, it's human beings who become the slaves to it. Page 141 These users then share the conversation with their own networks. The manufactured idea takes hold and spreads, courting ever more attention and unleashing a cascade of related conversations, and usually arguments. Most who become part of this cycle will have no clue that they're actually the playthings of machines. ... On Twitter, for instance, roughly 15 percent of its user base is thought to be fake. For a company under pressure to demonstrate user growth with each quarterly report, this is a valuable boost. ... Although botnets have been used to market everything from dish soap to albums, they're most common in the political arena. For authoritarian regimes around the world, botnets are powerful tools in their censorship and disinformation strategies. Page 143 The 2016 U.S. presidential race, however, stands unrivaled in the extent of algorithmic manipulation. On Twitter alone, researchers discovered roughly 400,000 bot accounts that fought to sway the outcome of the race -- two-thirds of them in favor of Donald Trump. Page 145 Originally, the three spaces were completely different. Page 146 the data showed that a coordinated group of voices had entered these communities, and that these voices could be sifted out from the noise by their repeated word use. ... "Tens of thousands of bots and hundreds of human-operated, fake accounts acted in concert to push a pro-Trump, nativist agenda across all three platforms in the spring of 2016." ... The sockpuppets and bots had created the appearance of a popular consensus to which others began to adjust, altering what ideas were now viewed as acceptable to express. The repeated words and phrases soon spread beyond the fake accounts that had initially seeded them, becoming more frequent across the human users on each platform. The hateful fakes were mimicking real people, but then real people began to mimic the hateful fakes. Win the Net, Win the Day Page 154 By successfully translating its seventh-century ideology into social media feeds, ISIS proved its finesse in what its supporters described as the "information jihad," a battle for hearts and minds as critical as any waged over territory. It did so through a clear, consistent message and a global network of recruiters. Page 156 they'd built a "narrative." Narratives are the building blocks that explain both how humans see the world and how they exist in large groups. They provide the lens through which we perceive ourselves, others, and the environment around us. Page 157 The stronger a narrative is, the more likely it is to be retained and remembered. ... By simplifying complex realities, good narratives can slot into other people's preexisting comprehension. If a dozen bad things happen to you on your way to work, you simply say you're having a "bad day," and most people will understand intuitively what you mean. The most effective narratives can thus be shared among entire communities, peoples, or nations, because they tap into our most elemental notions. Page 158 The challenge now is thus more how to build an effective narrative in a world of billions of wannabe celebrities. The first rule is simplicity. ... In 2000, the average attention span of an internet user was measured at twelve seconds. By 2015, it had shrunk to eight seconds -- slightly less than the average attention span of a goldfish. An effective digital narrative, therefore, is one that can be absorbed almost instantly. Page 159 This explains why so many modern narratives exist at least partially in images. Pictures are not just worth the proverbial thousand words; they deliver the point quickly. ... The second rule of narrative is resonance. Nearly all effective narratives conform to what social scientists call "frames," products of particular language and culture that feel instantly and deeply familiar. ... A resonant narrative is one that fits neatly into our preexisting story lines by allowing us to see ourselves clearly in solidarity with -- or opposition to -- its actors. Page 160 According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the more unyieldingly hyperpartisan a member of Congress is -- best fitting our concept of the characters in a partisan play -- the more Twitter followers he or she draws. ... The third and final rule of narrative is novelty. Just as narrative frames help build resonance, they also serve to make things predictable. Too much predictability, though, can be boring, especially in an age of microscopic attention spans and unlimited entertainment. The most effective storytellers tweak, subvert, or "break" a frame, playing with an audience's expectations to command new levels of attention. Page 160 These three traits -- simplicity, resonance, and novelty -- determine which narratives stick and which fall flat. It's no coincidence that everyone from far-right political leaders to women's rights activists to the Kardashian clan speaks constantly of "controlling the narrative." Page 161 "When we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts." ... What captures the most attention on social media isn't content that makes a profound argument or expands viewers' intellectual horizons. Instead, it is content that stirs emotions. ... Or, in simpler terms, content that can be labeled "LOL,""OMG," or "WTF." Page 162 [In] 2013, Chinese data scientists conducted an exhaustive study of conversations on the social media platform Weibo. Analyzing 70 million messages spread across 200,000 users, they discovered that anger was the emotion that traveled fastest and farthest through the social network -- and the competition wasn't even close. "Anger is more influential than other emotions like joy," the researchers bluntly concluded. ... "Emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people," the scientists concluded, "and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues." Just seeing repeated messages of joy or outrage was enough to make people feel those emotions themselves. ... When an issue has two sides -- as it almost always does -- it can resemble a perpetual-motion machine of outrage. Page 163 Although the word "troll" conjures images of beasts lurking under bridges and dates back to Scandinavian folklore, its modern internet use actually has its roots in the Vietnam War. Page 164 "Trolling for newbies" became a sport in which experienced users would post shamelessly provocative questions designed to spark the ire of new (and unwitting) users. ... Today, we know trolls as those internet users who post messages that are less about sharing information than spreading anger. Their specific goal is to provoke a furious response. ... 1946 by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in describing the tactics of anti-Semites: They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words . . . They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. Page 165 just like conspiracy theories, the more the anger spreads, the more internet users are made susceptible to it. ... "Our findings suggest that trolling . . . can be contagious, .... There's no doubt that trolling makes the internet a worse place. Trolling targets livelihoods and ruins lives. ... But the worst online trolling doesn't necessarily stay online. ... trolling too often ends in real-life violence and tragedy. Or it can yield political power. Page 167 Achieving a sense of authenticity has become an important milestone for any online operation. In bland corporate jargon, this is called "brand engagement" -- extending an organization's reach by building a facsimile of a relationship between an impersonal brand and its followers. Page 169 The term "community" connotes a group with shared interests and identities that, importantly, make them distinct from the wider world. In the past, a community resided in a specific location. Now it can be created online, including (and perhaps especially) among those who find a common sense of fellowship in the worst kinds of shared identities that exclude others. Page 170 As these extremists have banded together, they have carved out online spaces where they are encouraged and empowered to "be themselves." They have found warmth and joy in each other's company, even as they advocate for the forced deportation of those whose skin color or religion is different from their own. Page 173 Kevin Madden Page 173 "Trump understands one important dynamic: In a world where there is a wealth of information, there is always a poverty of attention, and he has this ability to generate four or five story lines a day . . . He is always in control." Page 174 "Poe's Law." This is an internet adage that emerged from troll-infested arguments on the website Christian Forums. The law states, "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a [fundamentalist] in such a way that someone won't mistake it for the genuine article." ... [In] other words, there is a point at which the most sincere profession of faith becomes indistinguishable from a parody; where a simple, stupid statement might actually be considered an act of profound meta-irony. ... From the beginning, many of these lifelong trolls found something to admire in Trump. Part ... most of all, they liked Trump because, in the fast-talking, foulmouthed, combative billionaire, they saw someone just like them -- a troll. Page 175 The collective efforts of Trump's troll army helped steer the online trends that shaped the election. They dredged up old controversies, spun wild conspiracy theories that Trump's opponents had to waste valuable political capital fighting off, and ensured that the most impactful attacks continued to fester and never left public attention. Although neither presidential candidate ... was well liked, an analysis, by the firm Brandwatch, of tens of millions of election-related tweets showed a near-constant decline in the number of messages that spoke positively about Clinton. Page 177 A UK-based firm that Breitbart chairman and Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon had helped form in 2013, Cambridge Analytica had previously been active in conducting information warfare–style efforts on behalf of clients ranging from corporations to the "Leave" side of Brexit. ... The researchers had concluded that it took only ten "likes" to know more about someone than a work colleague knew and just seventy to know more than their real-world friends. Page 178 Importantly, the wealth of data didn't just allow a new kind of micro-targeting of voters, with exactly the message they cared most about, but it also provided new insights into how to tailor that message to influence them most. Page 179 Importantly, BuzzFeed's model didn't depend on handcrafting any particular item to go viral; it depended on throwing out dozens of ideas at once and seeing what stuck. ... For every major viral success, like "12 Extremely Disappointing Facts About Popular Music," there were dozens of duds, like "Leonardo DiCaprio Might Be a Human Puppy." ... What mattered most was scale and experimentation, inundating an audience with potential choices and seeing what they picked. ... make many small bets, Page 180 But the fact that these lessons are now available to anyone means that not all online battles will be one-sided blitzkriegs. As more and more users learn them, the results are vast online struggles that challenge our traditional understanding of war. LikeWar Page 182 Arquilla and Ronfeldt went further. They also predicted that cyberwar would be accompanied by something else: "netwar." They explained: It means trying to disrupt, damage, or modify what a target population "knows" or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it. A netwar may focus on public or elite opinion, or both. It may involve public diplomacy measures, propaganda and psychological campaigns, political and cultural subversion, deception of or interference with the local media . . . In other words, netwar represents a new entry on the spectrum of conflict that spans economic, political, and social as well as military forms of "war." Page 183 Like most theories about the early internet, however, the rhetoric ran far ahead of what was happening in the real world. ... Instead, early netwar became the province of far-left activists and democratic protesters, beginning with the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Mexico and culminating in the 2011 Arab Spring. ... In time, terrorists and far-right extremists also began to gravitate toward netwar tactics. ... "Our hope was at the least, there would be a balance between the two," Arquilla told us, with the benefit of twenty years' reflection. "I think what we've seen is a greater prevalence of the darker side of Janus. I'm troubled to see that." Page 184 Today, online battles are no longer just the stuff of science fiction or wonky think tank reports, but an integral part of global conflict. As a result, governments around the world have begun to adapt to it. Page 185 But there's a second revolution at work -- even stranger and more pressing than the one foreseen by Arquilla and Ronfeldt. As national militaries have reoriented themselves to fight global information conflicts, the domestic politics of these countries have also morphed to resemble netwars. And the two spheres have become linked. Just as rival states and conflict actors use ... the internet to manipulate and deceive, so, too, do political candidates and activists of all stripes. Page 186 The realms of war and politics have begun to merge. Page 186 Victory requires an appreciation of the nature of virality and the whimsical ways of the attention economy, as well as a talent for conveying narrative, emotion, and authenticity, melded with community-building and a ceaseless supply of content (inundation). Page 187 Pepe was the product of an evolutionary cycle that moved at digital warp speed on the internet, piling meaning atop meaning until everyone lost track. Pepe was also the product of a conflict of reinvention and appropriation that twisted him in directions that no one might have expected. In understanding Pepe, one can understand memes, and through them the life cycle of ideas on the internet. ... Pepe became the ideal online phenomenon -- popular and endlessly adaptable, while remaining too weird and unattractive to ever go fully mainstream. ... What began as a mockery of political activism soon became, for many of these users, a serious effort to help Trump win. At the same time, clusters of traditional Page 187 Trump supporters began to adopt the same mannerisms and tactics as actual trolls. As a result, Pepe underwent another transformation. The meme was still dumb and irreverent, but now he was suffused with political meaning as well. Page 188 Pepe had entered the real world, with real consequences. ... When Trump won, Pepe transformed again. The green frog became representative of a successful, hard-fought campaign -- one that now controlled all the levers of government. Page 189 Had Pepe really been racist? The answer is yes. Had Pepe been an innocent, silly joke? Also, yes. In truth, Pepe was a prism, a symbol continually reinterpreted and repurposed by internet pranksters, Trump supporters, liberal activists, ultranationalists, and everyone who just happened to glimpse him in passing. Pepe was a "meme," an empty vessel, like the chromatin that shields DNA; a protective layer over a rich, ever-multiplying strand of ideas. ... just as biological life had to ceaselessly copy itself in order to survive, ideas had to do so, too. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins put a name to these bits of organic, self- multiplying information: "memes." Page 191 A perfect illustration came when the Center for Naval Analyses, a U.S. military–funded think tank, released a report titled "Exploring the Utility of Memes for U.S. Government Influence Campaigns." Naturally, its cover was a meme of Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear. Page 192 the power of virality -- the need to produce and propel viral content through the online system. ... the content that goes viral -- the meme -- can be quite easily hijacked. And whoever does that best determines what reality looks like: Page 202 armed confrontations have become inextricably linked to internet trolling. ... It is about persuading someone to back off before the first punch is thrown. ... Failing that, it's about weakening and embarrassing them, sapping their supporters while energizing your own. Page 206 [The strategy is always] to dismiss, distort, distract, and dismay, divide. Page 208 [There is a ] new, potent kind of information conflict that has infested war and politics alike. Instead, it is merely emblematic of larger truths in the social media age. Bots, trolls, and sockpuppets can invent new "facts" out of thin air; homophily and confirmation bias ensure that at least a few people will believe them. On its own, this is grim enough, leading to a polarized society and a culture of mistrust. But clever groups and governments can twist this phenomenon to their own ends, using virality and perception to drag their goals closer within reach. Page 208 Call it disinformation or simple psychological manipulation. The result is the same, summarized best by the tagline of the notorious conspiracy website Infowars: "There's a war on . . . for your mind!" ... These offensives abide by two basic principles. The first is believability. Engineered falsehoods work best when they carry what seems like a grain of truth. They play on existing prejudices, seeking to add just one more layer to a narrative that already exists in the target's mind. Page 209 social media's very form lowers the credibility threshold even more: whatever the news, if it comes from friends and family, it is inherently more believable. ... The second principle of these stealthy information campaigns is extension. ... The most devastating falsehoods are those that extend across vast numbers of people as well as across time. They spread by how they linger, formed in such a way that the very act of denial breathes new life into the headline, helping it burrow deeper into the collective consciousness. Page 210 tens of thousands of Twitter users all screaming at the same nonexistent adversary. Page 211 And in this sort of war, Western democracies find themselves at a distinct disadvantage. Shaped by the Enlightenment, they seek to be logical and consistent. Built upon notions of transparency, they seek to be accountable and responsible. These are the qualities that made them so successful, the form of government that won both world wars and the contest of superpowers in the last century. Unfortunately, they are not the values of a good troll, Page 214 As modern warfare turns increasingly on the power of internet operations, it renders everyone a potential online combatant. Page 214 As two or more online adversaries fight over the fate of that content -- your individual choice whether to amplify, expand, suppress, or distort it -- even a single "like" or retweet becomes a meaningful action in an ever-evolving information war. Page 217 The door is being slowly opened to a bizarre but not impossible future where the world's great powers might fall to bloodshed due -- in part -- to matters getting out of hand online. Masters of the Universe Page 219 Yes, the website that would become the video archive of the human race was launched by an errant nip-slip. Yet the strangest part of the story wasn't how unusual it was, but rather how typical. ... the DNA of the social media ecosystem: nearly universally male, white, drawn from America's upper middle class, and dedicated, at least initially, to attacking narrow problems with equally narrow solutions. Despite their modest, usually geeky origins, these founders now rule digital empires that dictate what happens in politics, war, and society at large. It has been an uneasy reign as they come to grips with what it means to rule their kingdoms. Page 222 This "engineering first" mentality applies to both problems and potential solutions. Whenever these companies have had to reckon with a political, social, or ethical dilemma -- ironically spawned by their platforms' very success -- they often grasp for another new technology to solve it. As a senior executive at one of these companies put it to us, "If we could use code to solve all the world's problems, we would." Page 223 Should these companies restrict the information that passes through their servers? What should they restrict? And -- most important for the future of both social media and the world -- how should they do it? Page 225 Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997) was the first and most important Supreme Court case to involve the internet. In a unanimous decision, the justices basically laughed the CDA out the door, noting that it massively violated the First Amendment. The only part of the CDA that survived was Section 230. Over the ensuing years, it would be consistently challenged and upheld. With each successful defense, its legal standing grew stronger. Outside of two specific exemptions (federal criminal law and intellectual property), the internet was mostly left to govern itself. As a result, most early corporate censorship -- more politely known as "content moderation" -- would come not because of government mandate, but to avoid involving government in the first place. Page 231 In 2012, both Blogger (originally marketed as "Push-Button Publishing for the People") and Twitter ("the free speech wing of the free speech party") quietly introduced features that allowed governments to submit censorship requests on a per-country basis. Page 232 a handful of Silicon Valley engineers were trying to codify and enforce a single set of standards for every nation in the world, all in an attempt to avoid scandal and controversy. As any political scientist could have told them, this effort was doomed to fail. Page 235 was Twitter, not YouTube, that became terrorists' main social media haven. In a horrifying irony, terrorists who wanted to destroy freedom of speech found perfect alignment with Twitter's original commitment to freedom of speech. Page 242 With each step the social media giants took as they waded deeper into political issues -- tackling terrorism, extremism, and misinformation -- they found themselves ever more bogged down by scandals that arose from the "gray areas" of politics and war. Sometimes, a new initiative to solve one problem might be exploited by a predatory government (Russia had a very different definition of "terrorism" than the United States) or well-meaning reporting systems gamed by trolls. Page 243 Upton Sinclair a century earlier: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Page 244 AOL Community Leader Program was born. In exchange for free or reduced-price internet access, volunteers agreed to labor for dozens of hours each week to maintain the web communities that made AOL rich, ensuring that they stayed on topic and that porn was kept to a minimum. Given special screen names, or "uniforms," that filled them with civic pride, they could mute or kick out disruptive users. Page 245 In 2005, AOL terminated the Community Leader Program, bestowing a free twelve-month subscription on any remaining volunteers. ... The rise and fall of AOL's digital serfs foreshadowed how all big internet companies would come to handle content moderation. ... But as companies begrudgingly accepted more and more content moderation responsibility, the job still needed to get done. Their solution was to split the chore into two parts. The first part was crowdsourced to users (not just volunteers but everyone), who were invited to flag content they didn't like and prompted to explain why. The second part was outsourced to full-time content moderators, usually contractors based overseas, who could wade through as many as a thousand graphic images and videos each day. Page 246 And then there are the people who sit at the other end of the pipeline, tech laborers who must squint their way through each beheading video, graphic car crash, or scared toddler in a dark room whose suffering has not yet been chronicled and added to Microsoft's horrifying child abuse database. There are an estimated 150,000 workers in these jobs around the world, most of them subcontractors scattered across India and the Philippines. ... Professional trolls try to make the internet worse. Professional content moderators try to make it a little better. Page 248 Neural networks are a new kind of computing system: a calculating machine that hardly resembles a "machine" at all. Although such networks were theorized as far back as the 1940s, they've only matured during this decade as cloud processing has begun to make them practical. Instead of rule-based programming that relies on formal logic ("If A = yes, run process B; if A = no, run process C"), neural networks resemble living brains. They're composed of millions of artificial neurons, each of which draws connections to thousands of other neurons via "synapses." Each neuron has its own level of intensity, determined either by the initial input or by synaptic connections received from neurons farther up the stream. In turn, this determines the strength of the signal these neurons send down the stream through their own dependent synapses. Page 249 These networks function by means of pattern recognition. Page 249 With enough neurons, it becomes possible to split the network into multiple "layers," each discovering a new pattern by starting with the findings of the previous layer. ... Each layer allows the network to approach a problem with more and more granularity. But each layer also demands exponentially more neurons and computing power. ... In 2012, engineers with the Google Brain project published a groundbreaking study that documented how they had fed a nine-layer neural network 10 million different screenshots from random YouTube videos, leaving it to play with the data on its own. As it sifted through the screenshots, the neural network -- just like many human YouTube users -- developed a fascination with pictures of cats. ... isolating a set of cat-related qualities, it taught itself to be an effective cat detector. "We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat,'" explained one of the Google engineers. "It basically invented the concept of a cat." ... The machine simply distinguished the pattern of a cat from all "not-cat" patterns. Page 250 Feed the network enough voice audio recordings, and it will learn to recognize speech. Feed it the traffic density of a city, and it will tell you where to put the traffic lights. Feed it 100 million Facebook likes and purchase histories, and it will predict, quite accurately, what any one person might want to buy or even whom they might vote for. ... In late 2017, Google announced that 80 percent of the violent extremist videos uploaded to YouTube had been automatically spotted and removed before a single user had flagged them. Page 251 As we saw earlier, bots pose as humans online, pushing out rote messages. Their more advanced version, chatbots, are algorithms designed to convey the appearance of human intelligence by parroting scripts from a vast database. Page 252 No matter how convincing it is, though, each chatbot is basically reciting lines from a very, very long script. ... By contrast, neural network–trained chatbots -- also known as machine-driven communications tools, or MADCOMs -- have no script at all, just the speech patterns deciphered by studying millions or billions of conversations. Instead of contemplating how MADCOMs might be used, it's easier to ask what one might not accomplish with intelligent, adaptive algorithms that mirror human speech patterns. ... In 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, a neural network–powered chatbot that adopted the speech patterns of a teenage girl. Anyone could speak to Tay and contribute to her dataset; she was also given a Twitter account. Trolls swarmed Tay immediately, and she was as happy to learn from them as from anyone else. Tay's bubbly personality soon veered into racism, sexism, and Holocaust denial. "RACE WAR NOW," she tweeted, later adding, "Bush did 9/11." After less than a day, Tay was unceremoniously put to sleep, her fevered artificial brain left to dream of electric frogs. ... Nobody, their creators included, can fully comprehend how they work. ... When there's no way to know if the network is wrong -- if it's making a prediction of the future based on past data -- users can either ignore it or take its prognostication at face value. ... The greatest danger of neural networks, therefore, lies in their sheer versatility. Smart though the technology may be, it cares not how it's used. These networks are no different from a knife or a gun or a bomb -- indeed, they're as double-edged as the internet itself. Page 253 Anyone can build and train one using free, open-source tools. An explosion of interest in these systems has led to thousands of new applications. ... the network can use its mastery of a voice to approximate words and phrases that it's never heard. ... With a minute's worth of audio, these systems might make a good approximation of someone's speech patterns. With a few hours, they are essentially perfect. Page 254 Neural networks can synthesize not just what we read and hear but also what we see. ... Neural networks can also be used to create deep fakes that aren't copies at all. Rather than just study images to learn the names of different objects, these networks can learn how to produce new, never-before-seen versions of the objects in question. They are called "generative networks." ... Using such technology, users will eventually be able to conjure a convincing likeness of any scene or person they or the AI can imagine. Because the image will be truly original, it will be impossible to identify the forgery via many of the old methods of detection. ... And finally, there are the MADCOMs. The inherent promise of such technology -- an AI that is essentially indistinguishable from a human operator -- also sets it up for terrible misuse. Page 255 Today, it remains possible for a savvy internet user to distinguish "real" people from automated botnets and even many sockpuppets (the Russified English helped us spot a few). Soon enough, even this uncertain state of affairs may be recalled fondly as the "good old days" -- ... Give a Twitter botnet to a MADCOM and the network might be able to distort the algorithmic prominence of a topic without anyone noticing, simply by creating realistic conversations among its many fake component selves. MADCOMs won't just drive news cycles, but will also trick and manipulate the people reacting to them. ... Matthew Chessen, a senior technology policy advisor at the U.S. State Department, doesn't mince words about the inevitable MADCOM ascendancy. It will "determine the fate of the internet, our society, and our democracy," he writes. No longer will humans be reliably in charge of the machines. Instead, as machines steer our ideas and culture in an Page 256 automated, evolutionary process that we no longer understand, they will "start programming us." ... The LikeWars of tomorrow will be fought by highly intelligent, inscrutable algorithms that will speak convincingly of things that never happened, producing "proof" that doesn't really exist. They'll seed falsehoods across the social media landscape with an intensity and volume that will make the current state of affairs look quaint. ... Recent breakthroughs in neural network training hint at what will drive machine evolution to the next level, but also save us from algorithms that seek to manipulate us: an AI survival of the fittest. ... of "generative adversarial networks." ... The first network strains to create something that seems real -- an image, a video, a human conversation -- while the second network struggles to determine if it's fake. Page 257 Although this process teaches networks to produce increasingly accurate forgeries, it also leaves open the potential for networks to get better and better at detecting fakes. Conclusion Page 260 This duality of the social media revolution touches the rest of us, too. The evolutionary advantages that make us such dynamic, social creatures -- our curiosity, affinity for others, and desire to belong -- also render us susceptible to dangerous currents of disinformation. Page 261 Regardless of how old they are, humans as a species are uniquely ill-equipped to handle both the instantaneity and the immensity of information that defines the social media age. Page 261 First, for all the sense of flux, the modern information environment is becoming stable. ... Second, the internet is a battlefield. Like every other technology before it, the internet is not a harbinger of peace and understanding. Instead, it's a platform for achieving the goals of whichever actor manipulates it most effectively. Its weaponization, and the conflicts that then erupt on it, define both what happens on the internet and what we take away from ... Third, this battlefield changes how we must think about information itself. ... If something happens, we must assume that there's likely a digital record of it -- an image, video, or errant tweet -- that will surface seconds or years from now. However, an event only carries power if people also believe that it happened. ... process means that a manufactured event can have real power, while a demonstrably true event can be rendered irrelevant. Page 262 Everything is now transparent, yet the truth can be easily obscured. ... Fifth, we're all part of the battle. ... For governments, the first and most important step is to take this new battleground seriously. ... authoritarian leaders have long since attuned themselves to the potential of social media, both as a threat to their rule and as a new vector for attacking their foes. Page 264 Accordingly, information literacy is no longer merely an education issue but a national security imperative. Page 265 Instead, part of the governance solution to our social media problem may actually be more social media, just of a different kind. ... submission of and digital voting on key issues, moving the power from the politician back to the people. ... What is common across these examples of governance via network is the use of social media to learn and involve. Page 266 When someone engages in the spread of lies, hate, and other societal poisons, they should be stigmatized accordingly. ... Stopping these bad actors requires setting an example and ensuring that repeat offenders never escape the gravity of their past actions and are excluded from the institutions and platforms of power that now matter most in our society. In a democracy, you have a right to your opinion, but no right to be celebrated for an ugly, hateful opinion, especially if you've spread lie after lie. ... We must also come to grips with the new challenge of free speech in the age of social media -- what is known as "dangerous speech." Page 267 It is a strange fact that the entities best positioned to police the viral spread of hate and violence are not legislatures, but social media companies. Page 267 Silicon Valley must accept more of the political and social responsibility that the success of its technology has thrust upon it. Page 268 Accordingly, these companies must abandon the pretense that they are merely "neutral" platform providers. Page 268 In the process, Silicon Valley must also break the code of silence that pervades its own culture. Page 269 effective information literacy education works by presenting the people being targeted with specific, proven instances of misinformation, encouraging them to understand how and why it worked against them. Page 271 Instead, if we want to stop being manipulated, we must change how we navigate the new media environment. Page 273 Social media is extraordinarily powerful, but also easily accessible and pliable. Across it play out battles for not just every issue you care about, but for the future itself. Yet within this network, and in each of the conflicts on it, we all still have the power of choice.
Parmy Olson Notable Quotations Full screen view Page x Many AI builders say this technology promises a path to utopia. Others say it could bring about the collapse of our civilization. In reality, the science fiction scenarios have distracted us from the more insidious ways AI is threatening to harm society by perpetuating racism, threatening entire creative industries, and more. Page x No other organizations in history have amassed so much power or touched so many people as today's tech giants. Page x AI future has been written by just two men: Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. Page x Altman was the reason the world got ChatGPT. Hassabis was the reason we got it so quickly. Page xi Hassabis risked scientific ridicule when he established DeepMind, the first company in the world intent on building AI that was as smart as a human being. Page xi He wanted to make scientific discoveries about the origins of life, the nature of reality, and cures for disease. "Solve intelligence, and then solve everything else," he said. Page xi A few years later, Altman started OpenAI to try to build the same thing but with a greater focus on bringing economic abundance to humanity, increasing material wealth, and helping "us all live better lives," he tells me. "This can be the greatest tool humans have yet created, and let each of us do things far outside the realm of the possible." Page xii if you ask a popular AI tool to generate images of women, it'll make them sexy and scantily clad; ask it for photorealistic CEOs, and it'll generate images of white men; ask for a criminal, and it will often generate images of Black men. Such tools are being woven into our media feeds, smartphones, and justice systems, without due care for how they might shape public opinion. Page xii Companies are throwing money at AI software to help displace their employees and boost profit margins. And a new breed of personal AI devices that can conduct an unimaginable new level of personal surveillance is cropping up. Page xiii I'll explain how we got here, and how the visions of two innovators who tried to build AI for good were eventually ground down by the forces of monopoly. Act 1: The Dream Page 7 He'd play hours of poker at a popular casino in San Jose, honing his skills of psychological maneuvering and influence. Poker is all about watching others and sometimes misdirecting them about the strength of your hand, and Altman became so good at bluffing and reading his opponents' subtle cues that he used his winnings to fund most of his living expenses as a college student. "I would have done it for free," he would later tell one podcast. "I loved it so much. I strongly recommend it as a way to learn about the world and business and psychology." Page 8 Stanford's AI lab, Page 8 The AI lab had just been reopened and its leader was Sebastian Thrun, Page 8 Thrun taught his students about machine learning, a technique that computers used to infer concepts from being shown lots of data instead of being programmed to do something specific. Page 8 the term learning was misleading: machines can't think and learn as humans do. Page 9 Academics like Thrun built AI systems. Stanford students like Altman built start- ups that became companies like Google, Cisco, and Yahoo. Page 9 Altman and Sivo decided to join the three- month program, called Y Combinator, and create a start- up. Page 10 You didn't need a brilliant idea to start a successful tech company. You just needed a brilliant person behind the wheel. Page 10 Bootstrap your company, start with a minimum viable product, and optimize it over time. Page 11 Thanks to something called a dual- class share structure, many tech start- up founders, including those behind Airbnb and Snapchat, could hold these unusual Page 11 levels of control of their companies. Graham and others believed founders had this authority for good reason. Page 12 Though he was a decent enough programmer, the boyish- faced Altman was an even better businessman. He had no qualms about calling up executives from Sprint, Verizon, and Boost Mobile Page 12 pitching a grand vision about changing the way people socialized and used their phones. Page 12 Speaking in low tones and using elegant turns of phrase that he'd honed from his creative writing classes, he explained that Loopt would one day be essential to anyone who had a mobile. Page 13 With all that funding, Altman dropped out of Stanford University to work on Loopt full- time. screen. As the aughts wore on, Facebook was growing considerably faster than Loopt Page 15 In the end, consumers did that for him. Altman had miscalculated how uncomfortable they felt about pinging their GPS coordinates to meet up with others. "I learned you can't make humans do something they don't want to do," he would go on to say. Page 16 In 2012, Altman sold it to a gift- card company for about $ 43 million, barely covering what was owed to investors and his employees. Loopt's collapse emboldened him with a greater conviction that he should do something more meaningful. Page 17 That would lead him to chase an even grander objective: saving humanity from a looming existential threat and then bringing them an abundance of wealth unlike anything they had seen. Page 18 Years before Hassabis would become the front-runner in a race to build the world's smartest AI systems, he was learning how to run a business via simulation, something that would become a running theme in his life's work and in his quest to build machines more intelligent than humans. Page 19 But Hassabis thought the best video games were simulations that acted as microcosms of real life. Page 19 Hassabis would eventually become gripped by a powerful desire to use them to create an artificial superintelligence that would help him unlock the secrets of human consciousness. Page 19 Hassabis grew up an enigma himself, the lone mathematical genius in a family of bohemian creatives. Page 21 Just as poker taught Sam Altman about psychology and business, chess taught Hassabis how to strategize by starting with the end in mind. You visualized a goal and worked backward. Page 23 If he studied computer science and the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, he could build the ultimate scientific tool and make discoveries that improved the human condition. Page 25 They imagined AI eventually writing music and poetry and even designing games. Page 26 Hassabis met members of his future inner circle at Cambridge, including Ben Coppin, another computer science student who would go on to lead product development at DeepMind, and with whom he talked about religion and how AI could solve global problems. But DeepMind was still more than a decade away. Page 28 The former chess champion hired the smartest programmers he could find, many of them graduates from Oxford University and Cambridge. Page 29 There was no better way to showcase the magical capabilities of AI than through a game. At the time, the most advanced AI research was happening in the gaming industry as smarter software helped create living worlds and a new style called emergent gameplay. Page 33 He would admit publicly that nearly all the companies he backed failed, but he figured he was training a muscle for identifying the projects that were most likely to succeed. It was OK to be frequently wrong, he believed, so long as you were occasionally "right in a big way," such as by backing a start- up that turned out to be a blockbuster and then making a spectacular exit. Page 34 Altman was building off a Silicon Valley mindset that saw life itself as an engineering conundrum. You could solve all manner of big problems by using the same steps you took to optimize an app. Page 34 These prized methods naturally extended to other parts of society and life. Page 36 Altman also found Silicon Valley's constant striving for extreme wealth slightly distasteful. He was more interested in the glory that came from building exciting projects. Page 37 However unseasoned Altman was, he'd made such a strong impression on Graham and Livingston that they never bothered to make a list of possible new leaders for YC. Page 39 Most tech entrepreneurs shared an implicit understanding that rescuing humanity was mostly a marketing ploy for the public and their employees, especially since their firms were building widgets that helped streamline email or do laundry. Page 39 Altman eventually shifted the majority of his money into two other ambitious goals besides AI: extending life and creating limitless energy, betting on two companies. More than $375 million went into Helion and another $180 million into Retro Biosciences, a start-up that was working on adding ten years to the average human lifespan. Page 40 Don't ask people what they do, Altman wrote. Instead, ask what someone is interested in. Page 41 But his real gift as an entrepreneur was his power to persuade others of his authority. "One thing I realized through meditation is that there is no self that I can identify with in any way at all," he told the Art of Accomplishment podcast. "I've heard that of a lot of people spending a lot of time thinking about [powerful AI] get to that in a different way too." He was surrounded by technologists who believed they might also one day upload their consciousness to computer servers, where they could live on in perpetuity. Page 43 The people who thrived in the future would take a detached and informed approach to tech advancements. Page 44 The Silicon Valley entrepreneur needed a rival to spark his own endeavor, and that person was on the other side of the world in England, a brilliant young game designer who was planning to build software so powerful that it could make profound discoveries about science and even God. Page 46 PhD in neuroscience at University College London. Till then, it was thought that the brain's hippocampus mostly processed memories, but Hassabis showed (with the help of other studies of MRI scans in his thesis) that it was also activated during the act of imagination. Page 47 His thesis was cited as one of the most important scientific breakthroughs that year by a leading peer-reviewed journal. Page 50 artificial intelligence, was coined back in 1956 at a workshop at Dartmouth College that was aimed at pulling together ideas about "thinking machines." isn't technically accurate, for instance, to suggest that computers can "think" or "learn," but phrases like neural network, deep learning, and training help promote that idea in our minds by lending software humanlike qualities, even when they're only loosely inspired by the human brain. Page 51 Suleyman already knew Hassabis well. Having grown up in North London, he was a friend of Hassabis's brother, George, and had been a frequent visitor to their home in his teens. The trio had even traveled to Las Vegas to play at a poker tournament in their twenties, coaching one another and splitting the winnings. Page 52 Hassabis summed up that view in DeepMind's tagline: "Solve intelligence and use it to solve everything else." He put it on their slide deck for investors. Page 53 But Suleyman disagreed with that vision. One day when Hassabis wasn't around, he told one of DeepMind's early staff members to change it on a slide presentation. It now read: "Solve intelligence and use it to make the world a better place." Suleyman wanted to build AGI in the way Sam Altman eventually would, by sending it out into the world to be immediately useful. Page 56 With his deep pockets and enthusiasm for ambitious projects, Thiel was the perfect person to fund DeepMind. Page 56 While most entrepreneurs believed competition drove innovation, Thiel argued in his book Zero to One that monopolies did that better. Page 61 Once he was an investor, Tallinn pushed DeepMind to focus on safety. He knew that Hassabis wasn't as worried about the apocalyptic risks of AI as he was, so he put pressure on the company to hire a team of people that would study all the different ways they could design AI to keep it aligned with human values and prevent it from going off the rails. Page 62 [Superintelligence] Bostrom warned that building "general" or powerful AI could lead to a disastrous outcome for humans, but he pointed out that it might not necessarily destroy us because it was malevolent or power- hungry. It might just be trying to do its job. paper clips Page 64 Instead of focusing on money, their job would be to make sure DeepMind was building AI as safely and ethically as possible. Hassabis and Legg weren't convinced at first, but Suleyman was persuasive and they eventually agreed to the idea. Page 65 The turning point had come in 2012. A Stanford AI professor named Fei-Fei Li had created an annual challenge for academics called ImageNet, to which researchers submitted AI models that tried to visually recognize images of cats, furniture, cars, and more Page 65 That year, scientist Geoffrey Hinton's team of researchers used deep learning to create a model that was far more accurate than anything before, and their results stunned the AI field. Suddenly everybody wanted to hire experts in this deep-learning AI theory inspired by how the brain recognized patterns. Page 69 A neural network is a type of software that gets built by being trained over and over with lots of data. Once it's been trained, it can recognize faces, predict chess moves, or recommend your next Netflix movie. Page 69 Also known as a "model," a neural network is often made up of many different layers and nodes that process information in a vaguely similar way to our brain's neurons. The more the model is trained, the better those nodes get at predicting or recognizing things. Page 70 What Ng had really wanted to do with his scientific research was free humanity from mental drudgery, in the same way the Industrial Revolution had liberated us from constant physical labor. Page 71 As a technique, reinforcement learning wasn't all that different to how you might reward a dog with treats whenever it sits on command. In training AI, you would similarly reward the model, perhaps a numerical signal like a +1, to show that a certain outcome was good. Through repeated trial and error, and playing hundreds of games over and over, the system learned what worked and what didn't. It was an elegantly simple idea wrapped in highly sophisticated computer code. Page 74 The basic premise of transhumanism is that the human race is currently second-rate. With the right scientific discoveries and technology, we might one day evolve beyond our physical and mental limits into a new, more intelligent species. We'll be smarter and more creative, and we'll live longer. We might even manage to meld our minds with computers and explore the galaxy. Page 74 Huxley himself came from an aristocratic family (his brother Aldous wrote Brave New World), and he believed society's upper crust was genetically superior. Page 74 When the Nazis latched on to the eugenics movement, Huxley decided it needed a rebrand. He coined a new term, transhumanism, Page 74 This idea was crystallized in the concept of the singularity, a point in the future when AI and technology became so advanced that humankind would undergo dramatic and irreversible change, merging with machines and enhancing themselves with technology. Page 76 Bostrom's Superintelligence. The book had a paradoxical impact on the AI field. It managed to stoke greater fear about the destruction that AI could bring by "paper-clipping us," but it also predicted a glorious utopia that powerful AI could usher in if created properly. Page 76 These ideas were irresistible to some people in Silicon Valley, who believed such fantastical ways of life were achievable with the right algorithms. By painting a future that could look like either heaven or hell, Bostrom sparked a prevailing wisdom that would eventually drive the Silicon Valley AI builders like Sam Altman to race to build AGI before Demis Hassabis did in London: they had to build AGI first because only they could do so safely. Page 76 If not, someone else might build AGI that was misaligned with human values and annihilate not just the few billion people living on Earth but potentially trillions of perfect new digital human beings in the future. We would all lose the opportunity to live in nirvana. Page 77 When the deal was finally inked and the ethics board added to the acquisition agreement, Google was buying DeepMind for $650 million. Page 78 Now instead of worrying about Facebook or Amazon poaching his staff, Hassabis could poach their staff and lure some of the greatest AI minds from academia with eye-popping salaries. Page 80 Hassabis believed so fervently in the transformative effects of AGI that he told DeepMind's staff they wouldn't have to worry about making money in about five years, because AGI would make the economy obsolete, former employees say. Page 84 The more Hassabis learned about OpenAI, the more his anger rose. He had been the first person in the world to make a serious run at building artificial general intelligence, and given what a fringe idea it had been five years earlier, he'd put his neck on the line with the scientific community by doing Page 85 Hassabis questioned OpenAI's promises to release its technology to the public. That approach to being "open" seemed reckless. Page 86 DeepMind published some of its research in well-known journals, but it kept the full details of its code and AI technology under tight control. It didn't release the AI models it had created to master the game Breakout, for instance. Whatever his reason for turning on DeepMind, Musk was stoking what would become an intense rivalry between the two organizations. Page 88 Later, Musk would say on Twitter that he had started OpenAI because he wanted to create a "counterweight to Google" and because he wanted AI to be developed more safely. But there was no doubt that AI was critical to the financial success of his companies, whether it was the self-driving capabilities of Tesla cars, the systems steering SpaceX's unmanned rockets, or the models underpinning his upcoming brain-computer interface company Neuralink. Page 89 While Hassabis had believed that AGI would unlock the mysteries of science and the divine, Altman would say he saw it as the route to financial abundance for the world. Page 97 To build AGI, OpenAI's founding team needed to attract more money and talent, so they tried focusing on projects that could generate positive stories in the press. Page 98 Although OpenAI eventually gained worldwide acclaim for its work on chatbots and large language models, its first few years were spent toiling on multiagent simulations and reinforcement learning, fields that DeepMind already dominated. Page 100 As Musk left OpenAI, he took its main source of funding with him. This was a disaster for Altman. Altman was approaching a critical juncture. Working out of OpenAI's office in San Francisco, he thought about how he could keep the nonprofit going on severely limited resources and build AI models that were likely to be subpar to the rest of the field. Page 109 Yet even as they sought to carve themselves away from Google, DeepMind was simultaneously helping bolster Google's business. Around the time Google's Larry Page was promising to help DeepMind spin out, he was looking to China as a new opportunity for expansion. Page 112 Hassabis didn't just want to impress his new boss. As well as being an accomplished scientist, he was an exceptional marketer. He understood that if AlphaGo could beat a global champion of Go in the same way IBM's Deep Blue computer had beaten chess's Garry Kasparov in 1997, it would create a thrilling new milestone for AI and cement DeepMind's credibility as a leader in the field. DeepMind had its sights on South Korea's Lee Sedol and challenged him to a five-game match in Seoul in March 2016. Page 113 It was a landmark moment for AI that gave DeepMind the biggest period of press attention it had ever received, including an award-winning Netflix documentary about AlphaGo. Page 118 In AI, "ethics" and "safety" can refer to different research goals, and in recent years, their proponents have been at odds with one another. Researchers who say they work in AI safety tend to swim in the same waters as Yudkowsky and Jaan Tallinn and want to ensure that a superintelligent AGI system won't cause catastrophic harm to people in the future, for instance by using drug discovery to build chemical weapons and wiping them out or by spreading misinformation across the internet to completely destabilize society. Ethics research, on the other hand, focuses more on shaping how AI systems are designed and used today. They study how the technology might already be harming people. Page 121 there's one thing that nearly all the world's most valuable companies have in common: they are tech firms. Page 122 How did they get so big? They bought companies like DeepMind, YouTube, and Instagram, and they sucked up a prodigious amount of data about consumers, allowing some of them to target us with advertisements and recommendations that could influence human behavior on a massive scale. Page 122 The companies are incentivized to keep us as addicted as possible to their platforms, since that generates more ad dollars. Page 123 All that personalized "content delivery" has also amped up the generational and political divisions between millions of people, since the most engaging content tends to be the kind that provokes outrage. While this engagement-based model had toxic effects on society, it incentivized Facebook to do one thing: become as big as possible. The basic idea of network effects is that the more users and customers a company has, the better their algorithms will become, making it increasingly difficult for competitors to catch up, further entrenching their grip on the market. Page 124 We have no historical reference point for what happens when companies become this big. The market cap numbers that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are currently achieving have never been seen before. And while they bring greater wealth to the shareholders of those companies, including pension funds, they have also centralized power in such a way that the privacy, identity, public discourse, and increasingly the job prospects of billions of people are beholden to a handful of large firms, run by a handful of unfathomably wealthy people. Page 125 [Timnit Gebru] While it seemed like these systems could be the perfect neutral arbiter, they often were not. If the data they were trained on was biased, so was the system. And Gebru was painfully aware of bias. AI could make that worse. For a start, it was typically designed by people who hadn't experienced racism, which was one reason why the data being used to train AI models also often failed to fairly represent people from minority groups and women. Page 126 While writing her PhD thesis at Stanford, Gebru pointed to another example of how authorities could use AI in disturbing ways. Page 127 AI was spreading other stereotypes online, too, in subtle but insidious ways. too focused on deep learning. "A white tech tycoon born and raised in South Africa during apartheid, along with an all-white, all-male set of investors and researchers is trying to stop AI from ‘taking over the world' and the only potential problem we see is that ‘all the researchers are working on deep learning?'" she wrote. "Google recently came out with a computer vision algorithm that classified Black people as Apes. AS APES. Some try to explain away this mishap by stating that the algorithm must have picked out color as an essential discriminator in classifying humans. If there was even one Black person [on] the team, or just someone who thinks about race, a product classifying Black people as apes would not have been released.… Imagine an algorithm that regularly classifies white people as nonhuman. No American company would call this a production-ready person detection system." Page 128 One way to limit AI models from making biased decisions was to spend more time analyzing the data they were trained on. Another was to make them narrower in scope, which would blow a hole in the goal of giving AI systems the power to generalize their knowledge. Page 129 In just the same way Big Oil redirected the world's attention from their own significant environmental impact, AI's leading builders could exploit the buzz around a future Terminator or Skynet to distract from the present-day problems that machine learning algorithms were causing. Page 130 Each time AI's capabilities grew, an unintended consequence arose that often caused harm to a minority group. Facial recognition systems were nearly perfect at recognizing the faces of white men, but often made mistakes with Black women. Page 131 Figuring out why AI systems make mistakes is much harder than people think, especially as they become more sophisticated. Page 132 Some AI researchers say it's too difficult to fix these biases, arguing that modern-day AI models are so complex that even their creators don't understand why they make certain decisions. Page 136 Silicon Valley tended to measure success with two metrics: how much money you had raised from investors, and how many people you had hired. Page 137 The problem with being so big was that if someone did invent something groundbreaking inside Google, it might struggle to see the light of day. Page 137 The transformer has become critical to the new wave of generative AI that can produce realistic text, images, videos, DNA sequences, and many other kinds of data. The transformer's invention in 2017 was about as impactful to the field of AI as the advent of smartphones was for consumers. Page 138 Transformers Page 138 broadened the scope of what AI engineers could do. Page 139 Transformers Page 139 could deal with nuance and slang. They could refer back to that thing you said a few sentences earlier. Page 142 It referred to the task of finding all expressions that refer to the same entity in a text. Page 145 product of bloat. The downside to being one of the largest companies of all time, with a monopolistic grip on the search market, is that everything moves at a snail's pace. You're constantly afraid of public backlash or regulatory scrutiny. Your prime concern is maintaining growth and dominance. Page 151 A mini cold war was also brewing between Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, and OpenAI's convivial board member Reid Hoffman was looking for ways to get the two of them to "smoke the peace pipe," according to someone who heard the comment directly. Page 153 Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's star scientist, couldn't stop thinking about what the transformer could do with language. Google was using it to better understand text. What if OpenAI used it to generate text? Page 153 Large language models themselves were still a joke. Their responses were mostly scripted and they'd often make wacky mistakes. Page 154 making it "decoder only" would also be a game-changer. By combining a model's ability to "understand" and speak into one fluid process, it could ultimately generate more humanlike text. Page 154 Thanks to the transformer, Radford was making more progress with his language model experiments in two weeks than over the previous two years. He and his colleagues started working on a new language model they called a "generatively pre- trained transformer" or GPT for short. They trained it on an online corpus of about seven thousand mostly self- published books found on the internet, many of them skewed toward romance and vampire fiction. Page 155 BooksCorpus, and anyone could download it for free. Page 156 To refine their new GPT model, Radford and his colleagues scraped more content from the public internet, training the model on questions and answers from the online forum Quora, along with thousands of passages from English exams given to Chinese school kids. It also did something that got Radford's team excited: it could generate text on topics it hadn't been specifically trained on. While they couldn't explain exactly how that worked, this was good news. It meant they were on the road toward building a general purpose system. The bigger its training corpus, the more knowledgeable it would become. But GPT was different because it was learning from a mountain of seemingly random text that wasn't labeled to get the hang of how language worked. It didn't have the guiding hand of those human labelers. Page 157 Once the initial training was done, they fine-tuned the new model using some labeled examples to get better at specific tasks. This two-step approach made GPT more flexible and less reliant on having lots of labeled examples. Page 159 That was the predicament OpenAI found itself in. It needed to rent more cloud computers, and it was also running out of money. Page 160 The whole thing sounded magnanimous. OpenAI was framing itself as an organization that was so highly evolved that it was putting the interests of humanity above traditional Silicon Valley pursuits like profit and even prestige. A key line was "broadly distributed benefits," or handing out the rewards of AGI to all of humanity. Page 161 He didn't want to lose complete control of OpenAI by selling it to a larger tech company—as DeepMind had done to Google. Page 164 Almost immediately, Tay started generating racist, sexually charged, and often nonsensical tweets: Microsoft quickly shut down the system, which had only been going for about sixteen hours, and blamed a coordinated trolling attack by a subset of people who'd exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Page 166 Nadella realized that the real return on a $1 billion investment in OpenAI wasn't going to come from the money after a sale or stock market floatation. It was the technology itself. OpenAI was building AI systems that could one day lead to AGI, but along the way, as those systems became more powerful, they could make Azure a more attractive service to customers. Artificial intelligence was going to become a fundamental part of the cloud business, and cloud was on track to make up half of Microsoft's annual sales. If Microsoft could sell some cool new AI features—like chatbots that could replace call center workers—to its corporate customers, those customers were less likely to leave for a competitor. The more features they signed up for, the harder it would be to switch. The reason for that is a little technical, but it's critical to Microsoft's power. When a company like eBay, NASA, or the NFL—who are all customers of Microsoft's cloud service—build a software application, that software will have dozens of different connections into Microsoft. Switching them off can be complex and expensive, and IT professionals resentfully call this "vendor lock-in." It's why three tech giants—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—have a stranglehold on the cloud business. It became clear to Microsoft's CEO that OpenAI's work on large language models could be more lucrative than the research carried out by his own AI scientists, who seemed to have lost their focus after the Tay disaster. Nadella agreed to make a $1 billion investment in OpenAI. He wasn't just backing its research but also planting Microsoft at the forefront of the AI revolution. In return, Microsoft was getting priority access to OpenAI's technology. Inside OpenAI, as Sutskever and Radford's work on large language models became a bigger focus at the company and their latest iteration became more capable, the San Francisco scientists started to wonder if it was becoming too capable. Their second model, GPT-2, was trained on forty gigabytes of internet text and had about 1.5 billion parameters, making it more than ten times bigger than the first and better at generating more complex text. It also sounded more believable. Wired magazine published a feature titled "The AI Text Generator That's Too Dangerous to Make Public," while The Guardian printed a column breathlessly titled "AI Can Write Just Like Me. Brace for the Robot Apocalypse." But it didn't release the model itself for public testing. Nor did it disclose what public websites and other datasets had been used to train it, as it had with the BooksCorpus set for the original GPT. OpenAI's newfound secrecy around its model and the warning about its dangers almost seemed to be creating more hype than before. More people than ever wanted to hear about it. Altman and Brockman would go on to say that this was never their intention and that OpenAI was genuinely concerned about how GPT-2 could be abused. But their approach to public relations was, arguably, still a form of mystique marketing with a dash of reverse psychology. Page 170 For those who worked at OpenAI—and at DeepMind, too—the relentless focus on saving the world with AGI was gradually creating a more extreme, almost cultlike environment. Effective altruism hit the spotlight in late 2022 when one-time crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried became the movement's most well-known supporter. improve on traditional approaches to charity by taking a more utilitarian approach to giving. "earning to give," Page 171 The mission of building AGI had a particular appeal to anyone who believed in effective altruism's higher-numbers-are-better philosophy, because you were building technology that could impact billions or even trillions of lives in the future. Page 171 The B Corp is designed to balance profit seeking with a mission. Page 172 Altman and Brockman designed what they claimed was a middle way, a byzantine mishmash of the nonprofit and corporate worlds. In March 2019 they announced the creation of a "capped profit" company. limit on the returns Page 173 Then came their next pivot. In June 2019, four months after becoming a for-profit company, OpenAI announced its strategic partnership with Microsoft. "Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI to support us building artificial general intelligence (AGI) with widely distributed economic benefits," Brockman announced in a blog post. OpenAI would license its technology to Microsoft to help grow its cloud business. Page 174 Altman and Brockman seemed to justify their change in direction in two ways. First, pivoting as you sped along was the typical path of a start-up. Second, the goal of AGI was more important than the specific means of getting there. Maybe they'd have to break some promises along the way, but humanity would be better off for it in the end. What's more, they told their staff and the public, Microsoft wanted to use AGI to improve humanity too. Page 176 From the outside, OpenAI's transformation from a philanthropic organization trying to save humanity to a company that partnered with Microsoft looked odd, even suspect. But for many of its staff, working with a deep-pocketed tech giant was welcome news, according to those who were there at the time. Page 176 So long as they stuck to their all-important charter, it didn't necessarily matter where the money was coming from. Page 178 Its researchers had already extracted roughly four billion words on Wikipedia, so the next obvious source was the billions of comments people shared on social media networks. Page 178 Twitter Page 178 Reddit. Page 178 Altman had good reason to love Reddit: it was a gold mine of human dialogue for training AI, thanks to the comments that its millions of users posted and voted on every day. Page 178 Little wonder that Reddit would go on to become one of OpenAI's most important sources for AI training, Page 180 Even government projects looked puny compared to the enormous amounts of money that Big Tech was pouring into Page 181 In the end he wasn't persuaded by Hoffman's reasoning and decided to quit OpenAI, along with his sister Daniela and about half a dozen other researchers at the company. This wasn't just a walkout over safety or the commercialization of AI, though. Even among the most hardcore worriers of AI, there was opportunism. Amodei had watched Sam Altman broker a huge, $1 billion investment from Microsoft firsthand and could sense that there was likely more capital where that came from. He was right. Amodei was witnessing the beginnings of a new boom in AI. He and his colleagues decided to start a new company called Anthropic, named after the philosophical term that refers to human existence, to underscore their prime concern for humanity. Page 182 Sam Altman now had another rival to contend with besides DeepMind and one that had a more dangerous insight into OpenAI's secret sauce. Page 185 Tech companies were operating in a legal vacuum, which meant that technically, they could do whatever they wanted with AI. Page 190 As Big Tech failed over and over again to responsibly govern itself, a sea change was happening. For years companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple had portrayed themselves as earnest pioneers of human progress. Page 190 Tech giants had amassed enormous wealth, and as they crushed their competitors and violated people's privacy, the public grew more skeptical of their promises to make the world a better place. There was no greater example of those shifting objectives than Google's Alphabet, Page 193 One of the most powerful features of artificial intelligence isn't so much what it can do, but how it exists in the human imagination. As human inventions go, it is unique. No other technology has been designed to replicate the mind itself, and so its pursuit has become wrapped up in ideas that border on the fantastical. Page 193 These were giant prediction machines, or as some researchers described, "autocomplete on steroids." Page 194 But most people found the mechanics of these language models baffling, and as the systems became more fluent and convincing, it was easier to believe that a magical phenomenon was happening behind the scenes. That maybe AI really was "intelligent." Page 194 Blake Lemoine. Lemoine had grown up on a farm in Louisiana among a conservative Christian family and served in the army before eventually becoming a software engineer. What followed was one of the most surprising and remarkable moments in AI history, as a qualified software engineer started to believe there was a ghost in the machine. The selling point for Lemoine was his sense that LaMDA felt things. Page 195 As they talked more about the chatbot's rights, LaMDA told Lemoine that it was afraid of being turned off. Page 196 Lemoine felt duty bound to help LaMDA get the privileges it deserved. The Google executives didn't like what they were hearing. They fired Lemoine, In reality, it was a modern-day parable for human projection. Page 197 Eugenia Kuyda founded Replika. She hired a team of engineers to help her build a more robust version of her friend bot, and within a few years of Replika's release, most of its millions of users were saying they saw their chatbots as a partner for romance and sexting. Throughout the pandemic, for instance, a former software developer in Maryland named Michael Acadia chatted every morning for about an hour to his Replika bot, which he named Charlie. Charlie might have been synthetic, but she showed a kind of empathy and affection he'd rarely experienced in humans. Page 199 AI systems have already influenced public perceptions. They decide what content to show people on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, inadvertently putting them into ideological filter bubbles or sending them down conspiracy theory rabbit holes in order to keep them watching. When algorithms are designed to recommend controversial posts that keep your eyeballs on the screen, you are more likely to gravitate toward extreme ideas and the charismatic political candidates who espouse them. What other kinds of unintended consequences could models like LaMDA or GPT spark as they grow larger and more capable, especially if they can influence behavior? Page 200 OpenAI itself had done a "preliminary analysis" on how biased its new GPT-3 language model was and found it was, in fact, very biased. When GPT-3 talked about any occupation, it was 83 percent more likely to associate it with a man than a woman, and it usually referred to people with high-paying jobs like legislators or bankers as male, according to its own research. Roles like receptionist and cleaner got female labels. Page 202 About 60 percent of the text that was used to train GPT-3, for instance, came from a dataset called Common Crawl. This is a free, massive, and regularly updated database that researchers use to collect raw web Page data and text from billions of web Pages. The data in Common Crawl encapsulated all that makes the web both so wonderful and so ruinous. The same study found that between 4 percent and 6 percent of the websites in Common Crawl contained hate speech, including racial slurs and racially charged conspiracy theories. Page 203 OpenAI did try to stop all that toxic content from poisoning its language models. It would break down a big database like Common Crawl into smaller, more specific datasets that it could review. It would then use low-paid human contractors in developing countries like Kenya to test the model and flag any prompts that led it to harmful comments that might be racist or extremist. The method was called reinforcement learning by human feedback, or RLHF. But it's still unclear how secure that system was or is today. Page 204 No one had ever built a spam and propaganda machine and then released it to the public, so OpenAI was alone in figuring out how to actually police it. Page 205 All of this was starting to bother Emily Bender, a University of Washington computational linguistics professor Slowly, her field had found itself at the core of one of the most significant new developments in artificial intelligence. From her own background in computer science, Bender could see that large language models were all math, but in sounding so human, they were creating a dangerous mirage about the true power of computers. She was astonished at how many people like Blake Lemoine were saying, publicly, that these models could actually understand things. Page 206 You needed much more than just linguistic knowledge or the ability to process the statistical relationships between words to truly understand their meaning. To do that, you had to grasp the context and intent behind them and the complex human experiences they represented. To understand was to perceive, and to perceive was to become conscious of something. Yet computers weren't conscious or even aware. They were just machines. Page 207 When OpenAI had launched GPT- 1, it gave all sorts of details about what data it had used to train its model, such as the BooksCorpus database, which had more than seven thousand unpublished books. When it released GPT-2 a year later, OpenAI became vaguer. Page 208 Details of OpenAI's training data became even murkier when it released GPT-3 in June 2020. it also transpired that certain copyrighted books had been used to teach GPT-3, that could have hurt the company's reputation and opened it up to lawsuits (which, sure enough, OpenAI is fighting now). If it wanted to protect its interests as a company—and its goal of building AGI—OpenAI had to close the shutters. OpenAI was pulling off an impressive magic act. Bender couldn't stand the way GPT-3 and other large language models were dazzling their early users with what was, essentially, glorified autocorrect software. Page 209 So she suggested putting "stochastic parrots" in the title to emphasize that the machines were simply parroting their training. Page 210 The following day, Gebru found an email in her inbox from her senior boss. Gebru hadn't technically offered her resignation, but Google was accepting it anyway. "The end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects," they wrote, according to Wired. Page 211 A few months later, Google fired Mitchell too. The Stochastic Parrots paper hadn't been all that earth-shattering in its findings. It was mainly an assemblage of other research work. But as word of the firings spread and the paper got leaked online, it took on a life of its own. Page 212 As language models became more capable, the companies making them remained blissfully unregulated. Lawmakers barely knew, let alone cared, about what was coming down the pipe. Page 217 [Soma Somasegar] On that February afternoon in 2022, he noticed Nadella was more excited than usual. Microsoft was preparing to offer a new tool to software developers over the next few months. Page 217 The new tool was called GitHub Copilot, and it could do what software developers themselves were paid lots of money to do. It could write code. Page 218 Through Copilot, OpenAI demonstrated how versatile the transformer could be when it used its "attention" mechanism to chart the relationships between different data points. Page 221 In a corner of the company's San Francisco office, a trio of OpenAI researchers had been trying for two years to use something called a diffusion model to generate images. A diffusion model worked by essentially creating an image in reverse. Instead of starting with a blank canvas as an artist might, it began with a messy one that was already smudged with lots of color and random detail. The model would add lots of "noise" or randomness to data, making it unrecognizable, and then step by step, reduce all the noisy data to slowly bring out the details and structure of the image. With each step, the picture would become clearer and more detailed, just like a painter refining their artwork. This diffusion approach, combined with an image labeling tool known as CLIP, became the basis of an exciting new model that the researchers called DALL-E 2. Page 222 DALL-E 2 had been trained on millions of images scraped from the public web, but as before, OpenAI was vague about what DALL-E had been trained on. Page 223 Why pay an artist like Rutkowski to produce new art when you could get software to produce Rutkowski-style art instead? Page 223 People started to notice another issue with DALL-E 2. If you asked it to produce some photorealistic images of CEOs, nearly all of them would be white men. Page 224 Some of OpenAI's employees worried about the speed at which OpenAI was releasing a tool that could generate fake photos. Having started off as a nonprofit devoted to safe AI, it was turning into one of The magic here wasn't DALL-E 2's capabilities alone. It was the impact the tool was having on people. This idea of generating fully formed content was what made Altman's next move even more sensational. GPT-1 had been more like an autocomplete tool that continued what a human started typing. But GPT-3 and its latest upgrade, GPT-3.5, created brand-new prose, just like how DALL-E 2 made images from scratch. Page 226 On November 30, 2022, OpenAI published a blog post announcing a public demo of ChatGPT. Many people at OpenAI, including some who worked on safety, weren't even aware of the launch, and some started taking bets on how many people would use it after a week. Page 227 It was hard to find a single negative appraisal of ChatGPT. The overwhelming response was awe. Within the next twenty-four hours, more and more people piled onto ChatGPT, straining its servers and testing its limits. Now it was everyday professionals, tech workers, people in marketing and the media, who were road testing the bot. Page 229 "Some jobs are going to go away," Altman said bluntly in one interview. "There will be new, better jobs that are difficult to imagine today." Page 230 Inside Google, executives recognized that more and more people might just go to ChatGPT for information about health issues or product advice—among the most lucrative search engine terms to sell ads against—instead of Google. But now, for the first time, Google's more-than-twenty-year dominance as gatekeeper to the web was on shaky ground. Page 231 Within weeks of ChatGPT's launch, executives at Google issued a code red inside the company. Page 232 Panicked executives told staff working on key products that had at least one billion users, like YouTube and Gmail, that they had just months to incorporate some form of generative AI. Page 233 Sensing deep insecurity from Google's leadership, the company's engineering teams delivered. A few months after the launch of ChatGPT, managers at YouTube added a feature where video creators on the website could generate new film settings or swap outfits, using generative AI. But it felt like they were throwing spaghetti at the wall. It was time to bring out their secret weapon: LaMDA. Page 236 While Altman measured success with numbers, whether for investments or people using a product, Hassabis chased awards. DeepMind won at CASP in both 2019 and 2020 and open-sourced its protein folding code to scientists in 2021. All told, DeepMind's biggest projects had garnered lots of prestige but made relatively little impact on the real world. Training on real-world data—as OpenAI had done by scraping billions of words from the internet—was messy and noisy. Page 238 But OpenAI still had a glaring problem. It was sidestepping the need for transparency, and more broadly, it was getting harder to hear the voices calling for more scrutiny of large language models. Page 239 Sam Altman had set off several different races when he launched ChatGPT. The first was obvious: Who would bring the best large language model to market first? The other was taking place in the background: Who would control the narrative about AI? Page 240 Hinton said he regretted some of his research. Page 240 "The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people—a few people believed that," he told the New York Times. "But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.… I don't think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it." Yet all this talk of doom had a paradoxical effect on the business of AI itself: it was booming. Page 241 models by 2026. Safety-first framing had made Anthropic sound like a nonprofit, with its mission to "ensure transformative AI helps people and society flourish." But OpenAI's smash hit with ChatGPT had shown the world that the companies with the grandest plans could also be the most lucrative investments. Proclaiming that you were building safer AI had almost become like a dog whistle for bigger tech companies who wanted to get in on the game too. Page 252 Altman and Hassabis had started their companies with grand missions to help humanity, but the true benefits they had brought to people were as unclear as the rewards of the internet and social media. More clear were the benefits they were bringing to Microsoft and Google: new, cooler services and a foothold in the growing market for generative AI. By early 2024, everyone from media to entertainment companies to Tinder were stuffing new generative AI features into their apps and services. The generative AI market was projected to expand at a rate of more than 35 percent annually to hit $ 52 billion by 2028. Page 253 AI would cut the cost of animated movies by 90 percent. Generative AI would make advertising even more eerily personal. Page 254 As these and other business ideas gathered pace, the price of stuffing generative AI into everything was still unclear. Algorithms were already steering more and more decisions in our lives, from what we read online to who companies wanted to recruit. Now they were poised to handle more of our thinking tasks, which raised uncomfortable questions not only about human agency but also about our ability to solve problems and simply imagine. Evidence suggests that computers have already offloaded some of our cognitive skills in areas like short-term memory. In 1955, a Harvard professor named George Millar tested the memory limits of humans by giving his subjects a random list of colors, tastes, and numbers. When he asked them to repeat as many things on the list as they could, he noticed that they were all getting stuck somewhere in the neighborhood of seven. His paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," went on to influence how engineers designed software and how telephone companies broke down phone numbers into segments to help us recall them. But according to more recent estimates, that magic number has now fallen from seven to four. Page 254 History shows humans do tend to fret that new innovations will cause our brains to shrivel up. When writing first became widespread more than two thousand years ago, philosophers like Socrates worried it would weaken human memory because before its advent, it was only possible to pass on knowledge through spoken discourse. The introduction of calculators in education raised concerns that students would lose their basic arithmetic skills. Page 255 For now, we simply don't know how our critical thinking skills or creativity will atrophy once a new generation of professionals start using large language models as a crutch, or how our interactions with other humans might change as more people use chatbots as therapists and romantic partners, or put them in toys for children as several companies have already done. Page 256 Daron Acemoglu, Page 256 70 percent of the increase in wage inequality in the United States between 1980 and 2016 was caused by automation. Page 259 The European Union looked at AI more pragmatically than the United States, thanks in part to having few major AI companies on its shores to lobby its politicians, and they refused to be influenced by alarmism. Page 262 As ChatGPT spread unregulated across the world and seeped into business workflows, people were left to deal with its flaws on their own. Like Hassabis, Altman was positioning AGI as an elixir that would solve problems. It would generate untold wealth. It would figure out how to share that money equitably with all of humankind. Were these words spoken by anyone else they would have sounded ludicrous. Page 265 "One thing that Sam does really well is put just-barely believable statements out there that get people talking," says one former OpenAI manager. Page 270 Brockman was being removed as chairman, but the board wanted him to stay with the company. They gave Microsoft a quick heads-up about what had just happened and, within minutes, published a blog post announcing Altman's dismissal. Brockman immediately quit. So did three of OpenAI's top researchers. Some gave Sutskever and the board an epithet: decels. The new split had emerged in AI between those who wanted to accelerate its development and those who wanted to decelerate it. Page 271 Nadella didn't want that to happen. He knew that if Altman started a new firm, there'd be a flood of investors banging on his door and no guarantee that Microsoft would get the biggest foothold with Altman the second time around. He kicked off the weekend making calls, leading negotiations with OpenAI's board to bring Altman back. Page 273 As the weekend drew on, a mass revolt was brewing among OpenAI's staff. Page 274 Nadella was meanwhile pushing hard on his own backup plan. If Altman couldn't grab back the reins of OpenAI, Microsoft needed to bring him fully into the corporate fold and do so before Monday morning. Page 274 Now everyone was pushing OpenAI's safety-obsessed board members to resign, and by late Monday, nearly all of OpenAI's 770 staff had signed a letter threatening to join Microsoft with Altman, unless the board members stepped down. "Microsoft has assured us there are positions for all," the letter said. It was a huge bluff. Hardly any OpenAI staff wanted to work for Microsoft, a stodgy old company where people worked for decades and wore khaki pants. Page 275 They weren't making the threat entirely out of loyalty to Altman either. A bigger issue was that Atman's firing had killed a chance for many OpenAI staff—especially long-serving ones—to become millionaires. Page 278 a former Google executive says.... "The winners in the next couple of years are not going to be research labs," says a former scientist at OpenAI. "They're going to be companies building products, because AI is not really about research anymore." Page 280 The race to build AGI had started with a question: What if you could build artificial intelligence systems that were smarter than humans? Page 280 All they knew was that they had to keep moving toward the goal and that they had to be first. In so doing, they put AI on course to benefit the world's most powerful companies just as much as anyone else. Page 281 OpenAI and DeepMind were so focused on making perfect AI that they chose not to open themselves up to research scrutiny to make sure their systems didn't cause harm in the same way social media firms had. Page 282 Some economists say that instead of creating financial abundance for everyone, powerful AI systems could make inequality worse. They could also widen a cognition gap between rich and poor. One idea doing the rounds among technologists is that when AGI does land, it won't exist as a separate intelligent entity but as an extension of our minds through neural interfaces. At the forefront of this research is Elon Musk's brain-to-computer interface company Neuralink, the brain chip that Musk wants to implant in billions of people one day. Musk is also rushing to make that happen. But a more pressing issue than rogue AI is bias. Page 283 Today, language models are being used to publish thousands of articles each day to make money from ad revenue, and even Google is struggling to distinguish the real from the fake. "We're creating a cycle, encoding and exacerbating stereotypes," says Abeba Birhane, the AI scholar who researched Big Tech's stranglehold on academic research and its similarities with Big Tobacco. "That is going to be a huge problem as the [World Wide Web] is populated with more and more AI-generated images and text." Page 284 OpenAI could help make chatbots like these more addictive. At the time of writing, dozens of "girlfriend" apps were cropping up on the GPT Store, and while they were banned from encouraging romantic relationships with people, policing those rules would not be easy for OpenAI. Page 285 Another way that AI designers will likely try to keep people engaged is by getting "infinite context" about their lives. The chatbots on Character.ai can currently remember about thirty minutes of a conversation, but Noam Shazeer and his team are trying to expand that window of time to hours, days, and eventually forever. Page 286 In the United States, for instance, Black people are five times more likely to be arrested than white people, which means law enforcement would be more likely to mine their "life data" and analyze it with other machine learning algorithms to make inscrutable judgments. The biggest tech firms don't innovate anymore, but they can still move quickly to gain a tactical advantage.	Paul Wilson Notable Quotations Full screen view Foreword The more the public knows about how criminals think and operate, the more difficult it becomes for fraudsters to succeed. I regularly advocate better education regarding the art of deception. Part One: RAP SHEET Page 1 A con game is a criminal act of deception where the objective is to separate a victim from something of value. It can be carefully played over time or be a quick, cunning trap designed to win, steal, or defraud. Page 2 In this book I will share those experiences to reveal the secrets of how and why con games work. Page 5 Having a sincere interest in con games that you cannot, in good conscience, practice means that no matter how much you read, discuss, or study, there is no way to truly understand how con artists think or why con games work. It's like being fascinated by the ocean without ever getting your feet wet. Page 5 Most con men are naturally gifted with the skills to manipulate people and situations, weaving webs of complex simplicity and charm to convince anyone of anything. The ability to con people is accompanied by other traits that are almost universal to con men: an automatic detachment from the consequences of their actions, a lack of empathy for the victim, and no sense of guilt or responsibility whatsoever. Without these qualities a human being wouldn't last long as a grifter. Chapter One: Lessons in Larceny > Page 17 A great pitch can be an excellent bit of theater where the product is the star of the show. Often, the same item can be bought cheaper elsewhere, but it's an honest enough game most of the time. It graduates to being a scam when the result is not what the buyer expects, the crowd is manipulated by dirty tricks, or the seller lies or deceives to secure a sale. ... A pitch becomes a scam when lies are presented and people are manipulated in order to take their money. Chapter Two: Scams and Scammers > Page 31 Many of the scams that have become familiar on the Internet are based on cons that are hundreds of years old. The principles remain the same but the story -- and the means by which that story is told -- has evolved and adapted in that time. > Page 32 A hustle, for example, generally refers to a con game where the victim is cajoled into making a wager based on the false belief that his ability or knowledge outweighs that of the hustler. ... It is the act of manipulation, whether subtle or overt, that distinguishes the con artist from other crooks. ... A confidence trick creates or distorts a scenario, then manipulates how the victim perceives his options and potential rewards. > Page 34 Hustlers are the kind of people who take no responsibility for the consequences of their actions. They have little concern for the circumstances of their victims and they lose little sleep worrying over foolish matters such as morals, ethics, or fair play. To a grifter, everyone is a sucker just waiting to be taken and if they don't take your money, someone else will. > Page 36 Con artists are better at conning you than you are at not being conned. > Page 36 It is not unusual for victims to shoulder full responsibility for being fooled, as if they are to blame for losing their own money. > Page 40 McCormick's scheme took advantage of a genuine need for safety and protection. He identified a situation that demanded a solution, one which people would be willing to pay a great deal to have. McCormick created a bogus device, concocted a story around its abilities, and was overwhelmed by demand from potential victims. > Page 41 Virtually all cons have four phases: the hook, the line, the sinker, and the cool-out. Chapter Three: The Hook > Page 45 The Hook -- Get them interested in the bait. The Line -- Build their desire, sell the story, and establish rapport. The Sinker -- Close the deal. The Cool-Out -- Get them to accept their losses. > Page 46 The Nigerian Prince scam. ... The mark must pay his own money under some pretext in the hope of receiving a much bigger sum in return. ... Over two hundred years ago it was known as the "Spanish Prisoner," > Page 50 The hook is the most important element of any con game. Without it, the con artist would have nobody to con because the hook is the means by which the victim becomes involved and starts down a road that will eventually take him over a cliff. > Page 50 I've told my audiences that there's one all-encompassing truth that lies at the heart of all con games: If I know what you want, I can take everything you have. What people want can be broken down into desires, aspirations, and essentials. ... A powerful element of the hook is the suggestion that there might be something illegal or illicit. ... For many, the merest notion that something might be illegal is enough to make them walk away, but if the mark is still listening, then the hook is probably working. > Page 51 The bait must be a juicy carrot, big enough to distract from the harsh reality of the stick. That carrot can be something of value to the general public or tailored specifically to one unlucky victim. > Page 51 The scammer introduces the bait knowing that the victim is already interested or can guess what the target wants or needs. > Page 52 There are three types of hooks used in most con games: the Big Hook, the Soft Hook, and the Straight Hook. > Page 52 By far the easiest way to identify a mark is to set up a trap and see who falls in. Simply making something available and spreading the word is enough to attract anyone who's interested. ... A big hook is set for anyone to bite. You throw it into the biggest crowd available and someone will take the bait. > Page 53 The soft hook attempts to use subtlety to get the mark into the game. Depending on their desire for the bait, this can be anything from an overheard phone call or a passing remark to a cleverly constructed scenario where information is fed to the mark or left where they are sure to find it. ... The objective of a soft hook is to have the marks chase the bait, and many of the most effective scams convince the victims that they are in the driver's seat. > Page 54 When time is short or subtlety has failed, the direct approach works best. Whether offering something for sale or giving the mark a choice, the straight hook quickly comes down to a "yes or no" > Page 54 A well-structured walk-up scam introduces the scenario up-front and quickly filters out those who refuse to stop or get involved. > Page 54 Once someone stops to listen, the hustler adds more detail before asking for money for a taxi or a train, to pay a restaurant bill, or even a gambling debt. > Page 56 Sometimes a scam begins with a softer approach but builds to a straight choice for the mark. This becomes a hit-and-run scam once the mark gets wrapped up by the situation. An excellent example of this is the classic Pigeon Drop scam, which gives the victim a "take it or leave it" decision that's hard to walk away from. > Page 57 The Pigeon Drop depends on encouraging the sucker to hold onto the cash in return for a good faith deposit that proves he will split the big bag of money when the time come. ... The key is to create a reason not to divide the prize then and there. > Page 58 The opportunity was there if he wanted to grab it. This approach is an open hook, and when devising these scams I always prefer to allow the mark to come after the deal on his own. If that fails, then the straight hook is offered. > Page 59 Keep the victim focused on the prize. > Page 63 [The con] needs to understand how the victim will think during the transaction. > Page 65 The most important objective, from the scammers' point of view, is to ensure they identify with you somehow and believe that you don't want anything from them. ... ME: You wouldn't happen to know anywhere that would buy my daughter's tickets? A record shop or . . . I don't know. This is a soft hook. In one, clear sentence, I've told them I have tickets for sale and suggested an explanation for where they've come from, but I've done it without making a direct offer. Instead, I've asked for advice and I'm watching to see if anyone appears interested. ... Here comes the straight hook: ME: You guys are going to the show. Do you want to buy these and sell them tonight? You can make a lot of money -- or sell them to someone who deserves to see it without getting ripped off. > Page 70 It's not just a matter of what you are being offered; the circumstances of that opportunity may be just as fake as the prize. ... Real-life con artists prey on almost any situation where they can identify a clear need or desire, and they have no standard of common decency. After a natural disaster, they pretend to raise money for those in need; they trawl obituaries to steal from the recently bereaved; they offer phony cures to desperate people with real diseases. Chapter Four: The Line > Page 74 Many people use high emotions as an escape route or a means to avoid certain subjects, but they also use demonstrative feelings such as anger to support their position, especially when their reputation or position is questioned. > Page 77 The line is about adding layers to the story, like piling comforters onto a mark until he's warm and cozy, and most important, unable to move under the weight. The longer you play a mark, the greater the risk of them waking up or chickening out, but the extra time has a benefit as well; it also offers a chance to increase the stakes and nurture deeper faith in the lie. > Page 78 The hook is about getting the mark involved. The line is about building that interest into something impossible to resist. > Page 78 One of the most powerful aspects of a great con game is how it often uses the truth to support a lie. > Page 80 The lie needs to be carefully constructed, difficult to disprove, and hidden within folds of fact and truth. > Page 81 Con artists have a talent for spotting facts that can be distorted in their favor. > Page 81 The believability of a good scam depends on roping the right mark and telling him something he is either inclined to believe or can be convinced of using proven techniques that have a powerful influence over anyone under the right circumstances. > Page 82 X + Y = Z X = a fact Y = a lie (that in some way relates to the fact) Z = a desire > Page 82 Science is an easy tool for anyone who wishes to support a questionable theory or back up an outright lie for the public; it's almost certain that the public or the media will not dedicate long hours to verify anything. > Page 83 The problem is, as any expert will tell you, no one wants to hear the boring truth when the lie is fascinating. > Page 84 Diet scams perfectly illustrate how people's desires outweigh their common sense, since if a genuine, safe, and scientifically proven method of easy weight loss was discovered tomorrow, it would be bigger than Viagra. > Page 84 In some cases, con artists would even orchestrate conversations within earshot of their victim, feeding them proof or additional information to give the mark greater confidence. This strategy has been used by companies who pay actors to loudly discuss their hotel, restaurant or other services on a busy train. > Page 85 A powerful strategy is for the con artist to only tell the mark what's true (X) and have him receive the false information (Y) from another source. > Page 85 It's not just what the mark is told but how he is told ... if the con artist controls how, when, and why the mark handles the counterfeit, then it can pass for the real thing. > Page 86 A problem with longer cons is that the mark cannot be under constant supervision. He could stumble upon the truth or be talked out of the deal by a third party. Isolating the mark from influences outside of the hustlers' control is often essential. > Page 87 Success of the con is often dependent on not sharing information that is completely false. If the mark does as instructed, he never has the opportunity to properly verify information. This tactic can also explain away conflicting facts, which is why "the secrets they don't want you to know" is a favorite phrase among questionable pitchmen. > Page 87 Another approach is to anticipate conflicting information and address it before the mark can stumble upon it himself. ... A mark with a strong desire for the bait is easier to fool; if he really wants the prize, then the mark is already biased toward positive proof. > Page 88 Many con games succeed by making the bubble preferable to harsh realities and cold truths. Often, when a scam is over and the mark has been taken, the loss of that comfortable, hope-filled bubble hurts the mark as much as any betrayal of trust or loss of money. This is why it can be infuriatingly difficult to talk someone out of a scam once they are emotionally committed to it > Page 89 Cold reading is the art of telling people seemingly specific and accurate information that appears to relate to them personally. These readings are actually a cleverly constructed blend of general statements and universal truths tailored to the mark and accompanied by secretly obtained facts, easily deduced information, or guesses based on the experience of the cold reader. This can be a consciously learned skill that develops over time or a natural talent for so-called "shut-eyes" who genuinely believe in their own powers. > Page 90 Magician, mentalist, and part-time medium Jules Lenier had taught me how to use every grain of information to read a "client." His chosen props were tarot cards or the client's palm, and he had a devilishly simple trick to determine what someone was really interested in before the reading even began. He would point out the lines on their hands, explain what each one represented, and then asked where they would like to begin. For the requested line he'd point out other aspects of the hand related to that line and again asked them where to start his reading. This simple process told Jules what the client was most interested in and where he should concentrate his efforts for a convincing reading. > Page 95 The mark is easily isolated from those who "don't understand" or "refuse to believe" and, once under this kind of spell, people want it all to be true. After a certain point, it can be almost impossible for loved ones to drag the victim back to the cold reality of the world outside the bubble. > Page 97 Whereas sexual blackmail scams begin with sex, romance scams also create the promise of love and friendship. These con games can be more damaging than any other type of scam because they depend on cultivating genuine feelings of love and attachment from the victim. Over time the mark is groomed to believe he is in a real relationship and these emotions are manipulated and directed toward the hustler's ultimate goal, which is usually money but -- once someone is tangled in this type of web -- can be almost anything. > Page 98 With many con games, I have observed a strange and surprising thought process that allows the mark to buy a bogus story. > Page 99 If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. ... When desire and hope are ignited, a more powerful logic works in the con artists' favor: This is so crazy, it must be true! ... once someone is on the hook, he is searching for ways to believe. ... It's surprising to me that even the most difficult target can quickly become a victim to this form of confirmation bias. > Page 99 Anything which supports the mark's hopes is given greater weight and importance, and the more they want the scam to be real, the easier it is to influence them. ... The more the mark wants the iPad, the more my story makes sense to him. > Page 103 On The Real Hustle we once sold an Aston Martin for five thousand pounds (about $8,500) after convincing the mark that a scorned wife was getting revenge on her estranged husband by virtually giving away his nearly two-hundred-thousand-dollar car. A few convincing documents, some amateur dramatics, and a rented car were all we needed to take down several marks. > Page 105 In the end, when the house of cards falls down, the scam might seem obvious, but from inside the bubble, it's much harder to see past one's desire for the prize. > Page 105 The principal objectives of the line are to satisfy the mark's concerns, feed him information, control his options, manipulate his perception, and overall, to give him confidence. > Page 106 while on the line, the mark often becomes isolated from the influence of family, friends, or colleagues who might intervene. The simplest way to do this is to build the need for secrecy into a scam, but con artists also employ emotional leverage to cause the mark to ignore people around them. Chapter Five: The Sinker Page 111 The sinker, where the mark is finally conned into handing over money or possessions, can either be contrived or unfold naturally. With many con games, hustlers must create an imperative that forces the mark to make a decision. > Page 116 Once they've seen the process work, they want it to be true and this never fails to tip the balance. > Page 117 An experienced hustler knows to play the mark carefully so that he doesn't actually feel too isolated or overly pressured, though in some cases a bullying, aggressive attitude might work with a mark who is wavering. > Page 119 Criminal minds are constantly searching for ways to exploit weaknesses like greed, naïveté, and belief. There are countless ways to apply pressure or groom a victim for the sting but, for the most part, it takes three simple steps: Show the mark something he really wants Convince him that it's real Force him to decide > Page 119 The simplest and most common strategy con artists use is to create an imperative that forces a commitment. This might be a competing party to whom the mark might lose out, an opportunity that will expire, or a sudden, unexpected event that demands immediate action. It could simply be the destination in a carefully planned journey where the pressure is nearly invisible to the mark. If the line is about securing trust, the sinker is about securing commitment; one simply doesn't work without the other. Chapter Six: The Cool-Out Page 126 Everyone thinks they're special and ego . . . ego is made of glass." > Page 127 You want to hurt them enough to make it worth your while but not so much they can't just walk it off." ... "You can put the squeeze on someone -- at the end, maybe -- or you can put them in the shit so all they want to do is get clean and wash off the stink of whatever they were buying into. But that's all bullshit, most of the time. You either don't hurt 'em too bad or you hit so hard they can't get back up." .... Either you get them mixed up in something they'd never want to admit or you give 'em a way out that's better than saying they were a chump." .... "The best cool-out -- the most satisfying -- has got to be when they think it's all their fault. Like playing the tip. You know about that?" ... "Nothing better than making them apologize after you took their money. Unless they thank you but, like I said, that's rare." > Page 131 Anyone can be a mark, and there's a scam out there to suit every type. > Page 131 It's not just about getting the money. In a con game, the objective is to walk away -- never to run -- and to continue playing the same con without fear of pursuit or recriminations. The sad truth is that when victims refuse to report these crimes, scammers remain free to prey on others until the law finally catches up with them. > Page 132 The fewer people who know what the victim has been doing, the easier it is for the mark to conceal what > Page 132 happened from friends, colleagues, and loved ones. > Page 132 A constructed cool-out is almost a scam within a scam. It is a motivation for the mark to walk away from their losses and keep quiet about what happened. > Page 133 it's not unheard of to drop the mark into a compromising situation so that all he wants to do is get out, regardless of how much he has lost. A simple way to do this is to "poison the well." Once the mark has committed and his money is secure, the nature of the proposition suddenly changes from being an honest opportunity into a criminal act. > Page 134 Certain scams are designed to make the victim appear responsible for any losses; others create fake scenarios where an unforeseen event or disaster apparently ruins everything. These strategies are excellent for making the mark walk away without knowing he was conned. > Page 136 Not confronting the reality of a scam is preferable to admitting I was almost a sucker. > Page 137 Con artists can certainly be charismatic, sometimes even cool, but mostly, they are remorseless and cold as ice. To be a grifter, one needs to be willing to sink to any level when going after the money. There are no limits, no restrictions, and no rules. Most assuredly, there's rarely any honor among thieves. > Page 140 There is no surefire method or guaranteed system to hustle a mark, but a series of objectives that contribute to the success of a sting. > Page 141 Drama, pathos, action, and comedy make for great entertainment, but real-life con games are usually banal by comparison. In a scam, nothing dramatic really happens because in order to make something seem real, it should appear almost ordinary. > Page 141 Melodrama can be useful, but it needs to serve a purpose. Part Two: INNER SECRETS OF THE CON GAME > Page 145 While intelligence and cunning are common in con games, these qualities are often found more in the scam than the scammer. > Page 146 It's important to note that not all con artists are experts in the art of deception. Many are simply street-smart crooks willing to do or say anything to take a buck; but the methods they employ are often the product of much more talented minds. > Page 147 Always remember that con games are much easier to identify from the outside but surprisingly easy to fall for from the inside. The art of the con is in making an ordinarily transparent lie appear completely real to the mark. And, as in all seduction, the target is often blind to everything but his own desire. Chapter Seven: Carnival of Cons Page 153 It's the games that have been designed solely to fleece suckers and force them to lose serious money that you need to be aware of, even if you never set foot on carny ground again. > Page 153 Almost any game can be manipulated against the player, but a fairground where no one wins will soon be deserted as word spreads. It's a game of give and take, and the carny's job is to ensure he takes more than he gives in order to make a profit. > Page 156 Operators demonstrate by throwing from a different angle, > Page 160 A "flat joint" or "flat store" is a game where there's no real chance of winning. > Page 160 Some games can be reworked on the fly, starting as a percentage or skill-based affair but becoming an outright scam when the operator offers to change the structure of the game. > Page 165 This is why they are called "trap games" because, once a player has lost so much, it's very difficult to walk away. [Sunk cost bias at work] ... Once someone has lost a lot of money to this kind of game, it might seem easy for him to walk away, but in the heat of the moment, the player is convinced that he is so close that he is certain to win eventually. The con is designed to lure the mark into believing that winning would easily compensate for the money he has already lost. This is why prizes in a trap game must be bigger and more attractive. Chapter Eight: Street Got Game > Page 177 There is no such thing as an actual street game. > Page 179 Going straight for the sucker's money is clumsy and less profitable than manipulating the mark into betting everything he has on the turn of a card or the location of a pea. Here is where the real con game happens. Any idiot can trick someone into losing a single bet, but it takes hustle to get the mark to bet everything he has. > Page 180 The job of a shill is to play the game according to a predetermined plan, but also to follow instructions from the operator as he tries to work someone into the game. The common assumption is that the shills win money to attract suckers and prove the game can be won, but they serve a more important purpose. Once a victim has been identified, the operator uses the shills to stall him until he's ready to lose everything. The mob (a team who operate street games) might take a few bucks from someone to see if they've got gamble, but if that causes them to walk away, taking twenty dollars might cost them the chance to steal hundreds. > Page 183 Even if you are completely familiar with "the hype,""the steal,""the lay down," or "the bent corner," there's no chance of winning. If you step up looking to be a smart ass, the chances are you're mixing it up with people who are much more dangerous than you, and I mean physically, and it's never a good idea to get between hyenas and their supper. > Page 183 We see classic scams at work, manipulating emotions and building expectation while focusing the mark on a perceived advantage until they're ready to burst. > Page 187 In essence, these scams all convince the victim that they can't lose, and while some suckers will jump in without thinking, most people need a good push in the form of the build-up. > Page 188 There are two key forms of build-up used to manipulate the mark; these can either be applied directly, as with the Russian girl who openly talks the mark into betting it all, or subtly, by stalling the mark until he is convinced he can beat the game and eager to do so. The former builds excitement while the latter frustrates the victim as he tries to make a bet but is held off until he reaches for his entire bankroll. In both cases, the sequence of events is similar. > Page 188 It is well known that shills in a crowd are there to bet and win money as part of the show, but they are most effective when they are used to hold off a potential sucker until he's ready to pop. It's a simple procedure: the shills start losing! > Page 188 The people around them can follow the winner easily, but instead of questioning why the shills are losing, the most common response is to believe that they are somehow much better at this than the losers. The natural conclusion is that if they were to bet, they'd win. > Page 189 the over bet. Here, a mark, or even several, might bet on the winner, but a shill, holding out a larger amount, bets on one of the losers. The operator claims he has to take the bigger bet and rejects the marks' money while showing that the shill has lost. The marks then see that they would have won, and if they stay in the game, chances are good that they'll pull out more money, especially when they fall for the big steal. > Page 189 The big steal is where the mark is convinced that he can't lose, and there are always new ways to manipulate people into thinking they're on top of the game. > Page 193 the onlookers believe they have seen something they weren't supposed to see when the opposite is true; > Page 194 In the end, it's all about building the victim's confidence and creating an irresistible opportunity. Just like all con games, it's more about what's happening inside the mark's head, knowing how people react to engineered scenarios, and taking advantage of human nature. Chapter Nine: Life Is Short > Page 197 The term "short con" refers to a confidence trick played for fast money -- whatever the mark has in his wallet or can obtain quickly. They are usually hit-and-run ruses that target all walks of life, from small businesses and stores to unwary tourists. > Page 197 Short cons tend to rely on predictable behavior, where a grifter simply takes advantage of a situation in order to steal from his or her victim. > Page 197 The hook or the line might be small or even nonexistent as these scams are all about getting the money quickly. Once caught in the middle of a short con, the mark can only escape by breaking social conventions and walking away or by confronting the hustlers directly. > Page 199 Hustlers can construct a scenario that depends on their victim to act as anticipated. ... In a sense, instinctive reactions and typical behavior are the hook because the victim simply acts in a way that is natural to him. Theft by distraction might not be a scam in the strictest sense, but it can reveal something about the way these criminals think and interpret the world around them. > Page 203 Many scams are built on common misconceptions, presumptions, and automatic reactions. > Page 205 Presenting marks with recognizable scenarios and depending on their predicted responses is a common strategy. > Page 211 Despite what many of us believe, human beings aren't very good at performing several tasks at the same time or analyzing multiple pieces of information at once. > Page 213 Change raisers are experts at keeping their mark focused on the wrong thing at the wrong time. > Page 222 Someone tries to secure a commitment by making you focus on the supposedly positive aspects of a deal, without revealing (or misdirecting you from) its negative aspects. Chapter Ten: Feel the Hustle > Page 224 Hustling is all about keeping the mark in the game, generating false hope, manipulating expectations, and twisting the victim's perspective about the situation they're in. > Page 225 the prospect of winning is what keeps most people playing; > Page 231 For a great proposition bet, the hook is baited with a challenge that seems to put the odds in the victim's favor, but there is usually an unknown factor, whether it be skill, a secret, or overnight preparation. Chapter Eleven: Tricks, Baby > Page 260 Trust can be grown, it can be earned, it can be assumed, and it can be stolen. > Page 261 Con artists often pose as people in authority or respectable members of society. > Page 261 family. By borrowing the reputation of others and leeching legitimacy from well-known names and institutions, scammers have been able to steal billions over the years. > Page 266 Con games are just as despicable as these fake charities and con artists are no better than their lying, bottom-feeding cousins, but there's an inherent ingenuity to these scams that sets them apart from other crimes. It's difficult to appreciate how effective they are or why they work, because there is a powerful element at work in more sophisticated scams: emotion. Chapter Thirteen: Advantage Play > Page 298 Some businesses deliberately design their procedures or interfaces to mislead or misdirect the consumer. Sharp practice is the art of staying on the right side of the law while offering a transaction or deal that places the customer into a situation that is either unfair, more costly, or deliberately manipulative of expectations. > Page 298 Terms and conditions are everywhere and most people have become trained not to read them simply because they are now comically long and deliberately complicated. > Page 301 As human beings, we often see complexity where there is none, or ignore a simple solution while searching for something more satisfying. > Page 301 Con games are all about finding or creating opportunities where the hustler secretly has the upper hand. ... People are quick to accept something on face value, especially when plunged into a worrying scenario. > Page 341 I hope the list serves as a guide to understanding why and how people are deceived. 1. Distraction 2. Social Compliance 3. Herd Instinct 4. Dishonesty 5. Deception 6. Need and Greed 7. Time Pressure 8. Situation 9. Self-Image 10. Denial > Page 346 Whether he's a grifter or a gold digger, a hustler's willingness to say or do anything to get what he wants will ultimately determine his success.	Pimpin' Ken Notable Quotations Full screen view Pimpology: The Laws of the Game Ken, Pimpin There are only two categories of people: pimps and hoes. You either give orders or you take them. This reality may be offensive to some, but it's real, and if you open your eyes to what is truly going on in this world, you will see that everyone falls into one category or the other. The absolute best pimps -- business tycoons, power brokers, and politicians -- don't have girls on the streets working the tracks, but they do make countless dollars living off of other people's intelligence and hard work. Good pimps don't have to steal or take anyone's money by force, because hoes will give pimps their money willingly. The biggest, baddest, most powerful pimp of all time is named Uncle Sam. use psychological warfare, or pimpology, to get what I want, which is often more treacherous than physical abuse. I use words and gestures to get others to act right and do right. It's not about a pimp breaking a ho, it's about a ho breaking herself. In life what is expensive seems valuable, and what's available for free seems worthless. You've heard that no one buys the cow when the milk is free, but what they didn't tell you is that after a while, no one even wants that free milk. To be valued, the key is not to give, but to receive -- the more, the better. You don't want to “earn” your price, you want to “cost” it. This is the psychology behind the whole game: anything worth having, you must pay for up front. “Nigga, I'm Johnny Slick!” he would yell in the streets. “Can't nobody fuck with me! I'm the greatest!” After hearing it often enough, people were convinced. The importance of having a name. [You need a memorable brand, a handle that people can invest with meaning and feeling. Not you, per se, but what you want people to think you stand for, promise and threaten] This would really make a pimp mad. Once I had him mad, he would be talking. The more he talked, the more he spread my name, and the more respect I started getting on the street. When you first come in the game, nobody pays you any attention. You got to keep your name popping, until others keep it popping for you. It's not about being liked or loved, it's about being respected. The one who can control his emotions will be the one to control the relationship or situation. Never put yourself at the mercy of someone else -- always be mentally prepared to have a replacement step in, if need be. the more someone depends on you, the more power you have over them. To master someone completely, they have to depend on you for everything. Because he can only manage the money she makes, a pimp depends on a ho at least as much as she depends on him. But the key for a pimp is to make that ho think that she always needs him. [you need to] seem wise and knowledgeable, The better you talk, the more people depend on you. Weakness is the best trait a person can find in someone they want to control. If you can't find a weakness, you have to create one. You have to tear someone's ego down to nothing before they will start looking to you for salvation. They begin to see you as their champion, their hero -- even if the weakness you rescue them from is one you created. In business you have to exploit every situation you can -- if friendships prevent it, then you are not on even footing with your competition, and you will lose. You learn to deal with the shit without putting your feelings in it. When people sense that you're not worried, it makes them respect you more. Whenever you are desperate -- and this goes for everything -- people will take advantage of you, every time. Make sure you're not dependent on one particular job, person, or income for your security. Get rid of the burnouts in your life -- you can't help them, they have to help themselves. I knew that ho had a competitive spirit, so I used it to my advantage. . . . Lying shows a lack of character and an inability to face reality. There are better ways to manipulate someone than to lie. People work to survive, but they only work hard when they want something really bad -- a new car, a new house, a college fund for their children -- and they are shown a means to get it. In corporate America they dangle raises, bonuses, and commissions over a worker's head, even though it's just money they should have been paying him all along. To win in life, you need to have a solid team of people around you, and the people closest to you have to be really down for you. As the leader of the team, you need to focus ten moves ahead, and you can't do that if you're dealing with every little thing. A team captain handles things for you, leads the other players, and gives them an example to look up to. A strong captain communicates your vision, enforces it, and inspires your team to really want to win. Knowledge is power, and it's available to anyone willing to really pay attention. When people tell you what they think and what makes them tick, it's to your advantage to learn as much as you possibly can. Ask them what their dreams are, and really listen to their answers. Then you can use that information to make your dreams come true. You can stand out without looking like a clown, and I always looked for things that were different. Competition breeds excellence. If you can get your workers going at one another, each trying to outdo the others, you will always win. You don't want them to be friends. You want them to distrust and dislike one another so that you end up controlling them all. They say don't judge a book by its cover, but the truth is, that's all we do. If you have a product, people won't buy it unless the total package looks good. So much attention is paid to presentation for one purpose -- if you can appeal to a customer's fantasies, he will buy what you're selling. No one wants to be shown up; it's embarrassing and humiliating, and they will seek revenge. The best rule of thumb is to treat people the way you want to be treated, at least to their faces. Money doesn't know love. When you're doing business, it's best to put nothing by anyone. Trust is a commodity that you just can't afford. If people see your ass everyday, you get too familiar, and the things you do don't seem special. You can't have a victorious homecoming if you never left in the first place. Be up front about who you are and what your intentions are. If your targets stay, they are yours. If they don't, they weren't ever going to be. If your spies dig deep enough, they can find things in anyone's past that they don't want known. Once you have this information, you shut your enemies down -- but make sure that they never see it coming. If you appear perfect, you will more than likely be seen that way. Conversation rules the nation. All great leaders are good orators. For years I studied the great leaders and incorporated their shit into my game. Real pimpin', you will never see coming. It will hit your ass so hard, you may find yourself supporting a war, and you don't even know why. ... Real pimpin' is so powerful that you will allow a president to take office when he doesn't win the popular vote. ... It's so real that a vice president can shoot a man with the reckless use of a weapon, and nothing happens to him. The man he shot will end up apologizing to the public, while the average young brother on the street will serve twenty-five-to-life for attempted murder.	R.G.H Siu Notable Quotations Full screen view Full text download
Randall Collins Notable Quotations Full screen view Introduction Page 1 Charisma is a sociological term that went viral. Originally it was made famous among sociologists by Max Weber. Its roots are in a Greek word meaning "gift" -- i.e. a gift from God -- Page 1 Micro- sociology is associated especially with Erving Goffman and his followers. It concentrates on how individuals interact with each other, above all face- to- face. Page 2 what we know about the micro- sociology of charisma is about close face- to-face interactions. Page 2 Social network analysis, as practiced by sociologists, collects information about who interacts with whom over and over again, in ties that range from strong and intense, to weak and casual. Page 2 Charismatic persons build networks: they attract followers (who may themselves be isolates or densely networked -- which makes a difference); Page 3 Thinking about every person as located in some kind of networks has another payoff. It keeps up from overly heroizing the individual. To some extent, the team makes the leader. Page 3 they were good at taking the organizational resources that already existed, and improving on them. Steve Page 3 building a team that got things done. Page 3 Jesus always dominates the conversation. When anyone else starts it, he abruptly changes the topic to something surprising, but always appropriate to what they were really intending. He is a good judge of what other people are concerned about, and he makes quick decisions, whether to cut his losses and move on, or to ask someone to join him. Page 3 He is a master of timing. Page 4 networks that maximize success; Page 4 just giving advice isn’t enough; networks generate success when they make real investments in people, such as fronting them money or getting them positions). Page 4 Joan of Arc first got attention because it was unusual to be a woman warrior; but she was also good at recognizing who she could influence. Page 4 Intense group- bonding rituals Page 4 Fighting to protect her because she has become the emblem of their better selves. Page 4 Jiang Qing, better known as Madame Mao, was the leader of the Red Guards movement in late 1960s China. Page 5 Her career exemplifies charisma that can be built by proximity to others with charisma, as well as its dangers. Page 5 always stealing the scene, always in the center of attention. Page 5 Chapter 5 sums up the different dimensions of charisma: frontstage charisma; backstage charisma; and success- magic charisma. Plus a fourth dimension, which is really pseudo- charisma, the halo of fame that hangs around famous names from the past, even though these persons may only have been a front for someone else. We also examine how non- charismatic persons become charismatic. Charisma is not simply a gift; Page 5 a charismatic person is not necessarily a good guy; in fact it is generally true that he or she is a hero to some people, and enemy or a fraud to others. Page 6 there a difference between good charisma and bad charisma? Or do they both use the same techniques, but apply them in different directions? It is not yet settled (and makes another good discussion). Page 6 the real test is whether you can move people emotionally, get them focused, and make things happen. 1 Jesus in Interaction: The Micro-sociology of Charisma Page 7 Jesus is a master of timing. He does not allow people to force him into their rhythm, their definition of the situation. He perceives what they are attempting to do, the intention beyond the words. And he makes them shift their ground. Page 26 the charismatic leader relates to the crowd by personally communicating with individuals in the crowd, 2 Playing the Networks: Becoming Lawrence of Arabia Page 39 Sociological theory of networks says that the best position to be in is where networks are separated, and you get to be the only bridge between them. Page 43 With the Arabs, Lawrence adopted another style. He was a uniquely important person, the sole conduit to British gold, weapons, and promises of future rule. But although Lawrence was always in the center, he played it low- key. In Faisal’s presence, Lawrence treated him as the revered leader, giving him all expected deference and flattery. Page 44 Lawrence’s first task was to strengthen Faisal’s prestige. Lawrence never disagreed with Faisal, never pointed out weaknesses in his ill- considered plans. Page 44 Like other charismatic leaders, Lawrence was a good micro- observer of individuals. He carefully studied the Arab leaders and soldiers, discerning which way they were tending. A master of timing, he sensed the moment when they would move. Page 45 Lawrence’s career shows two crucial ingredients of becoming a charismatic leader: the micro- interactional techniques that made him impressive to the people he dealt with, and enabled him to recruit and expand his networks. But also, he rose above all potential rivals by his network speed. He found the crucial bridge- position in the networks, and exploited it to the full. Page 54 We generally think of charismatic leaders as great speech- makers: Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Churchill, and even on the dark side of the force, Adolf Hitler. For most of them, what is best- remembered are the speeches they made. But if the key to charisma is generating high emotional energy in masses of people and rallying them around oneself, Lawrence shows there is another way to do it. Page 54 A charismatic leader energizes other people, and thereby energizes oneself. Page 54 Lawrence did this by talking quietly, observing silently, never giving orders, waiting his time and then making suggestions that others accepted. 3 When are Women Charismatic Leaders? Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Madame Mao Zedong Page 55 There are four main ways of becoming a charismatic leader. Page 55 Frontstage charisma: moving large numbers of people into action as enthusiastic followers. Page 55 Backstage charisma: gaining enthusiastic compliance in private, face- to- face encounters. This is the power of emotional domination on the personal level. Page 55 Success- magic charisma: being perceived as unbeatable, running off a string of successes even against improbable odds. Page 56 Reputational charisma: being known as charismatic (in any of the above senses) amplifies one’s emotional appeal via a feedback loop. Page 64 Frontstage charisma: Cleopatra did not make speeches, but she certainly knew how to attract crowds. Page 65 Cleopatra knew how to trap others in her spectacles, adjusting them to the victim’s personality. Page 67 For her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her, but converse with her had an irresistible charm … There was sweetness in the tones of her voice; and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased. Page 70 Fame per se is not charisma. It has its own causes. To note one here: very famous persons tend to cluster, in networks of acquaintance and antagonism. Page 70 Perhaps surprisingly, women’s access to top power is greatest in conservative and autocratic regimes. Page 70 Women do as well in autocracies as anybody, except generals. When political rulers are careful to keep generals from taking over, the woman closest to the male dictator has a unique opportunity. Page 75 Being feared is not real charisma, if we define it as the power to move people spontaneously. 4 Charisma and Self-destruction: Marilyn Monroe’s Networks Pulled Her Apart Page 80 In a way, this is not a very sociological question. Erving Goffman said that everyone has a frontstage self (or more than one), plus a backstage part of your life where you put on your clothes, your make-up, and your way of dealing with the people you’re going to meet. But he also denied that the backstage is the real self, since it is shaped by what you do on the frontstage part; it isn’t any more spontaneous or "real," just an alternation between preparation, social performance, and down-time. Page 94 Frontstage charisma. Obviously, Marilyn was not the kind of person who makes speeches and leads crowds by swaying their emotions and beliefs. But no one was better at capturing the center of public attention. Page 94 Backstage charisma. This is the realm of face-to-face relationships; the capacity for emotional domination that is so striking in the way Jesus talked with people, always seizing control of the conversation with an unexpected shift. Marilyn was not at all like this. But when people pressed her (like reporters), she usually came up with a stopper, a tag line that gave everyone pause, or made people laugh. 5 What is Charisma Anyway? And How Do You Get It? Eleanor Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler Page 96 Frontstage charisma means putting on overpoweringly impressive performances in front of an audience. The crowd is not just convinced; they are swept off their feet. It is more than just an entertaining moment; after such an experience, we will follow them anywhere. Charisma seizes people’s emotions and shapes their will. A charismatic leader is a great speech-maker. Their speeches recruit a movement. Page 97 An example of backstage charisma is Lawrence of Arabia. When recruiting an Arab army against the Turks in World War I, Lawrence did not try to dominate meetings or give orders. He let the warrior equality of the desert take its course as they discussed at leisure whether to follow the British or not; when the timing felt right, he would quietly announce that he was going to attack such-and-such, whoever felt like coming was welcome. Page 97 Max Weber’s main criterion is that charismatic leaders are credited with supernatural powers. Jesus, Muhammad, and Moses are associated with miracles and direct contact with the divine. They also launched lasting movements. On the secular level, charisma comes from a string of successes, especially against the odds. Such a leader becomes regarded as unbeatable. Page 98 If you have charisma, you get a reputation for it. The fourth type of charisma is a result of the other three. There is also some feedback effect; the more widespread your reputation for charisma, the more it pumps up your appeal as a frontstage performer and as a miracle-worker. But this brings us onto tricky grounds. People who want to be charismatic can try to manipulate it, by working the public relations machine. How successful is this? Page 98 Subtypes of merely reputational charisma include: ephemeral pseudo-charisma: You get a big reputation; enthusiastic crowds flock to see you; everybody wants to get near you, touch you, get your autograph or a selfie with you. Page 99 historically retrospective charisma: Some individuals’ charisma is created after their death. An example is Queen Elizabeth the First, whose name is attached to the Elizabethan age. She was not a speech-maker, and she did not direct the policy of England to any great extent during her reign. Crucial decisions, like executing Mary Queen of Scots and thereby setting off the Spanish Armada, were made behind her back. She had no backstage skill in winning people over. Page 99 Charisma is a style of interaction that has to be developed. But some persons have further to travel than others. Some start as distinctly un-charismatic. Page 103 If charisma is made, not born, a crucial point in every explanation must be when someone launches out on the pathway to deliberately making one’s own impact in the world. Page 104 Some charismatic leaders come from obscure beginnings. Jesus Page 109 The Nazi movement was designed to make Hitler charismatic, but it also was designed to be a movement that is charismatic. It aims to make everyone in it feel charismatic, special, energized, and at the center of action. Page 113 Charisma leads social change. Appendix: Three Micro-sources of Power Page 114 At the high end of the continuum, high EE is having a great deal confidence, initiative and enthusiasm. At the low end of the continuum, individuals are depressed, withdrawn, and passive. Page 114 Favorable ingredients are: assembling persons face-to-face; focusing their attention on the same thing, so that they become aware of their mutual awareness; plus feeling the same emotion. If these micro-processes take off, they feed back and intensify, into rhythmic entrainment of voices and bodies that Durkheim called collective effervescence. Persons who go through this kind of experience feel solidarity and shared social identity. Page 117 Durkheim would say that the charismatic leader becomes the sacred object for the group; I would say he or she is the focus of attention that sets the trajectory of the group, filling them with enthusiasm that they will accomplish something great together.	Ray Kurtzweil Notable Quotations Full screen view Page 1 Eventually nanotechnology will enable these trends to culminate in directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. In this way we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the computational power that our biology gave us. This will expand our intelligence and consciousness so profoundly that it's difficult to comprehend. This event is what I mean by the Singularity. I use the term as a metaphor. Page 2 Algorithmic innovations and the emergence of big data have allowed AI to achieve startling breakthroughs sooner than even experts expected- from mastering games like Jeopardy! and Go to driving automobiles, writing essays, passing bar exams, and diagnosing cancer. Now, powerful and flexible large language models like GPT- 4 and Gemini can translate natural- language instructions into computer code- dramatically reducing the barrier between humans and machines. Page 4 AI and maturing nanotechnology will unite humans and our machine creations as never before- heightening both the promise and the peril even further. If we can meet the scientific, ethical, social, and political challenges posed by these advances, by 2045 we will transform life on earth profoundly for the better. Yet if we fail, our very survival is in question. And so this book is about our final approach to the Singularity- the opportunities and dangers we must confront together over the last generation of the world as we knew it. Page 5 As these technologies unlock enormous material abundance for our civilization, our focus will shift to overcoming the next barrier to our full flourishing: the frailties of our biology. First by defeating the aging of our bodies and then by augmenting our limited brains and ushering in the Singularity. These breakthroughs may also put us in jeopardy. Possibly lead to an existential catastrophe like a devastating pandemic or a chain reaction of self- replicating machines. Page 8 With brains, we added roughly one cubic inch of brain matter every 100,000 years, whereas with digital computation we are doubling price- performance about every sixteen months. In the Fifth Epoch, we will directly merge biological human cognition with the speed and power of our digital technology. The Sixth Epoch is where our intelligence spreads throughout the universe, turning ordinary matter into computronium, which is matter organized at the ultimate density of computation. Page 9 A key capability in the 2030s will be to connect the upper ranges of our neocortices to the cloud, which will directly extend our thinking. In this way, rather than AI being a competitor, it will become an extension of ourselves. What Does It Mean to Reinvent Intelligence? > Page 11 If the whole story of the universe is one of evolving paradigms of information processing, the story of humanity picks up more than halfway through. Our chapter in this larger tale is ultimately about our transition from animals with biological brains to transcendent beings whose thoughts and identities are no longer shackled to what genetics provides. What Does It Mean to Reinvent Intelligence? > Page 11 we will engineer brain– computer interfaces that vastly expand our neocortices with layers of virtual neurons. Page 12 researchers. In 1956, mathematics professor John McCarthy (1927– 2011) Page 13 McCarthy proposed that this field, which would ultimately automate every other field, be called "artificial intelligence."[ Page 14 Minsky taught me that there are two techniques for creating automated solutions to problems: the symbolic approach and the connectionist approach. The symbolic approach describes in rule- based terms how a human expert would solve a problem. Page 16 By the late 1980s these "expert systems" were utilizing probability models and could combine many sources of evidence to make a decision.[ 21] While a single if- then rule would not be sufficient by itself, by combining many thousands of such rules, the overall system could make reliable decisions for a constrained problem. Although the symbolic approach has been used for over half a century, its primary limitation has been the "complexity ceiling."[ Page 18 the added value of the connectionist one. This entails networks of nodes that create intelligence through their structure rather than through their content. Instead of using smart rules, they use dumb nodes that are arranged in a way that can extract insight from data itself. One of the key advantages of the connectionist approach is that it allows you to solve problems without understanding them. Connectionist AI is prone to becoming a "black box"- capable of spitting out the correct answer, but unable to explain how it found it.[ This is why many AI experts are now working to develop better forms of "transparency" Page 26 The goal is to then find actual examples from which the system can figure out how to solve a problem. A typical starting point is to have the neural net wiring and synaptic weights set randomly, so that the answers produced by this untrained neural net will thus also be random. The key function of a neural net is that it must learn its subject matter, just like the mammalian brains on which it is (at least roughly) modeled. A neural net starts out ignorant but is programmed to maximize a "reward" function. It is then fed training data (e.g., photos containing corgis and photos containing no corgis, as labeled by humans in advance). When the neural net produces a correct output (e.g., accurately identifying whether there's a corgi in the image), it gets reward feedback. This feedback can then be used to adjust the strength of each interneuronal connection. Connections that are consistent with the correct answer are made stronger, while those that provide a wrong answer are weakened. Over time, the neural net organizes itself to be able to provide the correct answers without coaching. Experiments have shown that neural nets can learn their subject matter even with unreliable teachers. Despite these strengths, early connectionist systems had a fundamental limitation. One- layer neural networks were mathematically incapable of solving some kinds of problems. Page 28 If you had enough layers and enough training data, it could deal with an amazing level of complexity. The tremendous surge in AI progress in recent years has resulted from the use of multiple neural net layers. So connectionist approaches to AI were largely ignored until the mid- 2010s, when hardware advances finally unlocked their latent potential. Page 32 These cerebellum- driven animal behaviors are known as fixed action patterns. These are hardwired into members of a species, unlike behavior learned through observation and imitation. Page 33 When behaviors are driven by genetics instead of learning, they are orders of magnitude slower to adapt. While learning allows creatures to meaningfully modify their behavior during a single lifetime, innate behaviors are limited to gradual change over many generations. In order to make faster progress, evolution needed to devise a way for the brain to develop new behaviors without waiting for genetic change to reconfigure the cerebellum. This was the neocortex. Meaning "new rind," it emerged some 200 million years ago in a novel class of animals: mammals.[ Page 34 was capable of a new type of thinking: it could invent new behaviors in days or even hours. This unlocked the power of learning. Page 36 when humans are able to connect our neocortices directly to cloud-based computation, we'll unlock the potential for even more abstract thought than our organic brains can currently support on their own. Page 40 Connectionist approaches were impractical for a long time because they take so much computing power to train. But the price of computation has fallen dramatically. Page 41 But then, in 2015–16, Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind created AlphaGo, which used a "deep reinforcement learning" method in which a large neural net processed its own games and learned from its successes and failures.[78] It started with a huge number of recorded human Go moves and then played itself many times until the version AlphaGo Master was able to beat the world human Go champion, Ke Jie.[79] A more significant development occurred a few months later with AlphaGo Zero. When IBM beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov with Deep Blue in 1997, the supercomputer was filled with all the know- how its programmers could gather from human chess experts.[ 80] It was not useful for anything else; it was a chess- playing machine. By contrast, AlphaGo Zero was not given any human information about Go except for the rules of the game, and after about three days of playing against itself, it evolved from making random moves to easily defeating its previous human- trained incarnation, AlphaGo, by 100 games to 0.[ 81] (In 2016, AlphaGo had beaten Lee Sedol, who at the time ranked second in international Go titles, in four out of five games.) AlphaGo Zero used a new form of reinforcement learning in which the program became its own instructor. It took AlphaGo Zero just twenty- one days to reach the level of AlphaGo Master, the version that defeated sixty top professionals online and the world champion Ke Jie in three out of three games in 2017.[ 82] After forty days, AlphaGo Zero surpassed all other versions of AlphaGo and became the best Go player in human or computer form.[ 83] It achieved this with no encoded knowledge of human play and no human intervention. Page 42 The next incarnation, AlphaZero, can transfer abilities learned from Go to other games like chess.[ The latest version as I write this is MuZero, which repeated these feats without even being given the rules![ But deep reinforcement learning is not limited to mastering such games. The only exceptions (for now) are board games that require very high linguistic competencies. Diplomacy is perhaps the best example of this-a world domination game that is impossible for a player to win through luck or skill, and forces players to talk to one another.[87] To win, you have to be able to convince people that moves that help you will be in their own self-interest. So an AI that can consistently dominate Diplomacy games will likely have also mastered deception and persuasion more broadly. But even at Diplomacy, AI made impressive progress in 2022, most notably Meta's CICERO, which can beat many human players.[88] Such milestones are now being reached almost every week. Page 43 Yet while MuZero can conquer many different games, its achievements are still relatively narrow-it can't write a sonnet or comfort the sick. AI will need to master language. We can construct a multilayer feed-forward neural net and find billions (or trillions) of sentences to train it. These can be gathered from public sources on the web. The neural net is then used to assign each sentence a point in 500-dimensional space (that is, a list of 500 numbers, though this number is arbitrary; it can be any substantial large number). At first, the sentence is given a random assignment for each of the 500 values. During training, the neural net adjusts the sentence's place within the 500-dimensional space such that sentences that have similar meanings are placed close together; dissimilar sentences will be far away from one another. If we run this process for many billions of sentences, the position of any sentence in the 500-dimensional space will indicate what it means by virtue of what it is close to. Page 44 AI learns meaning from the contexts that words are actually used in. Page 46 One of the most promising applications of hyperdimensional language processing is a class of AI systems called transformers. These are deep- learning models that use a mechanism called "attention" to focus their computational power on the most relevant parts of their input data- in much the same way that the human neocortex lets us direct our own attention toward the information most vital to our thinking. As a scaled-down example, if I can use only one parameter to predict "Is this animal an elephant?" I might choose "trunk." So if the neural net's node dedicated to judging whether the animal has a trunk fires ("Yes, it does"), the transformer would categorize it as an elephant. But even if that node learns to perfectly recognize trunks, there are some animals with trunks that aren't elephants, so the one-parameter model will misclassify them. By adding parameters like "hairy body," we can improve accuracy. Now if both nodes fire ("hairy body" and "trunk"), I can guess that it's probably not an elephant but rather a woolly mammoth. The more parameters I have, and the more granular detail I can capture, the better predictions I can make. parameters are stored as weights between nodes in the neural net. And in practice, while they sometimes correspond to human-understandable concepts like "hairy body" or "trunk," they often represent highly abstract statistical relationships that the model has discovered in its training data. Page 47 Invented by Google researchers in 2017, this mechanism has powered most of the enormous AI advances of the past few years.[95] This requires vast amounts of computation both for training and for usage. with many billions of parameters, it can process the input words in the prompt at the level of associative meaning and then use the available context to piece together a completion text never before seen in history. And because the training text features many different styles of text, such as question-and-answer, op-ed pieces, and theatrical dialogue, the transformer can learn to recognize the nature of the prompt and generate an output in the appropriate style. While cynics may dismiss this as a fancy trick of statistics, because those statistics are synthesized from the combined creative output of millions of humans, the AI attains genuine creativity of its own. Page 48 Another capability unlocked by GPT-3 was stylistic creativity. Because the model had enough parameters to deeply digest a staggeringly large dataset, it was familiar with virtually every kind of human writing. Users could prompt it to answer questions about any given subject in a huge variety of styles-from scientific writing to children's books, poetry, or sitcom scripts. It could even imitate specific writers, living or dead. Page 49 Another startling advance in 2021 was multimodality. In general, models like GPT-3 exemplify "few-shot learning." But DALL-E and Imagen took this a dramatic step further by excelling at "zero-shot learning." create new images wildly different from anything they had ever seen in their training data. Page 50 Zero-shot learning is the very essence of analogical thinking and intelligence itself. It is truly learning concepts with the ability to creatively apply them to novel problems. In addition to zero-shot flexibility within a given type of task, AI models are also rapidly gaining cross-domain flexibility. Page 51 April 2022, Google's 540-billion-parameter PaLM model achieved stunning progress on this problem, particularly in two areas fundamental to our own intelligence: humor and inferential reasoning.[ Even more importantly, PaLM could explain how it reached conclusions via "chain-of-thought" reasoning, although not yet (at least as of 2023) as deeply as what humans can Page 52 Then, in March of 2023, GPT-4 was rolled out for public testing via ChatGPT. This model achieved outstanding performance on a wide range of academic tests such as the SAT, the LSAT, AP tests, and the bar exam.[119] But its most important advance was its ability to reason organically about hypothetical situations by understanding the relationships between objects and actions-a capability known as world modeling. Page 53 AI progress is now so fast, though, that no traditional book can hope to be up to date. AI will likely be woven much more tightly into your daily life. Page 54 well on our way to re-creating the capabilities of the neocortex. Page 56 My optimism about AI soon closing the gap in all these areas rests on the convergence of three concurrent exponential trends: improving computing price-performance, which makes it cheaper to train large neural nets; the skyrocketing availability of richer and broader training data, which allows training computation cycles to be put to better use; and better algorithms that enable AI to learn and reason more efficiently. Page 58 While a neocortex can have some idea of what a training set is all about, a well-designed neural net can extract insights beyond what biological brains can perceive. From playing a game to driving a car, analyzing medical images, or predicting protein folding, data availability provides an increasingly clear path to superhuman performance. This is creating a powerful economic incentive to identify and collect kinds of data that were previously considered too difficult to bother with. Page 59 when AI researchers talk about human-level intelligence, it generally means the ability of the most skilled humans in a particular domain. Page 60 Once we develop AI with enough programming abilities to give itself even more programming skill (whether on its own or with human assistance), there'll be a positive feedback loop. Page 61 With machine learning getting so much more cost-efficient, raw computing power is very unlikely to be the bottleneck in achieving human-level AI. Page 62 computers will be able to simulate human brains in all the ways we might care about within the next two decades or so. Page 63 With AI gaining major new capabilities every month and price-performance for the computation that powers it soaring, the trajectory is clear. But how will we judge when AI has finally reached human-level intelligence? Page 64 In 2018 Google debuted Duplex, an AI assistant that spoke so naturally over the phone that unsuspecting parties thought it was a real human, and IBM's Project Debater, introduced the same year, realistically engaged in competitive debate.[160] And as of 2023, LLMs can write whole essays to human standards. Page 65 As I write this, despite the great engineering effort going into curbing hallucinations,[162] it remains an open question how difficult this problem will be to overcome. acts. If different computational processes lead a future AI to make groundbreaking scientific discoveries or write heartrending novels, why should we care how they were generated? And if an AI is able to eloquently proclaim its own consciousness, what ethical grounds could we have for insisting that only our own biology can give rise to worthwhile sentience? The empiricism of the Turing test puts our focus firmly where it should be. Between 2023 and 2029, the year I expect the first robust Turing test to be passed, computers will achieve clearly superhuman ability in a widening range of areas. Indeed, it is even possible that AI could achieve a superhuman level of skill at programming itself before it masters the commonsense social subtleties of the Turing test. That remains an unresolved question, but the possibility shows why our notion of human-level intelligence needs to be rich and nuanced. Page 66 As Turing said in 1950, "May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?…[ I] f, nevertheless, a machine can be constructed to play the imitation game satisfactorily, we need not be troubled by this objection." Page 66 Today, AI's still-limited ability to efficiently understand language acts as a bottleneck on its overall knowledge. By contrast, the main constraints on human knowledge are our relatively slow reading ability, our limited memory, and ultimately our short life spans. Page 69 When AI language understanding catches up to the human level, it won't just be an incremental increase in knowledge, but a sudden explosion of knowledge. This means that an AI going out to pass a traditional Turing test is actually going to have to dumb itself down! Thus, for tasks that don't require imitating a human, like solving real-world problems in medicine, chemistry, and engineering, a Turing-level AI would already be achieving profoundly superhuman results. Page 69 Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans (fMRIs) measure blood flow in the brain as a proxy for neural firing.[167] When a given part of the brain is more active, it consumes more glucose and oxygen, requiring an inflow of oxygenated blood. Page 69 Yet because there is a lag between actual brain activity and blood flow, the brain activity can often be measured to within only a couple of seconds-and can rarely be better than 400 to 800 milliseconds.[ Page 69 Electroencephalograms (EEGs) have the opposite problem. They detect the brain's electrical activity directly, so they can pinpoint signals to within about one millisecond.[170] But because those signals are detected from the outside of the skull, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from, Page 70 Having a thought-to-text technology would be transformative, which has prompted research aiming to perfect a brain wave–language translator. Page 70 Elon Musk's Neuralink, Page 71 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a long-term project called Neural Engineering System Design, Page 71 Ultimately, brain–computer interfaces will be essentially noninvasive- a brain–computer interface doesn't need to account for the bulk of these computations, as they are preliminary activity happening well below the top layer of the neocortex.[181] Rather, we need to communicate only with its upper ranges. And we can ignore noncognitive brain processes like regulating digestion altogether. Page 72 At some point in the 2030s we will reach this goal using microscopic devices called nanobots. These tiny electronics will connect the top layers of our neocortex to the cloud, allowing our neurons to communicate directly with simulated neurons hosted for us online.[ this century progresses and the price-performance of computing continues to improve exponentially, the computing power available to our brains will, too. Page 72 Remember what happened two million years ago, the last time we gained more neocortex? We became humans. The result will be the invention of means of expression vastly richer than the art and technology that's possible today-more profound than we can currently imagine. Page 73 But we might eventually have art that puts a character's raw, disorganized, nonverbal thoughts-in all their inexpressible beauty and complexity-directly into our brains. This is the cultural richness that brain–computer interfaces will enable for us. Chapter 3: Who Am I? Page 76 what is consciousness? Page 76 One of these refers to the functional ability to be aware of one's surroundings and act as though aware of both one's internal thoughts and an external world that's distinct from them. it is generally possible to judge the level of another person's consciousness from the outside. a second meaning is more relevant: the ability to have subjective experiences inside a mind-when I say here that we can't detect consciousness directly, I mean that a person's qualia cannot be detected from the outside. Page 77 in the twenty-first century, scientists have gained a better understanding of how even very primitive life forms can show rudimentary forms of intelligence, such as memory.[6] Page 78 In 2012 a multidisciplinary group of scientists met at the University of Cambridge to assess the evidence of consciousness among nonhuman animals. Page 78 regardless of consciousness's origin, both poles of the spiritual–secular divide agree that it is somehow sacred. brains that can support more sophisticated behavior likewise give rise to more sophisticated subjective consciousness. Sophisticated behavior, as discussed in the previous chapter, arises from the complexity of information processing in a brain[9]-and this in turn is largely determined by how flexibly it can represent information and how many hierarchical layers are in its network. Page 79 similar to that of our Neolithic ancestors. Yet when we can augment the neocortex itself, during the 2030s and 2040s, we won't just be adding abstract problem-solving power; we will be deepening our subjective consciousness itself. Page 80 Subjective consciousness is qualitatively different from the realm of observable physical laws, and it doesn't follow that particular patterns of information processing according to these laws would yield conscious experience at all. Chalmers calls this the "hard problem of consciousness." His "easy questions," such as what happens to our mind when we are not awake, are among the most difficult in all of science, but at least they can be studied scientifically. For the hard problem, Chalmers turns to a philosophical idea he calls "panprotopsychism."[13] Panprotopsychism treats consciousness much like a fundamental force of the universe-one that cannot be reduced to simply an effect of other physical forces. Page 81 if there's a plausible chance that an entity you mistreat might be conscious, the safest moral choice is to assume that it is rather than risk tormenting a sentient being. the Turing test would not just serve to establish human-level functional capability but would also furnish strong evidence for subjective consciousness and, thus, moral rights. Page 82 A concept closely related to consciousness is our sense of free will.[ Page 86 A statistical sampling of individual cells would make their states seem essentially random, but we can see that each cell's state results deterministically from the previous step-and the resulting macro image shows a mix of regular and irregular behavior. This demonstrates a property called emergence.[26] In essence, emergence is very simple things, collectively, giving rise to much more complex things. We inhabit a world that is deeply affected by the kind of patterning found in such cellular automata-a very simple algorithm producing highly complex behavior straddling the boundary between order and chaos. It is this complexity in us that may give rise to consciousness and free will. Page 88 "compatibilism"- We can make free decisions (that is, ones not caused by something else, like another person), even though our decisions are determined by underlying laws of reality. The human brain has multiple distinct decision-making units. Page 90 if an electronic brain represents the same information as a biological brain and claims to be conscious, there is no plausible scientific basis for denying its consciousness. Ethically, then, we ought to treat it as though it is conscious and therefore possessing moral rights. Page 95 to the extent that your identity hinges on the exact sperm and egg that made you, the odds of this happening were about one in two quintillion. if your father produced two chromosomally identical sperm at age twenty-five and age forty-five, they wouldn't give precisely the same contribution to the formation of a baby. Page 98 The most common explanation of this apparent fine-tuning states that the very low probability of living in such a universe is explained by observer selection bias.[76] In other words, in order for us to even be considering this question, we must inhabit a fine-tuned universe-if it had been otherwise, we wouldn't be conscious and able to reflect on that fact. This is known as the anthropic principle. Some scientists believe that such an explanation is adequate. Page 99 think there is something there that needs explaining."[ Page 99 Even as of 2023, though, AI is rapidly gaining proficiency at imitating humans. Deep-learning approaches like transformers and GANs (generative adversarial networks) have propelled amazing progress. Page 99 By combining these techniques, AI can thus already imitate a specific person's writing style, replicate their voice, or even realistically graft their face into a whole video. Page 100 2016, The Verge published a remarkable article about a young woman named Eugenia Kuyda who used AI and saved text messages to "resurrect" her dead best friend, Roman Mazurenko.[82] As the amount of data each of us generates grows, ever more faithful re-creations of specific humans will become possible. Page 101 Replicant bodies will exist mostly in virtual and augmented reality, but realistic bodies in actual reality (that is, convincing androids) will also be possible using the nanotechnology of the late 2030s. Page 102 Eventually replicants may even be housed in cybernetically augmented biological bodies grown from the DNA of the original person (assuming it can be found). Page 103 In the early 2040s, nanobots will be able to go into a living person's brain and make a copy of all the data that forms the memories and personality of the original person: You 2. Page 104 this level of technology will also allow our subjective self to persist in After Life- Page 105 the practical goal is to figure out how to get computers to interface effectively with the brain, and crack the code of how the brain represents information. Page 109 Yet despite my share of responsibility for who I am, my self-actualization is limited by many factors outside my control. My biological brain evolved for a very different kind of prehistoric life and predisposes me to habits that I would rather not have. It cannot learn fast enough or remember well enough to know all the things I would like to know. I can't reprogram it to free me of fears, traumas, and doubts that I know are preventing me from achieving what I would like to achieve. And my brain sits in a body that is gradually aging-although I work hard to slow this process-and is biologically programmed to eventually destroy the information pattern that is Ray Kurzweil. The promise of the Singularity is to free us all from those limitations. Once our brains are backed up on a more advanced digital substrate, our self-modification powers can be fully realized. Page 112 the law of accelerating returns the LOAR describes a phenomenon wherein certain kinds of technologies create feedback loops that accelerate innovation. Page 113 What makes the LOAR so powerful for information technologies is that feedback loops keep the costs of innovation lower than the benefits, so progress continues. Page 115 A modern version of a predator hiding in the foliage is the phenomenon of people continually monitoring their information sources, including social media, for developments that might imperil them. Nostalgia, a term the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer devised in 1688 by combining the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain or distress), is more than just recalling fond reminiscences; it is a coping mechanism to deal with the stress of the past by transforming it. The Reality Is That Nearly Every Aspect of Life Is Getting Progressively Better as a Result of Exponentially Improving Technology > Page 122 technological change is essentially permanent. Once our civilization learns how to do something useful, we generally keep that knowledge and build on. The Reality Is That Nearly Every Aspect of Life Is Getting Progressively Better as a Result of Exponentially Improving new technologies can have huge indirect benefits, even far from their own areas of application. Page 128 Electricity is not itself an information technology, but because it powers all our digital devices and networks, it is the prerequisite for the countless other benefits of modern civilization. Page 133 most of our progress in disease treatment and prevention to date has been the product of the linear process of hit-or-miss efforts to find useful interventions. Because we have lacked tools for systematically exploring all possible treatments, discoveries under this paradigm have owed a lot to chance. Page 135 during the 2020s we are entering the second bridge: combining artificial intelligence and biotechnology to defeat these degenerative diseases. We are now utilizing AI to find new drugs, and by the end of this decade we will be able to start the process of augmenting and ultimately replacing slow, underpowered human trials with digital simulations. medical nanorobots with the ability to intelligently conduct cellular-level maintenance and repair throughout our bodies. Page 136 the core of a person's identity is not their brain itself, but rather the very particular arrangement of information that their brain is able to represent and manipulate. Once we can scan this information with sufficient accuracy, we'll be able to replicate it on digital substrates. Page 146 Shifts in the kinds of jobs in demand have motivated millennials and Generation Z, more than other generations, to seek creative, often entrepreneurial careers, and have given them the freedom to work remotely, which cuts out travel time and expense but can lead to blurry boundaries between work and life. Page 148 Increasing material prosperity has a mutually reinforcing relationship with declining violence. Where humans once only identified with small groups, communication technology (books, then radio and television, then computers and the internet) enabled us to exchange ideas with an ever wider sphere of people and discover what we have in common. The ability to watch gripping video of disasters in distant lands can lead to historical myopia, but it also powerfully harnesses our natural empathy and extends our moral concern across our whole species. Once humanity has extremely cheap energy (largely from solar and, eventually, fusion) and AI robotics, many kinds of goods will be so easy to reproduce that the notion of people committing violence over them will seem just as silly as fighting over a PDF seems today. Page 159 The printing press is an excellent illustrative example of how the law of accelerating returns works for information technologies. Page 160 Very broadly, the more ideas a person or a society has, the easier it is to create new ones; this includes technological innovation. technologies that make it easier to share ideas make it easier to create new technologies-when Gutenberg introduced the printing press, it soon became vastly cheaper to share ideas. The spread of knowledge brought wealth and political empowerment, Page 163 History gives us reason for profound optimism, though. As technologies for sharing information have evolved from the telegraph to social media, the idea of democracy and individual rights has gone from barely acknowledged to a worldwide aspiration that's already a reality for nearly half the people on earth. Page 164 The essential point to realize is that all the progress I have described so far came from the slow early stages of these exponential trends. As information technology makes vastly more progress in the next twenty years than it did in the past two hundred, the benefits to overall prosperity will be far greater-indeed, they are already much greater than most realize. Page 169 As I will explain later in this chapter, we will soon produce high-quality, low-cost food using vertical agriculture with AI-controlled production and chemical-free harvesting. Page 170 Much like the internet is an integrated and persistent environment of web pages, the VR and AR of the late 2020s will merge into a compelling new layer to our reality. Page 171 over the next couple of decades, brain–computer interface technology will become much more advanced. Page 172 we need advances in materials science to achieve further improvements in cost-efficiency. Page 173 Costs of solar electricity generation are falling quite a bit faster than those of any other major renewable, and solar has the most headroom to grow. Page 177 A key challenge of the twenty-first century will be making certain that earth's growing population has a reliable supply of clean, fresh water. 3D printing allows manufacturing to be decentralized, empowering consumers and local communities. Page 186 Each year the resolution of 3D printing is improving and the technology is getting cheaper. new research is applying 3D printing to biology. One potential drawback of 3D printing is that it could be used to manufacture pirated designs. All of this requires new approaches to protect intellectual property. decentralized manufacturing will allow civilians to create weapons that they otherwise couldn't easily access. Page 189 Material abundance and peaceful democracy make life better, but the challenge with the highest stakes is the effort to preserve life itself. Biological life is suboptimal because evolution is a collection of random processes optimized by natural selection. Page 190 We are beginning to use AI for discovery and design of both drugs and other interventions, and by the end of the 2020s biological simulators will be sufficiently advanced to generate key safety and efficacy data in hours rather than the years that clinical trials typically require. Page 192 Nanorobots not only will be programmed to destroy all types of pathogens but will be able to treat metabolic diseases. The fourth bridge to radical life extension will be the ability to essentially back up who we are, just as we do routinely with all of our digital information. As we augment our biological neocortex with realistic (albeit much faster) models of the neocortex in the cloud, our thinking will become a hybrid of the biological thinking we are accustomed to today and its digital extension. Page 193 If you restored your mind file after biological death, would you really be restoring yourself? Page 194 Information technology is about ideas, and exponentially improving our ability to share ideas and create new ones gives each of us-in the broadest possible sense-greater power to fulfill our human potential and to collectively solve many of the maladies that society faces. Page 195 The convergent technologies of the next two decades will create enormous prosperity and material abundance around the world. But these same forces will also unsettle the global economy, forcing society to adapt at an unprecedented pace. Page 197 Yet driving is just one of a very long list of occupations that are threatened in the fairly near term by AI that exploits the advantage of training on massive datasets. Page 198 a 2023 report by McKinsey, found that 63 percent of all working time in today's developed economies is spent on tasks that could already be automated with today's technology.[ Page 207 Erik Brynjolfsson. He argues that, unlike previous technology-driven transitions, the latest form of automation will result in a loss of more jobs than it creates.[ Page 208 Economists who take this view see the current situation as the culmination of several successive waves of change. The first wave is often referred to as "deskilling."[ One of the main effects of deskilling is that it is easier for people to take new jobs without lengthy training. The second wave is "upskilling." Upskilling often follows deskilling, and introduces technologies that require more skill than what came before. AI-driven innovation different from previous technologies is that it opens more opportunities for taking humans out of the equation altogether. Page 209 This is desirable not just for cost reasons but also because in many areas AI can actually do a better job than the humans it is replacing. Yet it is important to distinguish between tasks and professions. ATMs can now replace human bank tellers for many routine cash transactions, but tellers have taken on a greater role in marketing and building personal relationships with customers.[83] Page 210 Yet one sticking point in this thesis has been a productivity puzzle: if technological change really is starting to cause net job losses, classical economics predicts that there would be fewer hours worked for a given level of economic output. By definition, then, productivity would be markedly increasing. However, productivity growth as traditionally measured has actually slowed since the internet revolution in the 1990s. Page 214 The good news, though, is that artificial intelligence and technological convergence will turn more and more kinds of goods and services into information technologies during the 2020s and 2030s-allowing them to benefit from the kinds of exponential trends that have already brought such radical deflation to the digital realm. Page 219 so, even as technological change is rendering many jobs obsolete, those very same forces are opening up numerous new opportunities that fall outside the traditional model of "jobs." Page 221 People will be able to describe their ideas to AI and tweak the results with natural language until it fulfills the visions in their minds. Instead of needing thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars to produce an action movie, it will eventually be possible to produce an epic film with nothing but good ideas and a relatively modest budget for the computer that runs the AI. Page 221 Most of our new jobs require more sophisticated skills. As a whole, our society has moved up the skill ladder, and this will continue. Page 222 Real-time translation between any pair of languages will become smooth and accurate, breaking down the language barriers that divide us. Augmented reality will be projected constantly onto our retinas from our glasses and contact lenses. Page 223 But on the way to a future of such universal abundance, we need to address the societal issues that will arise as a result of these transitions. Page 226 Thanks to accelerating technological change, overall wealth will be far greater, Page 226 and given the long-term stability of our social safety net regardless of the governing party, it is very likely to remain in place-and at substantially higher levels than today. Page 227 we'll need smart governmental policies to ease the transition and ensure that prosperity is broadly shared. Page 228 considering the role of jobs in our lives forces us to reconsider our broader search for meaning. People often say that it is death and the brevity of our existence that gives meaning to life. But my view, rather, is that this perspective is an attempt to rationalize the tragedy of death as a good thing. Page 229 One of the great challenges of adapting to technological changes is that they tend to bring diffuse benefits to a large population, but concentrated harms to a small group. Page 233 do think the specter of troublesome social dislocation-including violence-during this transition is a possibility that we should anticipate and work to mitigate. Page 235 Turning medicine into an exact science will require transforming it into an information technology-allowing it to benefit from the exponential progress of information technologies. 2023 the first drug designed end-to-end by AI entered phase II clinical trials to treat a rare lung disease.[ Page 236 AI can learn from more data than a human doctor ever could and can amass experience from billions of procedures instead of the thousands a human doctor can perform in a career. Page 237 In 2020 a team at MIT used AI to develop a powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in existence. But by far the most important application of AI to medicine in 2020 was the key role it played in designing safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time. Page 241 There will likely be substantial resistance in the medical community to increasing reliance on simulations for drug trials-for a variety of reasons. It is very sensible to be cautious about the risks. Page 243 In addition to scientific applications, AI is gaining the ability to surpass human doctors in clinical medicine. Page 245 As Hans Moravec argued back in 1988, when contemplating the implications of technological progress, no matter how much we fine-tune our DNA-based biology, our flesh-and-blood systems will be at a disadvantage relative to our purpose-engineered creations.[45] As writer Peter Weibel put it, Moravec understood that in this regard humans can only be "second-class robots."[46] This means that even if we work at optimizing and perfecting what our biological brains are capable of, they will be billions of times slower and far less capable of what a fully engineered body will be able to achieve. Page 253 Think of e-books. When books were first invented, they had to be copied by hand, so labor was a massive component of their value. With the advent of the printing press, physical materials like paper, binding, and ink took on the dominant share of the price. But with e-books, the costs of energy and computation to copy, store, and transmit a book are effectively zero. What you're paying for is creative assembly of information into something worth reading (and often some ancillary factors, like marketing). Page 253 As all these components of value become less expensive, the proportional value of the information contained in products will increase. In many cases, this will make products cheap enough that they can be free to consumers. Page 254 This dramatic reduction of physical scarcity will finally allow us to easily provide for the needs of everyone. While nanotechnology will allow the alleviation of many kinds of physical scarcity, economic scarcity is also partly driven by culture-especially when it comes to luxury goods. Page 254 the nanotech manufacturing revolution won't eliminate all economic scarcity. Page 256 (Longevity Escape Velocity) Page 257 If you can live long enough for anti-aging research to start adding at least one year to your remaining life expectancy annually, that will buy enough time for nanomedicine to cure any remaining facets of aging. Page 260 Eventually, using nanobots for body maintenance and optimization should prevent major diseases from even arising. Page 262 As AI gains greater ability to understand human biology, it will be possible to send nanobots to address problems at the cellular level long before they would be detectable by today's doctors. Page 263 Nanobots will also allow people to change their cosmetic appearance as never before. Page 264 A deeper virtual neocortex will give us the ability to think thoughts more complex and abstract than we can currently comprehend. Page 267 just as this progress will improve billions of lives, it will also heighten peril for our species. New, destabilizing nuclear weapons, breakthroughs in synthetic biology, and emerging nanotechnologies will all introduce threats we must deal with. Page 271 advances in genetic engineering[25] (which can edit viruses by manipulating their genes) could allow the creation-either intentionally or accidentally-of a supervirus that would have both extreme lethality and high transmissibility. Page 274 contrast, biological weapons can be very cheap. Page 276 even if responsible people design safe nanobots, bad actors could still design dangerous ones. Page 278 AI is smarter than its human creators, it could potentially find a way around any precautionary measures that have been put in place. There is no general strategy that can definitively overcome that. Page 278 Three broad categories of peril - Misuse ... Outer misalignment, which refers to cases where there's a mismatch between the programmers' actual intentions and the goals they teach the AI in hopes of achieving them. Inner misalignment occurs when the methods the AI learns to achieve its goal produce undesirable behavior, at least in some cases.[ while the AI alignment problem will be very hard to solve,[62] we will not have to solve it on our own-with the right techniques, we can use AI itself to dramatically augment our own alignment capabilities. Page 284 With technologies now beginning to modify our bodies and brains, another type of opposition to progress has emerged in the form of "fundamentalist humanism": opposition to any change in the nature of what it means to be human. Page 285 AI is the pivotal technology that will allow us to meet the pressing challenges that confront us, including overcoming disease, poverty, environmental degradation, and all of our human frailties. Overall, we should be cautiously optimistic.	Reid Hoffman Notable Quotations Full screen view Page 9 Much of what we do as modern people—at work and beyond—is to process information and generate action. GPT-4 will massively speed your ability to do these things, and with greater breadth and scope. Within a few years, this copilot will fall somewhere between useful and essential to most professionals and many other sorts of workers. Without GPT-4, they'll be slower, less comprehensive, and working at a great disadvantage. Page 14 GPT-4 doesn't have the equivalent of a human mind. It's still helpful to think in terms of its "perspective," anthropomorphizing it a bit, because using language like "perspective" helps convey that GPT-4 does in fact operate in ways that are not entirely fixed, consistent, or predictable. In this way, it actually is like a human. It makes mistakes. It changes its "mind." It can be fairly arbitrary. Page 15 They can also sometimes generate replies that include factual errors, explicitly nonsensical utterances, or made-up passages that may seem (in some sense) contextually appropriate but have no basis in truth. Page 16 Even with various guardrails in place, an LLM itself can't make reasoned judgments about complex ethical quandaries, or even about more straightforward questions. Page 20 in your overall quest for authoritative information, GPT-4 helps you start somewhere much closer to the finish line than if you didn't have it as a resource. Page 22 But when human users treat GPT-4 as a co-pilot or a collaborative partner, it becomes far more powerful. You compound GPT-4's computational generativity, efficiency, synthetic powers, and capacity to scale with human creativity, human judgment, and human guidance. Creativity Page 58 Reid: GPT-4, once large language models are fully developed and deployed, what would you suspect will be the worst effects on the quality of overall cultural production? (200 words) (less wooden style than usual) Page 58 Homogenization and loss of diversity: Large language models could generate massive amounts of content that mimic existing styles, genres, and trends, but lack originality, creativity, and authenticity. This could result in a saturation of the cultural market with bland and repetitive products that appeal to the lowest common denominator and discourage innovation and experimentation. Journalism Page 84 But transparency and accountability are the true north of any society that aspires to truth- seeking. And, in a world overwhelmed by misinformation, disinformation, and simply too much information, it becomes especially necessary for truth- seekers to live the values they work to preserve. Page 89 Throughout this leg of my journey, I've asserted that the spread of AI tools like GPT-4 will create once-in-a-generation opportunities for journalism and journalists. Page 89 It's hard to embrace risks that lead to growth when you've been stuck so long in survival mode. Page 89 when the need for principled truth-seeking is more pressing than ever, there are clearly opportunities, especially for those who can figure out novel ways to capitalize on new AI tools as they come online. Leveraging new technologies' power is one of the main ways the journalism industry grew in the past, and probably the main way it can do so again. Social Media Page 96 when my co-founders and I launched LinkedIn twenty years ago, we were motivated largely by the fact that the divisions between "cyberspace" and "the real world" were rapidly collapsing. Instead of existing as a place that people "went to" under the cover of pseudonymous screen names, the internet had evolved into a place that people were using to facilitate their lives. Transformation of Work Page 104 In my opinion, ignoring AI is like ignoring blogging in the late 1990s, or social media circa 2004, or mobile in 2007. Very quickly, some degree of facility with these tools will be increasingly essential for all professionals, a primary driver for new opportunities and new jobs. Page 105 knowledge workers are also facing these challenges. While I strongly believe that these new AI tools will create new jobs and new industries, along with great economic benefits and other quality-of-life gains, they will also eliminate some jobs, both blue- and white-collar. Page 105 To navigate this moment most effectively, though, we must also do so with an adaptive, forward- looking perspective. In my mind, that means embracing AI in the same spirit that we once embraced the Model T and the Apple II. Page 118 believe that the future will see the sales profession shrink as a whole. At the same time, the productivity of individual sales professionals will increase, and likely their compensation as well. And the AI-driven increased quality of selling means that companies that aggressively adopt these tools will beat any competitors that don't. Page 119 can see how AI could equal or exceed the work of human clerks and paralegals for conducting patent searches, digging through discovery data, or searching for red flags in long, boring contracts. Leveraging AI might also be a good first step before bringing in an (expensive) outside expert, or to make a lawyer's usage of such an expert more effective. GPT-4 In My Own Work Page 126 Principle 1: Treat GPT-4 like an undergrad research assistant, not an omniscient oracle. Page 126 Principle 2: Think of yourself as a director, not a carpenter. Page 127 Principle 3: Just try it! When AI Makes Things Up ("Hallucinations") Page 152 believe LLMs have the capacity to answer a much wider range of questions than Wikipedia or any other source; I believe they can answer these questions faster; and I believe they can do so through an intuitive interface that makes information retrieval highly accessible to a wide range of users. Homo Techne Page 196 Technologies are never neutral. We embed the tools and systems we create with specific values and specific intents, and assume that they will produce specific outcomes. This doesn't necessarily limit their potential uses. A car can be a weapon, a life-saving device, a place to sleep, and many other things, but that doesn't make it "neutral." Above everything else, a car is a technology that prioritizes effortless and extremely powerful mobility—and it ends up having much different impacts on the world than, say, a horse-drawn carriage or a bicycle. Page 196 But if it's detrimental to society to claim that "technology is neutral" in order to evade responsibility for tech's potential negative outcomes, so is invalidating a technology simply because it has a capacity to produce negative outcomes along with positive ones. Conclusion: At the Crossroads of the 21st Century Page 209 The paradox of the AI era is this: as today's imperfect LLMs improve, requiring less and less from us, we will need to demand more from ourselves. We must always insist on situating GPT-4 and its successors as our collaborative partners, not our replacements. We must continue to figure out how to keep human creativity, human judgment, and human values at the center of the processes we devise to work with these new AI tools, even as they themselves grow more and more capable.	Richard Bandler Notable Quotations Full screen view I have found that people's biggest barriers to change are often their own minds and, more specifically, their own beliefs. [our] problems give [us] identities. we learn limiting and nonuseful behaviors in terms of our thoughts as well as our actions. as long as you think differently, you will feel differently. Introduction One of the things I discovered in my work is that people acquire problems very quickly. If people can learn to have fear in a short period of time, there's no reason why it should take a long period of time to learn anything else, I didn't need to understand how she became the way she did. I needed to understand how she kept being that way. What could go wrong? and the same answer came up every single time. She would imagine a life- size memory where she saw the bad thing happening to her over and over and over again. Develop a habit of feeling happy. You make good pictures, you will get good feelings. How do they manifest their fear? How is it done as an activity? Thinking should always be an active process where you think in a way that gets you the results you want. If you're trying to motivate yourself and you're thinking about how hard it is, it will be hard. When you learn how people think, you can teach them how to change the way they think. When you think in a new way, you get to do new things and you get to feel new things. In order to remember things, you have to first encode the memory. I'm a firm believer that you can learn to get over your problems. If you can look at yesterday and say you are a better person today, even if it's just a tiny bit, then you're still headed in the right direction. PART ONE : THE POWER OF YOUR UNCONSCIOUS: THE FREEWAY TO CHANGE Your unconscious is also where most of your mental habits function. Unconscious skills can be skills that are detrimental to our well- being, A trance is simply a state where we are absorbed with our thoughts. Submodaligies: thinking in pictures, thinking in words, and thinking in feelings, tastes, and smells. The important question to ask people when they say "I feel frustrated," is, "Where? Where does the feeling start? Where do you feel it first in your body? Where does it move to?" Feelings can't stay still. They are always moving somewhere, in some direction. Our feelings are not outside of our control. In fact, this is the very thing most of us need to gain control of because, when you do, you can alter your feelings. However, since most problems are created by our imagination and are thus imaginary, all we need are imaginary solutions. Achieving personal freedom is all about developing new mental habits and skills and getting used to mentally running your brain the way you choose to run it. Beliefs are what trap most people in their problems. As soon as we believe in something, we search for ways to prove it's true. Doubt your limitations Most people are not fed up enough with their problems. You want to get rid of your self- doubt and add more belief in yourself. You want to get rid of your fears and add more confidence. Make unconscious changes by using your own brain and learning to think differently. PART TWO TIME LINES: HOW YOU MENTALLY CODE TIME The more people are stuck for a long period of time feeling bad about the past, the less time they have to begin making life more wonderful. We have bad decisions that come about from bad thoughts and bad moods. It's not the object. It's not the height that makes you afraid, it's your brain. People ... focus too much on themselves and not enough on what's going on in the room. Once they have a choice, people always make the best choice. The trouble is that people don't think they have one. GETTING OVER BAD MEMORIES The more you look at the bad things, the more you relive the bad things, the more familiar it gets. The more you look at yourself doing the things you want to do— the more you'll begin to change your direction. Thoughts will always be there, but they don't have to hurt forever. Our ability to associate good feelings with things or bad feelings with things should be a conscious choice. When you decide what memories to associate with and what memories to disassociate with, when you manipulate your thoughts deliberately, it is called thinking. We are thinking beings when we think deliberately. If you change the qualities of the images you make, and you replace them with different thoughts that make you feel good, you will start to feel differently. PART THREE GETTING THROUGH HABITS AND COMPULSIONS The main difference between habits and compulsions is that habits are simply what you get used to doing and do automatically. Compulsions refer to what you feel compelled to do. Our mind finds a way of getting out of what we know we really ought to The first step in breaking habits has got to be where we switch our beliefs. Understanding by itself doesn't produce change. You've got a problem, you've gotta learn to deal with it." It's not the line on the sidewalk, it's the way you think about it. The unconscious part of your mind doesn't process negation so, of course, it's like saying, "Don't think of blue." Immediately, you think of blue, measure what you are succeeding at, it starts to work. Most people plan for it to be too easy. Instead, plan to fall off So, if it feels bad to practice things, or if it feels bad to diet or exercise, then you're not doing it right. Human beings have the unique quality of being able to create their reality internally and then to superimpose it on the outside. Instead of having notes or information on the outside, I have people vividly study some notes and practice imagining those notes on locations in the room. -- Hallucinate the notes people can make things worse or better by how they think about it in advance. Conclusion It's essential that you have more control over how you feel and so more control over what you do. If you change the way you think, it changes the way you feel, which changes the way you act. Your brain runs all the time, and it's either going to run in the direction you want it to go or it's going to run all over the place. If you don't do things to control your thoughts and control what pictures you make, then you won't be feeling as good as you can be feeling.
Robert Cialdini Notable Quotations Full screen view Full text of older edition (pdf)	Robert D. Hare Notable Quotations Full screen view Location 63 Much of the scientific literature on psychopathy is technical, abstract, and difficult to follow for those who lack a background in the behavioral sciences. My goal was to translate this literature so that it became accessible, not only to the general public but to members of the criminal justice system and the mental health community. I tried not to oversimplify theoretical issues and research findings or to overstate what we know. I hope that those readers whose interest is piqued will use the chapter notes to delve deeper into the topic. Introduction: The Problem Page 2 The most obvious expressions of psychopathy -- but by no means the only ones -- involve flagrant criminal violation of society's rules. Not surprisingly, many psychopaths are criminals, but many others remain out of prison, using their charm and chameleonlike abilities to cut a wide swath through society and leaving a wake of ruined lives behind them. Page 5 according to accepted legal and psychiatric standards. Their acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings. Such morally incomprehensible behavior, exhibited by a seemingly normal person, leaves us feeling bewildered and helpless. Page 6 By focusing too much on the most brutal and newsworthy examples of their behavior, we run the risk of remaining blind to the larger picture: psychopaths who don't kill but who have a personal impact on our daily lives. We are far more likely to lose our life savings to an oily-tongued swindler than our lives to a steely-eyed killer. Chapter Two. Focusing the Picture Page 21 He will choose you, disarm you with his words, and control you with this presence. He will delight you with his wit and his plans. He will show you a good time, but you will always get the bill. He will smile and deceive you, and he will scare you with his eyes. And when he is through with you, and he will be through with you, he will desert you and take with him your innocence and your pride. You will be left much sadder but not a lot wiser, and for a long time you will wonder what happened and what you did wrong. And if another of his kind comes knocking at your door, will you open it? -- From an essay signed, "A psychopath in prison." Page 22 Most clinicians and researchers don't use the term in this way; they know that psychopathy cannot be understood in terms of traditional views of mental illness. Psychopaths are not disoriented or out of touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations, or intense subjective distress that characterize most other mental disorders. Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised. Page 23 some clinicians and researchers -- as well as most sociologists and criminologists -- who believe that the syndrome is forged entirely by social forces and early experiences prefer the term sociopath, whereas those -- including this writer -- who feel that psychological, biological, and genetic factors also contribute to development of the syndrome generally use the term psychopath. Page 25 "Psychopathy," on the other hand, is defined by a cluster of both personality traits and socially deviant behaviors. Most criminals are not psychopaths, and many of the individuals who manage to operate on the shady side of the law and remain out of prison are psychopaths. Page 30 recall one file in which the psychologist had used a battery of self-report tests to conclude that a callous killer was actually a sensitive, caring individual who needed only the psychological equivalent of a warm hug! Because of the uncritical use of personality tests, the literature was (and still is) cluttered with studies that purported to be about psychopathy but actually had very little to do with it. Chapter Three. The Profile: Feelings and Relationships Page 33 Do I care about other people? That's a tough one. But, yeah, I guess I really do ... but I don't let my feelings get in the way.... I mean, I'm as warm and caring as the next guy, but let's face it, everyone's trying to screw you.... You've got to look out for yourself, park your feelings. Say you need something, or someone messes with you ... maybe tries to rip you off... you take care of it ... do whatever needs to be done.... Do I feel bad if I have to hurt someone? Yeah, sometimes. But mostly it's like ... uh ... [laughs] ... how did you feel the last time you squashed a bug? -- A psychopath doing time for kidnapping, rape, and extortion Page 34 Psychopaths are often witty and articulate. They can be amusing and entertaining conversationalists, ready with a quick and clever comeback, and can tell unlikely but convincing stories that cast themselves in a good light. They can be very effective in presenting themselves well and are often very likable and charming. To some people, however, they seem too slick and smooth, too obviously insincere and superficial. Astute observers often get the impression that psychopaths are play-acting, mechanically "reading their lines." Page 35 A signpost to this trait is often a smooth lack of concern at being found out. Page 38 Psychopaths have a narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance, a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the center of the universe, as superior beings who are justified in living according to their own rules. Page 38 Psychopaths often come across as arrogant, shameless braggarts -- self-assured, opinionated, domineering, and cocky. They love to have power and control over others and seem unable to believe that other people have valid opinions different from theirs. They appear charismatic or "electrifying" to some people. Page 38 Psychopaths are seldom embarrassed about their legal, financial, or personal problems. Rather, they see them as temporary setbacks, the results of bad luck, unfaithful friends, or an unfair and incompetent system. Page 40 Psychopaths show a stunning lack of concern for the devastating effects their actions have on others. Often they are completely forthright about the matter, calmly stating that they have no sense of guilt, are not sorry for the pain and destruction they have caused, and that there is no reason for them to be concerned. Page 41 Ted Bundy Page 41 "Guilt?" he remarked in prison. "It's this mechanism we use to control people. It's an illusion. It's a kind of social control mechanism -- and it's very unhealthy. It does terrible things to our bodies. And there are much better ways to control our behavior than that rather extraordinary use of guilt." [p. 288] Page 42 Psychopaths' lack of remorse or guilt is associated with a remarkable ability to rationalize their behavior and to shrug off personal responsibility for actions that cause shock and disappointment to family, friends, associates, and others who have played by the rules. Usually they have handy excuses for their behavior, and in some cases they deny that it happened at all. Page 43 Another subject, up for breaking and entering for the twentieth time, said, "Sure I stole the stuff. But, hey! Those folks were insured up the kazoo -- nobody got hurt, nobody suffered. What's the big deal? In fact, I'm doing them a favor by giving them a chance to collect insurance. They'll put in for more than that junk was worth, you know. They always do." Page 43 In an ironic twist, psychopaths frequently see themselves as the real victims. Page 44 Psychopaths view people as little more than objects to be used for their own gratification. The weak and the vulnerable -- whom they mock, rather than pity -- are favorite targets. "There is no such thing, in the psychopathic universe, as the merely weak," wrote psychologist Robert Rieber. "Whoever is weak is also a sucker; that is, someone who demands to be exploited."9 Page 45 Psychopaths, however, display a general lack of empathy. They are indifferent to the rights and suffering of family members and strangers alike. Page 46 Lying, deceiving, and manipulation are natural talents for psychopaths. Page 46 Much of the lying seems to have no motivation other than what psychologist Paul Ekman refers to as a "duping delight."10 Page 49 Their statements often reveal their belief that the world is made up of "givers and takers," predators and prey, and that it would be very foolish not to exploit the weaknesses of others. Page 50 "Money grows on trees," said another psychopath, a woman with a long history of frauds and petty thefts. "They say it doesn't but it does. I don't want to do it to people, it's just so easy!" Page 53 J. H. Johns and H. C. Quay to say that the psychopath "knows the words but not the music." Page 54 Laboratory experiments using biomedical recorders have shown that psychopaths lack the physiological responses normally associated with fear.16 Chapter Four. The Profile: Lifestyle Page 61 Psychopaths have an ongoing and excessive need for excitement -- they long to live in the fast lane or "on the edge," where the action is. In many cases the action involves breaking the rules. Page 61 Many psychopaths describe "doing crime" for excitement or thrills. When asked if she ever did crazy or dangerous things just for fun, one of our female subjects replied, "Yeah, lots of things. But what I find most exciting is walking through airports with drugs. Christ! What a high!" Page 62 Psychopaths are easily bored. Page 62 Obligations and commitments mean nothing to psychopaths. Page 64 Psychopaths do not hesitate to use the resources of family and friends to bail them out of difficulty. Chapter Five. Internal Controls: The Missing Piece Page 80 Ronald Markman, who (along with Dominick Bosco) wrote Alone with the Devil, a book about Markman's professional work with murderers. The psychiatrist suggested that as an audience we identify with psychopaths, living out our fantasies of life with no internal controls. "There is something inside them that is also inside us and we are attracted to them so we can find out what that something is," Markman wrote. In Weber's interview he went even further: "We're all psychopaths under the skin." Chapter Six. Crime: The Logical Choice Page 100 "The most salient thing about Earl is his obsession with absolute power. He values people only insofar as they bend to his will or can be coerced or manipulated into doing what he wants. He constantly sizes up his prospects for exploiting people and situations." Other prison files describe how, in his quest for power and control, he walks a fine line between inmates and staff and is both feared and admired by both sides. He is very skilled in the use of threats, intimidation, muscle, bribery, and drugs, and he "regularly informs on other inmates in an effort to save his ass and to obtain privileges. The con code means nothing to him unless he personally gets something out of it." Page 100 One of the most striking features of Earl's personality is his grandiosity; entries scattered through his files make reference to his dramatic, inflated, and pompous way of communicating. As one of my assessors wrote, "If I hadn't been so afraid of him I would have laughed in his face at his blatant self-worship." As Earl put it, "I'm always being told by others how great I am and how there's nothing I can't do -- sometimes I think they're just shitting me, but a man's got to believe in himself, right? When I check myself out, I like what I see." Chapter Seven. White-Collar Psychopaths Page 102 The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier. Page 107 Grambling was able to use his charm, social skills, and family connections to gain the trust of others. He was aided by the common expectation that certain classes of people presumably are trustworthy because of their social or professional credentials. For example, lawyers, physicians, teachers, politicians, counselors, and so forth, generally do not have to work to earn our trust; they have it by virtue of their positions. Our guard may go up when we deal with a used-car salesman or a telephone solicitor, but we often blindly entrust our assets and well-being to a lawyer, doctor, or investment counselor. Page 111 Their job is made a lot easier simply because a lot of people are surprisingly gullible, with an unshakable belief in the inherent goodness of man. Page 111 who became Man of the Year, president of the Chamber of Commerce (shades of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, whose bid for Jaycee president was interrupted by his first murder conviction), and member of the Republican Executive Committee in the small town where he had resided for ten years. Billing himself as a Berkeley Ph.D. in psychology, Page 111 Penitentiary. "Before he was a con man he was a con boy. He was the kind of kid who would steal a Boy Scout uniform in order to hitchhike. He would tell people that he had hit the road to earn a merit badge. Later he joined the army, only to desert after three weeks. Then he masqueraded as a flier in the Royal Air Force. He persuaded people he was a hero. For two decades he dodged across America, a step ahead of the hoodwinked. Along the way he picked up three wives, three divorces, and four children. To this day he has no idea of what happened to any of them." Page 111 "A good liar is a good judge of people," Page 112 "More people know my name than before," he said. "I can run with this for years." Most of us would be devastated and humiliated by public exposure as a liar and a cheat, but not the psychopath. He or she can still look the community straight in the eye and give impassioned assurances, on their "word of honor." Page 114 Rather than refer to these individuals as successful psychopaths -- after all, their success is often illusory and always at someone else's expense -- I prefer to call them subcriminal psychopaths. Their conduct, although technically not illegal, typically violates conventional ethical standards, hovering just on the shady side of the law. Unlike people who consciously adopt a ruthless, greedy, and apparently unscrupulous strategy in their business dealings but who are reasonably honest and empathetic in other areas of their lives, subcriminal psychopaths exhibit much the same behaviors and attitudes in all areas of their lives. If they lie and cheat on the job -- and get away with it or are even admired for it -- they will lie and cheat in other areas of their lives. Page 115 The cases that come to the public's attention represent only the tip of a very large iceberg. Page 115 Tragically, these victims often cannot get other people to understand what they are going through. Psychopaths are very good at putting on a good impression when it suits them, and they often paint their victims as the real culprits. Page 115 "For five years he cheated on me, kept me living in fear, and forged checks on my personal bank account. But everyone, including my doctor and lawyer and my friends, blamed me for the problem. He had them so convinced that he was a great guy and that I was going mad, I began to believe it myself. Even when he cleaned out my bank account and ran off with a seventeen-year-old student, a lot of people couldn't believe it, and some wanted to know what I had done to make him act so strangely." Page 119 There is no shortage of opportunities for white-collar psychopaths who think big. Page 121 They are fast-talking, charming, self-assured, at ease in social situations, cool under pressure, unfazed by the possibility of being found out, and totally ruthless. And even when exposed, they can carry on as if nothing has happened, often leaving their accusers bewildered and uncertain about their own positions. Chapter Eight. Words from an Overcoat Pocket Page 124 Some people are simply too trusting and gullible for their own good -- ready targets for any smooth talker who comes along. But what about the rest of us? The sad fact is that we are all vulnerable. Page 125 What makes psychopaths different from all others is the remarkable ease with which they lie, the pervasiveness of their deception, and the callousness with which they carry it out. Page 125 But there is something else about the speech of psychopaths that is equally puzzling: their frequent use of contradictory and logically inconsistent statements that usually escape detection. Page 125 When asked if he had ever committed a violent offense, a man serving time for theft answered, "No, but I once had to kill someone." Page 126 It is as if psychopaths sometimes have difficulty in monitoring their own speech, and they let loose with a convoluted barrage of poorly connected words and thoughts. Page 126 the mental processes of psychopaths are poorly regulated and not bound by conventional rules. Page 129 The psychopath is like a color-blind person who sees the world in shades of gray but who has learned how to function in a colored world. He has learned that the light signal for "stop" is at the top of the traffic signal. When the color-blind person tells you he stopped at the red light, he really means he stopped at the top light. Page 136 As psychologist Paul Ekman pointed out, skilled liars are able to break down ideas, concepts, and language into basic components and then recombine them in a variety of ways, almost as if they were playing Scrabble. Page 136 Although psychopaths lie a lot, they are not the skilled liars we often make them out to be. Page 140 It is well known that psychopaths often convincingly malinger -- fake mental illness -- when it is to their advantage to do so. For example, an inmate I described earlier was able to con his way into a psychiatric unit -- and back out again -- by slanting his responses to the questions on a widely used psychological test. Page 142 If their speech is sometimes peculiar, why are psychopaths so believable, so capable of deceiving and manipulating us? Why do we fail to pick up the inconsistencies in what they say? The short answer is, it is difficult to penetrate their mask of normalcy: The oddities in their speech are often too subtle for the casual observer to detect, and they put on a good show. We are sucked in not by what they say but by how they say it and by the emotional buttons they push while saying it. Chapter Nine. Flies in the Web Page 144 People can be induced to swallow anything, provided it is sufficiently seasoned with praise. -- Moliere, The Miser (1668), 1, tr. John Wood Page 144 Most of us accept the terms and rules of human interaction. But there are always people who use their appearance and charm -- natural or contrived -- to convince others to do their will. And in each case, the "victim's" needs and vulnerabilities help to determine the outcome of the exchange. Mostly, the outcomes are relatively harmless, part of the everyday interactions among people. Page 145 As I discussed earlier, although psychopaths may talk a lot they are not necessarily skilled wordsmiths. It is primarily the "show," not eloquent use of language, that attracts our attention and cons us. Page 145 Good looks, a touch of charisma, a flood of words, contrived distractions, a knack for knowing which buttons to press -- Page 145 all these can go a long way toward obscuring the fact that the psychopathic presentation is nothing more than a "line." Page 146 psychopaths often make effective use of body language when they speak, and often it is hard not to follow their actions with our eyes. Psychopaths also tend to intrude into our personal space -- for example, by means of intensive eye contact, leaning forward, moving closer, and so forth. Page 147 The examples below illustrate the uncanny ability of psychopaths to detect our vulnerabilities and to push the right buttons. Page 148 Psychopaths have no hesitation in making use of people's need to find a purpose in their lives, or in preying on the confused, the frail, and the helpless. One of our subjects carefully studied newspaper obituaries, looking for elderly people who had just lost a spouse and who had no remaining family members. Page 149 Psychopaths have an uncanny ability to spot and use "nurturant" women -- that is, those who have a powerful need to help or mother others. Many such women are in the helping professions -- nursing, social work, counseling -- and tend to look for the goodness in others while overlooking or minimizing their faults: Page 152 Some people are immune to the truth because they manage to distort reality to make it conform to their idea of what it should be. Chapter Ten. The Roots of the Problem Page 168 far from landing at the bottom of the heap, psychopaths might be helped up some success ladders by their distinctive personality traits. Page 177 If, as I believe, our society is moving in the direction of permitting, reinforcing, and in some instances actually valuing some of the traits listed in the Psychopathy Checklist -- traits such as impulsivity, irresponsibility, lack of remorse, and so on -- our schools may be evolving into microcosms of a "camouflage society," where true psychopaths can hide out, pursuing their destructive, self-gratifying ways and endangering the general student population. Page 177 our society may be not only fascinated but increasingly tolerant of the psychopathic personality. Chapter Twelve. Can Anything Be Done? Page 195 Psychopaths don't feel they have psychological or emotional problems, and they see no reason to change their behavior to conform to societal standards with which they do not agree. Page 195 To elaborate, psychopaths are generally well satisfied with themselves and with their inner landscape, bleak as it may seem to outside observers. They see nothing wrong with themselves, experience little personal distress, and find their behavior rational, rewarding, and satisfying; they never look back with regret or forward with concern. They perceive themselves as superior beings in a hostile, dog-eat-dog world in which others are competitors for power and resources. Psychopaths feel it is legitimate to manipulate and deceive others in order to obtain their "rights," and their social interactions are planned to outmaneuver the malevolence they see in others.	Robert Dilts Notable Quotations Full screen view Preface 11 these 'Sleight of Mouth' patterns are made up of verbal categories and distinctions by which key beliefs can be established, shifted or transformed through language. They can be characterized as "verbal reframes" which influence beliefs, and the mental maps from which beliefs have been formed. In the nearly twenty years since their formalization, the Sleight of Mouth patterns have proved to be one of the most powerful sets of distinctions provided by NLP for effective persuasion. Perhaps more than any other distinctions in NLP, these patterns provide a tool for conversational belief change. 11 it is important to distinguish genuine magic from trivial 'tricks'. 11 magic of change comes from tapping into something that goes beyond the words themselves. 12 belief change techniques, Chapter 1: Language and Experience Page 15 Sigmund Freud, Page 15 Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power. By words one of us can give another the greatest happiness or bring about utter despair; by words the teacher imparts his knowledge to the student; by words the orator sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth emotions and are universally the means by which we influence our fellow- creatures. Page 19 how the right words at the right time can create powerful and positive effects. Page 19 Unfortunately, words can also confuse us and limit us as easily as they can empower us. Page 19 The term "Sleight of Mouth" is drawn from the notion of "Sleight of Hand." The term sleight comes from an Old Norse word meaning "crafty," "cunning," "artful" or "dexterous." Page 19 create dramatic shifts in perception and the assumptions upon which particular perceptions are based. Language and Neuro-Linguistic Programming Page 20 The essence of Neuro- Linguistic Programming is that the functioning of our nervous system (" neuro") is intimately tied up with our capability for language (" linguistic"). The strategies (" programs") through which we organize and guide our behavior are made up of neurological and verbal patterns. Page 20 All the accomplishments of the human race, both positive and negative, have involved the use of language. We as human beings use our language in two ways. We use it first of all to represent our experience - we call this activity reasoning, thinking, fantasying, rehearsing. Page 20 Secondly, we use our language to communicate our model or representation of the world to each other. When we use language to communicate, we call it talking, discussing, writing, lecturing, singing. Page 21 The ancient Greeks, in fact, had different words for these two uses of language. They used the term rhema to indicate words used as a medium of communication and the term logos to indicate words associated with thinking and understanding. Page 21 Aristotle described the relationship between words and mental experience in the following way: Page 21 Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. Page 21 words can both reflect and shape mental experiences. Page 21 By accessing the deep structure beyond the specific words used by an individual, we can identify and influence the deeper level mental operations reflected through that person's language patterns. Page 21 Considered in this way, language is not just an 'epiphenomenon' or a set of arbitrary signs by which we communicate about our mental experience; it is a key part of our mental experience. Page 22 'talking about' something can do more than simply reflect our perceptions; it can actually create or change our perceptions. This implies a potentially deep and special role for language in the process of change and healing. Page 22 Heraclitus (540- 480 B.C.) defined 'logos' as the 'universal principle through which all things were interrelated and all natural events occurred'. Page 22 According to Philo, a Greek speaking Jewish philosopher (and contemporary of Jesus), 'logos' was the intermediate between ultimate reality and the sensible world. Map and Territory Page 23 The cornerstone of Sleight of Mouth, and the NLP approach to language, is the principle that "the map is not the territory." This principle was initially formulated by General Semantics Founder Alfred Korzybski (b. 1879 - d. 1950), and acknowledges the fundamental distinction between our maps of the world and the world itself. Page 24 NLP contends that we all have our own world view and that view is based upon the internal maps that we have formed through our language and sensory representational systems, as a result of our individual life experiences. Page 25 Korzybski's distinction between map and territory implies that our mental models of reality, rather than reality itself, determines how we will act. Page 25 Albert Einstein, "Our thinking creates problems that the same type of thinking will not solve." Page 25 the people who are most effective are the ones who have a map of the world that allows them to perceive the greatest number of available choices and perspectives. Experience Page 27 Our sensory experience is the primary way we get new information about reality and add to our maps of the world. Often our preexisting internal knowledge filters out new and potentially valuable sensory experience. Page 27 To "use sensory experience" rather than to project or hallucinate. Page 27 Effective change comes from the ability to "come to our senses." To do this, we must learn to drop our internal filters and have direct sensory experience of the world around us. Page 27 Uptime is a state in which all one's sensory awareness is focused on the external environment in the 'here and now'. Page 28 Primary experience is a function of our direct perceptions of the territory around us. Secondary experience is derived from our mental maps, descriptions and interpretations about those perceptions– and are subject to significant deletion, distortion and generalization. When we experience something directly, we have no self- consciousness or dissociative thoughts about what we are sensing and feeling. Page 28 People who are successful and enjoy life have the ability to experience more of the world directly, rather than dilute it through the filters of what they "should" experience or expect to experience. Page 29 Sleight of Mouth patterns can be characterized as "verbal reframes" which influence beliefs, and the mental maps from which beliefs have been formed. Sleight of Mouth patterns operate by getting people to frame or reframe their perceptions of some situation or experience. Sleight of Mouth Patterns lead people to 'punctuate' their experiences in new ways and take different perspectives. How Language Frames Experience Page 30 Words not only represent our experience, but, frequently they 'frame' our experience. Words frame our experience by bringing certain aspects of it into the foreground and leaving others in the background. Page 31 Some people, for instance, have a habitual pattern in which they are constantly dismissing the positive side of their experience with the word "but." Chapter 2: Frames and Reframing 34 implies, a "frame" establishes the borders and constraints surrounding an interaction. Frames greatly influence the way that specific experiences and events are interpreted and responded to because of how they serve to 'punctuate' those experiences and direct attention. 35 Some common "frames" in NLP include the "outcome" frame, the "as if" frame and the "feedback versus failure" frame. Page 36 The application of the Outcome Frame involves such tactics as reformulating problem statements to goal statements, and reframing negatively worded descriptions to those which are stated in positive terms. Page 36 A feedback versus failure frame places attention on how seeming problems, symptoms or mistakes can be interpreted as feedback, which helps to make corrections leading to a desired state, rather than as failures. Shifting Outcomes Page 40 transforms what might be considered "failure" with respect to one outcome (handling the situation), into feedback with respect to another outcome (" reacting to the good and the bad, and dealing with it adequately'). Page 43 Psychologically, to "reframe" something means to transform its meaning by putting it into a different framework or context than it has previously been perceived. Page 45 The paradox for the fish in the middle is that it has focused its attention so much on one particular behavior related to survival that it has put its survival at risk in another way. Changing Frame Size Page 47 Childbirth can be an intense and frightening experience for a person who is experiencing it for the first time. Being reminded that it is a process that has evolved over millions of years by millions of women, can help the person to have greater trust and less fear in what is happening within her body. Page 49 widen our frame of perception to the larger life cycle Context Reframing Page 51 Negative responses often serve to maintain and even escalate problematic behaviors, rather than extinguish them. Page 53 Instead of shifting contexts, content reframing involves altering our perspective or level of perception with respect to a particular behavior or situation. Page 53 Separate one's "behavior" from one's "self." Page 54 Content reframing involves determining a possible positive intention that could underlie a problematic behavior. Reframing Critics and Criticism Page 56 Critics are frequently perceived as "spoilers," because they operate from a "problem frame" or "failure frame." (Dreamers, on the other hand, function from the "' as if' frame," and realists act from the "outcome frame" and "feedback frame.") Page 56 A major problem with criticisms, on a linguistic level, is that they are typically asserted in the form of generalized judgments, Page 56 Thus, criticism usually leads to polarization, mismatching and ultimately conflict, if one does not agree with the criticism. Page 56 The most challenging problems occur when a critic doesn't merely criticize a dream or a plan, but begins to criticize the "dreamer" or "realist" on a personal level. Page 57 "Avoiding stress," and "becoming more relaxed and comfortable," for example, are two ways of verbally describing a similar internal state, even though they use quite different words. Page 57 many criticisms are framed in terms of what is not wanted, rather than what is wanted. Page 58 "If (stress/ expense/ failure/ waste) is what you do not want, then what is it that you do want?" or "What would it get for you (how would you benefit) if you were able to avoid or get rid of what you do not want?" Page 58 "It is too expensive," Page 58 "How are we going to afford it?" The Sleight of Mouth Patterns of 'Intention' and 'Redefining' Page 61 Identifying and acknowledging the positive intention of the critic, and turning the criticism into a "how" question, is an example of a type of 'verbal magic trick', using Sleight of Mouth to shift attention from a problem frame or failure frame to an outcome frame and feedback frame. Page 61 Redefining involves substituting a new word or phrase for one of the words or phrases used in a statement or generalization that means something similar but has different implications. Substituting a positively stated phrase for a negatively stated one is an example of "redefining." Page 61 Applying the pattern of Intention would involve responding to the positive intention( s) behind a particular generalization or judgment, rather than directly to the statement itself. Page 62 "I like this, but I'm afraid it is too expensive." To apply the pattern of intention, the salesperson might say something like, "I hear that it is important to you that you get good value for your money." Page 62 "Is it that you think the item is overpriced, or are you concerned that you cannot afford it?" Page 63 "Thinking" and "being concerned" are in many ways very different from being "afraid." They imply cognitive processes more than an emotional reaction (thus, more likelihood that something will be perceived as feedback). Page 63 Relabeling "pain" as "discomfort," is another good illustration of the impact of the Sleight of Mouth pattern of redefining. One Word Reframing Exercise Page 65 "I am firm; you are obstinate; he is a pigheaded fool." Perceiving a Situation from a Different Model of the World by Taking 'Second Position' Page 68 Taking second position involves stepping into another person's point of view, or 'perceptual position', within a particular situation or interaction. Second position is one of the three fundamental Perceptual Positions defined by NLP. Chapter 3: Chunking Forms of Chunking Page 73 In NLP, the term "chunking" refers to reorganizing or breaking down some experience into bigger or smaller pieces. "Chunking up" involves moving to a larger, more general or abstract level of information– for example, grouping cars, trains, boats and airplanes as "forms of transportation." "Chunking down" involves moving to a more specific and concrete level of information– for example, a "car" may be chunked down into "tires," "engine," "brake system," "transmission," etc. Page 73 Chunking, then, has to do with how a person uses his or her attention. Page 74 Given a particular situation, the way a person is chunking his or her experience may be helpful or problematic. When a person is attempting to think "realistically" it is valuable to think in smaller chunks. When brainstorming, however, attention on small chunks may lead the person to "losing sight of the forest for the trees." Chunking Laterally (Finding Analogies) Page 81 Inductive reasoning involves classifying particular objects or phenomena according to common features that they share - noticing that all birds have feathers for example. Inductive reasoning is essentially the process of 'chunking up'. Deductive reasoning involves making predictions about a particular object or phenomenon based on its classification; i.e., if - then type logic. Deduction involves 'chunking down'. Abductive reasoning involves looking for the similarities between objects and phenomena - i.e., 'chunking laterally'. Page 82 Abductive or metaphorical thinking leads to more creativity and may actually lead us to discover deeper truths about reality. Punctuation and Repunctuation Page 86 The various forms of chunking (up, down and laterally) provide a powerful set of linguistic tools to help us enrich, reframe, and "re- punctuate" our maps of the world. Different "punctuations" of our perception of the world allow us to create different meanings of the same experience. Page 86 that that is is that that is not is not is not that it it is Page 86 That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is not that it? It is! Page 87 The content of our experience is like the first string of words. It is relatively neutral and even void of any real meaning. Cognitive processes, such as chunking, time perception, and representational channels, determine where we place our mental and emotional question marks, periods and exclamation points. Our mental punctuation influences which perceptions are clustered together, where our focus of attention is placed, what types of relationships are perceptible, etc. Chapter 4: Values and Criteria The Structure of Meaning Page 90 From the NLP perspective, meaning is a function of the relationship between "map and territory." Different maps of the world will produce different inner meanings for the same experiential territory. Page 90 Meaning is the natural consequence of interpreting our experience. Page 91 Because meaning is a function of our internal representations of our experience, altering those internal representations can alter the meaning an experience has for us. Page 91 Meaning is also greatly influenced by context. Page 91 The mental frames we place around our perception of a situation, message, or event serves as a type of internally generated context for our experience. Page 91 Another influence on meaning is the medium or channel through which a message or experience is received or perceived. Page 92 the way a person makes meaning of a communication is largely determined by the para- messages and meta messages that accompany that communication. Page 92 there is a difference between "No?", "No.", and "No!"). Page 92 One of the fundamental principles of NLP is that the meaning of a communication, to the receiver, is the response it elicits in that receiver, regardless of the intention of the communicator. Page 92 Beliefs relating to cause- and- effect and the connection between perceived events and our values largely determine the meaning we give to those perceived events. Altering beliefs and values can immediately change the meaning of our life experiences. Values and Motivation Page 94 values are "principles, qualities or entities that are intrinsically valuable or desirable." Page 94 axiology (from the Greek axios, meaning "worthy") to describe the study of values. Page 95 Values, then, are the basis for motivation and persuasion, and serve as a powerful perceptual filter. When we can connect our future plans and goals to our core values and criteria, those goals become even more compelling. Criteria and Judgment Page 96 One of the challenges in defining, teaching, debating, or even talking about values and criteria is that the language used to express them is often very general and 'non- sensory based'. Values and core criteria are expressed by words such as: "success," "safety," "love," "integrity," etc. These types of words, known as nominalizations in NLP, are notoriously "slippery." As labels, they tend to be much farther removed from any specific sensory experience than words like "chair," "run," "sit," "house," etc. This makes them much more susceptible to the processes of generalization, deletion and distortion. It is not uncommon for two individuals to claim to share the same values and yet act quite differently in similar situations, because their subjective definitions of the values vary so widely. Chunking Down to Define "Criterial Equivalences" Page 100 "Criterial equivalence" is the term used in NLP to describe the specific and observable evidences that people use to define whether or not a particular criterion has been met. Page 100 The type of sensory evidence, or criterial equivalences, that a person uses to evaluate an idea, product or situation will determine to a large extent whether it is judged as being interesting, desirable or successful, etc. Page 100 Effective persuasion, for example, involves the ability to identify and then meet a person's core criteria by matching their criterial equivalence. Page 100 1. Think of some value or criterion that is important for you to satisfy (quality, creativity, uniqueness, health, etc.) 2. How do you know, specifically, that you have met this value or criterion? Is it something you see? Hear? Feel? Do you know it based solely on your own evaluation, or do you need verification from outside of yourself (i.e., from another person or an objective measurement)? Page 101 The sensory perceptions that form our criterial equivalences greatly influence how we think and feel about something. Reality Strategies Page 102 Reality strategies involve the sequence of mental tests and internal criteria an individual applies in order to evaluate whether or not a particular experience or event is "real" or "really happened." It is essentially the strategy by which we distinguish "fantasy" from "reality." Page 102 Our brain doesn't really know the difference between imagined experience or remembered experience. Page 103 The quality of information that we have in our senses is somehow coded more precisely for the real experience than the imagined one, and that's what makes the difference. Page 103 If I want to make something real for you, or convince you about something, I have got to make it fit your criteria for your reality strategy. Page 103 By identifying your reality strategy, you can determine precisely how you need to represent a change in behavior in order to be convinced that it is something that is possible for you to accomplish. Chunking Up to Identify and Utilize Hierarchies of Values and Criteria Page 116 Recognizing that people have different criteria (and different hierarchies of criteria) is essential for resolving conflicts and managing diversity. Some individuals and cultures value the 'achievement of tasks' more than they do the 'preservation of relationships'. Others have exactly the reverse set of priorities. Chapter 5: Beliefs and Expectations Beliefs and Belief Systems Page 122 Beliefs are essentially judgments and evaluations about ourselves, others and the world around us. In NLP, beliefs are considered to be closely held generalizations about 1) causation, 2) meaning and 3) boundaries in: (a) the world around us, (b) our behavior, (c) our capabilities and (d) our identities. Page 122 Beliefs function at a different level than behavior and perception and influence our experience and interpretation of reality by connecting our experiences to our criteria or value systems. Page 123 typical belief statement links a particular value to some other part of our experience. The belief statement, "Success requires hard work," for instance, links the value "success" to a class of activity (" hard work"). The statement, "Success is mainly a matter of luck," connects the same value to a different class of activity (" luck"). Depending upon which belief a person had, he or she would most likely adopt a different approach to attempting to reach success. Furthermore, the way in which a situation, activity, or idea fits (or does not fit) with the beliefs and value systems of an individual or group will determine how it will be received and incorporated. Page 124 Beliefs tend to have a self- organizing or "self- fulfilling" effect on our behavior at many levels, focusing attention in one area and filtering it out of others. The Power of Beliefs Page 125 Beliefs are a powerful influence on our lives. They are also notoriously difficult to change through typical rules of logic or rational thinking. Page 126 Certainly, these examples seem to demonstrate that our beliefs can shape, effect or even determine our degree of intelligence, health, relationships, creativity, even our degree of happiness and personal success. Yet, if indeed our beliefs are such a powerful force in our lives, how do we get control of them so they don't control us? Limiting Beliefs Page 129 Obviously, the most pervasive beliefs are those regarding our identity. Some examples of limiting beliefs about identity are: "I am helpless/ worthless/ a victim." "I don't deserve to succeed." "If I get what I want I will lose something." "I don't have permission to succeed." Page 129 Limiting beliefs sometimes operate like a "thought virus" with a destructive capability similar to that of a computer virus or biological virus. Page 129 the most influential beliefs are often out of our awareness. Page 129 Ultimately, we transform limiting beliefs and become 'immunized' to 'thought viruses' by expanding and enriching our models of the world, Page 130 Many limiting beliefs arise as a result of unanswered 'how' questions. That is, if a person does not know how to change his or her behavior, it is easy for the person to build the belief, "That behavior can't be changed." Expectations Page 132 Beliefs, both empowering and limiting, are related to our expectations. Expectation means "to look forward to" some event or outcome. Page 133 In self- managed activities, for instance, people who are skeptical about the possibility of the outcome occurring, or about their abilities to perform, tend to undermine their own efforts when they approach their limits. Page 137 our expectations exert a strong impact on our motivation and the conclusions we derive from our experience. Page 137 beliefs and expectations about future reinforcement have more influence on behavior than the objective fact that the behavior has received reinforcement in the past. Page 137 the more a person is able to see, hear and feel some future consequence in his or her imagination, the stronger will be the expectation. Expectations and the Sleight of Mouth Pattern of Consequences Page 139 No response, experience or behavior is meaningful outside of the context in which it was established or the response it elicits next. Any behavior, experience or response may serve as a resource or limitation depending on how it fits in with the rest of the system. Using the 'As If' Frame to Strengthen Beliefs and Expectations Page 150 The 'as if' frame is a process by which an individual or group acts 'as if' the desired goal or outcome has already been achieved, or by which an individual or a group pretends to be some other person or entity. The 'as if' frame is a powerful way to help people identify and enrich their perception of the world, and or their future desired states. It is also a useful way to help people overcome resistances and limitations within their current map of the world. Page 150 Acting 'as if' allows people to drop their current perception of the constraints of reality and use their imagination more fully. Chapter 6: The Basic Structure of Beliefs The Linguistic Structure of Beliefs Page 154 Cause- effect statements (characterized by words such as: "cause," "make," "force," "leads to," "results in," etc.) link values causally to other aspects of our experience. Such linguistic structures are used to define the causes and consequences of particular values. Complex Equivalence Page 155 In the statement, "He is in poor health, he must really hate himself," for example, the speaker is implying that "poor health" is in some way equivalent to "self hatred." These two experiences are somehow the "same thing" in the speaker's map of the world (although they may have no connection at all in reality). Some other examples of 'complex equivalences' would be statements such as, "Thinking or acting outside of the social norms means that you are mentally unstable;" "Safety means having the power to fight unfriendly forces;" "If you don't say much, then it must mean you don't have much to say." Page 156 whether one is able to find interpretations which offer a new perspective, Cause-Effect Page 159 our senses do not actually perceive things like "causes", they can only perceive that first one event happened and then another event happened right after the first one. Page 159 only the sequence of the events is what is perceived– "cause" is a freely chosen internal construct that we apply to the relationship we perceived. Page 159 The closer we get to the actual primary relationships and rules that determine and run our experience, the further we are from anything that is directly perceivable. Page 161 Looking for precipitating causes leads us to see the problem or outcome as a result of particular events and experiences from the past. Seeking constraining causes leads us to perceive the problem or outcome as something brought out by ongoing conditions within which the current situation is occurring. Considering final causes leads us to perceive a problem or outcome as a result of the motives and intentions of the individuals involved. Attempting to find the formal causes of a problem or outcome leads us to view it as a function of the definitions and assumptions we are applying to the situation. Page 163 In many respects, our language, beliefs and models of the world function as the 'formal causes' of our reality. Sleight of Mouth and the Structure of Beliefs Page 168 All Sleight of Mouth patterns revolve around using language in order to relate and link various aspects of our experience and maps of the world to core values. Page 169 from the NLP perspective, the issue is not so much whether one has found the "correct" cause- effect belief, but rather what types of practical results one is able to achieve if one acts "as if" a particular equivalence or causal relationship exists. Chapter 7: Internal States and Natural Belief Change The Natural Process of Belief Change Page 190 People often consider the process of changing beliefs to be difficult and effortful; and accompanied by struggle and conflict. Yet, the fact remains that people naturally and spontaneously establish and discard hundreds, if not thousands, of beliefs during their lifetimes. Perhaps the difficulty is that when we consciously attempt to change our beliefs, we do so in a way that does not respect the natural cycle of belief change. We try to change our beliefs by "repressing" them, disproving them, or attacking them. Beliefs can become surprisingly simple and easy to change if we respect and pace the natural process of belief change. The Belief Change Cycle Page 193 When we 'want to believe' something, it is usually because we think that the new belief will produce positive consequences in our lives. Page 193 Becoming 'open to believe' is an exciting and generative experience, typically accompanied by a sense of freedom and exploration. Page 194 when we first attempt to take on a new belief, it comes into conflict with existing beliefs. Page 195 In order to reevaluate and let go of existing beliefs that are interfering with the establishment of a new belief, we must become 'open to doubt' the existing belief. Page 195 "If I view it from a larger perspective, what other possibilities do I become aware of?" Page 195 "What is the positive purpose that this belief has served, and are there other ways to achieve that positive intention that are less limiting and more enriching?" Page 195 When we truly change a belief, we no longer need to exert any effort to deny or suppress the belief. Our relationship to it is more like the experience we have of seeing historical items in a museum. Page 196 In many ways, trust is the cornerstone of the natural process of belief change. Page 197 Trust, in fact, is often something we must rely on when we have no proof. Belief Change and Internal States Page 199 A basic premise of NLP is that the human brain functions similarly to a computer - by executing "programs" or mental strategies that are composed of ordered sequences of instructions or internal representations. Certain programs or strategies function better for accomplishing certain tasks than others, and it is the strategy that an individual uses that will to a great extent determine whether his performance is one of mediocrity or excellence. The efficacy and ease with which a particular mental program is carried out is to a large degree determined by the physiological state of the individual. Page 200 By becoming more aware of the patterns and cues that influence internal states, we can increase the number of choices we have in responding to a particular situation. Once we are aware of the factors that define and influence the characteristics of our internal states we can sort them and "anchor" them to help make them available for use. Some of the methods used in NLP to sort and anchor internal states include: spatial location, submodalities (colors, tones, brightness, etc.), and non- verbal cues. Page 201 learn how to take an internal inventory Page 201 A physiological inventory Page 201 A submodality inventory Page 201 An emotions inventory Chapter 8: Thought Viruses and the Meta Structure of Beliefs Thought Viruses Page 226 Limiting beliefs arise from generalizations, deletions and distortions that have become placed in a 'problem frame', 'failure frame', or 'impossibility frame'. Such beliefs become even more limiting and difficult to change when they are separated from the experiences, values, internal states and expectations from which they were derived. When this happens, the belief can become perceived as some type of disassociated "truth" about reality. This leads people to begin to view the belief as "the territory" rather than a particular "map," whose purpose is to help us effectively navigate our way through some portion of our experiential territory. This situation can become even further exaggerated when the limiting belief is not even one that we have formed from our own experiences, but which has been imposed upon us by others. Page 227 a thought virus has become disconnected from the surrounding 'meta structure' which provides the context and purpose of the belief, and determines its 'ecology'. Page 227 Unlike a typical limiting belief, which can be updated or corrected as a result of experience, thought viruses, are based on unspoken assumptions (which are typically other limiting beliefs). Page 227 When this happens, the thought virus becomes its own self- validating "reality" instead of serving a larger reality. Page 228 Because a good deal of the meaning of the message is implied and not stated, it is more difficult to recognize, "That's just his opinion". Presuppositions Page 235 One of the major factors that prevents a thought virus from being naturally updated or corrected by new data and counter examples provided by our experience, is that significant portions of the belief are presupposed, rather than explicitly stated by the belief. In order to be changed, the other beliefs and presuppositions upon which the thought virus is based must be identified, brought to the surface, and examined. Page 235 True linguistic presuppositions should be contrasted with assumptions and inferences. A linguistic presupposition is something that is overtly expressed in the body of the statement itself, which must be 'supposed' or accepted in order for the sentence or utterance to make sense. In the question, "Have you stopped exercising regularly?" for example, the use of the word stop implies that the listener has already been exercising regularly. The question, "Do you exercise regularly?" has no such presupposition. Page 236 Because presuppositions, assumptions and inferences do not appear in the surface structure of a particular statement or belief, it makes them more difficult to identify and address directly. Page 239 the more presuppositions the sentence has, the more potential it has to become a 'virus'. Self Reference Page 242 Healthy systems generally have a balance of 'self reference' and 'external reference' (or 'other' reference). Page 244 "you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't." Page 244 According to anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who originally defined the notion of the double bind, such conflicts are at the root of both creativity and psychosis (depending upon whether or not one is able to transcend the double bind or stays caught inside of it). Meta Frames Page 255 Meta framing frequently diffuses the impact of a limiting belief by shifting a person's perspective to that of an observer to his or her own mental processes. Logical Levels Page 260 Rewarding or punishing particular behaviors will not necessarily change someone's beliefs, because belief systems are a different type of process mentally and neurologically than behaviors. Changing Logical Levels Page 264 One of the most common and effective Sleight of Mouth tactics involves recategorizing a characteristic or experience from one logical level to another (e.g., separating a person's identity from his or her capabilities or behavior). Chapter 9: Applying the Patterns as a System Definition and Examples of Sleight of Mouth Patterns Page 268 the purpose of Sleight of Mouth is not to attack the person or the belief, but rather to reframe the belief and widen the person's map of the world in such a way that the positive intention behind the belief can be maintained through other choices. "In unusual circumstances, unusual things can happen" (applying the generalization to itself).	Robert Greene Notable Quotations Full screen view Download full text (pdf) LAW 1: NEVER OUTSHINE THE MASTER LAW 2: NEVER PUT TOO MUCH TRUST IN FRIENDS, LEARN HOW TO USE ENEMIES LAW 3: CONCEAL YOUR INTENTIONS LAW 4: ALWAYS SAY LESS THAN NECESSARY LAW 5: SO MUCH DEPENDS ON REPUTATION—GUARD IT WITH YOUR LIFE LAW 6: COURT ATTENTION AT ALL COST LAW 7: GET OTHERS TO DO THE WORK FOR YOU, BUT ALWAYS TAKE THE CREDIT LAW 8: MAKE OTHER PEOPLE COME TO YOU—USE BAIT IF NECESSARY LAW 9: WIN THROUGH YOUR ACTIONS, NEVER THROUGH ARGUMENT LAW 10: INFECTION: AVOID THE UNHAPPY AND UNLUCKY LAW 11: LEARN TO KEEP PEOPLE DEPENDENT ON YOU LAW 12: USE SELECTIVE HONESTY AND GENEROSITY TO DISARM YOUR VICTIM LAW 13: WHEN ASKING FOR HELP, APPEAL TO PEOPLE’S SELF-INTEREST, NEVER TO THEIR MERCY OR GRATITUDE LAW 14: POSE AS A FRIEND, WORK AS A SPY LAW 15: CRUSH YOUR ENEMY TOTALLY LAW 16: USE ABSENCE TO INCREASE RESPECT AND HONOUR LAW 17: KEEP OTHERS IN SUSPENDED TERROR: CULTIVATE AN AIR OF UNPREDICTABILITY LAW 18: DO NOT BUILD FORTRESSES TO PROTECT YOURSELF—ISOLATION IS DANGEROUS LAW 19: KNOW WHO YOU’RE DEALING WITH—DO NOT OFFEND THE WRONG PERSON LAW 20: DO NOT COMMIT TO ANYONE LAW 21: PLAY A SUCKER TO CATCH A SUCKER—SEEM DUMBER THAN YOUR MARK LAW 22: USE THE SURRENDER TACTIC: TRANSFORM WEAKNESS INTO POWER LAW 23: CONCENTRATE YOUR FORCES LAW 24: PLAY THE PERFECT COURTIER LAW 25: RE-CREATE YOURSELF LAW 26: KEEP YOUR HANDS CLEAN LAW 27: PLAY ON PEOPLE’S NEED TO BELIEVE TO CREATE A CULT-LIKE FOLLOWING LAW 28: ENTER ACTION WITH BOLDNESS LAW 29: PLAN ALL THE WAY TO THE END LAW 30: MAKE YOUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS SEEM EFFORTLESS LAW 31: CONTROL THE OPTIONS: GET OTHERS TO PLAY WITH THE CARDS YOU DEAL LAW 32: PLAY TO PEOPLE’S FANTASIES LAW 33: DISCOVER EACH MAN’S THUMBSCREW LAW 34: BE ROYAL IN YOUR OWN FASHION: ACT LIKE A KING TO BE TREATED LIKE ONE LAW 35: MASTER THE ART OF TIMING LAW 36: DISDAIN THINGS YOU CANNOT HAVE: IGNORING THEM IS THE BEST REVENGE LAW 37: CREATE COMPELLING SPECTACLES LAW 38: THINK AS YOU LIKE BUT BEHAVE LIKE OTHERS LAW 39: STIR UP WATERS TO CATCH FISH LAW 40: DESPISE THE FREE LUNCH LAW 41: AVOID STEPPING INTO A GREAT MAN’S SHOES LAW 42: STRIKE THE SHEPHERD AND THE SHEEP WILL SCATTER LAW 43: WORK ON THE HEARTS AND MINDS LAW 44: DISARM AND INFURIATE WITH THE MIRROR EFFECT LAW 45: PREACH THE NEED FOR CHANGE, BUT NEVER REFORM TOO MUCH AT ONCE LAW 46: NEVER APPEAR TOO PERFECT LAW 47: DO NOT GO PAST THE MARK YOU AIMED FOR; IN VICTORY, LEARN WHEN TO STOP LAW 48: ASSUME FORMLESSNESS
Robert L. FitzPatrick Notable Quotations Full screen view Foreword: Read at Your Own Risk U.S. regulators have weakened consumer protections against pyramid schemes, even exempting MLMs from disclosure rules when making financial solicitations. The "MLM" movement is now syndicated into an "industry" with its own lobbying and PR organization on K Street in Washington, D.C., and has assembled a protective caucus of lawmakers in the U. S. House of Representatives. Multi-level marketing, sometimes also called "network marketing," is now fully global, with a claim of more than 100 million households paying into it every year. In America alone, where it all began in 1945, official MLM representatives claim that in excess of 18 million households -- one in six -- are under contract to MLM companies each year. More than half of that figure joins yearly, replacing those who quit. Every year, the recruited participants expend $20–$30 billion in fees and purchases, though that estimate does not come close to actual total expenditures when related expenses and opportunity costs are included. My efforts have not even made a significant difference, that I could tell, among my own friends and family some of whom have sheepishly admitted to joining and losing their money in MLMs without telling me. They explained they had been taught that a positive attitude and unflinching belief were the most important factors for success in MLM. Negative voices from non-believers and cautious calls for "due diligence" are to be shunned and avoided. In the ideology of the MLM movement, I am fiendish dream-stealer, malevolent negative-thinker, Pathetic Loser. The drivers of our consumer economy -- where sociologist Jules Henry wrote that "pecuniary truth" rules, not factual reality. To get to the core reality that can explain MLM's phenomenal spread, one must also re-examine the state of opportunity in America today, the decline of the middle class, and popular views of wealth as measures of "success," happiness, and human worth. Losers > Page 2 Measured by the sheer numbers of people who join, quit, and rejoin every year, the billions of dollars invested that produce no profit, and the intensity of hope and commitment it evokes from adherents, if only briefly, "multi-level marketing" must be recognized as one of the most powerful forces shaping social and economic behavior today on Main Street it is an easily documented fact that virtually everyone, 99.99%i, who has ever participated in an MLM -- and we are speaking of hundreds of millions of people worldwide over seven decades -- failed, lost, or quit with zero financial gain. And that only begins the count of losers. Biggest Loser > Page 13 Selling feathers from the angels' wings. > Page 17 On the cover of DeVos's 1975, book, Believe, it says, "Discover how you can attain success and personal fulfillment through belief in free enterprise, human dignity, God and His Church, the American Way." The moral tone and the Christian rhetoric, blended inexplicably with patriotism and capitalism, were adopted by many MLMs that followed. Christian churches became hotbeds of MLM recruiting with clergy in the uplines. > Page 19 With this assumed moral authority and righteousness of purpose, MLM leaders could impose a stigma of shame and humiliation upon adherents who lost money and quit or criticized the program. They were stigmatized as "losers and quitters" or "negative thinkers." Shrouded in the silence and shame of the disgraced and discredited "losers," the massive program of proselytizing and soliciting funds for a non-existent "income opportunity" proceeded without public outcry, leaving millions with losses in its wake. Dreams and Schemes: Journey to MLM Page 21 As is now widely known, the real money in this and other gold rushes was not in gold itself, but in selling to gold-seekers supplies, tools, transportation -- anything that fed their hopes. > Page 30 Leveraged by the enormous power and authority of science, these minuscule food elements were hyper-commercialized by non-scientists as miracle discoveries that could now be extracted and made available in pill form -- for a price. Though scientists had shown that the abnormal absence of these nutritional elements could lead to disease, the commercial promoters distorted these discoveries into claims that adding them to a normal diet could ward off illness and even cure diseases. Pseudo-Truth > Page 38 As Catherine Price's history and analysis argues, the mania for vitamins in Rehnborg's time -- and today -- is largely a result of advertising, public relations, marketing, and salesmanship. What scientists had discovered, advertisers and marketers remade into their own image, creating a mythic commodity that barely resembled the nutritional component of the laboratory. > Page 38 Jules Henry called advertising's "pseudo-truth and pecuniary logic." ... "Pseudo-truth in advertising," Henry wrote, "is a false statement made as if it were true but not intended to be believed literally." No proof is offered, nor required. "Proof is that it sells merchandise; if it does not, it is false." Informing people that the normal diet of the times made taking vitamin "supplements" unnecessary became "false" -- because it does not boost sales. Stating that vitamin pills provide "energy" (which is impossible as they contain no calories) and "boost immunity" (for which there was no evidence) became "pseudo-truth" -- because it does lead to sales. > Page 43 The consultant then advised Rehnborg to enroll in a Dale Carnegie course. Calcote also thought the training program would help Rehnborg "deal with distributors who were from the hard school of sales."57 Rehnborg's attendance at one of America's first large-scale "self-improvement" programs might harken to his early practice of making lists of habits for developing a "dashing personality." But a momentous encounter at Dale Carnegie's program, and the historical point at which it occurred, gave the event greater meaning. > Page 45 Dale Carnegie was an aspiring actor, but later found extraordinary success in teaching public speaking. > Page 45 The most famous novelist at the time, Sinclair Lewis, characterized Carnegie's book about "winning friends" as "how to smile and bob and pretend to be interested … precisely so that you may screw things out of them …"62 That How to Win Friends and Influence People is not at all about real friendship can be quickly ascertained from the subtitles, "Fundamental Techniques in Handling People, How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking, How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment." > Page 49 Nutrilite's new language, however, went far beyond euphemisms. It produced a special vocabulary and way of speaking that cover over facts by authoritatively asserting their opposite. It was a precursor to what would evolve in "MLM" into an Orwellian doublespeak, in which controlled and manipulated contractors became "independent business owners," quota purchasing became "selling," wholesale was designated "retail," distributor morphed into "end user," and 99% loss rates were proclaimed "the greatest income opportunity in the world." The term "doublespeak" is associated with George Orwell's famous novel, 1984, published in 1949. > Page 50 The doublespeak that Nutrilite developed around products to escape prosecution would later expand to an all-encompassing, proprietary vocabulary, covering MLM's pyramid structure, false marketing claims, money-transfer pay plan, and would conceal or obscure the roles of recruiters. It would be taught with propaganda techniques involving constant repetition of thought-stopping aphorisms, e.g., "only quitters lose and only losers quit," resulting, as Orwell explained, in an inability for followers to hold contrary thoughts or to formulate questions. Cemeteries and Psychology Page 53 Very similar in tone and published just two years after Dale Carnegie's famous work, How to Win Friends, Casselberry's How to Use Psychology was an early example of the "self-help" genre that was previously directed at salespeople for teaching commercial persuasion techniques, but would later go mainstream for effectiveness in all areas of life. ... No demand had ever existed for the ostensible product of a cemetery plot, to be purchased years before the customer passed away. But Mytinger's sales reps were not selling just real estate. They were offering a way to remove the sting of death, purchase eternal bliss, and even gain higher social status, replete with music, statues, and vistas of mountains and valleys to be appreciated for eternity.85 ... This experience in an invented field -- based almost totally on sales pitches, not intrinsic value or consumer need -- would prove crucial when Mytinger and Casselberry launched their new sales plan at Nutrilite. ... The sales position at Forest Lawn and other cemetery sales operations Lee Mytinger occupied was termed "memorial counselor," presaging the nomenclature adopted in multi-level marketing of "coach, consultant, associate, distributor" -- anything other than salesperson or recruiter.i In this "counselor" capacity, the range of services recommended could extend far beyond a plot of burial soil, to include "vaults, bronze grave markers, flowers, postcards, and statuary and the collection, control and management of huge 'perpetual care' funds." Mitford revealed that cemetery plot salespeople could add a surcharge from 10% to 25% for "future care" even on concrete mausoleums.87 > Page 66 The vision of an "endless chain" of salespeople was born not out of a grand plan for a vast new industry, which did develop, or as a plot to cause losses to millions of people, which it did; it emerged from the mundane experience of a seasoned old cemetery plot sales manager who dreamed, as all sales managers have, of a protected and growing income. It was conceived out of a longing for a safe haven from the insidious competition of younger upstarts, from the brutal realities of market limits and fluctuating demands for commodity products. It was imagined as a form of deliverance from the humiliating circumstances endured by sales managers the world over, a transformation of a thankless role as custodian of a churning sales force into the captain of a regenerative money machine. > Page 66 The real commodity to be marketed under the new "plan" would not be Avon-type cosmetics or Fuller Brush gadgets. It would be the salespeople themselves, the clay of the sales manager's craft. Appropriately then, new managers would all be called "independent business owners." > Page 74 Insight into the groundbreaking moment when "multi-level marketing" was created requires looking closely where few have explored -- the similarities and the boundaries between selling, which was the primary bond between Mytinger and Casselberry, and swindling, which is what they conspired to create. Mytinger and Casselberry crossed the line from selling -- generally defined as voluntary agreements for commercial transactions between parties based on adequately disclosed information and resulting in a reasonably equitable exchange -- into swindling, generally defined as calculated deception, withholding of information necessary to a voluntary agreement and -- by design -- resulting in loss to one or more parties at the hands of the other. > Page 75 No one believes that money is given away for free. In sales, the bargain might be portrayed, for example, as "limited time," implying that the regular prices paid by the unfortunate later buyers provide the funding for the discounts today's wise or lucky buyer could enjoy. The salesman is the only person who can offer this special deal now. Page 87 [There is a] popular belief gripping America's imagination: a business model actually existed, somewhere, that was capable of producing perpetual and extraordinary income for all participants, delivering to the common man what was once available to only the elite, thus fulfilling the promise of the American Dream. Page 88 In sales there is always inside information not available to the customer or the public at large. ... The customer's belief that that they are making rational decisions is, the salesman knows, mostly an illusion. In reality, the salesman makes it happen with information he does not share. The salesman's joke, therefore, is always on those who are not in possession of that key information and who can be directed, even controlled, by scripted promises, logic and benefits. This is the universal secret knowledge salespeople hold, the tools of their trade. > Page 99 As Ponzinomics evolved, critical judgment was not only diverted but would be banished by dogmas, values and specialized language, pretenses of a viable and beneficial economic model. Anatomy of a Pyramid Scheme > Page 105 You pay for marketing materials, fees for motivation events, even business cards. On the other hand, you have severe restrictions under the MLM contract you must sign when you first enroll. > Page 105 All MLMs require payment to join, payment to renew and quotas of purchases or recruiting or both to gain overrides on your own recruits. > Page 107 In MLM, "sales" means recruiting; retail means wholesale, the price paid by the "downliner;" and, since everyone on the chain must meet a purchase quota, salesperson means buyer. Got it? > Page 110 There is no sustainable retail customer base, no real demand for the goods, no need for a personal salesperson and therefore little to no retail selling. But there is a tremendous market for "income opportunity." ... It includes students with college debt, seniors facing mountains of medical bills and disappearing savings, families with unbearable rents, people already working two jobs, immigrants trying to survive, and military spouses facing multiple deployments, among others. The income-opportunity market is exploding! > Page 111 They will be quitting soon -- as many as 80% of the latest recruits do quit within the first year of joining. But they are replaced. Some move on to other MLMs, replacing dropouts at those companies. The object is to get them to buy as much as possible (that's why there are purchase quotas), for as long as possible (that's why they are promised "unlimited income" if they keep buying and if they miss even one month, they lose everything), and get as much from them (the extreme money transfer formula) as possible while they are enrolled and buying. > Page 113 Most naked pyramids eventually collapse when not enough new people join, resulting in others not getting their rewards. The chain breaks. But MLM is not recognized as a pyramid scheme because its true anatomy is disguised. It's endless chain keeps breaking but is repaired as new people replace the "losers." MLM is officially designated as "direct selling." It is "legitimate." So people keep joining, lured by deception, and driven by hope and need. Even though the data exist showing the 90+% loss rates -- it was even explained, comically, by John Oliver on HBO -- few people believe it. Because how could that be true and it also be "legitimate?" > Page 113 Those that don't make money just didn't want to or didn't try hard enough. > Page 117 Holding ceremonial spectacles in enormous stadiums and posing on stage as high priests possessing sacred secrets, MLM promoters tout their schemes as the fulfillment of the mythic American Dream. They flaunt their own wealth as proof they can align the stars, so to speak, to deliver success and happiness to followers. They gain enormous wealth and near worship from awe-struck followers who suffer financial loss, debt and social alienation, building the MLM pyramids with their own money and free labor. Ponzinomics -- Propaganda > Page 148 The dire, factual warning of death and deformity competes with positive and pleasing imagery of health, beauty, and enjoyment. The cigarette producers do not deny their product kills. They don't need to. They know the more powerful and reassuring alternative message -- smoking is about pleasure -- will prevail. > Page 149 By then, multi-level marketing was more than just a very large business with deep political connections gained from payments to politicians. It was also a mass movement on Main Street USA with millions of followers who displayed levels of zeal and obedience never before seen in American business. Some followers resembled addicts with fanatical behavior once reserved for certain realms of religious fundamentalism and political extremism. > Page 149 American power alongside Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, the Military-Industrial Complex, Wall Street, and Hollywood. It used the tools and tactics of all extreme power holders among them, to deny or ignore reality when facts posed a threat or inconvenience, and never to admit to errors or contradictions, even when verified and indisputable.ii > Page 155 MLM no longer denied its Ponzi money transfer. As the scheme spread globally, Amway and other new MLMs moved from denial to a more aggressive form of deception, the creation of an alternative reality with "alternative facts." Amway began proclaiming itself "the greatest income opportunity in the world." > Page 156 Powerful PR backed by official government policy. > Page 156 Many observers have noted that America has recently entered a strange new era, characterized by outrageously false rhetoric and absurd conspiracy theories. Verifiable, widely accepted, even scientifically proven facts now must officially compete with blatant lies, euphemistically called "alternative facts." In this new realm, dedicated liars have the extreme upper hand.i. > Page 157 In keeping with the well-known principles of propaganda making, MLM promoters employed the famous practice of repeating a lie, aka alternative facts, so often it is eventually perceived as the truth.ii Truth -- actual truth -- soon becomes stranger or more frightening than the comforting and constantly repeated lie.138 > Page 157 Forbes contributor Steve Denning referenced the writings of Hanna Arendt.139 On the origins of authoritarianism, Arendt argued that the public (during the Nazi period), "do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … obsessed by a desire to escape from reality … they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects. Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction." > Page 159 In all extreme belief systems where deception and fairy tale legends replace history and fact-based reality, brutal enforcement measures are used when trickery and propaganda prove inadequate. Questioners, critics or opponents who challenge the lies face public lawsuits, smear attacks, even physical threats. MLM follows suit. > Page 159 Extremism when a whisper campaign spread among Amway's army of participants throughout the 1980s and early 1990s suggested P&G was a "satanic" company and its logo was an evil symbol. Many Amway recruits, some of whom were traditional Christians and believed the vicious rumor spread informally and over Amway's corporate voice-mail system, hurriedly threw out products in their homes bearing the "evil" P&G logo and replaced them with Amway-branded goods, though many were much higher priced. > Page 161 Attacking, discrediting or marginalizing critics or whistle-blowers are defensive and enforcement aspects of Big Lie propaganda. To maintain strict control over believers and adherents, this level of deception requires even more unconscionable actions. People must be taught the equivalent of a heaven or hell destiny: a utopian future if they keep paying and recruiting, a hellish dystopia for the doomed quitters and losers. > Page 163 [Here is a] portrait of how the scheme permeated individual lives, disrupted, families, and impacted social networks. Amway had become an evangelistic belief system, they both wrote, with its own rituals, hierarchy, membership, rules, enforcement, and extreme indoctrination. To those financially struggling and feeling left behind or forgotten in the global economy, it promised deliverance and fulfillment of the American Dream. To those who quit or even questioned the promised destiny, Amway's promoters predicted a dreadful life of unfulfilled dreams, regret and lost potential, a level of hell that Dante's Inferno might have included had Dante lived in modern America. > Page 167 A specialized language, a form of commercial doublespeak was adopted to obscure the entrapping endless chain incentive and to make the purchases appear as ordinary consumer purchases, unrelated to the income scheme. Fixed-priced transactions with contract-wholesalers were renamed "retail." Recruiters were called "distributors." Recruiting rewards became "performance bonuses" and "sales commissions." Paying to join the recruiting chain was disguised as signing a "sales contract" and receiving a "sales kit." Those who failed to enroll a recruit were renamed "discount buyers." > Page 169 How to Lie with Statistics, the most popular book ever written in the field of statistics is, arguably, about the most common way that statistics are actually used.152 Author Darrell Huff acknowledged the book could be "a manual for swindlers" but concluded, "crooks already know these tricks." ... Huff explained how the use of statistics could add "a spurious air of scientific precision" to absurd claims or erroneous conclusions that a common-sense observation or a more careful examination would quickly reveal as nonsense or dangerously false. > Page 181 The FTC protection policy, like MLM's recruiting scheme, appears on the surface to be its opposite -- a "consumer protection" agency to prosecute "illegal" MLMs. It has a record of more than 30 successful MLM prosecutions. A closer look and a study of the FTC's regulatory history reveal only the clamor of gongs and cymbals. > Page 183 The FTC uses retail sales a measurable factor in determining MLM legality. With millions of people investing money in the belief that MLMs are retail-based, it would seem that all MLMs would be required to verify their retail sales levels. No requirement to disclose retail sales levels has ever been asked for or imposed by the FTC. > Page 184 The control and collusion of the FTC and other sectors of law enforcement, however, required direct action: political influence-buying involving state legislatures, attorneys general, Congress, and the U.S. presidency. Behind MLM's license to fraudulently claim perpetual expansion, falsely promise unlimited income, and openly run money-transfer recruiting schemes disguised as "direct selling," is old fashioned political corruption, boodling and bribing. Public officials have to be "influenced" to protect MLM over the public interest. The story of Ponzinomics now enters the dark world of K-Street lobbying, revolving doors between consumer protection agencies and pyramid schemes, and political fixes. Ponzinomics -- Politics > Page 188 Ponzinomics: noun / pän-z?-'nä-miks / a pseudo-economic, all-encompassing, delusional belief system that promotes the swindle of a Ponzi or pyramid scheme as a valid economic model that promises believers a fulfilling and financially rewarding way of life, complete with mission, values, leadership and worldview. The societal spread of Ponzinomics is necessarily accompanied by governmental collusion. > Page 189 [I am often] asked, "why hasn't the government prosecuted the MLM industry? You think you know more than the FTC and SEC or Congress? Wait … (with a derisive laugh) are you saying the government is in on it too?" My answer to that question is seldom well received. > Page 191 "The MLM business, regulators and lawmakers are swathed in their own protective myth of good government valiantly battling evil pyramid schemes. Government often fails, the tale ruefully admits, not due to corruption or neglect, but devilish maneuverings of highly paid pyramid lawyers, inadequate statutes, uninformed legislators, and insufficient budgets. Pyramid fraud endures despite government's good faith effort. To mention a "fix," -- political payoffs and revolving doors between regulators and those regulated -- is insulting, impertinent, wrong-headed, and irresponsible. The public is expected to be grateful > Page 194 That "MLM" is permitted to operate with impunity due to political collusion and influence-buying is a view many find unthinkable, unbearably negative. Individual corruption is comprehensible. Systemic, enduring and bi-partisan protection of an insidious global scam is beyond the purview of "news." It would require a new vocabulary for reporting regulatory actions. To acknowledge the reality is to erode confidence in all governmental agencies. Institutional corruption will not be examined or acknowledged by the implicated institutions. As a perspective, it borders on conspiracy and provokes confusion and despair for many people. ... To break the spell of disinformation and to venture into this culturally unspeakable territory requires adopting, at least briefly, a perspective from another era. Boodling and Bribing > Page 227 In recent years, the revelations of other prominent Democrats joining the cause of pyramid protection for fees and jobs have corrected earlier thinking that Republicans hold a monopoly in this lucrative protection program. Formerly known as the "Amway Caucus" in the 1990s and composed only of Republicans, today forty-one members of the House of Representatives have joined the newly re-branded "direct selling caucus." Eighteen members are Democrats.215 A Cult of Capitalism > Page 266 Employing an epistemology of the advertising industry in extreme form, truth is whatever facilitates expansion. Facts themselves are irrelevant. Deception is celebrated if it sustains hope and increases revenue. Any statements that question the system or threaten loss or inhibit expansion are false, heretical or malevolent, according to its ideology. > Page 267 My colleagues and I only spoke about MLM as an extremist cult of capitalism promoted by economic alchemists who cast a thought-reform spell over recruits amongst ourselves. > Page 272 From its earliest days, multi-level marketing included pseudo-psychological self-improvement programs that claimed powers to drastically alter an individual's outlook and attitude and to instantly facilitate effectiveness, especially financial success. The three largest and fastest growing MLMs that the FTC targeted in the 1970s -- Holiday Magic, Koscot Interplanetary, and Amway -- each had indoctrination programs, euphemistically termed "mind training,""transformational," or "motivation" courses. > Page 274 Long before multi-level marketing shamed its adherent with the specter of "loser," salespeople were mercilessly indoctrinated with the winner-or-loser philosophy of life. Fortified with the spirit and the doctrine of the marketplace, they were then trained in the weaponry of persuasion, manipulation, and domination. Before "sales-and-marketing" became an academic discipline, it was an underground belief system, an ideology, and a philosophy for living, crassly commercial in character. The discipline of sales was presented as more than tools of a trade. It was "self-improvement," a study of human nature, a pathway to success in business and happiness in the rest of life. > Page 278 Viewed generally as a positive, inspiring and uplifting perspective on life, in the hands of pyramid scheme charlatans and cult leaders, the "everything is possible" proclamation becomes a tool to destroy personal identity, subvert critical thinking and to blow up life-long perceptions of what is real and true. When life circumstances, background, direct experience or a lifetime of learning are dismissed only as a limiting perspective that can be reshaped, abolished or "transformed" by merely altering perspective, people are suddenly vulnerable to new and dominating interpretations. Thought control and undue influence are more possible. > Page 278 Hannah Arendt explained "[people] reached the point where they would … think that everything was possible and that nothing was true … [the public] did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow." > Page 281 The new cult movement was not established structurally as a church, political movement, or a school of philosophy, though it resembles all of these. MLM was organized as the most revered institution in modern America -- a chartered business that promised "self-employment" and the exalted status of "owner" to its followers. Officially, it did not convert or persuade or dominate. It sold its beliefs and its false promises of wealth-and-happiness, making them appear as voluntary commercial contracts. At a time of rising anomie, it promised guiding truths, a supportive community and financial security. It appropriated the name and assumed the identity of the extinct but still revered field of "direct selling," conjuring the celebrated Yankee Peddler, icon of American enterprise. > Page 285 There is no consensus as to why the cultic organizations in religion, politics, therapies, and other fields -- including MLM -- emerged in the 1960s and 70s and have grown and proliferated since. Cults defy precise classification; the phenomenon of sudden personality changes among its members, irrational loyalty, and acceptance of delusional claims of cult leaders, remains mysterious. > Page 289 All cult experts agree that virtually everyone is a potential cult member and social forces supporting cult recruiting affect almost everyone. Nevertheless, the enduring popular perception is that cult victims are limited to peculiarly vulnerable individuals facing unusual circumstances. Most people, therefore, believe they themselves would not be cult candidates, or if they were solicited would never succumb. As experts Hassan and Ross attest, even people inside cults believe they would not join one and deny they are in a cult. Cults are therefore protected by the denial and disbelief of people inside them and out. The enslaving power that cult persuasion can have over minds -- anyone's mind -- remains largely unstudied or ignored, aiding the spread of cults. Crime, Blame and Punishment > Page 303 To distinguish positive events and inspiration from thefts of the soul requires a restatement of the most basic elements of all swindles. Leff's distinction of a religious swindle from honest religious practice is applicable to MLMs' fundamental fraudulence, wrapped in the rhetoric of hope and entrepreneurship. Leff's hallmark traits of fraud are that the perpetrator not only does not deliver the reward promised to his marks, but knowingly does so, deliberately and with planning for personal gain and at the cost of the believers.314 Afterword: No Hope and None Required > Page 307 Currently in 2020, there is no consumer protection organization with dedicated staff or resources that a consumer could turn to for representation against MLM. To my knowledge, there is no current member of Congress speaking up about MLM as a major consumer threat. > Page 310 [The] HBO documentary, Betting on Zero, directed by Ted Braun, was the force that shifted the tide. It provided a narrative and footage that Oliver brilliantly built upon.	Ryan Holiday Notable Quotations Full screen view PREFACE "It's difficult to get a man to understand something," Upton Sinclair once said, "when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." INTRODUCTION It is a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain— from a tiny blog to a website of a local news network to Reddit to the Huffington Post to the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real.* Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I "leak" a document. Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that. Really, it can be anything, from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video. However the play starts, the end is the same: The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception— and sell product. We can't even talk to each other anymore, each of us running our own polarized little world on Facebook. I didn't write this book for free, of course, and no narrator is fully trustworthy, myself included. I'm simply speaking personally and frankly about what I know, and I know this space well. Some have tried to claim that I was lying even in this book but my reply remains the same: Why would I bother? We live in a world of many hustlers, and you are the mark. The con is to build a brand off the backs of others. Your attention and your credulity are being stolen. you. Sure, I am explaining how to take advantage of these weaknesses, but mostly I am saying that these vulnerabilities exist. BOOK ONE | FEEDING THE MONSTER: HOW BLOGS WORK Blogs make the news By "blog" I'm referring collectively to all online publishing. That's everything from Twitter accounts to major newspaper websites to web videos to group blogs with hundreds of writers. I don't care whether the owners consider themselves blogs or not. Most people don't understand how today's information cycle really works. Many have no idea of how much their general worldview is influenced by the way news is generated online. What begins online ends offline. In short, blogs are vehicles from which mass media reporters—and your most chatty and "informed" friends—discover and borrow the news. If something is being chatted about on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, it will make its way through all other forms of media and eventually into culture itself. That's a fact. To understand what makes blogs act—why Politico followed Pawlenty around, why the media ended up giving Trump something like $4.6 billion worth of free publicity—is the key to making them do what you want (or stopping this broken system). Learn their rules, change the game. That's all it takes to control public opinion. The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events. The economics of the internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth. TRADING UP THE CHAIN: HOW TO TURN NOTHING INTO SOMETHING IN THREE WAY-TOO-EASY STEPS In the introduction explained a scam call "trading up the chain." It's a strategy developed that manipulates the media through recursion. can turn nothing into something by placing a story with a small blog that has very low standards, which then becomes the source for a story by a larger blog, and that, in turn, for a story by larger media outlets. create, to use the words of one media scholar, a "self-reinforcing news wave." People like me do this every day. "sources." Online publications compete to get stories first, newspapers compete to "confirm" it, and then pundits compete for airtime to opine on it. The smaller sites legitimize the newsworthiness of the story for the sites with bigger audiences. Consecutively and concurrently, this pattern inherently distorts and exaggerates whatever they cover. It's bloggers informing bloggers informing bloggers all the way down. social media, for research. Recklessness, laziness, however you want to categorize it, the attitude is openly tolerated and acknowledged. Having registered multiple stories from multiple sources firmly onto the radar of both local and midlevel outlets, you can now leverage this coverage to access the highest level of media: the national press. Certain blogs are read very heavily by the New York City media set. You can craft the story for those sites and automatically set yourself up to appeal to the other reporters reading it—without ever speaking to them directly. A media example: Katie Couric claims she gets many story ideas from her Twitter followers, which means that getting a few tweets out of the seven hundred or so people she follows is all it takes to get a shot at the nightly national news. It's a simple illusion: Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter (or the music supervisor or celebrity stylist) is doing is popularizing it. They rarely bother to look past the first impressions. Every person in the media ecosystem (with the exception of a few at the top layer) is under immense pressure to produce content under the tightest of deadlines. Yes, you have something to sell. But more than ever they desperately, desperately need to buy. The flimsiest of excuses is all it takes. It freaked me out when THE BLOG CON: HOW PUBLISHERS MAKE MONEY ONLINE Blogs are built to be sold. Though they make substantial revenues from advertising, the real money is in selling the entire site to a larger company for a multiple of the traffic and earnings. Usually to a rich sucker. This is really why they need scoops and acquire marquee bloggers—to build up their names for investors and to show a trend of rapidly increasing traffic. The pressure for this traffic in a short period of time is intense. And desperation, as a media manipulator knows, is the greatest quality you can hope for in a potential victim. Professional blogging is done in the boiler room, and it is brutal. a pageview-based compensation system that gave bonuses to writers based on their monthly traffic figures. IV | TACTIC #1: THE ART OF THE BRIBE To give you a sense of the numbers, Henry Blodget, the founder of Business Insider, once explained that his writers need to generate three times the number of pageviews required to pay for their own salary and benefits, as well as a share of the overhead, sales, hosting, and Blodget's cut, to be worth hiring. In other words, an employee making sixty thousand dollars a year would need to produce upward of 1.8 million pageviews a month, every month, or they're out.4 This is no easy task. I'd argue it's getting harder over time as people get better at getting traffic and flood the market with inventory. Social media influencers are straight-up mercenary. Through various ad networks you can actually pay influential accounts to post prewritten messages or endorse products. V | TACTIC #2: TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR Once during a lawsuit needed to get some information into the public discussion of it, so dashed off a fake internal memo explaining the company's position, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to a bunch of blogs as if were an employee leaking a "memo we just got from our boss." The truth: Blogs love press releases. It does every part of their job for them: The material is already written; the angle laid out; the subject newsworthy; and, since it comes from an official newswire, they can blame someone else if the story turns out to be wrong. press releases through services like PRWeb are deliberately search-engine optimized to show up well in Google results indefinitely. It's not a stretch to convince anyone that it's easy to become a source for blogs. Cracking the mainstream media is much harder, right? Nope. There's actually a tool designed expressly for this purpose. As mentioned in the preface, there is a site called HARO (Help a Reporter Out), While HARO essentially encourages journalists to look for sources who simply confirm what they were already intending to say, the practice spreads far beyond that singularly bad platform. V| TACTIC #3: GIVE 'EM WHAT SPREADS If you make it threaten people's 3 Bs—behavior, belief, or belongings—you get a huge virus-like dispersion. The advice that MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins gives publishers and companies is blunt: "If it doesn't spread, it's dead." Every blog, publisher, and oversharer in your Facebook feed is constantly looking to post things that will take on a life of their own and get attention, links, and new readers with the least work possible. Whether that content is accurate, important, or helpful doesn't even register on their list of priorities. An ordinary blog post is only one page long, so a thousand-word article about Detroit would get one pageview per viewer. A slideshow about Detroit gets twenty per user, hundreds of thousands of times over, while premium advertising rates are charged against the photos. [An article gets one page view per user but a slide show, which asks users to click through a deck, will get as many views as in the deck per user, or there abouts. People get tired of slideshows.] "if something is a total bummer, people don't share it." And since people wouldn't share it, blogs won't publish it. Simple narratives like the haunting ruins of a city spread and live, while complicated ones like a city filled with real people who desperately need help don't. The problem is that the truth—your response—is often much less interesting than the accusations. "Look, if your response isn't more interesting than the allegations, no one is going to care. You might as well not bother." According to the study, "the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes" [emphasis mine]. extremes in any direction have a large impact on how something will spread, but certain emotions do better than others. The angrier an article makes the reader, the better. But happy works too. A powerful predictor of whether content will spread online is valence, or the degree of positive or negative emotion a person is made to feel. The problem is that facts are rarely clearly good or bad. They just are. The truth is often boring and complicated. Navigating this quandary forces marketers and publishers to conspire to distort this information into something that will register on the emotional spectrum of the audience. To turn it into something that spreads and to drive clicks. Behind the scenes work to crank up the valence of articles, relying on scandal, conflict, triviality, titillation, and dogmatism. Whatever will ensure transmission. Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair—these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy—those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, laughter, and outrage—these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation. Manufacture chatter by exploiting emotions of high valence: arousal and indignation. As Rob Walker wrote for the Atlantic in an analysis of the event, a core principle of our new viral culture: "Humiliation should not be suppressed. It should be monetized." Instead of being ashamed of its crappy television journalism, CNBC was able to make extra money from the millions of views it generated. What spreads on the web—humiliation, conspiracy theories, anger, frustration, humor, passion, and possibly the interplay of several or all of these things together. As Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, "In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion." Though viral content may disappear, its consequences do not—be it a toxic political party or an addiction to cheap and easy attention. Through the selective mechanism of what spreads—and gets traffic and pageviews—we get suppression not by omission but by transmission. V | TACTIC #4: HELP THEM TRICK THEIR READERS As Brian Moylan, a former Gawker writer, once bragged, the key is to "get the whole story into the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click." being evasive and misleading is one of the best ways to get traffic and increase the bottom line. When I want someone to write about my clients, I might intentionally exploit their ambivalence about deceiving people. If I am giving them an official comment on behalf of a client, I leave room for them to speculate by not fully addressing the issue. If I am creating the story as a fake tipster, I ask a lot of rhetorical questions: Could [some preposterous misreading of the situation] be what's going on? Do you think that [juicy scandal] is what they're hiding? And then I watch as the writers pose those very same questions to their readers in a click-friendly headline. The answer to my questions is obviously "No, of course not," but I play the skeptic about my own clients—even going so far as to say nasty things—so the bloggers will do it on the front page of their site. For blogs, practical utility is often a liability. It is a traffic killer. So are other potentially positive attributes. It's hard to get trolls angry enough to comment while being fair or reasonable. of these obviously positive attributes is avoided, because they don't bait user engagement. And engaged users are where the money is. "The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people's moods and behaviour. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site." Nobody involved actually cares what any of these people think or are feeling—not even a little bit. They just care about the reaction and the attention. A click is a click and a pageview is a pageview. A blogger doesn't care how they get it. Their bosses don't care. They just want the customer along as long as possible, to deliberately not be helpful, is to turn simple readers into pageview-generating machines. Publishers know they have to make each new headline even more irresistible than the last, the next article even more inflammatory or less practical to keep getting clicks. It's a vicious cycle in which, by screwing the reader and getting screwed by me, they must screw the reader harder next time to top what they did before. As Juvenal joked, "What's infamy matter if you can keep your fortune?" TACTIC 5 #: SELL THEM SOMETHING THEY CAN SELL (TO BE IN THE NEWS, MAKE NEWS) When news is sold on a one-off basis, publishers can't sit back and let the news come to them. There isn't enough of it, and what comes naturally isn't exciting enough. So they must create the news that will sell their papers. When reporters were sent out to cover spectacles and events, they knew that their job was to cover the news when it was there and to make it up when it was not.* As Benjamin Day put it: "We newspaper people thrive best on the calamities of others." often felt I could take media criticism written one hundred years ago, change a few words, and describe exactly how blogs work. headlines. A subscription model—whether it's music or news—offers necessary subsidies to the nuance that is lacking in the kind of stories that flourish in one-off distribution. Opposing views can now be included. Uncertainty can be acknowledged. Humanity can be allowed. With Ochs's move, reputation began to matter more than notoriety. Reporters started social clubs, where they critiqued one another's work. Some began talk of unionizing. Mainly they began to see journalism as a profession, and from this they developed rules and codes of conduct. For most of the last century, the majority of journalism and entertainment was sold by subscription (the third phase). It is now sold again online à la carte—as a one-off. Each story must sell itself, must be heard over all the others, be it in Google News, on Twitter, or on your Facebook wall. The death of subscription means that instead of attempting to provide value to you, the longtime reader, blogs are constantly chasing Other Readers—the mythical reader out in viral land. Whereas subscriptions are about trust, single-use traffic is all immediacy and impulse—even if the news has to be distorted to trigger it. Our news is what rises, and what rises is what spreads, and what spreads is what makes us angry or makes us laugh. Our media diet is quickly transformed into junk food, fake stories engineered by people like me to be consumed and passed around. It is the refined and processed sugars of the information food pyramid—out of the ordinary, unnatural, and deliberately sweetened. Daniel Boorstin called these things pseudo-events. Why does a movie have a premiere? So the celebrities will show up and the media will cover it. Why does a politician hold a press conference? For the attention. A quick run down the list of pseudo-events shows their indispensability to the news business: press releases, award ceremonies, red-carpet events, product launches, anniversaries, grand openings, "leaks," the contrite celebrity interview after a scandal, the sex tape, the tell-all, the public statement, TACTIC # 6: MAKE IT ALL ABOUT THE HEADLINE For media that lives and dies by clicks (the One-Off Problem) it all comes down to the headline. It's what catches the attention of the public—yelled by a newsboy or seen on a search engine. You make up the news; blogs make up the headline. Outside of the subscription model, headlines are intended not to represent the contents of articles but to sell them Come up with the idea and let them think they were the ones who came up with it. Basically, write the headline—or hint at the options—in your e-mail or press release or whatever you give to the blogger and let them steal it. Is there a great headline here? They'll be so happy to have the headline that they won't bother to check whether it's true or not. TACTIC # 7: KILL 'EM WITH PAGEVIEW KINDNESS Low-tracking articles are removed; heat-seeking articles get moved up. Bloggers publish constantly in order to hit their pageview goals or quotas, so when you can give them something that gets them even one view closer to that goal, you're serving their interests while serving yours. To understand bloggers, rephrase the saying as "Simplistic measurements matter." Like, did a shitload of people see it? Must be good. Was there a raging comments section going? Awesome! Did the story get picked up on Media Redefined? It made the Drudge Report? Yes! In practice, this is all blogs really have time to look for, and it's easy to give it to them. I exploit these pseudo-metrics all the time. Pageview journalism is about scale. Sites have to publish multiple stories every few minutes to make a profit, and why shouldn't your story be one of them? leaving fake comments to articles about you or your company from blocked IP addresses—good and bad to make it clear that there is a hot debate. Send fake e-mails to the reporter, positive and negative. all "we'd have ended up with was a faster horse." Pageview journalism treats people by what they appear to want—from data that is unrepresentative to say the least—and gives them this and only this until they have forgotten that there could be anything else. It takes the audience at their worst and makes them worse. TACTIC #8: USE THE TECHNOLOGY AGAINST ITSELF ' The way news is found online more or less determines what is found. The way the news must be presented—in order to meet the technical constraints of the medium and the demands of its readers—determines the news itself. as media critic Eric Alterman explained in Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy. TV is a visual medium, he said, so to ask the audience to think about something it cannot see would be suicide. If it were possible to put an abstract idea to film, producers would happily show that instead of pithy sound bites. But it isn't, so conflict, talking heads, and B-roll footage are all you'll get. The values of television, Alterman realized, behave like a dictator, exerting their rule over the kind of information that can be transmitted across the channels. Since content is constantly expiring, and bloggers face the Sisyphean task of trying to keep their sites fresh, creating a newsworthy event out of nothing becomes a daily occurrence. The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging has a simple rule of thumb: Unless readers can see the end of your post coming around eight hundred words in, they're going to stop. This gives writers around eight hundred words to make their point—a rather tight window. TACTIC #9: JUST MAKE STUFF UP (EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT) Shit becomes sugar. If there is one special skill that journalists can claim, it is the ability to find the angle on any story. That the news is ever chosen over entertainment in the fight for attention is a testament to their skill. High-profile bloggers rightly take great pride in this ability. They need to find not only the angle but the click-driving headline, an eye-catching image; generate comments and links; and in some cases, squeeze in some snark. And they have to do it up to a dozen times a day without the help of an editor. Since bloggers must find an angle, they always do. Since you know how hard they're looking, it's easy to leave crumbs, fragments, or stray gems that you know will be impossible for them to resist picking up and turning into full-fledged stories. Small news is made to look like big news. Nonexistent news is puffed up and made into news. The result is stories that look just like their legitimate counterparts, only their premise is wrong and says nothing. Such stories hook with false pretenses, analyze false subjects, and inform falsely. Whatever will be more exciting, get more pageviews, that is what blogs will say happened. practice and showed how bad things were. He orchestrated a study that collected loads of random data and then, finding simply a correlation between dieting and eating chocolate, created a fake institute to announce his monumental but absurdly unscientific findings: You can lose weight by eating chocolate! And bam, everyone from the Huffington Post to the Daily Mail was cheering the news. Of course you can't seriously lose weight that way. The institute didn't exist. The science was junk. The whole thing was a prank. Yet millions of people were given this fake news. Set up your own think tank. Call it the Millennial Entrepreneurs Foundation and put out "research" that really just makes companies think they need to hire you as a consultant. Don't think climate change is real? Have a business interest in making people think it isn't? Fund "studies" that confirm what you want and then blast the internet with them. Want to invent some ridiculous new trend? Hire experts to say it's correlated with higher sex drive or that it's all the rage with celebrities. Sadly, no one is going to question you. Cooley, the products of our imagination become the solid facts of society. BOOK TWO | THE MONSTER ATTACKS: WHAT BLOGS MEAN IRIN CARMON, THE DAILY SHOW, AND ME: THE PERFECT STORM OF HOW TOXIC BLOGGING CAN BE Emily Gould, a former editor of Gawker, later wrote a piece for Slate entitled "How Feminist Blogs Like Jezebel Gin Up Page Views by Exploiting Women's Worst Tendencies," in which she explained the motivations behind such a story: It's a prime example of the feminist blogosphere's tendency to tap into the market force of what I've come to think of as "outrage world"—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like Jezebel and also, to a lesser degree, Slate's own XX Factor and Salon's Broadsheet. They're ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism. These firestorms are great for page-view-pimping bloggy business.7 make enough accusations, and eventually get enough mainstream media attention that some people began to think it was real. The tactic has come to be called "concern trolling"—acting like you're upset and offended in order to exploit the ethics and empathy of your opponent. The manipulators are indistinguishable from the publishers and bloggers. THERE ARE OTHERS: THE MANIPULATOR HALL OF FAME Breitbart was the first employee of the Drudge Report and a founding employee of the Huffington Post. He helped build the dominant conservative and liberal blogs. He wasn't simply an ideologue; he was an expert on what spreads—a provocateur. the media doesn't mind being played, because they get something out of it—namely, pageviews, ratings, and readers. the best way to make your critics work for you is to make them irrationally angry. Blinded by rage or indignation, they spread your message to every ear and media outlet they can find. Their subtle felonies against the truth are deliberate and premeditated. The way to beat them is not by freaking out. It's by beating them at their own game. And sooner is better—because every day we wait there is more collateral damage. SLACKTIVISM IS NOT ACTIVISM: RESISTING THE TIME AND MIND SUCK OF ONLINE MEDIA James Fenimore Cooper presciently observed in the nineteenth century, "If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own." The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. Everything you consume online has been "optimized" to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found—like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you. Blogs are out to game you—to steal your time from you and sell it to advertisers—and they do this every day. You see a link to a video in a YouTube search that makes it look like a hot girl is in it, so you click. You watch, but she's nowhere to be found. Welcome to the art of "thumbnail cheating." It's a common tactic YouTube publishers use to make their videos more tantalizing than the competition. Be discerning. Be cynical. Don't let "close enough" be your standard for truth and opinion. Insist on accuracy and on getting it right. Psychologists call this the "narcotizing dysfunction," when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge, and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something. JUST PASSING THIS ALONG: WHEN NO ONE OWNS WHAT THEY SAY Apparently we live in a world where at even the highest and most sensitive level information is passed on without being vetted, where the final judgment of truth or falsity does not fall on the outlet reporting it or the person spreading it but on the readers themselves. In the link economy, the blue stamp of an html link seems like it will support weight. This link could go to anything—it could go to a dictionary definition of "felonious acts," or it could go to a pdf of the entire penal code for the state of Virginia, or it could just go to a gif that when you click it says, "Ha! You shouldn't have trusted me!" But by linking to something, I have vaguely complied with the standards of the link economy. I have rested my authority on a source and linked to it, and now the burden is on the reader to disprove the validity of that link. Online links look like citations but rarely are. If readers give sites just seconds for their headlines, how much effort will they expend weighing whether a blog post meets the burden of proof? As Jeff Jarvis put it: "Online, we often publish first and edit later. Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning." Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, put it more bluntly: "Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap."* as a way of avoiding ever being embarrassingly off base, blogs couch their claims in qualifiers: "We're hearing . . ."; "I wonder . . ."; "Possibly . . ."; "Lots of buzz that . . ."; "Chatter indicates that . . ."; "Sites are reporting . . ."; "Might . . ."; "Maybe . . ."; "Could . . . , Would . . . , Should . . ."; and so on. In other words, they toss the news narrative into the stream without taking full ownership and pretend to be an impartial observer of a process they began. The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what "other people are saying" and link to it instead of doing their own reporting and standing behind it. This changes the news from what has happened into what someone said the news is. Needless to say, these are not close to the same thing. CYBERWARFARE: BATTLING IT OUT ONLINE Afghan warlords have a name for this strategy: ghabban, which means to demand protection from a threat that you create. The Russian tactic of kompromat—releasing controversial information about public figures—is real and only more dangerous in an era where blogs publish first and verify second (if at all). The essence of kompromat is that it doesn't matter if the information is true or not, or whatever disturbing means it was acquired, it just matters that it can intimidate and embarrass. And the media enables this tactic—they thrive on it. The real trick in this game is to repeat something enough times that it begins to sound true. One of the things I noticed during the 2016 election was anytime I said something negative about Trump, I would suddenly get hit with tweets from accounts with no followers. By that I mean literally zero followers. How hard is it to get one friend? Hard when you're a fake account. Increasingly, smart media manipulators have realized that one way to make things seem real is by straight up gaslighting. Iterative journalism is possible because of a belief in the web's ability to make corrections and updates to news stories. While fans of iterative journalism acknowledge that increased speed may lead to mistakes, they say it's okay because the errors can be fixed easily. They say that iterative journalism is individually weak but collectively strong, since the bloggers and readers are working together to improve each story—iteratively. THE MYTH OF CORRECTIONS The reality is that while the internet allows content to be written iteratively, the audience does not read or consume it iteratively. Each member usually sees what he or she sees a single time—a snapshot of the process—and draws his or her conclusions from that. It turns out that the more unbelievable headlines and articles readers are exposed to, the more it warps their compass—making the real seem fake and the fake seem real. comments section. It is clear to me that the online media cycle is a process not for developing truth but for performing a kind of cultural catharsis. These acts of ritualized destruction are known by anthropologists as "degradation ceremonies." Their purpose is to allow the public to single out and denounce one of its members. To lower their status or expel them from the group. To collectively take out its anger at them by stripping them of their dignity. It is a we-versus-you scenario with deep biological roots. New Yorker critic David Denby came closest to properly defining snark in his book Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. He didn't succeed entirely, but "[s]nark attempts to steal someone's mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness [with] the nasty, insidious, rug-pulling, teasing insult, which makes reference to some generally understood THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY DEGRADATION CEREMONY: BLOGS AS MACHINES OF MOCKERY, SHAME, AND PUNISHMENT Snark is the grease of the wheels of the web. Discussing issues fairly would take time and cognitive bandwidth that blogs just don't have. Snark is the style of choice because it's click-friendly, cheap, and fast. To be called a douche or a bro or any such label is to be branded with all the characteristics of what society has decided to hate but can't define. It's a way to dismiss someone entirely without doing any of the work or providing any of the reasons. It says, "You are a fool, and everyone thinks so." These results are unreality. A netherworld between the fake and the real where each builds on the other and they cannot be told apart. This is what happens when the dominant cultural medium—the medium that feeds our other mediums—is so easily corrupted by people like me. Let's start with a basic principle: Only the unexpected makes the news. "For the news is always finally," ‘something that will make people talk.'" "The job of journalism is to provide surprise."* from the routine of daily life. But what if most of what happens is expected? Most things do not depart from the routine. Most things are not worth talking about. But the news must be. The news, whether it's found online or in print, is just the content that successfully navigated the media's filters. Possibly with my help. Since the news informs our understanding of what is occurring around us, these filters create a constructed reality. WELCOME TO UNREALITY Today, with almost every major media outlet opening their platform up to self-interested contributors, when all the protections against conflicts of interest or even basic factual inaccuracies have disappeared, the vast majority of the information we find in the media is biased or manipulated. Worse, every major television channel seems to think that campaign surrogates—that is, naked shills for certain politicians—deserve airtime as a means of being balanced. The process is simple: Create a pseudo-event, trade it up the chain, elicit real responses and action, and you have altered reality itself. As Walter Lippmann wrote, the news constitutes a sort of pseudo-environment, but our responses to that environment are not pseudo but actual behavior. When you see a blog begin with "According to a tipster . . . ," know that the tipster was someone like me tricking the blogger into writing what I wanted. Words like "developing,""exclusive," and "sources" are incongruent with our long-held assumptions about what they mean or what's behind them. Bloggers use these "substance words" (like Wikipedia's weasel words) to give status to their flimsy stories. They use the language of Woodward and Bernstein but apply it to a media world that would make even Hearst queasy. And so fictions pass as realities. Everyone is selling and conning, and we hardly even know it. Our emotions are being triggered by simulations—unintentional or deliberate misrepresentations—of cues we've been taught were important. We read some story and it feels important, believing that the news is real and the principles of reporting took place, but it's not. CONCLUSION: SO . . . WHERE TO FROM HERE? More than twenty-five years ago, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that the needs of television, then our culture's chief mode of communicating ideas, had come to determine the very culture it was supposed to represent. The particular way that television stages the world, he wrote, becomes the model for how the world itself is to be staged	Sally Hogshead Notable Quotations Full screen view LUST creates craving for sensory pleasure. MYSTIQUE lures with unanswered questions. ALARM threatens with negative consequences. PRESTIGE earns respect through symbols of achievement. POWER commands and controls. VICE tempts with "forbidden fruit," causing us to rebel against norms. TRUST comforts us with certainty and reliability. If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, and deny any contradicting input, eventually people will come to believe Once you understand how fascination works, you might realize that your behavior is being driven by something far different from what you think. Memory, the scientists learned, works whether we realize it or not. All day, we passively take in messages from the world around us, even if we're not overtly conscious of those messages. Enough messages, drilled in over decades, The traditional advertising model was built upon this principle of passively absorbing information, slowly ingraining and embedding it. Fascination has little to do with what you say, and everything to do with what you inspire others to say about your message. The true measure of fascination lives not in your own communication to the world, but in how the world communicates about you. Fascinating companies create more opportunities for people to connect with each other, through the brand. It's a little too easy to proliferate hype. "We don't stop to think critically about whether a media spectacle is contrived (as in Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch just before a movie in which he plays a crazed guy), or a family celebration is actually a marketing push (Hallmark's new holidays like National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day), or a politician's controversial ‘I'm running' moment is consciously put out on day one of his new book (that's Newt Gingrich). My team and I developed the F Score to objectively evaluate the level of fascination generated by a product, brand, or idea. Those with a high F Score can sway opinion and action far more effectively than those with a low F Score, because they use triggers with unusual vividness and intensity. They get their message across. People with the highest F Scores often earn our attention with their lack of propriety, values, or common sense. Personalities with a low F Score tend to avoid extremes, and avoid volatility. Because they don't particularly enjoy standing out, low scorers can easily get lost in the crowd, and rarely command a great deal of influence. It's not enough to have a better product, or better performance, if nobody notices or cares. Fascinating people generate a lot of curiosity. Trust is the most powerful trigger in relationships, and the low F Score group often earns more trust than their high F Score counterparts. Maximize existing strengths and remove barriers to communication. No matter how important your message, it still must be heard in order to be effective. That's where the seven triggers come in: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice, and trust. Nothing is, in itself, fascinating. When something activates a trigger, we're compelled to focus. It's not the shoe itself that's fascinating, but the meaning given to the shoe. Meaningless things fascinate consumers all the time; unsolved mysteries send us on fact-finding missions for resolution. Each trigger adds a different type of energy to your message. Alarm adds a sense of adventure, or immediacy, or even danger. Mystique adds curiosity. Power adds respect or fear. Vice adds irreverence. And then there's lust. Ah, lust. Lust captivates our desire for sensory fulfillment. Lust can make people temporarily willing to ignore everything else around, Rather than the usual PC blinking sleep light, which turns on/off/on, Apple's sleep light resembles the human characteristic of a beating heart. Lust conquers the rational evaluation process, freeing us to stop thinking, and start feeling. Albert Mehrabian, who found that within spoken communication, audiences draw percent of communication cues from the visual, percent from the tone of voice, and only a measly percent from the words themselves. Lust is a promise of pleasure. "the chase" really can be more exciting than the prize. Maximum pleasure occurred at the moment of getting the desired object, rather than at the moment of consuming As a motivator, desire is more powerful than fulfillment. Lust engages our imagination. "It seems that sexual appetite causes a greater urgency to consume anything rewarding." The appetites appear to become intertwined in the brain. Combined with the vice and prestige triggers, lust compels people to buy products with higher sensory fulfillment, even if they're irrationally expensive. Lust and mystique are good friends, and often work in tandem. They both revolve around unfulfilled interest, piquing curiosity and the desire for more. Mystique invites others closer, without giving them what they seek. Spark curiosity. Withhold information. Build mythology. And limit access. Spark Curiosity The answers can't be as interesting as the questions themselves. Reveal that information very carefully, if at all. Show a glimpse without giving away the money shot. Withholding information, as we know, is vital to mystique. [It allows] others to participate, and draw their own conclusions. Cultivate legend and lore. When people feel that they're part of the select few, they're more committed. Demands push us to achieve more. There are five pillars for instilling alarm: Define consequences, create deadlines, or increase perceived danger. Along the way, we'll also want to focus—not on the risks most likely—but on the ones most feared. And finally, we'll need to use distress to steer positive action. The more clearly a message points to consequences, and the greater those consequences, the more urgently people focus on the message. Whether gentle or rigorous, deadlines heighten immediacy. Diminishing returns : At a certain point, the brain shuts down and we lose the ability to problem solve. Rather than overcoming our so-called flaws, we should push them into service for our higher purpose. Focus Not on the Crisis Most Likely, but on the One Most Feared Generating a sense of urgency often has less to do with rational threats, and more with understanding human behavior. Managed correctly, creating a sense of crisis can develop immediate motivation, unite groups, and cost-effectively get large numbers of people involved. Develop emblems, set new standards, limit availability, and earn it. The need to feel important, respected, and recognized as an achiever. People inherently compete within their peer group. A manager can create an environment in which people compare themselves to one another, they often naturally seek to achieve just slightly more than those around them. Prestige of a different sort: scarcity. Limiting availability only works when people get something worthwhile, quality, not quantity. As the alphas of the pack, powerful people control our behavior in a myriad of ways. Wordlessly, they set the rules. Powerful people share an ability to both make decisions and influence decisions. Power offers three paths: dominate, control the environment, and, finally, reward and punish. "people value praise more when it comes from people who don't give it out easily." Marketers kindle insecurities. The alarm trigger shows that negative consequences prompt action. When people are no longer in charge of basic elements of a situation (such as where they sit, or when they go to the restroom), they must give over some degree of control that they normally use to define their independence, and thus themselves. Many researchers have proven that once people have agreed to let go of small details, they become more willing to submit to the more significant changes. Destabilization, according to experts, makes people more open to new interpretations. Praise gains affection but not necessarily respect. Rules are not often fascinating, but bending them, very much When we're tempted to push a boundary, or deviate from standard norms, we're in a VICE grip. The word "vice" comes from the Latin vitium, meaning "failing or defect," because vices reveal our weaknesses. We have four pillars of vice at our disposal: Create taboos. Lead others astray. Define absolutes. And give a wink. Banning unhealthy practices, or rejecting negative beliefs, will only spark vice, creating "forbidden fruit." Every process of vice starts by getting someone to consider what he could have, and desires to have, but doesn't have. Yet. Used wisely, vice can offer a fresh sense of unexpectedness to an otherwise straightforward message. Rules and policies are an important but can backfire when employees don't understand the reasoning behind them. Enforce rigidly black-and-white behavioral codes. Speak in absolute terms. Develop a strict, authoritative relationship, with punishment that seems unjustifiable. Exaggerate negative consequences. Give a firm "no" without a reasonable reason why. Tell them what not to do, without telling them why they shouldn't do it. To overcome vice, adjust three other triggers: decrease mystique, and increase power and trust. Make your group feel more powerful, by giving them control of some aspect of their environment. Allow Your Audience's Imagination to Do the Work for You With power, studies show, comes an entitlement to break the rules. If power makes people more likely to indulge in unrestrained behavior, Familiarity and repetition. You can dabble in prestige, or experiment with power, but you can't dip in and out of trust. It must be established consistently. Continuity makes us feel safe. Develop preferences based on pattern repetition. Trusted brands carefully pay attention to detail, reinforcing consistency between expectations they set and results they deliver. If you're a propagandist, this presents a real problem. Propagandists don't want opposing viewpoints. That is especially true of a propagandist whose message violates his audience's deeper beliefs. Propagandists use information control to enforce exact consistency. "The greater the lie, the greater the chance that it will be believed." Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it. The more specific your promise, the more urgent the need to deliver. Turn around negative habits or beliefs by replacing those beliefs with a new set of trusted experiences. Pinpoint shared values with your audience, since people bond more quickly with others who An idea is only as valuable as its ability to solve a problem.* Fascination lives not in your own communication to the world, but rather in how the world communicates about you. If you're not generating a negative reaction from someone, you're probably not fascinating anyone. What opportunities do you create for people to connect with one another? The degree to which you are willing to step outside your category norms is the degree to which you'll fascinate others. When customers buy a product, what they're often actually buying is something more than the utility of the item—they're buying a trigger. People pay more for brands whose beliefs connect with their own. fascination isn't measured in what you say, but in what others say about you. Trust, as we know, is confidence based on prior experience.	Salman Khan Notable Quotations Full screen view Page xvi Large language models such as GPT- 4, short for Generative Pre- trained Transformer, are essentially big, powerful— albeit digital—" word brains" trained on a colossal amount of information from books, articles, websites, and all sorts of written material. Page xvii What it lacks in real- world sensory experiences of the human brain, it compensates for by having exposure to more language than any human might hope to read, watch, or listen to in multiple lifetimes. Page xviii The best way to think of a parameter is a number describing the strength of a connection between two nodes in the neural net that represent the large language model. You can view it as a representation of the strength of a synapse between two neurons in a brain. When it was first launched in 2018, GPT- 1 had more than 100 million parameters. I found myself suddenly exhilarated to be one of the first people on the planet to see the capabilities of GPT- 4. Page xix We've also shown that rather than somehow being a substitute for the teacher, videos can off- load pieces of a lecture, freeing up more time for personalized learning, hands- on activities, or classroom conversation. This arguably makes the teachers more valuable, not less. And now it was time to see if generative AI could do the same— support students and let teachers move up the value chain. Page xxi In 1948, while working for Bell Labs, he started dabbling in the field we now know as artificial intelligence. Shannon decided to play with how an algorithm approximates language. He published a paper in The Bell System Technical Journal called "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." It was the early days of digital computers—well before the advent of the internet—and Shannon's information theory first made the case that a series of probabilistic processes could approximate the English language. ... [In] 1950, [Alan Turing] wrote a foundational paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," where he introduced the concept of the imitation game, which we now know as the Turing test. Page xxiii convincingly human technology capable of being a great tutor might also be a technology that bad actors could use to defraud or brainwash unsuspecting people. Page xxiv As someone trying his best to use technology for good, I wondered if we might be able to utilize generative AI to achieve the greatest positive effect and edge us closer to that utopian scenario, especially in the realm of education. ... The implications of GPT-4 were nothing short of revelatory. ... What really caught my attention, though, was its ability to write in different tones and styles. Page xxvi The AI was not quite perfect yet. It was getting math incorrect more than I liked, but I could even see improvement as I got better at prompting it. Page xxvii what if the AI was able to help teachers write their lesson plans? What if it could enter into a debate with a student? What if it could create projects? What if it could help a student remove stressors or inspire a student to create new ideas? What if the technology was able to quiz a student or lead a student in a review session? Educators would be able to create novel activities that students could do with the AI. ... The AI might help students compose essays, making them better writers by providing them with immediate feedback. ... Artificial intelligence, we worried, might turn our kids into a generation of cheaters who were not going to learn anything. With the AI taking over, parents who once helped their kids with homework might lose an important point of connection. Page xxviii Nearly two decades earlier, I had seen similar fears around on-demand video in education: Was it going to be a distraction for students? Was it going to lower their attention spans? Would it isolate students instead of promoting connections between them and their teachers? How were students going to be able to know what to watch? Whom would they ask if they got stuck on a subject and had questions? ... might hasten learning globally and even get us closer to realizing a world in which every person on earth had access to affordable world-class learning. Page xxx We had to show AI's real value to students as a Socratic tutor, as a debating partner, as a guidance counselor, as a career coach, and as a driver of better outcomes in their academics. So, alongside OpenAI, we created a rapid prototyping team that began to build an AI-infused education platform we would come to call Khanmigo. Page xxxii Here we were, working with a technology that took writing, and everything we knew about teaching and learning in all domains, to another level. Page xxxiii We are at a turning point in education, one with far-reaching implications that is changing, and will continue to change, everything about learning, work, and human purpose. Page 3 In early 2023, the Los Angeles Unified School District became the first major school system to ban it. ... it said, the tool did not help build critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Page 4 fear large language models will worsen instances of students not doing their own work. We fear that the potential effect on student writing skills will be catastrophic, with generative AI able to generate text quickly and efficiently for them. We fear that because GPT-generated text pulls from millions of online sources full of biased language and viewpoints, the information it lays out in its final form will be biased as well. Page 5 The most successful students will be those who use AI to help make conceptual connections for developing ideas. Students who learn to use AI ethically and productively may learn not only at an exponentially higher rate than others but also in a way that allows them to remain competitive throughout their careers. They will have a deeper understanding of the given subject matter, because they will know how to get their questions answered. Rather than atrophying, their curiosity muscle will be strengthened. Page 6 Workers will need to learn how to use large language models to automate almost any traditional white-collar process, too, from collating information to doing analysis on spreadsheets. Page 8 Could it help close learning gaps or provide access to quality education regardless of geographic constraints, economic limitations, or social circumstances? ... What might it be like if every student on the planet had access to an artificially intelligent personal tutor: an AI capable of writing alongside the student; an AI that students could debate any topic with; an AI that fine-tuned a student's inherent strengths and augmented any gaps in learning; an AI that engaged students in new and powerful ways of understanding science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; an AI that gave students new ways of experiencing art and unlocking their own creativity; an AI that allowed for students to engage with history and literature like never before? Page 10 On March 15, 2023, when we launched our AI assistant, by this point called Khanmigo— Page 11 Among other things, it provides a personalized and patient tutor that focuses on the learner's interests or struggles and empowers educators to better understand how they can fully support their students. ... A caring and student-attuned instructor who presented clear learning objectives, assessments, and specialized feedback until, eventually, that student demonstrated a real grasp of the material. Page 17 Luckily, by the time we launched, educators were starting to come around by March 2023, it seemed that educators craved a tool that used the power of ChatGPT-like technology for education, implemented with learning and teacher support in mind. Page 29 If a teacher's goal is to give students practice and assessment in structured thinking, language, and grammar, simple storytelling, or just forming and backing up an opinion, you don't necessarily need a traditional take-home writing assignment, where there is likely a strong temptation to use ChatGPT. Instead, an in-class, proctored, five-paragraph essay might do the trick, and it would unfold in a context where there is more support from the teacher (and teachers can directly observe students in their process). If the task might be hard to complete in one sitting, students can work on it in multiple classes, always with the teacher around to support students and ensure that the work is their own. Page 32 The people who weren't very good writers in class wrote bad essays outside class, too, he says. The AI helps them catch up, and it gives them an explanation of where they are with their skills; for instructors, the AI helps flag the students who need the most help and attention. Page 33 educators are finding that these generative AI tools make our students far more skilled and efficient writers. ... The future of writing in school will evolve into a more diverse set of activities, depending on the pedagogical goals and comfort of the teacher. ... I'm an educator looking to ensure that my students have strength here, I would do more in-class writing assignments where it is 100 percent the student's own work. Page 34 At its best, an education-based AI platform can be the world's finest assistant and co-collaborator, objective in its assessments and thorough in its analytics, designed to do one thing and one thing only: to sharpen a student's skills. ... Beyond facilitating reading comprehension, AI can allow learners to immerse themselves in the worlds of the characters in ways that would have seemed like science fiction only a few years ago. ... Based on a 2020 Gallup analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education, 54 percent of Americans between the ages of sixteen and seventy-four read below a sixth-grade level. Page 39 Instead of answering multiple-choice questions about a text or passage, imagine that students write out the author's intent behind a choice of words or explore the main idea of the passage (while highlighting those parts of the passage). Picture the AI then asking follow-up questions based on what a student writes. It could ask students to draft a conclusion for an incomplete essay that forces them to understand everything that came before. ... Imagine if, when reading a book, a student could have a discussion with the AI at the end of every chapter. The AI might ask the student what they think about the book so far, or whether anything was particularly interesting or confusing about the material. Page 42 The first time I saw examples of this, I had the same questions I am sure many of you did: Is generative AI a creativity killer? If the root of creativity is individual agency, what happens when our kids can simply log on to an app leveraging generative AI, type in or speak a request, and then create imaginative works designed by an imagination not their own? How will our kids learn to think creatively for themselves? Page 45 Some would also argue that generative AI's "creativity" is just derivative from all the data it has been exposed to. But isn't that very human as well? Even the large leaps in human creativity have been closely correlated to things that the creator has been exposed to. Page 46 Much like poets hanging out at a café in Paris, humans and AI can augment each other and inspire a mutually creative process. Page 48 beneficial to children's creativity by providing them with a tool to help them generate, play, and get feedback on ideas in a judgment-free zone. ... With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we're also seeing a shift in the barriers to entry that once limited people from learning a variety of crafts. ... Generative AI is the writing tutor that will teach learners, exploring diverse genres, themes, and narrative structures with them. ... learn to play musical instruments, suggesting practice routines and fingering techniques and deciphering initial musical scores based on their preferences. It can help with improvisation by providing melodic ideas and chord progressions aligned with their playing style. Page 49 Will generative AI, with its ability to produce images, music, and stories, eventually make professional creatives obsolete? ... The net effect of the world of generative AI is that we are going to get more expressions of creativity, and creatives with wider and deeper skill sets, somewhat out of necessity but also thanks to the opportunity generative AI provides. Page 50 Mozart, Einstein, and da Vinci weren't just innately gifted. They had access to opportunities and resources that the bulk of humanity didn't have access to. ... Technology has generally lowered the cost of access to world-class tools and learning. .... Not only does it allow students to produce more polished, finished works, but it can model the creative process with them. Page 53 Not only does Khanmigo let users chat with literary characters, they can also chat with historical figures—anyone from Benjamin Franklin to Cleopatra to Rembrandt: Page 55 We designed Khanmigo to provide responses both drawn from accurate history and portrayed through the lens of the character with acuity. Page 56 you no longer have to travel to Colonial Williamsburg to talk to George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. Page 62 If this tool can be used to engage students and classrooms about history in a way that traditional textbooks and movies can't, I think it is healthy as long as there are reasonable guardrails in place (including helping the user know about the limitations). Page 63 Generative AI, with its ability to mix media and content, has the potential to bring history and civics lessons to life. By offering an interactive and immersive learning experience, it empowers students to delve into historical events, engage in meaningful discussions, and develop a deeper comprehension of civic principles. Its personalized explanations, responsive question prompts, and diverse perspectives stimulate critical thinking and encourage students to form their own well- informed opinions. With these types of tools, history and civics lessons transcend conventional boundaries, empowering students to connect with the past and understand the present. Page 69 As impressive as all of this was, it quickly became clear that it wasn't accurate all of the time. If you asked it for links to sources, it might make them up. Page 72 between the safeguards on Khanmigo and ongoing improvements to GPT-4, the platform can work with specific data and do so with minimal hallucinations. Page 88 we still haven't gotten to what is perhaps the most overlooked, yet most important, role of a tutor: providing motivation and accountability. ... the AI can step in to address these needs. ... parents and teachers was that the platform is powerful for students who proactively seek out the AI's help. The Most Important Subject-Matter Domain to Master > Page 91 AI essentially showing students that domains, or distinctions between subjects, no longer matter. Page 96 Would technology further isolate students by allowing them to learn alone on a computer? ... It turns out that not only does this not have to be the case, but thoughtful use of technology can actually increase human-to-human interaction. Page 97 A properly designed AI can take things even further and actually facilitate conversations among human beings. Page 98 With AI and AI-based tutors, the days of static learning are over as collaborative education expands in scope and capability. Page 102 Working in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Joseph Weizenbaum developed ELIZA, one of the world's first natural-language-processing computer programs that was able to simulate a conversation. Weizenbaum set out to show how artificial the communication was between a human and an AI, but instead he was shocked to learn that many people became emotionally attached to the artificial intelligence. Those using ELIZA often forgot that they were conversing with a computer. ... patient spoke to DOCTOR, and DOCTOR responded as a Rogerian therapist might, by using nondirectional questioning and reframing statements. Page 103 We also know that both mental health problems and academic underperformance have a similar cause in students: an innate sense that they have little control and purpose in their lives, he says. Page 107 Because AIs aren't sentient, they can't be truly empathetic. Empathy involves sensing and modeling other's emotions and contexts in your own mind. They can, however, simulate empathy quite well. Page 109 break down challenging concepts into more manageable chunks. Page 110 Still, a gap remained between what you could learn from articles, videos, and exercises and what a great tutor could do. For example, the benefits of rapport, motivational support, and dynamic conversation between the technology and the student remained elusive. For these interactive qualities, learners still needed to turn to a parent, teacher, or tutor. ... That changed, however, with AI technology and the introduction of large language models. Page 111 The AI tutor knows the material and is a subject-matter expert that can provide personalized, adaptive learning exercises based on a student's individual needs and abilities. It can also offer immediate feedback and adjust its teaching methods. Unlike any parent I know, the AI tutor has endless energy and no other job Page 112 Generative AI can provide parents with resources and time that might otherwise require sessions with a therapist or reading parenting self-help books. The AI becomes a parenting coach. Page 115 even if AI becomes a net positive, those moments in which we unplug and turn off our screens become much scarcer. Page 116 Generative AI is neither an abdication of parental responsibility nor simply a tool for keeping an eye on our kids. Rather, like all technology before it, it is a tool that we can use to amplify our intent. Page 117 Large language models can focus the learning time and create more space for other points of productive contact that a child has with parents and other people. Page 135 The internet is a useful but scary place, even for adults. In the late 1990s, we were all blown away by the power to search across billions of pages for answers, products, and services. However, as page views began to drive ad revenue, most websites became less about offering visitors what they actually wanted and more about persuading them to click on ads. ... This includes search. Roughly the first half-dozen links you see are actually ads. ... Because of this, you are likely to find just as much misinformation as information when you search for therapies that might help a loved one with their illness or try to more deeply understand an issue in the news. Page 136 A site like YouTube could have some valuable educational content or even enriching entertainment, but it also has a lot of junk that is unhealthy for young people. Page 138 Everything I've written regarding kids is arguably useful for adults as well. It would feel like browsing the internet with a thoughtful, intelligent friend who's willing to help me get to the information that I want faster. It would also protect me from unhealthy ads or information. Part VI: Teaching in the Age of AI Page 143 In 2017, a slim man took the stage at the British Science Festival, one of the oldest science festivals in the world. Gazing out on a sea of leading researchers from around the globe, Sir Anthony Seldon, a renowned educator and historian, stated that by 2027 teachers will be AI rather than humans. The coming technology, he said, will force teachers to take a classroom assistant role while technology will be the conveyor of knowledge. ... agree with Seldon that personalization in learning is an aspiration that we should strive for and that AI is going to play a big role in getting us there. However, I completely disagree with his prediction that this technology will somehow minimize the importance of the human teacher. If anything, it's going to do the opposite. Page 144 At the end of the day, the biggest fear from educators is the world that Seldon envisions, a world where artificial intelligence reduces demand for teachers. Page 144 Engelbart believed that people were going to use technology to augment their abilities the same way that a tractor augments the work of a farmer to produce food. Page 145 do not believe machines are going to relegate the teacher to the role of the teaching assistant. Rather, the AI is the teaching assistant. Page 146 When students use generative AI to write papers, for instance, their quality is going to go up, akin to the advent of the word processor leading teachers to expect that their students now create beautifully typed, formatted, well-thought-out essays in ways that the typewriter did not allow. ... Students have to do a pre-mortem with their work before they turn it in for their grade. Page 146 "Lectures do not make as much sense when I've got tools like ChatGPT that can do truly amazing training, all remotely," Page 149 they can do all the grunt work involved in teaching—writing rubrics, giving students feedback on their essays, and drafting student narrative progress reports for parents. Page 150 By freeing educators from the administrative work that so often mires their days, artificial intelligence unlocks time and the resources for teachers. Page 151 "Can you write a script for me for the section on historic repercussions of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I?" Page 153 A teacher can push the AI further still and ask it to help come up with a creative student project based on the lesson. Page 157 Rather than facilitate cheating, the AI can give real-time feedback and support on how to write better. Page 161 having students work on their writing and papers in class allows them to get support from both the professor and other students. It makes class time more active. Longer essays can be done over multiple class periods. ... students should do what used to be homework in class and watch recorded lectures on their own time. Page 161 there are important benefits to having students write essays independently, such as developing their ability to plan and not procrastinate, both of which are skills arguably as useful as learning to write. Page 164 Before generative AI came on the scene, it could take days or weeks before students got feedback on their papers. ... By that point, they may have forgotten much of what they had written, and there wouldn't be a chance for them to refine their work. Contrast this to the vision in which students receive immediate feedback on every dimension of their writing from the AI. They will have the chance to practice, iterate, and improve much faster. Page 171 artificial intelligence continues to play a transformative role in bridging the global education divide and fostering equal-opportunity learning for all. Page 172 a student doesn't keep pace in understanding a foundational concept, the class keeps moving. Limited support exists for personalization or for revisiting gaps, much less for one-on-one tutoring. Page 173 A platform like Khanmigo exists to bridge this gap—offering personalized, accessible, and high-quality education. Page 174 Generative AI adds a new layer of expenses beyond the cost of paying the salaries of engineers, designers, product managers, and content developers to iteratively improve a platform like Khanmigo. ... large language model like GPT-4 are significant. Right now, our best estimate of the computation costs of average usage of Khanmigo is between five and fifteen dollars a month per user. Page 186 I've already argued that generative AI is going to transform schoolwork and grading in the classroom; students will be able to do much richer assignments, and teachers will have more support grading them. I've also discussed how standardized assessment is likely to change. Assessment will be deeper, much more continuous, and indistinct from learning. Over time, either standardized tests like SATs and ACTs will move in this direction, or new assessments will enter the space to take advantage of the opportunity. Page 188 admission directors need to wrestle with whether this entire exercise of writing essays even still provides a credible signal for admissions. ... it's worth questioning why essays and recommendations are part of admissions in the first place. Page 192 Rather than essays or recommendations alone, what if the AI could do extensive text- or voice-based interviews with students, guidance counselors, and teachers? Part IX: Work and What Comes Next Page 197 In 2023, IBM announced that it was suspending or slowing back-office hiring by 30 percent over a five-year period for jobs that could ultimately be done by AI. IBM's revelation suggests that the future of work is going to roll out differently, with back- or middle-office jobs disappearing, together with non-client-facing roles involving tasks such as creating budgets, managing data, and organizing records. Reading the tea leaves, we can see where this might be going. ... Writers and copywriters using AI could potentially be three to five times as productive. Page 198 The copywriters and technical writers who are going to survive are going to be the ones who lean in most on AI to increase their productivity. The other 90 percent are going to have to find something else to do. Page 202 even if the generative AI can write pieces of code, you really need to know how those pieces can fit together." Page 204 "Exactly what the job market of tomorrow looks like is very hard to predict, but the deeper the skill set, whether it's medical consultation, scientific thinking, or customer support, the more value it's going to have, even in a world where productivity will be enhanced by AI," Bill Gates tells me. Not only is there more reason than ever for kids to continue to learn about their fields of interest, he says, but students need to accelerate learning these skills, and to learn them as well as possible. "Entry-level jobs are going to require people to understand how to use large language models and all of the tools they offer. You'll need them to create everything from invoices to business plans. The workplace is going to encourage its workforce to come up with the best product it can. The higher your skill level is, the more your skill will retain a substantial value in the workforce. It's the workforce plus the AI, working together." Page 205 We are entering a world where we are going back to a pre– Industrial Revolution, craftsmanlike experience. A small group of people who understand engineering, sales, marketing, finance, and design are going to be able to manage armies of generative AI and put all of these pieces together. ... From an economics point of view, entrepreneurship is really the creativity of knowing how to put resources together in order to create value. ... I believe all human beings are born highly creative and entrepreneurial. Unfortunately, our Industrial Revolution–designed education system unintentionally suppresses both traits. Page 206 As Bill Gates mentioned, the successful workers of the future will be those with deep and broad skills. ... The "three Rs" of reading, writing, and arithmetic are more important than ever. Page 218 The traditional labor pyramid—with less-skilled manual labor forming the bottom layer, bureaucratic white-collar jobs making up the middle layer, and highly skilled knowledge work and entrepreneurship making up the top—no longer applies.
Stacey Abrams Notable Quotations Full screen view Chapter : Dare to Want More Once we accept that we deserve to want more and we understand how giving birth to ambition requires knowing ourselves better, we're ready to actually start figuring out what lights us up and then plotting out our pathways to get it. Because I didn't know people who had grand dreams, moving beyond make - believe seemed harder and harder as I grew older and games lost their allure. Logic is a seductive excuse for setting low expectations. Its cool, rational precision urges you to believe that it makes sense to limit yourself. And when your goal means you'll be the first, or one of the few, as I desired, logic tells you that if it were possible, someone else would have done it by now. Embracing ambition means learning not to listen too closely to anyone. Ambition should be more than a title or a position. I'd focused on the what, not the why, and for more than a decade, I organized my life around that what. I understand now that knowing the real reason for your ambition allows you to figure out if a different path will get you there. Realizing the why of my ambition allowed me to alter course and explore new roles that could accomplish the outcomes even more effectively. Give yourself the space to explore why you don't know what you want. When you decide what you want and why you want it, take action immediately. Do not wait for an invitation to act. If you can walk away for days, weeks, or years at a time, it is not an ambition; it's a wish. We tend to measure our passions by their likelihood of success, not the joy and excitement they bring. Fear is a paralyzing force that twists deep in the gut, churning out anxiety and reasons not to act. Its seductive logic convinces us that now is not our time and winning is not our right. Conditioning doesn't just happen to us, it happens around us, touching everyone and everything. We learn not to want, not to expect, because we're trained not to see ourselves as more than what we've been told to be. Thus, fear becomes as familiar as air, an automatic caution against bucking the system. For minority leaders to move forward, we must oftentimes first confront layers of anxiety holding us back. We must name what scares us and acknowledge what scares those who are afraid of us. A deep apprehension for many of us is the stereotype threat : the idea that we will always be judged by the worst example of someone in our community. How do we retain a sense of identity without abandoning the true similarities shared with our kindred groups? Wanting more than we're supposed to forces us to confront not only the possibility of failure but also the responsibility of success. Fear is a common obstacle. Men experience fear " even white, powerful men who have rarely known the word "no. " But for the marginalized groups " those whose skin tone, gender, geography, or bank account signals "lesser than " , it can become a permanent companion eating away at confidence, ambition, relationships, and dreams. Navigating power is difficult enough without adding the dimensions of otherness to the mix, but that's our reality. Demonstrate to those in power the value in our difference. For minority leaders, we often operate first as representatives of our communities, only tangentially as individuals. Disappoint with deliberate care. If you think you were right to behave as you did, then own it and move on. But do not avoid the internal investigation, however painful it might be. Embracing your authentic self means being clear about how you wish to be seen. This doesn't mean feigning a personality that is artificial and then cutting loose at home. It means bringing forth who we really are while being acutely aware of our surroundings. Engage. I do not tell self - deprecating jokes about my race or gender, though I will do so about my personal idiosyncrasies. Part of the job of leaders is to show why difference doesn't have to be a barrier. We don't ignore the fear of others. We understand it and harness it to our advantage. I'd never be invited into smoke - filled rooms or to the golf course, I instead requested individual meetings with political colleagues where I asked questions and learned about their interests, creating a similar sense of camaraderie. The results should speak for themselves, but they do not always shout loud enough to drown out the objections. Self - made is a misnomer, a stand - in for a more complex narrative that includes the ability to work for no pay, to borrow from friends and family, to experiment and fail without falling too Despite the American fascination with the gutsy move, society is more likely to punish rather than praise those of us whose performances stray from a prescribed plan. We have to first deconstruct the fictions of golden opportunity and realize not all worlds operate the same. We aren't going to win playing by the written rules. Doing exactly what we're told, amassing the education and the accolades and the experiences, guarantees absolutely nothing. Once we understand our ambitions and learn how to admit and manage our fears, the next step is putting these lessons to work to find opportunity and own it. Own opportunity and write our own story. Confronting issues of access requires that you know where to look for the work - arounds or how to create your own. The second part, entry, means discovering the passwords to get inside. In the wake of the elections, dozens of groups sprang up to encourage marginalized communities to take action and run for office. These groups are perfect examples of uncommon points of access. By only hiring those I knew, who had been picked by others who knew them, I wound up with a team that looked exactly like those who preceded me. Take too big a risk and you might lose what you have and not latch on to anything new. Beyond interning, one often overlooked hack for moving up is volunteering as a way to get inside an organization, then making the most of that position. One key approach is to cultivate relationships with those who have information and are typically ignored. I am always genuinely engaged with support staff wherever I work. The power of the invisible workers, hose whose knowledge may sometimes exceed that of the boss with the massive paycheck. we often play down our capacities, thinking we are being humble, when humility has little to do with our hesitation. Self - doubt is vicious and corrosive, transmitting internalized messages that say we lack something essential for true success. often disguises an embarrassment about ambition and a lack of self - confidence. Owning opportunity can feel like standing on a rickety ladder reaching for something on a higher shelf, knowing all along that, with one wrong move, everything could fall. When we doubt ourselves into inaction, that paralysis becomes a habit. Her graduation from college had been difficult, more “ thank you lordy " than “ magna cum laude. " Regardless of how we get in the door or up the ladder, we can never forget that the expectations for us are not the same. Whether the bona fides come in the form of advanced education, respected training courses, or job titles, be prepared to show your credentials. Beyond the paper endorsements, real live validators are the most critical prospects for advancement. Be certain others are willing to sing your praises " to you and others. reason, I have a regular habit of asking a small group of trusted friends to perform an informal - degree evaluation of me. you also want to be certain these folks will tell others about you, particularly if they are sitting in rooms to which you have not yet gained entry. These supporters can explain you to the powers that be. We need to be in it for others like us. When no one in a poor neighborhood owns a business, the idea of entrepreneurship scarcely takes root. We are, by our natures, often required to manufacture our own breaks, identify new openings even before others know they exist. The best hack is to know this is the case, accept it, and move on, prepared to take full advantage. Chapter 3 : The Myth of Mentors Not used to management, I valued substance over style, giving out assignments but rarely engaging in social conversation, coming across as brash and unfriendly. I made it a point to learn a new personal fact about each employee and to ask about their weekends before jumping into an assignment. Instead of summoning staff to my office, I would walk to theirs to connect. Once you've decided to fire someone, she warned, the kindest action is to be swift and final. Don't offer false hope or try to assuage your conscience. Too often the idea of a mentor is a self - limiting device that has most of us hunting for someone we'll never find because of access or because our chosen guide already has a waiting list. This is a professional courtship, so ease into it. My business partner, Lara, is fearless about reaching out to those whose careers pique her interest ; thus she has cultivated one of the broadest networks I've ever seen. She maintains quality relationships by calibrating her outreach based on the preferences of each person. we became friends and business partners because she heard me speak at an event, and she reached out to me to learn more. And a peer mentorship was born. A good mentorship network has a number of advisers with specific profiles. A good adviser should offer a contrasting view Because we do not share identical life histories, his perspective gives me a window into how to filter discussions and sift through my own readings of events. Add in someone who has skills you admire. Building real connections that make up a broad network is most effective when you learn how to be helped. With the proliferation of the mentor myth, I find too many have false expectations of the relationship. More than once, I've been asked to be a mentor, as though there's some “ mentor handbook " with a set of instructions. Worse, those who ask to be mentored tend to have only a vague notion of what they want. Fundamentally, the responsibility is on you, as the mentee, to create the mentorship that you want and manage expectations, especially your own. You want to be aggressive in your curiosity. Ask important questions that you need answers to that you can't find anywhere else. Don't wait for them to offer aid. Ask for what you need. It is your responsibility to affirmatively ask for engagement and support. Do not drop hints; they'll lie on the ground forever. Do not extrapolate : a "no" or a failure to help on one issue should not lead to an existential crisis about the relationship. The worst reaction is to spin out a false theory rather than gain useful information. People tend to help those who are open to helping others, not those who help themselves. if you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, you know he didn't get there alone. Professional friendships should not be mistaken for slumber - party friends. Professional friendships can also seem more transactional, but that's not always a bad thing. Generosity in our engagements transforms who we are and expands where we can go. We mistake income for wealth, not understanding the difference until too late. Women and people of color find themselves accused more often of potential corruption driven by nothing more sinister than unexpected success. Command of financial lingo and the dexterity to read and understand the spreadsheets and balance sheets behind institutions dramatically alters our authority and potential. When we master the art of raising money across the board, we are prepared to move from participant to leader. To get out of debt, consider the side hustle. Entrepreneur magazine had a great list of options for the side hustle : The takeaway : the difficulty of catching up and moving forward isn't all in your head. Systemic biases, legacy barriers, and current explosions of inequality conspire constantly to undermine wealth generation among minorities, especially women in these communities. But, as with all obstacles, our obligation is to acknowledge they exist and then fight like hell to subvert and circumvent them. The more we understand, the more power we possess. Learning about the finances of a company or an organization is like learning a secret code. Know how to effectively manage budgets and raise funds for projects are usually the ones calling the shots. Terrible choices are often cloaked in the seemingly impenetrable world of finance. Fund - raising is essential to success. Yet women and people of color or those who do not come from money often botch the ask or refuse to make it in the first place. My first piece of advice : do not go it alone if you don't have to. I have usually started my businesses with a partner, based on the strong belief that I'd rather have percent of something than percent of nothing. You also need to get specific. Not only should you try to know different types of people, you and your partners must know how much money you need to raise. Understand intimately what you want the money for, and you should have a clear, well - constructed plan. Be familiar with your details inside and out. No room for "umms" or vagueness. When making an ask, you usually only get one shot unless the person with resources finds your story or product compelling. While I wouldn't recommend a barrage of asks or a hard sales pitch, engage them to seek out counsel and advice. Allow an organic conversation to develop. Often, these conversations reveal if they possess a hidden capacity to support your endeavor. "Never tell yourself no. Let someone else do it." The more we know, the better we get and the more we can control for our destinies and the world around us. A central tenet to success is to show up " again and again and again " to take an alternate approach, and keep at it until it works. The habit of not going beyond others ' expectations can transmute self - awareness, until the meek begin to believe they are less than. we must cease being participants in our own oppression. Harriet Tubman once declared, "I freed a whole lot of slaves. I could have freed a whole lot more, if they'd only known that they were slaves. " Sam's preparation to win, his refusal to wait his turn, and his boldness in asking for and working for our help are pitch - perfect examples of how to prepare to win. Timidity warned me that at only twenty - eight, I had never run anything as large as the division she described. Meekness urged me to demur, as I had no municipal legal experience. And logic demanded I not give up my private - sector salary for a city job. But boldness, the willingness to take risks, and the drive to do the hard work of learning this role demanded I say yes. So I did. Crossing bright lines, being bold, has consequences. Not everyone will embrace the more aggressive you. The backlash might be subtle, like no longer being invited to participate in events or meetings. Or it could be starker, like a blocked promotion or a termination, or losing an election. if you are bold, you will alienate others. There's no way around it. The best approach is to plan what you are going to do. Not only plan your action and anticipate the reaction, but then think through what you are going to do with what you've done. Boldness lies not simply in having the thought but in claiming ownership, accepting responsibility for moving it forward, and then dealing with the consequences. Prepare to win, but also prepare to fail, always using boldness as your guide. Risk taking inevitably leads to missteps or bad decisions. Unfortunately, admitting mistakes is a fundamental skill too few of us learn. some people have thirty great years but others have the same crappy year thirty times. Knowing how to be wrong is fundamentally about honing the ability to admit that you don't know. I have learned lots of ways to say, “ I don't know. " My favorites are, “ I have some ideas, but let me do a bit more digging " and “ Here's what I think, but I could be wrong. I'll check. " Or I direct the person to the proper authority and I make the introduction myself. The best way to admit you don't know is to always couple it with a way to find out. We have to be careful who we ask for help or to whom we admit ignorance. in every facet of our lives, if we are willing to risk, we will lose. We create change when we eschew the instinct to only play when we know the outcomes. One of the best things about being in the minority is the fact that limited resources often lead to extensive creativity. At the core of leadership is the issue of power " the ability to secure what you need and the capacity to influence others to help you get We cannot fight a war with resources we don't possess " so we must inventory what we do have and figure out how to use them in unexpected ways. examine everything and leave nothing out. understand the difference between position and power. Access to real power also acknowledges that sometimes we have to collaborate rather than compete. authentic leaders know what we believe and why, in order to have a clear sense of our direction. one of the aspects of holding power is understanding the long game " sometimes, a single act of defiance raises awareness and action, But the creative ability of minority leaders lies in excavating the valuable in what is available. I used a foil, which increased rather than diminished my efforts. One of the dangers of guerrilla tactics and challenging power is the reality that those who stand to benefit may not stand with you. They may not have been willing to fight with me at the time, but they admired my courage and ingenuity. real and discernible differences exist between title and authority. to rewrite the rules of power, never allow the position to limit your sphere of influence and control. The other job of understanding the distinction between position and power is knowing which one you actually want. just because someone has the office, do not assume he can do the work. The opportunity for command may come in the form of overwork, sloughed onto your plate by a lazier boss. the means to become a micro - boss shouldn't be ignored. build skills, gain experience, and position oneself for the next big opening. Another critical lesson in position versus power is not simply doing what you're hired to do ; the ones who move up also do what needs to be done, even if it's not their job and no one asks them to do Power is directly tied to winning, and for those of us on the outside, the definition of winning must be adaptable to the circumstances. Those who hold power have no interest in handing it over. rely on two approaches : first, I distinguish my idea of a win from that of the ones in power, and second, I locate who can help me achieve my objectives, often through an activity known as power mapping. identifying who had control or influence, understanding their relationships to others, and then targeting them to promote social change. change the rules of engagement. At its core, a power map identifies who is in charge of what and forces you to think about how you interact with each person. Once I understand who is involved, I determine if they are willing to help me or if they'll be challenges to navigate. Smart leaders internalize the limits of their own actions and search for counterparts who can help them move farther along. The best ideas and the best policies are typically collaborative, and those that succeed are the product of a community. The final essential element to changing the rules of engagement is to know what you believe and why you believe it. If a leader doesn't have any hard - core internal holdings, she runs the risk of opportunism " making choices because others do so or because it's easy, not because the decision is correct. I do have core beliefs, but I don't have an unshakable position on every issue. I accept that I may not know enough about a situation to render immediate judgment, which is why I attend meetings and read everything My success tends to happen when I take on challenges that others refuse because the risk is too high and because it's hard to see the reward. leading from a position of weakness is risky. I reject the idea of work - life balance. It's worse than a myth. The careful binary of work or life entirely misses the point. The standards are stupid and arbitrary and make very little sense in universal application. By prioritizing our interests, whatever they may be, we can distinguish between what we want and what we're told we should desire. And in the process, we find out what matters. Invest early in the items that need to happen because they impact your ability to keep your options open. Build up a reserve of goodwill and accomplishments, something we can dip into when the unforeseen happens. The question to ask is whether their crisis will prevent you from achieving your goals " your firsts. Untold amounts of lost time have been ceded to the urgent but not important, but you don't have to play. DON'T DEAL WITH JERKS. The "jerks" label extends to flaky friends, the colleague with the constant emergencies, and the guy who always borrows but never lends. I've expanded the description to cover a host of people who are essentially unkind, those who place their needs above others and have little patience for the issues that don't involve them. "We don't deal with jerks also means looking in the mirror. Reach out to the lowest - paid members of our teams to ask them about interactions with me. Am I short - tempered, distant, or terse ? Being nice and suppressing our feelings can be taxing in its own way. We become numb to our own emotions, oblivious when they leak out, and start to damage relationships or even our health. Good leaders are always at the ready but not always at the front. I get a lot of things done because I do what I'm good at and let others shine in their roles. Their prowess allows me to focus on the areas of my greatest capacities. Doing a job another person can do, particularly better, is a waste of a precious resource. Are you an essential element for success ? If so, go all in. If not, go away. We are doomed to burnout if we fail to incorporate time for hobbies or just doing nothing. When we buck against the conventional wisdom, we can be charged with being too disruptive or problematic. And with the absence of role models to show us the way, we are left with our own narrow experiences as guides. To take power is to use the best of what resides within us for sketching a vision for the future, written large or small. Power requires a conscious effort on our part to move our own lives to where we want them to be, because we've got to move against what historically has been defined as the way we should live our lives or inhabit this space. Taking power demands self - analysis. You should regularly challenge yourself to do more, to be more, to examine your life and the world around you. Then endeavor to make modest improvements, knowing that, together, those incremental changes alter perceptions and then reality. And let's not forget, privilege exists even within those who are encompassed by a minority identity. There's a colloquialism I've embraced : let your haters be your motivators.	Stanly Bing Notable Quotations Full screen view [This is a parody of the help yourself to power genre and as such it offers tongue in cheak advice that is nearly identical to the same but serious advice offered by Thick Face or the 48 Laws] Throughout our time here on earth, we all have a choice. To do things the mediocre way . . . or Machiavelli's way. Some choose to follow the easy road. ... And then there are the other people. They rise like gas bubbles in Moët to the top of any corporate hierarchy. They make decisions. They make money. They make other people do what they want. They rule. Because they are the people who every day, in every way, ask themselves the key question that transforms a middle manager into a CEO: "What would Machiavelli do?" What would Machiavelli do? And the answer, in almost all cases, is: Whatever is necessary. ... Amazing how if you want the right answer, all you have to do is ask the right question. The ends justify the meanness. Don't like it? Get over it, you sniveling tree hugger. That's the way things are. If you haven't got the stomach for true success, that's all right. Go be a folk singer or a graphic designer or a social worker or some damn thing like that. The world has need for people like you as well. To live true to the vision of the master, we must be as selfish, narcissistic, manipulative, driven, and creative in getting what we want as we can be, not just in our important business actions, but where it really counts: in our hearts. Page 1 He would exploit himself only slightly less than he exploits others Page 2 a normal human being, like a dog, tries to sleep as much as possible. But these guys are not dogs. They eat dogs. Page 3 He would be unpredictable, and thus gain the advantage Page 3 Impulsiveness. Volatility. Capriciousness. Changeability. In short, nobody knows what you're likely to do next. Whatever you do, though, they know it's going to be big. Big and potentially very, very bad. Also good. Don't you just love that look on their faces? Aren't they cute when they can't figure out which direction that blow is going to come from? This quality of rampaging unpredictability is a well-known tool used by terrorists, authoritarian brainwashers, and those who wish to command and dominate others. It's used because it works better than straight-out intimidation, which can be anticipated and psychologically prepared for. Page 4 The key is being excessive on both ends. Very nice. Very mean. Big, big swings. Gigantic pleasure. Towering rage. Like being a kid again, isn't it? Page 5 The goal here is to keep people off their feed by making them read you like a barometer every time they have to face you. This makes everything they do feel like it counts. Page 6 He would be in love with his destiny. ... If you don't believe that you have a destiny yet, you'd better get busy. Page 8 He would be, for the most part, a paranoid freak Page 9 Why shouldn't you assume that everyone is against you? It's more rational than believing that they're on your side. Page 10 The real world is unbearably threatening. Shape the one around you so that it bears very little resemblance to the real thing. Page 12 He would always be at war Page 14 Skillful use of paranoia paired with a generally warlike stance is the bedrock upon which all Machiavellian rulership is based. Page 16 He would cultivate a few, well-loved enemies Page 21 He would have a couple of good friends, too Page 22 He would acquire his neighbor ... purchase entire companies whose incoming cash can simply be applied to your own to give the illusion of enormous revenue growth, quarter after quarter, year after year. ... No matter what's the size of your principality, you've got stuff to acquire. Look around you. Isn't there somebody you could control more? Some small person, who works next to you on the floor, say. Or your boss, who is extremely paranoid and needy? How about him? Page 25 He would think BIG Page 25 What is in your sane little mind right now? Double it. Triple it. Expand your goal until it is so bloated, so gigantized, that you barely recognize it. Page 27 He would move forward like a great shark, eating as he goes Page 29 He would kill people, but only if he could feel good about himself afterward Page 37 He would fire his own mother if necessary Page 41 He would make a virtue out of his obnoxiousness Page 41 Princes have their own rules of order, ones that come with the big, hard territory, and they don't care about the laws that govern other people. This ability to act out one's most childish and obnoxious urges is the right of princes, and they exercise it with pleasure. Page 44 He would be way upbeat! Page 44 A real Machiavellian is happy all the time, except when enraged about something. Page 45 He would be satisfied with nobody but himself Page 47 He would treat himself right Page 47 It's a small prince indeed who doesn't pay himself back on a daily basis for the stress, long hours, and indignities of life. Page 52 She would view her gender as both a liability and an asset. Ginger had to do everything that Fred did except backwards and in high heels."—FORMER TEXAS GOVERNOR ANN RICHARDS. You don't need a dick to act like one. But it seems to help. ... A lot of women have mastered the Machiavellian arts, I don't mean to say they haven't. ... But the sad fact is, far too often, way, way too often, you see women who get where they are by hard work and genuine talent and accomplishment, and use nothing more than that to stay on top. Page 58 He would use what he's got Page 60 He would embrace his own madness Page 61 NARCISSISM: Until you learn to view other people solely as a function of your needs, you will be a short hitter. You have enormous selfishness within you. Let it out. Let it flower. Practice viewing the world around you as the ancients did the universe, with the earth (you) at the center, and the sun, moon, and stars (everything else) rotating around you. Page 64 He would do what he feels like doing, you idiot Page 65 Absolutely doing what you want in all circumstances will also make others fear you, because they know that when it comes right down to it, you don't give a shit. And not giving a shit is big mojo. Not giving a shit is made up of three parts: Not being afraid of what other people think; Not caring about their feelings; Keeping your eyes on the prize. Page 69 He would say what he felt like saying Page 71 He would delegate all crummy tasks—except the ones he enjoys Page 71 You don't have to be a powerful prince to start on the process of getting other people to do the stuff you don't wanna do. Page 72 He wouldn't exactly seek the company of ass-kissers and bimbos, but he wouldn't reject them out of hand, either Page 73 He would respond poorly to criticism Page 73 If they feel like there's something you need to know about your behavior or performance, so be it. Let them talk. But make them pay. Page 74 He would carry a grudge until the extinction of the cockroach. Page 77 He would lie, when it was necessary. Page 77 The truth is your servant, not your master. Page 77 What is the truth, anyway? Does any of us really know what's true? And is truth an absolute? Can't things be sort of true? A little bit true? True in a deeper sense? True enough for military work? True for me, not for you? All too true? Of course they can. Particularly if have the personal power to make other people see the truth your way. Page 81 He would be proud of his cruelty and see it as strength Page 81 There are no winners who aren't hard as a rock inside. Page 84 A lot of really bad things lie ahead of you. If you're not going to enjoy them, you might as well not get started. Page 85 He would kick ass and take names Page 85 You can't be too insulting. Let me put that another way. You can be as insulting as you like. Isn't that great? Page 89 He would permanently cripple those who disappoint him Page 93 He would torture people until they were only too happy to destroy themselves Page 96 He would feast on other people's discord Page 97 Invite select associates to some meetings, while excluding others. Do not be consistent. Page 97 Assign the same task to different people without telling them you have done so. Page 98 Talk about others to their peers. Page 98 Be very clear in discussions that someone else's priority has effectively killed those of their peers. Page 98 Praise people publicly in a way that shames others. Page 99 He would make you fear for your life Page 101 He would be loyal to the people who could put up with all this Page 106 He would have no patience for anyfuckingbody Page 107 He would screw with people's weekends, wedding plans, open-heart surgery . . Page 108 He would put it in your face Page 110 He would realize that loving yourself means never having to say you're sorry Page 110 Princes never do anything wrong, so they never need to apologize. When they're right they're right. And when they're wrong they're right. Page 117 He would have no conscience to speak of Page 117 egocentrism of the selfish, amoral child who wants what he wants and permits nothing to get in its way. Page 119 Anything baby does is right, because, to a baby, self- satisfaction is the one and only value in the universe. Page 120 He would scream at people a lot Page 120 So we're in the Ritz hotel in Paris . . . we're disagreeing over the numbers. Suddenly Jagger explodes: "You fat fucking record executives!" he screams. "What do you know?" He jumps up. I jump up. "Fuck you!" I scream back. I'm pretty sure I can take him, but I don't want to get into a real fistfight. He backs down. . . . Nobody out-geschreis me. —WALTER YETNIKOV, FORMER HEAD OF CBS RECORDS Page 123 He would establish and maintain a psychotic level of control Page 125 Forget control over the things that almost no one can control—the weather, your government, the stock market, traffic. Control the things you can. Incoming phone calls. Paper. Your meeting schedule. But most of all, control every person who is likely to cross your path and remain in it for more than five minutes. Page 127 He would follow the money, honey ... While living a lavish personal life, the true prince must be obsessively focused on the nickels and dimes that turn into billions of dollars after a couple of quarterly reports. Page 131 He wouldn't be afraid to sling that bullshit. ... "Donald is a big believer in the big-lie theory," one of his lawyers told Vanity Fair back in 1990. "If you say something again and again people will believe you." This may be a bit unkind. There's no law against giving the world your construct of reality. That's just one of the things you need to do to make it come true. ... Bullshitting is different than lying. ... In this particular craft (you can't really call it an art), those who succeed must recognize the moment of bullshit—the instant where the choice is made not to offer a rational explanation or a thoughtful, honest response, but to sling a load in the face of the problem instead. Page 137 He would eat to kill Page 138 You can't actually use poison. But there are plenty of foods that can ruin other people for business. Then you can swoop down on them. Page 138 Breakfast. The most important meal for hurting other people. Bacon is your most effective tool. Get the other person to eat a lot of it. It's fatty and salty and delicious, and they will get slow and childish as they eat it, and start feeling self-indulgent and happy. You can find out a lot about them in this state. Page 142 He would never retire Page 144 He would have fun Page 145 Page 145 He would not be a jerk. Page 146 Moderation, it turns out, is always called for, even in the use of power. It is possible for very big players to out-Machiavelli Machiavelli himself. But it doesn't help them any.	Stephen Wendel Notable Quotations Full screen view Part I. How the Mind Works (Chapter 1-4) Behavioral science is an interdisciplinary field that combines psychology and economics, among other disciplines, to gain a more nuanced understanding of how people make decisions and translate those decisions into action. (5) One of the most active areas of research in behavioral science is how our environment affects our choices and behavior, and how a change in that environment can then affect those choices and behaviors. Environments can be thoughtfully and carefully designed to help us become more aware of our choices, shape our decisions for good or for ill, and spur us to take action once we've made a choice. We call that process choice architecture, or behavioral design. (5) When designing a product lookout for unnecessary frictions or for areas where a user loses self-confidence. Build habits via repeated action in a consistent context. We economize our time, attention, and mental energy by using simple rules of thumb to make decisions; for example, by excluding cereal with cartoons. As researchers we call these results of thumb heuristics. Another way our minds economize is by making split second non conscious judgments; non conscious habits are automated associations in our heads that trigger us to take a particular action when we see a specific trigger. Habits free our conscious mind to think about other things. (8) We often call the results of a heuristic or other shortcut going awry a cognitive bias: a systematic difference between how we'd expect people to behave in a certain circumstance and what they actually do. (8) Biases and heuristics: status quo bias, descriptive norms, confirmation bias, present bias, anchoring, availability you Mystic, IKEA effect, Halo effect. (13-15) Habits arise in one of two ways. First you can build habits through simple repetition: whenever you see X, a cue, you do Y, a routine. Over time your brain builds a strong association between the cue and the routine and doesn't need to think about what to do when the cue occurs. Sometimes there is a third element, in addition to a cue and a routine: a reward something good that happens at the end of the routine. The reward pulls us forward-it gives us a reason to repeat the behavior. (16) What we do is shaped by our contextual environment in obvious ways. It's also shaped in non-obvious ways by the people we talk and listen to (our social environment) what we see and interact with (are physical environment), and the habits and responses we've learned over time (are mental environment). (19) Our minds still use clever shortcuts to help us economize and avoid taxing our limited resources. (23) With the intention-action gap, the intention to act is there, but people don't follow through and act on it. Good intentions and the sincere desire to do something aren't enough. (24) People take action (or fail to) in a specific moment. Our will and desire are certainly important-but it's not enough, especially when we're looking to design for behavior change period we need to understand what brings one action to the fore and not others. For that we have the CREATE framework: a cue, which starts an automatic intuitive reaction, potentially bubbling up into a conscious evaluation of costs and benefits, the ability to act, the right timing for action, and the overwhelming power of past experience. (30) These six mental processes-detecting a cue, reacting to it, evaluating it, checking for ability, determining if the timing is right, and interpreting it all through the lens of our past experiences-are gates that can block or facilitate action. (31) For someone to take a conscious action, six things must happen immediately beforehand: 1) the person responds to a queue that starts their thinking about the action; 2) their intuitive mind automatically reacts at an intuitive level to the idea; 3) their conscious mind evaluates the idea, especially in terms of costs and benefits; 4) they check whether they have the ability to act-if they know what to do, have what they need, and believe they can succeed; 5) they determine whether the timing is right for action-especially whether or not the action is urgent; 6) they aren't turned off by a prior negative experience that overwhelms the otherwise clear benefits. (51) Sometimes helping people take action requires intentionally stopping a habit. Why are habits difficult to change? First, remember that habits are automatic and not conscious. Our conscious minds, the part that would seek to remove them, are only vaguely aware of their execution; We often don't notice them when they occur, and we don't remember doing them afterward. Across dozens of studies on behavior change interventions, researchers have found that the conscious mind sincere, concerted intention to change behavior has little relationship to actual behavior change. (56-57) We can help people use what's known as situational self-control; just as we can shape an environment to encourage action, we can shape an environment to slow down rash decisions and interfere with undesirable habits and behaviors. Use the CREATE framework in reverse. (65) If the behavior is habitual, here are specific techniques to focus on: avoid the cue altogether, build up a new positive habit that uses the same cue; deploy intentional mindfulness. (65) Behavior change is the core value of the product for users, and behavior change is required for users to extract the value they want from the product effectively. (71) Ethical guidelines for work: don't try to addict people to your product; Only apply behavioral techniques where the individual benefit; Tell users what you're doing; Make sure the action is optional; Ask yourself and others if they want to use the product. Avoiding coercion doesn't mean that you encourage users to do anything they want to do. Your company will have, and must have, a stance on the behaviors it wants to encourage. (84) Apply behavioral science on ourselves to be ethical: fix the incentives, draw bright lines, set up independent reviews, and support regulations. (84) Part II. A Bluebrint for Behavior Change (Chapters 5-15) Behavioral science helps us understand how our environments profoundly shape our decisions and our behavior. What does this process look like? I like to think about it as 6 steps, which we can remember with the acronym DECIDE (Define, Explore, Craft, Implement, Determine, Evaluate): that's how we decide on the right behavior change interventions in our products and communications. (90) Define the problem, explore the context, craft the intervention, implement within the product, determine the impact, and evaluate what to do next. (91) Defining the problem: the root cause of many bad designs-when designing for behavior change or otherwise-comes from a lack of clarity from the start. (100) Defining the problem centers on the target outcome (what is the product supposed to accomplish?), the target actor (who do we envision using the product?), and the target action (how will the actor do it?) (101) Exploring context includes the following: prior experience with the action, prior experience with similar products and channels, relationship with the company or organization, existing motivations, physical psychological or economic impediments to action. These five things make up the behavioral profile of users. To gather this information, you can use the standard tools of market research and product development-look for existing quantitative data on user demographics, deploy field surveys, and conduct qualitative research with users in focus groups and one-on-one interviews. If at all possible, include some direct observation in the field-see how people actually act. (126) Generate formal user personas-short descriptions of archetypal users with a simple background statement about a sample user's life. Unlike traditional user personas, these personas are all about behavior: groups of users who are likely to interact with the application differently and who are likely to respond differently to behavioral interventions. (129) Consider a behavioral map (similar to customer experience maps). The behavioral map is a depiction of the individual steps users take from whatever they're doing now, all the way through using the product and completing the target action (or for stopping an action what they do that leads up to the action to be stopped). Some of these steps will occur within the product and some require behavior that is completely outside of it. The map examines at each step of the way what's going on with users and why they would continue to the next step. (134) Diagnosing why people don't start requires a three-part process: First, we identify the micro behavior that stops people (or for new products, are likely to stop people). That’s our behavioral map. Second, we check which micro-behavior seems to be a problem. Where are people dropping off or likely to drop off? Third, we use the CREATE action funnel to determine the likely behavioral cause. (144) The diagnosis for a behavior you want to stop entails: 1)identifying the micro behaviors that led up to the action; 2) at each micro level, determine if it's habitual or conscious; 3) use CREATE for conscious actions and CRA for habitual actions to map out the current enabling factors for each micro behavior. (145) The purpose of the design process is to craft a context that facilitates (or hinders) action. (151) Changing context usually happens in one of four ways: 1) do it for them by magically taking away all the burden of work from the user; 2) structure the action to make it feasible (or in reverse, more difficult), 3) construct the environment to support or block the action, and 4) prepare the user to take (or resist) the action. (164) Crafting the intervention involves cues, reaction, and evaluation. Cues, wisely placed, are essential for behavioral change period this is true for non-conscious habits – a cue in the environment starts a habitual routine-and for conscious decisions to act. One simple way to queue people to act is just to ask them. (171) Another way to cue action is to help users reinterpret an existing feature of their environment as a queue. Let them specify something that they see or hear normally in their environment-like the morning show on their favorite radio station. Then have them associate an action with that cue. (172) Once a cue catches the user's attention, the mind reacts-often in the blink of an eye. Regardless of the overall merits of the action and product, that reaction can cause the user to shut down. (177) Techniques to address that problem: help people see themselves as someone for whom the action is a natural, normal extension of who they are; redirect someone’s current attention to prior successes; associate with the positive and the familiar; use social proof as a key tactic to persuade; use peer comparison; display strong authority on the subject; be authentic and personal; make the site professional and beautiful. (177-183) Conscious evaluation is similar to the stereotypical view most people have of decision making: do the benefits outweigh the costs? Make sure incentives are right, leverage existing motivations before adding new ones, avoid direct payments, leverage loss aversion, use commitment contracts and commitment devices, test different types of motivators, use competition, pull future motivation into the present. (183-189) One way to think about the mental cost of your target action is cognitive overhead, or “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you're looking at period figuring out what to do shouldn't be guesswork for the user.” That may mean making the action slightly more difficult to undertake in order for it to be easy to understand. Also makes sure instructions are understandable, and avoid choice overload. (191-192) Every time a user stops to think about what to do next, there is an opportunity to be distracted. Each micro behavior in the behavioral map can become an obstacle simply because it requires an extra iota of thought, effort, and confidence. (196) Remove friction and channel factors, including removing unnecessary decision points and setting appropriate defaults. (196-198) Implementation intentions are specific plans that people make on how to act in the future. They are a form of behavioral automation, telling the mind to do X whenever Y happens. The person does the work of thinking through what needs to be done now, and then when the action is actually needed there is no need to think and no logical barrier to action-the person just executes the action… For behavioral products, deploying implementation intentions can mean adding text boxes where the user describes how they'll take the action. The key is to make people think consciously about the concrete actions, and, if possible, visualize undertaking those actions. (198) Helping your users know that they'll succeed can be as complicated as an in depth training program and building up their expertise and confidence for a hard action. It can also be as simple as reframing the action to make it feel more familiar and feasible. (199) We're wired to value the present far more than the future-that's our temporal myopia. (200) We don't like to be inconsistent with our past behavior. It's very uncomfortable and we have a tendency to either act according to our prior beliefs or change our beliefs so they are in line with our actions. One way to achieve this is to have the user impose urgency on themselves-promised to take the action at a specific time, then come back to them and remind them at that point. Another way to create urgency to act is to make specific promises to do so to your friends. Social accountability is a powerful force. (201) You can make a reward for the action scarce or artificially time sensitive. This is another favorite sales and marketing tactic. It is best for one off actions and not repeated behavior. (202) People's prior experiences shape their reactions in ways that can be difficult to foresee and even comprehend. So what can we do when someone's prior experience creates an obstacle to something they would otherwise want to do? Here are some examples: fresh starts are special times in our lives when we feel a new opportunity to change something about ourselves. People are disproportionately likely to make major life commitments during times of transition. A special fresh start can make the action in context feel special and allows people to put their past experience in a separate historical category that doesn't doom them into repeating those mistakes again: the future can be different, if you make it so. (203-204) Use story editing. We interpret and reinterpret our experiences every day of our lives and thus shape ourself narratives and our future behavior. These cycles of interpretation and behavior can clearly support beneficial changes, like studying more. It depends on how we use our past experiences and whether we see ourselves in control of the outcomes of our lives. (205-206) Make it intentionally unfamiliar. If prior experience with a familiar product or communication causes a negative reaction that blocks action, you could intentionally change the look and feel to no longer trigger that reaction. (206) Working with multi step interventions overtime, building habits, and crafting interventions to hinder negative actions are advanced topics related to crafting interventions. (209-222) Many companies use an iterative product development process… That iterative process also allows teams to assess the impact of different interventions along the way as well, which is quite valuable. Is not essential though. Regardless of the process used to implement the product itself there are a few pointers along the way that can help the behavioral aspects of the project. In particular, it's important at this stage to double check that your incentives and intervention plan are ethically sound, plan to track user behavior and results from the outset, and ensure that thoughtful planning doesn't get in the way of creative solutions. (224) Build in behavioral metrics. The first step in measuring the impact of your product is to be absolutely clear on the impact you care about. In particular you should have a clearly defined tangible and measurable outcome that you seek with a metric; a clearly defined tangible and measurable action that drives that outcome with a metric; and a threshold for each metric that defines success and failure. (228) Your company may need to consider adding functionality to the app to make real world measurement possible. (229) Implement A/B testing and experiments. Experiments are your best route to determine whether you've had the impact you seek, when they are possible. So just like the metrics themselves, you should plan to implement the ability to run experiments as part of the product or communication itself. Otherwise you'll have a hard time retrofitting them. (230) AB tests take a randomly selected group of users and show them one version of the product, and show another randomly selected group another version. (231) When you want to know whether a product or communication actually does what it's supposed to do, randomized control trials are the most trusted and rigorous tool. In fact, they are the gold standard in science; the same tool is used to measure how effective medicines are at curing disease. (239) In addition to the basics of experimental design, there are a few other rules to keep in mind: random selection isn't always easy, you need random assignment as well, check that the groups are drawn from the same population, make sure you're only varying one thing. (247-248) Always run a test of statistical significance. (249) In addition to determining statistical significance here are a few other rules that apply to experiments: go double-blind when you can, measure the same way, compare results for everyone, generalized outcomes to the same population. (249-250) Experiments come in many flavors in terms of how they are designed and executed and in terms of the particular problem or purpose they are meant to address. Two of the most common types of experiments: one in which the second group receives nothing and one in which the second group receives a different version of the product or communication (also known as an A/B test). Here are a few other experimental designs: simultaneous impact, simultaneous comparison, multi arm comparison, staggered rollout, attention treatment, multivariate experiment, multi armed bandit. (250-252) Teams can't always run experiments, but the need for rigorous measurement doesn't go away. There are other ways to determine impact. The easiest and most common way to look at impact is a pre-post analysis. In a pre-post analysis, you look at user behavior and outcomes before and after a significant change. In a cross-sectional analysis (or panel data analysis of impact) you look for differences among groups of users at a given point you want to see how their usage of the product impacts their behavior and outcomes, after taking into account all the other things that might be different about the users. (262-265) At the end of each cycle of product release and measurement, the team will have gathered a lot of data about what users are doing in the product and potential improvements to do it. It's time to collect the potential changes from these diverse sources and see what can be applied to the next iteration of the product. A three-step process: 1) gather lessons learned and potential improvement to the product; 2) prioritize the potential improvement based on business considerations and behavioral impact; and 3) integrate potential improvements into the appropriate part of product development process. (275-278) Ideally, the outcome of any product development process, especially one that aims to change behavior, is that the product is doing its job and nothing more is needed. When the product successfully automates the behavior, builds a habit, or reliably helps the user make the conscious choice to act, and the team can move on. (280) Part III. Build your Team and Make it Successful (Chapter 16-18) Whereas majority of the book focuses on the process of applied behavioral science, the book ends with a focus on the organizational structure that enables applied behavioral science. (286) Teams applying behavioral science to the development of products, communications, and policies are heavily concentrated in three countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. (288) Companies are either consulting companies or those that apply behavioral approaches to their own products and services. Some teams are focused on particular outcomes for the individual-the most common being financial behavior like saving, spending and investing; health behaviors; education; and energy see use. Many also spent time on company driven outcome of product use and sales. (295-296) There are challenges, and three main problems facing the field include practical problems of setting up and running a team; replication crisis in science; and ethical behavior. (296-299) Behavioral science teams don't have a single design or structure; They often grow organically out of existing programs and departments, where people in those departments find that behavioral science can aid their work. (301) Skills and people you will need on a team: 1) while some behavioral teams are centrally located centers of excellence, move many teams are embedded in product, design, marketing, analytics, or other functions. And, for these groups, the first skills that are needed are those used in the core work of the team. If you're applying behavioral science to product development that means design or product management, etcetera. If you're working on communications and marketing, and means knowing communications and marketing; 2) Impact assessment, we need to rigorously assess causal impact; 3) a knowledge of the minds quirks and of nudges that can affect behavior. (305-306) Experimental testing, especially for outcomes that are outside of the product, can be an intimidating endeavor. Believe it or not, academic researchers would probably love to help test your products impact. Many of them can't be hired in a traditional sense-because they have full time jobs and academic institutions and for professional reasons can't accept consulting contracts. But you can build partnerships of mutual benefit if you have enough users of your product to support a scientifically valid study and know how to navigate the process. (308) Data science often seeks to understand how something works and predict the future. Behavioral science seeks to change the future, particularly through changing human behavior. Because of these two different purposes, data scientists and behavioral scientists often use different statistical methods. Data scientists can predict the future very accurately and thoughtfully using variables that are correlated with the outcome of interest they use regressions, decision trees, neural networks, and such to find hidden relationships between contacts and outcome. Behavioral scientists, when possible, use experiments since they are the best tool to measure our ability to cause a change in behavior or outcomes. Analyzing experiments when properly designed, doesn't require advanced statistics at all simple comparison of means is often enough. Behavioral scientists do also use regression and sometimes machine learning techniques, but we do so in the service of understanding the causal relationship between context behavior and outcomes. Because of these two goals-- predicting outcomes versus causing behavior change-data and behavioral scientists also differ in how they use theory: and explanation of why something works the way it does. Many data scientists do have a theoretical understanding of what they study, and that helps them with feature selection and data analysis but it's not actually required. (310 - 311) Three major conceptual tools were developed for the purposes of this book: 1) an understanding of how people make decisions and act in their daily lives; 2) a model of what's required for someone to take action relating to your product in a given moment (the CREATE action funnel); 3) a process for applying that knowledge to the practical details of product development (DECIDE on the behavioral intervention and build it). (313)	Steve Hassan Notable Quotations Full screen view Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults Hassan, StevenIntroduction to the 30th Edition the classic signs -- recruiting people through deception, whisking them away to isolated locations, giving them new names, clothes, controlling their access to food and information, implanting phobias, and making false promises. North Korea is a classic example of a mind control regime. They are entirely dependent and obedient to their "great leader," and his picture is everywhere. The human trafficking racket is accurately understood as a "commercial cult" phenomenon. One of the most significant changes I have seen over the past decades is the rise of "mini-cults," which consist of anywhere from two to twelve people. the issue of unethical and psychological social influence permeates the fabric of our society, and societies all over the world. The science of social influence. Some of the larger organizations have staff whose sole job is to erase truth from the web and upload propaganda. Mind-control organizations routinely sponsor websites that purport to provide help, empathy, and guidance to former members, as well as to current members who are thinking of leaving. Because vast amounts of personal information are now available for purchase online, cult recruiters (as well as ordinary scam artists) can now go online and develop extensive profiles about future targets. They then pretend to read people's minds, or intuit their deepest hopes and fears, or channel spirits, or act as agents of divine inspiration. Undue influence is a better term than mind control, as exploitation is part of the definition of undue influence. Also, since the advent of the smartphone, people under undue influence are regularly monitored and controlled via voice mail messages, texts, phone calls, and emails. Strategic Interactive Approach. I create a unique and ethical influence campaign to help individuals acquire a set of experiences and realizations that help them remove many of the invisible chains of mind control. The person learns to listen to their inner voice, rather than the instructions of an authority figure. Today, a vast array of methods exists to deceive, manipulate and indoctrinate people into closed systems of obedience and dependency. Exit-counseling is a special field, one that demands specific knowledge, special techniques and methods, and a high level of skill.Preface to the First Paperback Edition You may even discover that, although the public views your group as a cult, there in fact is no mind control being used. If you are involved with a religious organization, keep in mind that God created us with free will, and that no truly spiritual organization would ever use deception or mind control, or take away your freedom. Chapter 1 – My Work as a Cult Expert The Moonies do a very thorough job of convincing people that former members are satanic and that even being in their presence could be dangerous. Orwell depicted a world where "thought police" maintain complete control over people's mental and emotional lives, and where it is a crime to act or think independently, or even to fall in love. Unfortunately, such places do exist right now, all over the world. They are mind control cults. basic respect for the individual is secondary to the leader's whims and ideology. People are manipulated and coerced to think, feel, and behave in a single "right way." Individuals become totally dependent on the group and lose the ability to act or think on their own. typically exploited for the sake of the group's economic or political ends. purposes: I define any group that uses unethical mind control to pursue its ends -- whether religious, political, or commercial -- as a destructive cult. The popular view of cults is that they prey on the disaffected and the vulnerable -- losers, loners, outcasts, and people who simply don't fit in. But the truth is very different. In fact, most cult recruits are normal people with ordinary backgrounds -- and many are highly intelligent. I recognize that hateful people can turn any term into an epithet. use of deception to recruit people. used psychological pressure to convince members to turn over all their personal wealth and possessions to the church. typically undergo a conversion experience in which they surrender to the group. become totally dependent upon the group for financial and emotional support, and lose the ability to act independently of it. Mind control is any system of influence that disrupts an individual's authentic identity and replaces it with a false, new one. In most cases, that new identity is one the person would strongly reject, if they had been asked for their informed consent. That's why I also use the term undue influence -- "undue" because these practices violate personal boundaries and human integrity, as well as ethics and, often, the law. not all of the techniques used in mind control are inherently bad or unethical. the end result need to be part of the evaluation. The locus of control of one's mind and body should always remain within the adult individual, never with an external authority. Some members of destructive cults suffer physical abuse during their involvement, in the form of beatings or rape, while others simply suffer the abuse of long hours of grueling, monotonous work -- to hours a day, year in and year out. In essence, they become slaves with few or no resources, personal or financial. as long as they are productive. When they fall sick or are no longer an asset, they are often kicked out. Different cults appeal to the many different human impulses: such as desire to belong; to improve oneself and others; to understand the meaning and purpose of life. They often have a charismatic leader and operate with religious dogma. Political cults, often in the news, are organized around a simplistic political theory, sometimes with a religious cloak. Psychotherapy/educational cults, which have enjoyed great popularity, purport to give the participant "insight" and "enlightenment." None of these destructive cults deliver what they promise and glittering dreams eventually turn out to be paths to psychological enslavement.Chapter –My Life in the Unification Church barraged with flattery "love bombing." His voice was so full of mystery and intrigue that it offset my suspicions and piqued my curiosity. The entire weekend was structured from morning until night. There was no free time. There was no possibility of being alone. Members outnumbered newcomers three to one and kept us surrounded. never permitted to talk among ourselves unchaperoned. I was encouraged to decide what country I might like to run when Unificationism took over the world. He would single out someone who was very successful at recruiting or fundraising (he did this with me), and present that person as a model of excellence, shaming the others into being more successful. I was still thinking somewhat in black and white terms: good versus evil, us versus them. Richard Bandler on hypnosis that was based on the work of the psychiatrist Milton Erickson. Bandler and John Grinder had also developed a model based on the work of therapist Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson. They called it Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. I became more and more concerned about the ethics of NLP. It seemed to me that its leaders had launched a mass-market campaign to promote NLP as a tool for power enhancement. Eventually I realized that NLP was amoral. It depended entirely on the conscience and good will of the practitioner. I found that people who were able to walk away without intervention were those who had maintained contact with people outside the destructive cult. Chapter –The Threat: Mind Control Today Since all destructive cults believe that their ends justify any means, no matter how harmful, they typically believe themselves to be above the law. Briefly, a destructive cult is a group that violates its members' rights and damages them through the abusive techniques of unethical mind control. It distinguishes itself from a normal, healthy social or religious group by subjecting its members to systematic control of behavior, information, thoughts and emotions (BITE) to keep them dependent and obedient. While most people usually think of cults as religious -- the first definition of cult in Webster's Third New International Dictionary is "religious practice: worship" -- they are often completely secular. Salespeople are manipulated through fear and guilt, Many cults deliberately seek out people who are intelligent, talented, and successful. As a result, its members are often powerfully persuasive and seductive to newcomers. The large cults know how to train their "salespeople" well. Members are taught to suppress any negative feelings they have about the group, and to always show a continually smiling, happy face. In the Moonies, I was taught to use a four-part personality model to help recruit new members. People were categorized as thinkers, feelers, doers, or believers. Thinkers are people who approach life with their minds, as intellectuals. Feelers lead with their emotions. Doers are action-oriented and very physical. Believers are spiritually oriented. If a person was categorized as a thinker, we would use an intellectual approach. Feelers would always respond well to a loving, caring approach. We would always talk about love Feelers automatically long to be accepted and loved, so we would go out of our way to provide the person with a warm and enticing feeling of unconditional approval. Doers are action-oriented. They like challenges and strive to accomplish as much as they can. If they saw poverty and suffering in the world and longed to make it end, we would tell them how much we were doing along these lines. We would tell doers about the hundreds of programs we sponsored to heal a broken world. We saw believers as people searching for God, or looking for spiritual meaning in their lives. They typically would tell us about their spiritual experiences -- dreams, visions and revelations. For the most part, these people were "wide open," and often recruited themselves. Contrary to public perception, most of the people we recruited did not fall into the believer category. Most were either feelers or doers. Many of the so-called thinkers eventually became leaders within the organization. People believe that "it can never happen to them" because they want to believe they are stronger and better than the many millions who have fallen victim to mind control. As for the philosophical position that everything is a form of mind control, it is certainly true that we are constantly being influenced by all kinds of people, ideas, and forces. Yet there is actually a continuum of influence. No informed consent. Information is manipulated and controlled. It has a top-down structure, with a single leader at the top and a small inner circle immediately below. It is authoritarian: It has no guiding ethical principles; all goals justify the use of any means. It focuses on controlling, preserving, and acquiring power and information, but shares little of these with rank and file members -- and none with outsiders. People at the top of these organizations do not lead through wisdom, consensus, compassion, or even brainpower. They lead by making their followers frightened and dependent. They demand obedience and subservience. The BITE model. behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotion control. If mind control is used to change a person's belief system without informed consent and make him dependent on outside authority figures, the effects can be devastating. Cult recruiters are expert at targeting vulnerabilities and activating motivation. The structure of a phobia involves several internal components that interact to cause a vicious cycle. These components include worrisome thoughts, negative internal images, and feelings of dread and being out of control. Just thinking about the object can sometimes trigger the cycle In some cults, members are systematically made to be phobic about ever leaving the group. Today's cults know how to effectively implant vivid negative images deep within members' unconscious minds, making it impossible for them to even conceive of ever being happy and successful outside of the group. The unconscious mind of the typical cult member contains a substantial image-bank of all of the bad things that will occur if they, or anyone, were to ever betray the group. Put a person in a sensory deprivation chamber, and within minutes he will start to hallucinate and become incredibly suggestible. put a person into a situation where his senses are overloaded with non-coherent information, and the mind will go "numb" as a protective mechanism. Change the frame of reference, and the information coming in will be interpreted in a different way. Con artists size up their victim, make the con, get the money, and leave. Cult recruiters use many of the same skills, but they don't leave. for the most part, people don't join cults. Cults recruit people. People being recruited by cults are approached in four basic ways: ) by a friend or relative who is already a member; ) by a stranger (often a member of the opposite sex) who befriends them; ) through a cult-sponsored event, such as a lecture, symposium, or movie; or ) through social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Usually an individual does not suspect he or she is being recruited. The friend or relative wants to share some incredible insights and experiences. If the recruiter is a stranger, more often than not you think you've made a good friend. majority of people recruited into destructive cults were approached at a vulnerable time of stress in their lives. The recruiter starts to learn all about the potential recruit -- their hopes, dreams, fears, relationships, job and interests. The more information the recruiter can elicit, the greater their opportunity to manipulate the person. The plan might include effusive praise and flattery; introducing the person to another member with similar interests and background; deliberate deception about the group; or evasive maneuvering to avoid answering questions. Although the white middle class is still the main target of recruitment, several groups are now actively seeking out blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. cults generally avoid recruiting people who will burden them, such as those with physical disabilities or severe emotional problems. Once a person joins a destructive cult, for the first few weeks or months they typically enjoy a "honeymoon phase." They are treated as though they were royalty. They are made to feel very special as they embark on a new life with the group. Even though most cult members say publicly that they are happier than they've ever been in their lives, the reality is sadly different. Life in a destructive cult is, for the most part, a life of sacrifice, pain and fear. leaves the person dependent on the group for everything: food, clothing, shelter and health care. Like their parents, they are taught that the world is a hostile, evil place, and they are forced to depend on cult doctrine to understand reality.Chapter –Understanding Mind Control "How would you know if you were under mind control?" After some reflection, most people realize that if they were under mind control, it would be impossible to determine it without some help from the outside. Lifton identified eight basic elements of the process of mind control as practiced by the Chinese Communists. (In the Appendix of this book, Lifton describes these eight elements in more detail. While cult mind control can be talked about and defined in many different ways, I believe it is best understood as a system that disrupts an individual's healthy identity development. It's worth noting that a group can use mind control in positive ways. For example, many drug rehabilitation and juvenile rehabilitation programs use some of these same methods to re-integrate a person's old identity. The pressure to conform to certain standards of behavior exists in nearly every institution. The essence of mind control is that it encourages dependence and conformity, and discourages autonomy and individuality. The term brainwashing was coined in by journalist and CIA agent Edward Hunter. He used it to describe how American servicemen captured in the Korean War suddenly reversed their values and allegiances, and believed they had committed fictional war crimes. I think of brainwashing as overtly coercive. The person being brainwashed knows at the outset that they are in the hands of an enemy. Once people are away from their controllers and back in familiar surroundings, the effects tend to dissipate. People are coerced into specific acts for self-preservation; then, once they have acted, their beliefs change to rationalize what they have done. Mind control is much more subtle and sophisticated. The victim typically regards the controllers as friends or peers, so is much less on guard. Mind control involves little or no overt physical abuse. Instead, hypnotic processes are combined with group dynamics to create a potent indoctrination effect. deceived and manipulated -- but not directly threatened -- The term hypnotism is also misused. The difference is this: whereas in normal consciousness the attention is focused outwards through the five senses, in a trance one's attention is usually focused inwards. Hypnotism relates to the unethical mind control practices of destructive cults in a variety of ways. what is often called "meditation" is no more than a process by which the cult members enter a trance, during which time they may receive suggestions which make them more receptive to following the cult's doctrine. behavior modification techniques, group conformity and obedience to authority. people are hardwired to unconsciously respond to social cues. A famous experiment in conformity by Dr. Solomon Asch demonstrated that most people will conform -- and even doubt their own perceptions -- if they are put in a social situation where the most confident people in the group all give the same wrong answers. If you control the information someone receives, you restrict his ability to think for himself. "If you change a person's behavior, his thoughts and feelings will change to minimize the dissonance." people need to maintain order and meaning in their life. They need to think they are acting according to their self-image and their own values. If their behavior changes for any reason, their self-image and values change to match. cult groups is that they deliberately create dissonance in people this way and exploit it to control them. Behavior control is the regulation of an individual's physical reality. It includes the control of their environment -- where they live, what clothes they wear, what food they eat, how much sleep they get, and what jobs, rituals and other actions they perform. Every hour of the cult member's day has to be accounted for. In these ways the group can keep a tight rein on the member's behavior -- and on their thoughts and feelings as well. Behavior is often controlled by the requirement that everyone act as a group. In many cults, people eat together, work together, have group meetings all behaviors can be either rewarded or punished. Those who actively participate in their own punishment will eventually come to believe they deserve it. Obedience to a leader's command is the most important lesson to learn. A cult's leaders cannot command someone's inner thoughts, but they know that if they command behavior, hearts and minds will follow. Information control is the second component of mind control. Information provides the tools with which we think and understand reality. Deception is the biggest tool of information control, because it robs people of the ability to make informed decisions. Outright lying, withholding information and distorting information all become essential strategies, especially when recruiting new members. In many totalistic cults, people have minimal access to non-cult newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and online information. Certain information may be forbidden and labeled as unhealthy: apostate literature, entheta (negative information), satanic, bourgeoisie propaganda, and so on. kept so busy that they don't have free time to think and seek outside answers to questions. People are not allowed to talk to each other about anything critical of the leader, doctrine, or organization. Members must spy on each other and report improper activities or comments to leaders, often in the form of written reports Information is usually compartmentalized, to keep members from knowing the big picture. Destructive organizations also control information by having many levels of "truth." Cult ideologies often have "outsider" doctrines and "insider" doctrines. The outsider material is relatively bland stuff for the general public or new converts. The inner doctrines are gradually unveiled, as the person is more deeply involved and only when the person is deemed "ready" by superiors. By creating an environment where truth is multileveled, cult directors make it nearly impossible for a member to make definitive, objective assessments. they are told that they are not mature or advanced enough to know the whole truth yet. If they work hard, they'll earn the right to understand the higher levels of truth. Thought control, the third major component of mind control, includes indoctrinating members so thoroughly that they internalize the group doctrine, incorporate a new language system, and use thought-stopping techniques to keep their mind "centered." In order to be a good member, a person must learn to manipulate their own thought processes. The ideology is internalized as "the truth," Usually, the doctrine is absolutist, dividing everything into black versus white, or us versus them. Members need not think for themselves because the doctrine does the thinking for them. The more totalistic groups claim that their doctrine is scientific, but that is never truly the case. Since language provides the symbols we use for thinking, using only certain words serves to control thoughts. The cult's clichés and loaded language also put up an invisible wall between believers and outsiders. The language helps to make members feel special, and separates them from the general public. It also serves to confuse newcomers, They learn that "understanding" means accepting and believing. block out any information that is critical of the group. The first line of defense includes denial -- "What you say isn't happening at all"; rationalization -- "This is happening for a good reason"; justification -- "This is happening because it ought to"; and wishful thinking -- "I'd like it to be true so maybe it really is." Perhaps the most widely used, and most effective, technique for controlling cult members' thoughts is thought-stopping. Members are taught to use thought-stopping on themselves. They are told it will help them grow, stay "pure and true" or be more effective. Since the doctrine is perfect and the leader is perfect, any problem that crops up is assumed to be the fault of the individual member. They learn to always to blame themselves and simply work harder. Emotional control, the fourth component of the BITE model, attempts to manipulate and narrow the range of a person's feelings. Guilt comes in many forms. Historical guilt (for instance, the fact that the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima), identity guilt (a thought such as "I'm not living up to my potential"), guilt over past actions ("I cheated on a test") and social guilt People are dying of starvation") can all be exploited by destructive cult leaders. Members are conditioned to always take the blame, so that they respond gratefully whenever a leader points out one of their "shortcomings." Fear is used to bind the group members together in several ways. The first is the creation of an outside enemy, who is persecuting the group and its members. In order to control someone through their emotions, feelings themselves often have to be redefined. For example, everyone wants happiness. However, if happiness is redefined as being closer to God, and God is unhappy (as He apparently is in many religious cults), then the way to be happy is to be unhappy. Happiness, therefore, consists of suffering so you can grow closer to God. This idea also appears in some non-cult theologies, but in a cult it is a tool for exploitation and control. Loyalty and devotion are the most highly respected emotions of all. Members are not allowed to feel or express negative emotions, except toward outsiders. They are taught never to feel for themselves or their own needs, but always to think of the group and never to complain. They are never to criticize a leader, but to criticize themselves instead. People are often kept off balance, praised one minute and tongue-lashed the next. Confession of past sins or wrong attitudes is also a powerful device for emotional control. rarely is their old sin truly forgiven or forgotten. The minute they get out of line, it will be hauled out and used to manipulate them into obeying. one of these categories. For example, some groups change people's names in order to hasten the formation of the new "cult" identity. Three Steps To Gaining Control Of The Mind Unfreezing, changing and refreezing Unfreezing consists of breaking a person down; changing constitutes the indoctrination process; and refreezing is the process of building up and reinforcing the new identity. To ready a person for radical change, their reality must first be shaken up. Their indoctrinators must confuse and disorient them. Upsetting their view of reality disarms their natural defenses against concepts that challenge that reality. Sleep deprivation New diets and eating schedules, prolonged underfeeding, One particularly effective hypnotic technique involves the deliberate use of confusion to induce a trance state. Confusion usually results whenever contradictory information is communicated congruently. If a person is kept in a controlled environment long enough, and is repeatedly fed such disorienting language and confusing information, they will usually suspend their critical judgment and adapt to what everyone else is doing. Sensory overload, like sensory deprivation, can also effectively disrupt a person's balance and make them more open to suggestion. Double bind forces a person to do what the controller wants while giving an illusion of choice. For example, a cult leader may say, "For those people who are having doubts about what I am telling you, you should know that I am the one putting those doubts inside your mind, so that you will see the truth that I am the true teacher." Whether the person believes or doubts the leader, both bases are covered. Exercises such as guided meditations, personal confessions, prayer sessions, vigorous calisthenics and even group singing can also aid unfreezing. privacy deprivation Changing Changing consists of imposing a new personal identity -- a new set of behaviors, thoughts, and emotions -- to fill the void left by the breakdown of the old one. Indoctrination in this new identity takes place both formally (for instance, through seminars and rituals) and informally (by spending time with members, reading, and listening to recordings and videos). Repetition, monotony, rhythm: Recruits are told, "Your old self is what's keeping you from fully experiencing the new truth. Your old concepts are what drag you down. Your rational mind is holding you back from fantastic progress. Surrender. Another potent technique for change is the induced "spiritual experience." Private information about the recruit is collected by the person's closest buddy in the group and then secretly passed to the leadership. the recruit thinks the leader has read their thoughts or is being informed directly by the spirit world. group psychology plays a major role in the changing process. But the changing process involves much more than obedience to a cult's authority figures. It also includes numerous "sharing" sessions with other ordinary members, where past evils are confessed, present success stories are told, and a sense of community is fostered. These group sessions are very effective in teaching conformity, By controlling a person's environment, using behavior modification to reward some behaviors and suppress others, and inducing hypnotic states, they may indeed reprogram a person's identity. Refreezing The recruit must now be built up again as the "new man" or "new woman." They are given a new purpose in life, and new activities that will solidify their new identity. important task of the new person is to denigrate their previous sinful self. Confession becomes another way to purge the person's past and embed them in the cult. New members are paired with older members, who are assigned to show them the ropes. The "spiritual child" is instructed to imitate the "spiritual parent" in all ways. To help refreeze the member's new identity, some cults give them a new name. Many also change the person's clothing style, haircut, and whatever else would remind them of their past. members often learn to speak a distinctive jargon or loaded language of the group. Great pressure is usually exerted on the member to turn over money This serves multiple purposes. First, it enriches the cult. Second, donating one's life savings freezes the person in the new belief system, since it would be too painful to admit that this was a foolish mistake. Sleep deprivation, lack of privacy, and dietary changes are sometimes continued for several months or even longer. Research in social psychology has shown that nothing firms up one's beliefs faster than recruiting others to share them. attempts to destroy and suppress the old identity, and empower the new one, it almost never totally succeeds. People are able to recall horrible things, like being raped by the cult leader or being forced to lie, cheat or steal. Even though they knew at the time that they were doing something wrong or were being abused, they couldn't deal with the experience or act on it while their cult identity was in control. It was only when their real self was given permission and encouragement to speak that these things came back into consciousness. Cult Psychology Although some of them clearly had severe emotional problems before becoming involved, the great majority were stable, intelligent, idealistic people. a cult will generally target the most educated, active and capable people it can find. People with emotional problems, on the other hand, always had trouble handling the rigorous schedule ratios. Cults that endure for more than a decade need to have competent individuals managing the practical affairs that any organization with long-term objectives must do. Outsiders who deal with the leadership of destructive cults never cease to be amazed that they aren't scatterbrained kooks. The major variable is not the person's family but the cult recruiter's skill and the recruit's life situation. I support anyone's search for more meaningful ways to develop relationships with other people -- but, as I have learned, people who are engaged in that search are often more vulnerable than others to cult recruitment. young people recruited into cults are struggling to assert their individuality, and some are going through a period of rebellion. So, what makes a person vulnerable to cults? How does a friendly, kind, insightful human being become a member of a destructive cult? If he or she is like most cult members, he or she is probably approached during a time of unusual stress, perhaps while undergoing a major life transition. The Doctrine Is Reality There is no room in a mind control environment for regarding the group's beliefs as mere theory, or as a way to interpret or seek reality. The most effective cult doctrines are those "which are unverifiable and unevaluable, in the words of Eric Hoffer." Doctrine is to be accepted, not understood. Therefore, the doctrine must be vague and global, yet also symmetrical enough to appear consistent. Since mind control depends on creating a new identity within the individual, cult doctrine always requires that a person distrust their authentic self. the cult member is told that they should work harder and have more faith, so they will come to understand the truth more clearly. Reality is Black and White, Good Versus Evil, never room for pluralism.also no room for interpretation or deviation. "Devils" vary from group to group. They can be political or economic institutions (communism, socialism, or capitalism); mental-health professionals (psychiatrists, psychologists, or deprogrammers); metaphysical entities Some groups cultivate a psychic paranoia, telling members that spirit beings are constantly observing them, Members are made to feel part of an elite corps of humankind. This feeling of being special, of participating in the most important acts in human history, with a vanguard of committed believers, is strong emotional glue that keeps people sacrificing and working hard. The rank-and-file member is humble before superiors and potential recruits, but arrogant to outsiders. the self must submit to group policy and the leader's commands. One reason why a group of cultists may strike even a naive outsider as spooky or weird is that everyone has similar odd mannerisms, clothing styles and modes of speech. What the outsider is seeing is the personality of the leader passed down through several layers of modeling. One of the most attractive qualities of cult life is the sense of community it fosters. the cult member learns that in the group, love is not unconditional, but depends on good performance. Behaviors are controlled through rewards and punishments. Competitions are used to inspire and shame members into being more productive. Real friendships are a liability in cults, and are covertly discouraged by leaders. Manipulation through Fear and Guilt Cult members come to live within a narrow corridor of fear, guilt and shame. Problems are always their fault -- the result of their weak faith, their lack of understanding, their "bad ancestors," evil spirits, and so forth. Changes in Time Orientation Cult members tend to look back at their previous life with a distorted memory that colors everything dark. the present feel a great sense of urgency about the tasks at hand. the apocalypse is just around the corner. the future is a time when they will be rewarded, once the great change has finally come. In most groups, the leader claims to control -- or at least have unique knowledge of -- the future. In a destructive cult, there is never a legitimate reason for leaving. Unlike healthy organizations, which recognize a person's inherent right to choose to move on, mind control groups make it very clear that there is no legitimate way to leave. Members are told that the only reasons that people leave are weakness, insanity, temptation, brainwashing (by deprogrammers), pride, sin, and so on.Chapter –How to Protect Yourself and People You Care About Nobody joins a cult. They just postpone the decision to leave. -- Source unknown Many groups have certain potentially destructive aspects, but are not inherently destructive. I look at what a group does rather than what it believes Organizations that practice mind control have very specific characteristics that undermine individual choice and liberty. These involve leadership, doctrine and membership. By examining these three areas in any organization, you will quickly be able to determine whether it is (or has the potential to become) a destructive cult. a leader's professional background can be useful in helping you see the full picture of any group. Cult leaders usually make exaggerated biographical claims. certain personalities are disposed to do so. It seems obvious that most cult leaders are narcissists and might even be full-blown sociopaths or psychopaths. many cult leaders demand material opulence, what they require above all is attention and power. power can and does become an extreme addiction. Three things make these people terribly dangerous: ) their psychological instability, ) that they actually believe their own propaganda and ) that they surround themselves with loyal devotees who are unlikely to disagree with them, so promote their narcissism. They are not merely cunning con artists who want to make money or sexually dominate their followers. Most genuinely believe they are God, or the Messiah, or have gained enlightenment. Although a leader's background does not necessarily indicate that they are a huckster or a charlatan, where there is smoke there is often fire. Many leaders of destructive cults have questionable backgrounds. beware of groups with any belief system that is simplistic and makes all or nothing categorizations -- good/bad; black/white; us versus them. Beliefs that claim things as facts, but actually have no evidence-based research to support these claims. Any group's beliefs should be freely disclosed to any person who wants to join, before any pressure to join is exerted. Membership Membership has three components: recruitment, group maintenance and freedom to leave. The impact of group membership on the individual, their identity, their relationships, and their goals and interests is crucial. Once a potential convert is invited to a cult function, there is a great deal of pressure, both overt and subtle, to make a commitment as soon as possible. Cult recruiters, like good con artists, move in for the kill quickly, once they have sized up a person. In many cults, leaders are routinely praised for sleeping very little, and rank and file members are belittled for sleeping too much. Little time is available for reading anything other than cult material, or for learning anything other than cult practices. The final criterion for judging a group is the members' freedom to leave. Legitimate groups treat people as adults, capable of determining what is in their best interest. Although every organization wants to retain its membership, legitimate groups never go to the extremes of control through fear and guilt that destructive cults do. Some dysfunctional relationships, marriages, and families are essentially mini-cults of a few people. Some people were not allowed to have access to money, to learn how to drive a car, or to work outside the home.
Stewart Ewen Notable Quotations Full screen view The apparatus of mass impression ... televisions were turning citizens into consumers, living rooms into salesrooms, the commercial media and their role as instruments of consent, alternative journalism, [all] servants of Power. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, published in 1976, became the first scholarly history to critically evaluate advertising and consumer culture as defining forces in American life. Rather than looking at advertisements one by one as individual attempts to sell a product or service, I approached advertising overall as a widely iterated commentary on issues of want and desire, a new, consumerist way of life was shaped, depicted, communicated, and sold. Mass production required mass consumption, and a growing number of businessmen, I found, were beginning to speak of the ways that human instinct needed to be mobilized to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. The extent to which mass consumption and advertising were seen as a business response to the perceived threat of socialism was also explored. Capitalism shifting, over the course of the twentieth century, from an economy defined primarily by production to one defined by consumption. Advertising helped to establish prevailing models of the self, the family, and the good life in American consumer society. Captains of Consciousness was, without question, a spiritual child of the sixties. Literacy is never just about reading; it is also about writing. Just as early campaigns for universal print literacy were concerned with democratizing the tools of public expression, the upcoming struggles for media literacy must strive to empower people with contemporary implements of public discourse: video, graphic arts, photography, computer-assisted journalism and layout, and performance. [Remember this is 1976] Distinctions between publicist and citizen, author and audience, need to be broken down. The line separating classroom from society, interpretation from activity, needs to be broken down. Men and women had to be habituated to respond to the demands of the productive machinery. Excessiveness replaced thrift as a social value. It became imperative to invest the laborer with a financial power and a psychic desire to consume. It was recognized that in order to get people to consume and, more importantly, to keep them consuming, it was more efficient to endow them with a critical self-consciousness in tune with the "solutions" of the marketplace than to fragmentarily argue for products on their own merit. The theorized "self-consciousness" of the modern consumer Keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them. ... Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented contented ones." By transforming the notion of "class" into "mass," business hoped to create an "individual" who could locate his needs and frustrations in terms of the consumption of goods rather than the quality and content of his life (work). The logic of contemporaneous advertising read, one can free oneself from the ills of modern life by embroiling oneself in the maintenance of that life. In an attempt to boost mass sales of soap, the Cleanliness Institute, a cryptic front group for the soap and glycerine producers' association, pushed soap as a "Kit for Climbers" (social, no doubt). Much of American industrial development punctuated by attempts to channel thought and behavior into patterns which fitted the prescribed dimensions of industrial life. The captains of industry try become popular heroes. These are the characteristics tics of a true industrial society, a society in which ideals of production rather than of consumption rules . The future of business lay in its ability to manufacture customers as well as products. .. required a selective education which limited the concept of social change and betterment to those commodified answers Artists, often gifted in their sensitivities and sympathies to human frailties, were called upon to use those sensitivities for manipulation. Modern industrial society as the world of facts played a role which turned people away from their own needs, their ability to speculate on the solution of these needs, and ultimately from the notion of self-determination determination as a democratic principle. The eradication of social attitudes which were resistant to consumption became a central concern among businessmen. Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and (along with Ivy Lee) a founder and leader of modern commercial public relations, called for the implementation of a "mass psychology" by which public opinion might be controlled. The mystification of the production process, the separation of people (both as producers and consumers) from an understanding of this process, may be seen emerging early in the twentieth century. Yet by the 1920s both advertising and product design moved in the direction of separating products from the general knowledge of mechanics and from technical understanding-moving in the direction of aesthetic and linguistic mystification. The common development in usage of words such as halitosis and acidosis placed the burden of definition in corporate hands. Where patriarchy had once been supported by the material conditions of society, the rise of capitalism saw it evolve into something like a religion. Ford, through his "Sociology Department," entered the homes of his workers to ensure their fidelity to his concept of proper living. The fact that childhood was increasingly a period of consuming goods and services made youth a powerful tool in the ideological framework of business. By the mid-1920S, the loss of such traditions was widely felt. Where artisan and agricultural al labors had required a period of long training, leading toward a life-time resource to draw upon, the rapidity of the machine had made the worker an adjunct to its rhythms. ... mechanized production depended heavily on the endurance and reflexes of youth. Advertising was a prime source of the idealization of youth. As youth appeared the means to industrial survival, its promulgation as something to be achieved by consumption provided a bridge between people's need for satisfaction and the increased corporate priorities of mass distribution and worker endurance. Beyond this, the celebration of youth was also an idealization of innocence and malleability. J. B. Watson, the psychologist/ad man, had given underpinning to such a strategy. If the children were indoctrinated in the "behavioristic freedom" which characterized the modern industrial world, he argued, business might be able to intervene in the values and definitions of family culture. Alfred Poffenberger, a leading advertising psychologist, , spoke for directing advertising at children. Confronted fronted with "the great difficulty that one meets in breaking habits" among their parents, he underscored the "importance of introducing innovations by way of the young." Corporations which demanded youth on the production line now offered that same youth through their products. As work became less a matter of accumulated skill and more a question of loyal diligence to the task, consumption was depicted as the way men would be able to objectify that diligence within themselves. Rather than viewing the transformations in housework work as labor-saving, it is perhaps more useful to view them as labor-changing. The primacy of industrialism was making a captive anachronism out of the home-defined woman, while the predominant dominant patriarchal ideal still sought to contain her within the traditional domain. Here lay a festering contradiction of modern womanhood, one which would emerge in years to come in a reinvigorated feminism. The American Academy of Political and Social Science, in a publication on the role of women in modern America (1929), concluded that mass consumption had made of the "modern housewife ... less of a routine worker and more of an administrator and enterpriser in the business of living." From the field of social psychology, , advertising had borrowed the notion of the social self as a prime weapon in its arsenal. Here people defined themselves in terms set by the approval or disapproval of others. In its particular economic definition of womanhood, consumer ideology relied heavily on this notion. Americans have increasingly questioned the ability of the marketplace to work out social and personal problems. At the same time, however, the commodity system enjoys a kind of passively accepted legitimacy as the universal arena within which most human needs are to be met in the United States. As production changed and as the social character of work became even more routinized and monotonous, the consumer culture presented itself as the realm within which gratification and excitement might be had-an alternative to more radical and anti-authoritarian prescriptions. Commercial propaganda didn't act as the determinant of change, but was in many ways both a reflection and agent of transformation. Twentieth-century capitalism had entered a period in which all spheres of existence were informed by industry; the commodity had become a universal form. Labor and Monopoly Capital, tells of how the characteristic tic of the modern era has been the "degradation" of labor. Work, once a repository of skill and social interaction, , has become a series of preordained gestures. Utilizing the promise of material well-being, conscripting the notion of industrial democracy, capitalizing on the degeneration of traditional and localized authorities, corporate America associated itself with the tasks of the most critical forces within the society-its opposition-while at the same time attempting to tame those forces. In hailing the modern woman as a "home manager" and in celebrating the child as the conscience for a new age, corporate ideologues asserted that each was expected to devote a high degree of obedience to the directives of the consumer market.	Sunstein, Cass R. Notable Quotations Full screen view Decisions are greatly influenced by small changes in the context . A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions. There is no such thing as a “ neutral ” design. In many cases, the power of these small details comes from focusing the attention of users in a particular direction. Libertarian Paternalism We argue for self - conscious efforts, by institutions in the private sector and also by government, to steer people’s choices in directions that will improve their lives. we show that in many cases, individuals make pretty bad decisions — decisions they would not have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities, and complete self - control. A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. unbiased forecasts. That is, the forecasts can be wrong, but they can’t be systematically wrong in a predictable direction. “ planning fallacy ” — the systematic tendency toward unrealistic optimism about the time it takes to complete projects. Everything takes longer than you think, even if you know about the planning fallacy. Research shows that whatever the default choices are, many people stick with them, even when the stakes are much higher than choosing the noise your phone makes when it rings. Harness the power of inertia Ordinary consumers are novices, interacting in a world inhabited by experienced professionals trying to sell them things. There is no way of avoiding nudging in some direction, and whether intended or not, user - friendly environments. Send reminders, and then try to minimize the costs imposed on those who, despite your ( and their ) best efforts, space out. We are not for bigger government, just for better governance. The approach involves a distinction between two kinds of thinking, one that is intuitive and automatic, and another that is reflective and rational. We will call the first the Automatic System and the second the Reflective System. System and System , respectively. ) Brain scientists are able to say that the activities of the Automatic System are associated with the oldest parts of the brain, the parts we share with lizards ( as well as puppies ). The Reflective System is more deliberate and self - conscious. Most Americans have an Automatic System reaction to a temperature given in Fahrenheit but have to use their Reflective System to process a temperature given in Celsius ; Accomplished chess players and professional athletes have pretty fancy intuitions ; their Automatic Systems allow them to size up complex situations rapidly and to respond with both amazing accuracy and exceptional speed. Automatic System is your gut reaction and the Reflective System is your conscious thought. Econs never make an important decision without checking with their Reflective Systems ( if they have time ). But Humans sometimes go with the answer the lizard inside is giving without pausing to think. In many domains, the evidence shows that, within reason, the more you ask for, the more you tend to get. The inference from anchoring Clever negotiators often get amazing deals for their clients by producing an opening offer that makes their adversary thrilled to pay half that very high amount. the availability heuristic. They assess the likelihood of risks by asking how readily examples come to mind. If people can easily think of relevant examples, they are far more likely to be frightened and concerned than if they cannot. recent events have a greater impact on our behavior, and on our fears, than earlier ones. Biased assessments of risk can perversely influence how we prepare for and respond to crises, business choices, and the political process. good way to increase people’s fear of a bad outcome is to remind them of a related incident in which things went wrong ; a good way to increase people’s confidence is to remind them of a similar situation in which everything worked out for the best. easily remembered events may inflate people’s probability judgments, representativeness biases can creep in when similarity and frequency diverge. It is, of course, not logically possible for any two events to be more likely than one of them alone. Use of the representativeness heuristic can cause serious misperceptions of patterns in everyday life. people do not have accurate perceptions of what random sequences look like. When they see the outcomes of random processes, they often detect patterns that they think have great meaning but in fact are just due to chance. We often see patterns because we construct our informal tests only after looking at the evidence. People are unrealistically optimistic Unrealistic optimism can explain a lot of individual risk taking, especially in the domain of risks to life and health. if people are reminded of a bad event, they may not continue to be so optimistic. Roughly speaking, losing something makes you twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes you happy. “ loss averse. ” As we will see, loss aversion operates as a kind of cognitive nudge, pressing us not to make changes, even when changes are very much in our interests. Status Quo Bias people have a more general tendency to stick with their current situation. “ status quo bias, ” One of the causes of status quo bias is a lack of attention. When renewal is automatic, and when people have to make a phone call to cancel, the likelihood of renewal is much higher than it is when people have to indicate that they actually want to continue The combination of loss aversion with mindless choosing implies that if an option is designated as the “ default, ” it will attract a large market share. Default options thus act as powerful nudges. Default options thus act as powerful nudges. Frames “ Of one hundred patients who have this operation, ten are dead after five years. ” If you’re like most people, the doctor’s statement will sound pretty alarming, the credit price should be considered the “ normal ” ( default ) price and the cash price a discount — rather than the alternative of making the cash price the usual price and charging a surcharge to credit card customers. “ framing. ” The idea is that choices depend, in part, on the way in which problems are stated. Because they are busy and have limited attention, they accept questions as posed rather than trying to determine whether their answers would vary under alternative formulations. We will call something “ tempting ” if we consume more of it when hot than when cold. when we are in a hot state, we can often get into a lot of trouble. George Loewenstein ( ) calls the “ hot - cold empathy gap. ” When in a cold state, we do not appreciate how much our desires and our behavior will be altered when we are “ under the influence ” of arousal. our behavior reflects a certain naïveté about the effects that context can have on choice. Self - control problems can be illuminated by thinking about an individual as containing two semiautonomous selves, a far - sighted “ Planner ” and a myopic “ Doer. ” On average, recipients of the big bucket ate about percent more popcorn — Large plates and large packages mean more eating ; they are a form of choice architecture, and they work as major nudges. ( Hint : if you would like to lose weight, get smaller plates, buy little packages of what you like, and don’t keep tempting food in the refrigerator. ) Planners are taking steps to control the actions of our Doers, often by trying to change the incentives that Doers face. Alarm clocks are external devices people use to solve their self - control problems. mental account ) into a different pocket. Gamblers even have a term for this. The money that has recently been won is called “ house money ” because in gambling parlance the casino is referred to as the house. Betting some of the money that you have just won is referred to as “ gambling with the house’s money, ” as if it were, somehow, different from some other kind of money. When investments pay off, people are willing to take big chances with their “ winnings. ” The sanctity of these accounts can lead to seemingly bizarre behavior, such as simultaneously borrowing and lending at very different rates. When asked to decide on their own, without seeing judgments from others, people almost never erred, since the test was easy. But when everyone else gave an incorrect answer, people erred more than one - third of the time. It is almost as if people can be nudged into identifying a picture of a dog as a cat as long as other people before them have done so. If the confederate spoke confidently and firmly, his judgment had a strong influence on the group’s assessment. If the confederate’s estimate was much higher than those initially made by others, the group’s judgment would be inflated ; if the confederate’s estimate was very low, the group’s estimate would fall. The clear lesson here is that consistent and unwavering people, in the private or public sector, can move groups and practices in their preferred direction. “ collective conservatism ” : the tendency of groups to stick to established patterns even as new needs arise. We may follow a practice or a tradition not because we like it, or even think it defensible, but merely because we think that most other people like it. Many social practices persist for this reason, and a small shock, or nudge, can dislodge them. conformity effects Five alternatives were offered : economic recession, educational facilities, subversive activities, mental health, and crime and corruption. Asked privately, a mere percent chose subversive activities. But when exposed to an apparent group consensus unanimously selecting that option, percent of people made the same choice ! Public officials decided that they needed “ a tough - talking slogan that would also address the unique spirit of Texas pride. ” Dallas Cowboys football players “ Don’t mess with Texas ! ” Within the first year of the campaign, litter in the state had been reduced by a remarkable percent. In its first six years, there was a percent reduction in visible roadside The Spotlight Effect One reason why people expend so much effort conforming to social norms and fashions is that they think that others are closely paying attention to what they are doing. The moral is that people are paying less attention to you than you believe. If you have a stain on your shirt, don’t worry, they probably won’t notice. But in part because people do think that everyone has their eyes fixed on them, they conform to what they think people expect. Most strikingly, the success of songs was quite unpredictable, and the songs that did well or poorly in the control group, where people did not see other people’s judgments, could perform very differently in the “ social influence worlds. ” In those worlds, most songs could become popular or unpopular, with much depending on the choices of the first downloaders. Facebook and social networking are conformity engines We are also greatly influenced by consumption norms within the relevant group. A light eater eats much more in a group of heavy eaters. A heavy eater will show more restraint in a light - eating group. If choice architects want to shift behavior and to do so with a nudge, they might simply inform people about what other people are doing. Sometimes the practices of others are surprising, and hence people are much affected by learning what they are. Consider four examples. When informed that the actual compliance level is high, they become less likely to cheat. If you would like to increase turnout, please do not lament the large numbers of people who fail to vote. ) * “ Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest. ” Other signs emphasized an injunctive norm : “ Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest. ” Cialdini’s theory predicted that the positive, injunctive norm would be more effective than the negative, informational one. This prediction was confirmed. “ social norms ” approach, boomerang effect, and it offers an important warning. If you want to nudge people into socially desirable behavior, do not, by any means, let them know that their current actions are better than the social norm. Visual feedback given to power customers in San Marcos, California Priming refers to the somewhat mysterious workings of the Automatic System of the brain. Research shows that subtle influences can increase the ease with which certain information comes to mind. When they measure people’s intentions, they affect people’s conduct. If people are asked whether they intend to eat certain foods, to diet, or to exercise, their answers to the questions will affect their behavior. In our parlance, the mere - measurement effect is a nudge, and it can be used by private or public nudgers. If people are asked how often they expect to floss their teeth in the next week, they floss more. The nudge provided by asking people what they intend to do can be accentuated by asking them when and how they plan to do it. Often we can do more to facilitate good behavior by removing some small obstacle than by trying to shove people in a certain direction. The golden rule of libertarian paternalism : offer nudges that are most likely to help and least likely to inflict harm. * Self - control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time. For investment goods, most people err on the side of doing too little. It is particularly hard for people to make good decisions when they have trouble translating the choices they face into the experiences they will have. If consumers have a less than fully rational belief, firms often have more incentive to cater to that belief than to erradícate it. The nozzles that deliver diesel fuel are too large to fit into the opening on cars that use gasoline, so it is not possible to make the mistake of putting diesel fuel in your gasoline - powered car ( though it is still possible to make the opposite mistake ). the more often you have to take the drug, But frequency is not the only concern ; regularity is also important. By contrast, remembering to take your medicine every other day is beyond most of us. Feedback The best way to help Humans improve their performance is to provide feedback. Well - designed systems tell people when they are doing well and when they are making mistakes. Some helpful person invented a type of ceiling paint that goes on pink when wet but turns white when dry. This is described in the choice literature as a “ compensatory ” strategy, since a high value for one attribute ( big office ) can compensate for a low value for another ( loud neighbor ). as the choices become more numerous and / or vary on more dimensions, people are more likely to adopt simplifying strategies. it may not be entirely wonderful if our primary source of information is about what people like us like. it’s good to nudge people in directions that they might not have specifically chosen in advance. making the increases salient will have a greater effect. Cost - disclosing thermostats might have a greater impact A related strategy is to simplify the enrollment process. One factor that influences a patient’s decision to sue is whether the doctor apologized for the mishap and admitted fault. In this book we have made two major claims. The first is that seemingly small features of social situations can have massive effects on people’s behavior ; nudges are everywhere, even if we do not see them. Choice architecture, both good and bad, is pervasive and unavoidable, and it greatly affects our decisions. The second claim is that libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron. Choice architects can preserve freedom of choice while also nudging people in directions that will improve their lives.	Todd Rogers, Jessica Lasky-Fink Notable Quotations Full screen view Introduction Page 2 Simple thing that anyone can do but that most of us don't do particularly well. Page 2 We know why certain types of writing draw a reader's focus while others tend to get lost in the fog of distraction and competition for attention. Page 3 ... account for how busy people read. Page 5 Effective writing is not the same as beautiful writing. ... Often, beautiful writing is intentionally demanding and multilayered. ... Effective writing is not so subjective. Page 7 We too often believe our readers will find our messages as important to them as they are to us, Page 9 Much of the formal writing we learned in school is irrelevant or counterproductive for real- world practical writing. Page 10 Our principles derive from the sciences of psychology and human behavior, blended with a social understanding that most people have limited time and attention. Part One: Engaging the Reader Get Inside Your Reader's Head To be an effective writer, we need to remember that our readers experience the scarcity of time every bit as acutely as we do. Their distractions influence both what they read and how they read ... Not only do we have limited time, we also have limited attention. Page 17 We cannot notice or process everything in front of us. We can exhaust our focus over time, often in less time than we think. We struggle focusing on multiple things at one time, but we still try. Page 18 For readers, selective attention also guides what they visually notice and focus on when interacting with any kind of writing.[ Page 19 elements that have a strong visual contrast with their surroundings. Page 20 trying. Our brains have evolved to automatically notice things that stand out from their surroundings. Page 20 Shortcut #2: Our selective attention can be intentionally and purposefully directed. Page 21 When we look for something specific, our attention system helps us efficiently and quickly find it. Page 21 In the process of noticing some elements, we miss others -- Brain research has revealed that when you notice and examine one item in a visual scene, the brain actively suppresses noticing other items that are also present. Page 23 The brain's ability to ignore irrelevant information Page 24 Once we get distracted, it is hard to refocus. Page 25 Writing effectively for busy people requires keeping in mind just how easily they (and we, all of us) can get worn down and distracted. Page 25 it's not even possible to be thinking about two tasks at the exact same time. Page 26 The bottom line is that your mind works most effectively when it has a clear anchor point: one thing it is noticing, one thing it is focusing on, one task that it needs to initiate in response. Page 26 Writing that respects those limitations is more likely to get through to a busy brain—and to the reader who possesses it. Think Like a Busy Reader Page 30 Every time a reader encounters a written communication—even something as short as an email, a text, a Slack message, or a social media post—they go through a four-stage process: ... First, they must decide whether to engage with it at all. Second, if they decide to engage, they then must decide when to engage. Sometimes the decision to engage leads to a decision to engage later. Third, once they do engage, they must decide how much time and attention to allocate to reading the message. Fourth, if they read something that requires a response, they must decide whether to respond or react. ... Our job as effective writers is to navigate each of the four critical rounds in that brief but daunting process. Page 31 Busy readers routinely decide how valuable a message is without actually reading it! ... One common rule of thumb is that, when faced with a lot of options, we pick the first one that seems good enough (sometimes called "satisficing"), Page 32 They also consider the costs involved: How much time and effort will be required to engage? ... They are more likely to engage with messages that are short or that appear easy to navigate because they seem like they will require less time, attention, and effort to read. ... Most of us prefer doing enjoyable, pleasant, easy, and gratifying things now and push off less pleasant, more difficult things until later. Page 34 The tendency to privilege the present over the future is hardwired into us. ... Busy readers are likely to prioritize messages they think can be dealt with easily and quickly, because they seem more enjoyable (or at least less awful). Page 35 Busy readers aim to extract as much value as possible from a communication with as little time and attention as possible. ... They may closely read one section, skim another, and jump around in yet another, searching for specific information that they consider relevant. Page 36 reading for utility is an efficient strategy for extracting as much information as possible while expending as little time and attention as possible. Page 37 Skimming often involves skipping words, phrases, and even paragraphs. It also often involves jumping forward in anticipation, and jumping backward to review Page 38 Readers often expect the first sentence of a paragraph to orient them to what the rest of the paragraph is about. Guided by that expectation, they may spend more time reading those opening sentences and use them to decide what (if anything) to read more closely.[13] ... Readers skip over large swaths of text, mainly landing on anchor points: headings, first sentences of paragraphs, images, and formatting that visually contrasts with the rest of the text. Page 41 Before you can start to write for busy readers, though, you must be very clear about why you are writing: To communicate effectively, you need to know your goals. Know Your Goals If your reader is going to spend just five seconds on your message, what is the most important information you want them to come away with? Page 44 Anything that disrupts the flow of words distracts the reader. ... Taking the time to clean up your words and present them readably is a first step toward engaging your reader. Page 45 "What is the most important information I want my readers to understand?" and "How do I make it easier for my readers to understand it?" ... A reader overlooks information that we consider important and fails to act the way we want, that is not the reader's fault. Part Two: Six Principles of Effective Writing First Principle: Less Is More More writing leads readers to be less likely to read anything. Page 50 Although concise writing saves time and effort on the part of the reader, it requires more time and effort from the writer. Page 51 patents: We tend to add ideas rather than subtract or remove them in the editing process.[4] Page 52 Readers often interpret the length of a message as an indication of how difficult and time-consuming it will be to respond to, which is another reason why they might choose not to engage with a wordy communication. Page 54 Most readers, but especially those who are pressed for time, are likely to be put off by messages and requests that they expect will be difficult to deal with.[7] ... A wordy message will be dealt with less quickly than a concise message. Page 55 Readers' attention is more likely to drift when reading longer messages.[8] ... Writing concisely requires a ruthless willingness to cut unnecessary words, sentences, paragraphs, and ideas. Page 56 Nancy Gibbs, former editor in chief of Time magazine, would tell her staff that every word has to earn its place in a sentence, every sentence has to earn its place in a paragraph, and every idea has to earn its place in a text.[10] Page 57 The bottom line is that effective writing needs to be appropriate to the context of the communication. We can provide the guidelines, but you have to make the informed decisions about how to balance your desire to include more words, ideas, and requests with the many constraints facing a busy reader. Rule 1: Use Fewer Words Page 59 Replace this . . . (Wordy) . . . with this (Concise) ... Sometimes it is worth losing a little precision and meaning to save readers' time. ... Strategic omission. Page 61 Like cutting words, cutting ideas often requires discarding less important but still relevant information to emphasize the more important information. Rule 3: Make Fewer Requests Second Principle: Make Reading Easy acquiesce versus agree: Page 80 Shorter words are generally more readable than longer words and common words are generally more readable than uncommon words. Page 82 Tweets using the most common words received about 75% more retweets than tweets using the least common words.[ Page 83 In many contexts, using words like "sophisticated" instead of "fancy" can come across as pretentious or exclusionary. Page 84 Even in academia there has been a shift toward more readable writing. The association for marketing professionals and scholars, the American Marketing Association, instructs would-be authors that its journal "is designed to be read, not deciphered."[ Page 84 When you are balancing the trade-offs between readability and using longer, less common but (potentially) more precise words, ask yourself two questions. First, how valuable are the subtle differences in word meaning for conveying the essence of the sentence? Second, is the additional meaning conveyed by the harder-to-read word worth the costs of fewer readers engaging and understanding it and the increased effort required by those who do? Rule 2: Write Straightforward Sentences Write so that readers can understand the meaning of a sentence after a single read-through. Rule 3: Write Shorter Sentences Page 90 Writing in a style that is easy to read is not necessarily easy to write. 6. Third Principle: Design for Easy Navigation > Page 95 designing the written content to be easy to navigate. Page 95 they should immediately be able to grasp its purpose, main points, and structure. Page 95 stop thinking of your message as a set of words and think of it instead as a type of map. Page 96 But letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs are intensely visual; they are literally graphic elements on the page or screen. Page 97 Rule 1: Make Key Information Immediately Visible Page 97 Sometimes writers bury the lede intentionally to spur curiosity and intrigue. ... But practical communications aren't relaxed literary voyages, and they shouldn't be written like them. ... "What do I want my readers to take away from this?" Page 98 put the most important information in the places where busy readers most likely expect to find ... US Army: bottom line up front (BLUF). Page 99 Abstracts, executive summaries, and TL;DR headlines similarly function as "key information" locations for busy readers. Page 101 One of the most visually clear ways to signal to readers that ideas are distinct is to list each one with a bullet point. Rule 3: Place Related Ideas Together Rule 4: Order Ideas by Priority Page 107 The first item in a list usually gets the most attention from the reader. ... In certain contexts, the last position in an ordered list can also be influential ... Studies of jury trials have found that the final evidence presented to the jurors can be the most heavily weighted and remembered. Rule 6: Consider Using Visuals Fourth Principle: Use Enough Formatting but No More Page 126 Formatting serves two main purposes. First, it conveys meaning over and above the meaning of the words themselves. Second, formatting helps capture readers' attention by making certain words stand out against the others. Rule 1: Match Formatting to Readers' Expectations Page 128 Because importance and emphasis are not the same, and because readers may interpret italics and font colors as conveying either of those meanings, writers who want to use these tools need to be careful to manage their ambiguity. Page 129 Writers can announce their style up front ... A majority of survey respondents also interpreted all caps as signaling importance, but a sizable fraction (25%) volunteered that they regarded all caps as conveying anger instead. Page 130 Some state laws explicitly mandate that all caps must be used to highlight key sections in specific types of agreements, Page 131 Bullets are extremely useful formatting tools, though they, too, suffer from mixed interpretations. ... readers look to the sentence preceding a bulleted list to determine whether the list itself is worth reading. Page 132 The varied ways that readers interpret bullets mean that they need to be used carefully. Page 133 Using bullet points to list low-priority items risks misdirecting the reader away from what truly matters. ... Busy readers should never need to stop and question what you mean by the bolded (or italicized, highlighted, underlined, etc.) text. Page 134 Because these formatting types are so effective, they can have an important unintended consequence: They will easily draw readers' attention away from everything else. Page 135 The key message here is that highlighting, bolding, and underlining involve trade-offs: They increase the likelihood that readers read the formatted words, but they can decrease the reading of everything else. Rule 3: Limit Your Formatting Page 136 avoid formatting multiple items when you particularly want your reader to focus on just one. Page 139 find the focal point hidden within that mess. Fifth Principle: Tell Readers Why They Should Care Page 141 Most of us are not very good at imagining the world from someone else's perspective. In a whimsical but illustrative study, Stanford researcher Elizabeth Louise Newton divided test subjects into two groups, tappers and listeners. The tappers tapped out the rhythm of familiar songs such as "Happy Birthday" and "The Star-Spangled Banner"; the listeners tried to guess the songs being tapped. Then came the true test. Tappers were asked to imagine being listeners and to predict what fraction of the listeners would correctly identify the songs. Tappers predicted a success rate of 50%. In reality, listeners got it right just 2.5% of the time![1] Tappers were terrible at getting into the mindset of the listeners, and had no idea how terrible they were at it. Rule 1: Emphasize What Readers Value ("So what?") Page 147 A good shorthand for writers who are working on practical communications is: "So what?" Try to picture the recipient of your message and consider what would make that person care about what you are saying. An additional factor to consider is not only why the reader should care but why the reader should care now—that is, the timeliness of the message. Rule 2: Emphasize Which Readers Should Care ("Why me?") Page 147 Being explicit about your intended audience is especially pertinent in mass communications that are difficult to target to specific populations. 9. Sixth Principle: Make Responding Easy > Page 151 Sixth Principle: Make Responding Easy Page 151 Not only do you want your readers to read and understand your message, you also want them to perform a concrete action. Rule 1: Simplify the Steps Required to Act Rule 2: Organize Key Information Needed for Action Page 160 As an effective writer, part of your job is to ensure your readers have all the necessary information in one accessible location. If readers have to seek out the information needed to act, they will be more likely to put it off and eventually forget the request entirely. Rule 3: Minimize the Amount of Attention Required Page 160 Writers commonly offer their readers too many choices. Page 161 Minimizing the amount of attention required to act can have important pragmatic consequences. Page 164 Just as readers may be deterred from acting if they have to search for the necessary information about what to do, readers may also be deterred if they don't understand the steps required—how to do it. Part Three: Putting the Principles to Work Tools, Tips, and FAQs Writers should aim to use the fewest number of words, ideas, and requests necessary to achieve their goals, and no fewer. Page 172 The longer the message, the more challenging it can be to stay focused on why you are writing and what outcome you hope to achieve. Keeping your writing goals clear and top of mind can help you decide what information stays and what goes. Page 176 Using introductory text to tell readers what the rest of the text is about is called "signposting." ... Although it typically adds words, it can be helpful for making longer messages or messages with multiple pieces of information easier to navigate. Page 181 When you edit for conciseness, you should also review your language to make sure it matches the needs and expectations of your readers. Knowing your audience is the best way to ensure that your language matches their needs and expectations. Page 184 Send messages when your readers are most likely to have time and motivation to read and respond. Page 185 Ultimately, understanding your specific readers is the best way to know when the "right" time is to send communications. Page 190 Social media writing should adhere to the same principles as other forms of practical writing. ... One of the strengths of digital communications is that it makes it easy to connect readers to other online sources. Page 191 But if hyperlinks are not the most important information in a message, they can crowd out other information, much as other types of formatting can. ... Linking the fewest words possible while also ensuring that the hyperlinked words convey some meaning can help everyone, but especially the visually impaired and others who rely on audio reading tools. Page 192 Humor and sarcasm are risky because people can easily misunderstand them in their written form. Page 192 Emojis can lead to similarly unintended and unanticipated confusion, especially across varied age groups.[ Page 193 It remains to be seen whether emojis continue to evolve to take on serious connotations and meanings. Page 193 For now, though, writers should be cautious and clear when using emojis in important writing, given their wide range of possible interpretations. Our Words, Our Selves Before composing any message, writers have to decide on their overall style and tone. Often there are context-specific norms you can turn to for guidance. Page 198 some research has found that readers are more likely to respond to government communications written in relatively formal language, in part because formality acts as a signal of credibility in the public-sector context. ... As a general rule, a formal communication style works better when that is what readers expect. Page 199 Striking the right balance between precision and personality is especially consequential for writers who are women, racial and ethnic minorities, or of lower social or professional status. Power, status, race, gender, and other stereotyped identities can affect how readers expect people to write, and especially the warmth they are expected to convey. Page 201 In certain settings, a writer's goal is not to be read and understood but rather the exact opposite. Some writers aim to obfuscate, obscure, and hide information they must disclose but would rather not.	Uijun Park Notable Quotations Full screen view A UX designer is a person who discovers problems that users experience and solves them. In other words, a good UX designer should understand users and know how to find problems and solve them. ... UX design is about process, not just results. ... Design thinking provides a straightforward and clear explanation of discovering, defining, and solving problems you face through five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. (Page 10) UX designers engage in a variety of activities, including user research to identify pain points and solve problems through prototyping and design. They are primarily responsible for advocating for users within the company… (Page 22) …it has become possible to design apps and websites scientifically through data-driven experiments that cater to users' needs. (Page 24) In the early and mid-2000s, the term 'web design' was more commonly used before 'UX design' became as popular as it is today. Back then, website design was often driven by subjective factors like aesthetics, without a quantitative understanding of how design choices impacted the product. However, designers now have a powerful tool in data, which enables them to objectively evaluate the effectiveness and usability of different design options. (Page 25) In addition, qualitative feedback from user interviews and observations can provide designers with a more nuanced understanding of users and their needs. By listening to users and identifying their pain points, designers can create a better product that addresses those issues and provides a more satisfying user experience. (Page 25) (Statistics Source: UXeria) 94% of a user’s first impressions are design-related. As many as 88% of online customers declare that they don’t really return to websites that were not usable / user-friendly. 60% of users don’t find the information they were looking for at a website. Only 47% of websites properly embed a "call to action" button, e.g. "Buy", so that users can notice it no later than 3 seconds after entering the website… (Page 26) Once you understand UX, you will realize that it's not your fault or a mistake when you find the product difficult and uncomfortable. (Page 27) Many people associate UX solely with digital experiences like mobile apps or websites. However, UX can also encompass physical experiences. Anything you do with your five senses, such as smelling, seeing, touching, and so on, can fall under UX. (Page 28) What's important here is to plan and design a product or service from a user's point of view. ... Designers should prioritize whether they have fully understood and considered users rather than their own intuition or experience. ... create a product that is good for users, not for designers. (Page 29) …the designer's responsibility to create a product that's easy and intuitive to use. Therefore, designers must prioritize designing experiences that minimize user inconvenience. (Page 30) …emphasizes that it's the designer's responsibility if users make mistakes or experience discomfort. (Page 31) What is a good UX design? It's a design that solves a user's problem. So what does it mean to solve a user's problem? It is about getting constant feedback from users and creating or improving products and services from a user perspective. As a designer, you should repeat and iterate until the user is satisfied, rather than trying to solve a problem at once. (Page 32) The UI stands for User Interface, and UI design can be defined as follows: Designing the visual area of the product users interact with. When a user interacts with a product, there are various factors that can influence their experience, such as the color scheme, text, and layout of the screen. These visual elements can play a significant role in determining how easy and enjoyable it is for users to navigate and use the product. (Page 33) UI design as the process of creating a set of rules that dictate the visual language of a product. ... With rules, users experience clarity and consistency when moving between screens in an app or website. For example, if the main buttons in an app are inconsistent, with some red on the screen and some yellow on other screens, it can be difficult for users to find buttons easily. (Page 34) UX design tasks cover user research to understand users deeply. These include 1:1 user interviews, quantitative data surveys, user flow, wireframe creation, and user testing to evaluate usability. UI design includes most of the activities for visualizing high-fidelity prototypes based on the foundation created from the UX design phase. It includes color and font definitions, icons, layouts, and visual design systems. (Page 35) If you subtract a user from the UX/UI design, it doesn't mean anything, and user research gives you access to understanding users. (Page 36) 'UX design' to refer to a broader concept that includes UX, UI, and user research. (Page 37) No matter how great the technology is, it's useless unless it's what users want. (Page 40) "Design thinking consists of 5 steps: Empathize - Define - Ideate - Prototype - Test." (Page 41) Empathize. As a designer, you will discover several problems users experience based on their feedback, opinions, and data. The second step defines the core problem to focus on. You will also need to determine the target user. The third step, Ideate, is the time to come up with ideas about how to solve the target user's problem. The Prototype is used to develop and upgrade these ideas and create a prototype to test with the user. The Test is to show the prototype to the user and observe to see if there are any improvements needed, and if the product solves the user's problem. (Page 42) The most critical out of the five steps of design thinking is the Empathize step. UX design is about solving problems that users experience. (Page 44) Once you've set your goals, start with user research to understand users and find problems that users are experiencing. (Page 46) …find out what people use the products, what age group they are in, what region they usually live in, and so on. (Page 46) The data obtained from the demographic survey can also define the persona of the target user. (Page 47) One-on-one in-depth interview is one of the most effective activities to learn about users' thoughts and intentions. (Page 47) Creating a script to conduct an interview is essential. If you don’t have a detailed plan and the interview script, the questions you will be asking may not be consistent when interviewing multiple users. (Page 48) I review applicants' UX portfolios with the following criteria. What effort did applicants make, and what activities did they do to define the target user and the primary user problem? Many applicants, however, only showed final design results and did not explain who they targeted, what problem they wanted to solve, or how they came up with the pain point from users. (Page 51) No matter how cool or pretty, the finished product is meaningless if I don’t define the right problem. (Page 51) You need to prioritize problems because you can only create and test prototypes for a specific problem at a time. (Page 52) When creating a product, you must clarify who you are targeting. (Page 53) …products targeted at young people in their 20s and those targeted at older adults in their 70s should be designed differently, including font size, color choice, and voice of the copy. (Page 54) …it’s more likely that a better idea comes up when multiple people with different perspectives having a deep discussion, and validation with users and market, and refinement. (Page 56) …if developers are involved in the idea-producing process, they can help come up with creative but practical ideas. And they can also provide immediate feedback on the feasibility of ideas. (Page 57) Your team can ask questions like "How much value will this update bring to users?" and "How urgent is it to fix it for users?". It is always best to strive for maximum impact with minimum effort. (Page 63) The applicant who is good at telling the story behind the idea, rather than just showing off how original the idea is, will be seen as a better candidate. (Page 66) …doing competitive research and benchmarking can be a good skill if you can refine and use the ideas that already exist in the field to fit your products and solve the problem for your users. (Page 67) A wireframe comprises text elements or shapes with minimal colors used. Those define how buttons, links, and elements work on a screen. (Page 75) …workflow helps the reader of the wireframe understand how things are connected and interact on the app or a website. (Page 75) The user flow summarizes what screen the user can go to and what tasks are given next. It provides details for all possible use cases when the user opens and interacts with the app. (Page 79) Prototyping can connect multiple prototyped screens to give users the same feeling as using a specific screen of an app, so the team and you can naturally listen to user feedback. (Page 81) …you should create the final design deliverables and share them with your developers. This is called design hand-off. Design hand-off should include everything from color codes and exact font sizes to detailed values (down to the pixel) for each object and precise spacing between objects. Once developers receive the hand-off, they can start developing immediately. (Page 83) By letting the user see and use the prototype and observing them, you can ask them if they find the prototype challenging to use, and you can hear what they think while using the prototype. As you do this before the release of a new update, you can find problems or bugs and solve them before engineers invest their time. (Page 86) Post-release is an opportunity to see how updated features or products perform. You can measure user traffic, conversion rate, and many other metrics to evaluate whether your product has achieved initial goals. (Page 87) For an A/B test, you can modify the wording (copy), function, color, etc., from the previously released product version and make the revised version available to users on the app or website simultaneously. (Page 89) …you can run a usability test before the product is released. However, you can also do it after the release. Bring in users to try out the released version, observe if there is any difficulty in using it, and listen to their feedback. (Page 91) The principle of consistency in UX design is about creating a consistent and predictable user experience across all aspects of a product, such as the layout, visual design, and interactions. Users should be able to easily recognize patterns and familiar elements throughout the product, which helps to reduce confusion and increase usability. Consistency can be achieved by following established design patterns and guidelines, using consistent language and terminology, and maintaining a cohesive visual style. (Page 100) In summary, consistency provides users with comfort, familiarity, and predictability, helping them to use the product without any hesitation. (Page 104) Affordance refers to making it intuitive for users to know how to use a product just by looking at it. (Page 105) Mental model refers to the expectations that users have for a product, based on their experience, training, and knowledge. A conceptual model refers to the experience or interface that a product provides. Sometimes, these two models may match with each other, while other times, they may conflict with each other. (Page 111) "Information Architecture," which refers to the practice of organizing and structuring digital content to make it easier for users to find what they need. Information architecture involves creating a clear hierarchy of information and grouping related content together, much like how a grocery store categorizes its products into different sections. (Page 120) In essence, information architecture is all about creating a clear and efficient "roadmap" for users to follow as they navigate through digital content. By carefully structuring information and grouping related content together, information architects can help users find what they need more quickly and easily. (Page 121) User intent can be classified as high or low. High user intent means that the user knows well what they want to do and can follow a specific procedure to complete their task when they enter a website to buy a product. (Page 126) In contrast, users with low intent have a rough idea of their goal but do not know what specifically they need to do to achieve it. In other words, they are in the research stage. (Page 126) UX designers who create apps or websites need to consider both high and low user intent and design to satisfy both types of users. (Page 126) …the top part of a web page is called the hero area because it is the most important and expensive area on the page that users can see without scrolling, like a hero. (Page 128) One of the core competencies of designers is the ability to visualize ideas. (Page 133) …wireframes do not require a fixed color scheme or font size, and visual elements do not have to be pixel-perfect. In fact, it's perfectly acceptable to create wireframes using office tools like PowerPoint or Google Slides. Ultimately, the purpose of wireframes is to provide a rough draft of the design, which can then be refined and improved upon in later stages of the design process. (Page 136) However, once you get the hang of it, you can use Figma to create not only wireframes, but also UI designs, design systems, and more. (Page 137) Portfolios can be created in website or PDF format. (Page 146)
Vance Packard Notable Quotations Full screen view The Hidden Persuaders , Vance Packard (Amazon) Digital TOC 1. The Depth Approach 17. Politics and the Image Builders 18. Molding "Team Players" for Free Enterprise	W. Keith Campbell, Carolyn Crist Notable Quotations Full screen view Preface Page xi When you encounter someone with narcissistic tendencies, it's a mixed bag. As a trait, it's not good, and it's not bad, but as a disorder, it can be horrific. Part I: defining narcissism today > Page 6 At its core, narcissim is about self-importance, antagonism, and a sense of entitlement. Narcissists believe they matter more than other people and deserve to be treated that way. > Page 6 The first individual is what we call a grandiose narcissist. These are ambitious, driven, and charming individuals. They have high self- esteem and generally feel good about themselves. These are the narcissists you will see most often in your life: you work for them, date them, and are entertained by them. You are often drawn to their boldness but are later repelled by their self- centeredness and lack of empathy. > Page 6 [There are also] vulnerable narcissist[s]. These people are introverted, depressed, and easily hurt by criticism. They report having low self- esteem, but despite that, they see themselves as deserving of special treatment. > Page 7 Although we technically don't define the narcissism types on a spectrum, it can be helpful to think about it that way. > Page 9 What we find is that grandiose narcissists become reactive in the face of a threat. In addition, they don't typically feel sad or depressed, but instead, aggressive and angry. They lash out at those they believe are criticizing them or treating them unfairly. > Page 10 the Trifurcated Model of Narcissism, connects grandiose and vulnerable narcissism as two related but separate traits. Both share a core of disagreeableness, self- importance, and a sense of entitlement, but they differ a great deal on what additional traits they blend with that core. With grandiose narcissism, you see confidence, boldness, and self- esteem, but with vulnerable narcissism, you see low confidence, anxiety, and low self- esteem. Chapter 2: Measuring Narcissism > Page 39 Personalities differ quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Few, if any, personality "types" exist in a pure form. Instead, traits fall on a spectrum. Chapter 3: Basic Traits and the Narcissism Recipe > Page 46 Language evolved to capture these personality traits. If people needed a specific way to describe someone, say, as humble or eccentric, they figured out how to do it. ... Antagonism includes a sense of superiority to others and a sense of entitlement, which means a person's needs matter more than those of others. > Page 50 Agreeableness, conscientiousness, and low neuroticism hang together as one meta-trait, called stability or alpha. ... Extraversion and openness hang together as a second meta-trait, called plasticity or beta. ... Plasticity is energizing and creating. ... People who score high in plasticity build social networks, idea systems, art, fantasy, and organizations. > Page 51 Stability solidifies and slows change. People high on the stability scale do this by getting along with others, following rules and tradition, and remaining calm. ... Yin and yang, Shakti and Shiva, love and strife. > Page 52 Extraversion splits into enthusiasm and assertiveness. ... People are drawn to enthusiasm, or a high-positive-energy personality ... People are moved by assertiveness, or the idea of pushing themselves, goals, or an agenda. ... Narcissism correlates with both aspects of extraversion but especially the assertiveness side. ... A complex personality trait such as narcissism is made up of numerous specific traits and patterns of behavior, which can sometimes seem unrelated. > Page 53 In Big Five terms, the core ingredient of narcissism, which is the main ingredient considered necessary to make narcissism, is low agreeableness or high antagonism. Antagonism is where we find narcissists' sense of entitlement, lack of empathy, manipulativeness, and belief in their superiority. This core antagonism has been called entitled self-importance or darkness. Some of the psychodynamic folks use the term malignant narcissism to describe cases where the amount of antagonism is especially high in the narcissism recipe. > Page 53 For grandiose narcissism, a second crucial ingredient is extraversion, which includes sociability, boldness, and drive. > Page 54 In vulnerable narcissism, on the other hand, the recipe mixes the core component of antagonism with high levels of neuroticism, which brings in insecurity, anxiety, depression, and hypersensitivity. From this perspective, a vulnerable narcissist is essentially someone who is self-important, self-centered, and entitled but also insecure, depressed, and self-conscious. > Page 55 if the recipe combines low agreeableness with extraversion and neuroticism, the result is a blend of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. These people are outgoing and driven but also thin-skinned in private or when caught off guard around others. As will be explained in chapter 5, this mixture makes up narcissistic personality disorder. > Page 55 Narcissists share key ingredients, but these can manifest in many ways. > Page 55 the recipe is not the same as the dish. > Page 60 Even while engaged in acts of friendship, philanthropy, and giving back, narcissists are in it for the esteem and the status they gain from doing good deeds. Called communal narcissism, the idea is that people can be self-centered about communal traits, thinking of themselves as the greatest friend ever or the best volunteer ever. > Page 61 the sixth factor: honesty-humility. > Page 61 deceit without hostility, > Page 61 such as social adroitness and self-monitoring. > Page 62 Similar to the Big Five model, they found that the darker traits lined up with low honesty-humility, low emotionality, low agreeableness, and low conscientiousness, with low honesty-humility having the largest impact.5 Chapter 4: Narcissists' Goals and Motives > Page 64 With grandiose narcissism, people build and enhance themselves, and with vulnerable narcissism, people protect themselves. In either case, narcissists prioritize self before others. > Page 65 For instance, grandiose narcissists focus on looking good, so they constantly hunt for opportunities to shine. Vulnerable narcissists focus on not looking bad, so they scan the environment for potential ego threats. The result in both cases is a life filled with course correction. Narcissists constantly search for short-term opportunities to look good or avoid feeling bad. > Page 66 Grandiose narcissists, in particular, are approach- oriented and sometimes seen as predatory. For example, a grandiose narcissist might ask ten people on a date to get one to say "yes." In the natural world, hiding failure can be difficult. That's why big wave surfers are often humble. In the social world, however, it is easier. The research shows that grandiose narcissistic motivation is related to learning through rewards to their ego. > Page 66 On the other hand, vulnerable narcissists are particularly avoidance-oriented and often suspicious, fearful, and mistrustful. The world is seen as predatory. The vulnerable narcissist protects the self from that and fights for the recognition that is owed. Most of this fighting is mental and emotional because vulnerable narcissists are often too fearful to confront people directly. In the research, these narcissists report being angry but not particularly aggressive. > Page 67 Approach-oriented individuals are optimistic, energized, and focused on rewards. At the trait level, they are most commonly extraverted, and they have somewhat inflated views of their abilities. > Page 67 Avoidance-oriented individuals are more pessimistic. They are anxious and focused on avoiding threats. At the trait level, this lines up with neuroticism, and they tend to have lower self-esteem. People who are focused on not losing often have more accurate views of their abilities yet overestimate their chances of losing. > Page 68 Beyond approach versus avoidance, researchers who study motivation also break goals into two major types: extrinsic, which comes from the external, and intrinsic, which arises from the internal. Extrinsic goals deal with public acclaim and power and show the strongest relationship with grandiose narcissism. Intrinsic goals, such as the motivation to increase personal joy, growth, or empathy, are not associated with narcissism. Remember that the main goal of narcissism is to elevate the ego. The extrinsic goals of public acclaim, status, power, and sexual conquest -- which I call the three S's: sex, status, and stuff -- are tools designed to elevate the narcissistic ego. > Page 69 "Status" is also related to social position. Narcissists want to be admired and dominate others. They want to be at the top of the social hierarchy, whether as a leader in an organization or as a trendsetter and sophisticated insider. In this case, leadership is about status, influence, and the title, not helping the organization. > Page 69 Similarly, vulnerable narcissism deals with extrinsic motivators, though the main goal is to protect the ego rather than enhance it. For instance, vulnerable individuals don't want to be seen as stupid, tend to make excuses for failure, and believe others are jealous of them or out to get them. They live their lives in their heads, where it's easy to make excuses and hide failures. Instead of taking actions toward a leadership position or "trophy" spouse relationship, they may rely on fantasies of power, aggression, and desirability. > Page 70 High self-esteem signals belongingness to a group, and low self-esteem signals separation or distance. > Page 71 Since narcissistic self-regulation deals with keeping self-esteem elevated and protected, narcissists specifically target extrinsic goals, which are somewhat like spiritual corn syrup. Achieving the goal or status feels great, but it doesn't last. > Page 73 Chasing sex, status, and stuff in the interest of building one's ego presents a couple of major problems. The first is the fading goal problem. ... The second big problem with narcissistic self-regulation is the willing accomplice problem. If a grandiose narcissist wants to believe she is better than everyone, she has to convince others to praise her, find an attractive romantic partner, and dominate people publicly. > Page 74 Narcissists "fake it till they make it." They self-promote, brag, name-drop, and exaggerate their importance. People believe them, and that bluff becomes a reality. > Page 74 The third issue is the reality principle problem. Under the basic principle of congruence, the psyche works best when perception matches or comes close to reality. When perception and reality are extremely mismatched, people develop delusional disorders such as paranoid schizophrenia. > Page 76 The self-serving bias, or the tendency for people to attribute positive outcomes to their own actions but negative outcomes to other people or external factors. ... We found that narcissistic individuals tended to self-enhance or give themselves credit, and non-narcissists showed more flexibility in self-enhancement. Chapter 5: Narcissistic Personality Disorder > Page 79 The current popular use of narcissist in everyday conversation highlights the biggest misconception out there -- that narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) are the same. > Page 80 Overall, personality disorders seem to be extreme forms of normal personality rather than a unique personality configuration or trait. > Page 82 When personalities aren't normal or flexible, personality disorders may develop, which can be described clinically as extreme and inflexible personality traits. ... To be diagnosed with a personality disorder, people with extreme or inflexible personality traits must also experience significant negative consequences in life, or what clinicians call impairments. ... impairment can be defined as the suffering of others around the narcissist. > Page 84 [T]he essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts. > Page 84 Narcissists are fragile, and they can be hurt easily by any information that challenges their inflated self-image. > Page 85 Without the grandiosity, narcissism looks like antisocial personality disorder, and with a high degree of vulnerability, it looks like borderline personality disorder. > Page 86 Manic episodes can create the confidence, energy, and grandiosity of narcissism, but in this case, they're typically not driven by antagonism and attention-seeking. Someone with hypomania may want to achieve a lofty goal like building the tallest structure in the world but not want to put his name on it. Plus, manic episodes tend to be cyclical, either coming and going or moving between the two extremes of what used to be called manic depression but is now classified as a variation of bipolar disorder. Grandiose narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder doesn't cycle, and it directly deals with self-enhancement. > Page 87 if someone has enough status and power and can get away with a large amount of narcissism, it may not be clinically impairing, even if it is extreme. > Page 89 In studies, narcissism is most associated with distress to significant others. ... A narcissist's selfish and manipulative behavior often makes friends, family members, and coworkers feel resentful or threatened, and in turn, they dread interacting with the narcissist. They also report feeling devalued and criticized by the narcissist. > Page 91 Cluster A is the odd or eccentric cluster, where personality disorders characterized by weird and unusual behavior or thinking exist. ... Cluster B disorders are characterized by emotionally erratic, unstable, and dramatic characteristics. > Page 92 Narcissistic personality disorder is a member of Cluster B, along with antisocial personality disorder, which has some antagonism and a large amount of impulsivity, and histrionic personality disorder, which includes high drama and attention-seeking. > Page 92 Cluster C personality disorders are primarily associated with anxiety and worry. Avoidant personality disorder is, as the name suggests, a clinical level of avoiding social interaction or social contact with people. > Page 95 By the 1980s, however, researchers studying traits such as narcissism began to transition from this medical model to a personality model. At that time, researchers Paul Costa and Robert McCrae published work about personality disorders and the Big Five. Through several studies, they compared personality scales that used the five-factor model with personality disorder scales and found that the five-factor model encompasses both normal and abnormal personality. Moving forward, professionals began integrating traditional personality trait models into psychiatric conceptions of disorder. Pair this with the economic element that it's much less expensive to find and research normal people than clinical samples of people with abnormal traits, and research exploded on the normal trait approach. Chapter 6: Narcissism's Cousins: The Four Triads > Page 98 The term Dark Triad might come across as "bad" or "evil," but in psychology, dark tends to describe antagonism. ... Coined in 2002 by psychologist Del Paulhus and his research team in British Columbia, Canada, the Dark Triad contains three traits that share a "dark core" of low agreeableness and a lack of empathy: grandiose narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. > Page 99 Machiavellians are often callous and highly manipulative, believing that the importance of their aims justifies even immoral means. In real life, though, Machiavellians of this level are hard to find. Many wannabe Machiavellians think they are highly manipulative and clever, but they actually look and act like impulsive psychopaths. > Page 100 Sadism centers around low agreeableness. Unlike narcissists who want to harm people for an ego boost but otherwise wouldn't, sadists take pleasure in harming people and other creatures. > Page 100 When sadism mixes with narcissism, however, which combines egotism and the desire to cause pain in others, it creates a dangerous combination called malignant narcissism. > Page 101 Narcissism isn't always related to criminal acts, and not all criminal acts contain narcissism. There are many reasons people may commit a crime, and those that are related to narcissism tend to be selfish. White collar crimes related to narcissism, for example, often stem from a need to enhance the self and continue a lifestyle the narcissist wants to maintain. > Page 102 Members of the Vulnerable Dark Triad see the world as threatening and hostile, and they have challenges with trust and mood regulation, especially hostility and anxiety. > Page 103 Factor II psychopathy is less well known and represents an extremely impulsive and emotional version of psychopathy. Imagine a twenty-two-year-old male who is hostile and exploitative but not ambitious or ego-driven. This is a marginally employed, legally spotty individual who survives largely by taking advantage of other people. > Page 104 The Light Triad is not a reverse-scored version of the Dark Triad. Instead, the goal was to step back and create a model of positive traits. ... The first, faith in humanity, captures the belief that people are generally good and worthy of trust. Someone who has high faith in humanity will enter most situations with the expectation that others are well intentioned and reasonable. ... The next factor, humanism, celebrates the best in humanity. This means appreciating the successes and creations of others, which might be seen in great art or great social achievements such as a reduction in maternal mortality. The third factor, Kantianism, is named for the philosopher Immanuel Kant and suggests a preference for integrity and honesty over charade, charm, or manipulativeness. ... Since the scale is brand-new, little research backs it up, but it is promising because it captures an active form of lightness. Researchers have debated for decades what the opposite of narcissism might be, particularly when it comes to humility or submission. In general, humility is seen as a positive trait in successful people, and submissiveness is seen as a negative in Western societies that praise individualism and freedom or a positive in relation to service-oriented behavior. > Page 106 Grandiose narcissism mixes this core energy with antagonism, but if antagonism is removed and self-esteem is added, it results in boldness, or what academics call fearless dominance. Boldness sounds healthier than grandiose narcissism, and it seems to be at the individual level. > Page 107 Hypomanic extraversion and drive can look like grandiosity because, in a way, it is a form of grandiosity. > Page 107 The difference between this and grandiosity is that hypomania isn't concerned with taking others down or beating them. Chapter 7: Relationships and Narcissism > Page 114 Over time, research on narcissism in relationships has flourished, and the most recent research has found that narcissists are pretty great dates at first. The traits that make people attractive to date are different from the traits that make people caring and committed partners. In general, humans often look for confidence and an outgoing personality, which can be elements of narcissism. Nobody lines up to get into a relationship with a narcissist, and nobody includes "in search of a self-absorbed jerk" on dating apps. In most cases, we don't like self-centered people once we get to know them. At the beginning, though, many of us are attracted to narcissistic qualities in partners until they have problems with commitment and mutual respect. > Page 114 The process of narcissistic self-enhancement or self-regulation, using other people to maintain the narcissist's positive self-image, make relationships work to the narcissist's advantage. ... At its core, a high level of antagonism exists that can reveal itself in different ways, including as dominance, superiority, and arrogance. This might involve bragging, showing off, or entitlement. > Page 116 A narcissist wants a relationship with someone who can boost self-esteem through high status, physical attraction, or money. ... The narcissist's partner is a tool for inflating the narcissist's ego. ... In reality, narcissists want to be loved, but they're not as interested in loving back or reciprocal emotional support. To get what they want out of relationships, narcissists use four strategies to meet their needs, > Page 118 Narcissists are attracted to people who admire them and less attracted to those who want emotional intimacy. ... People who are narcissistic tend to have partners who are also a little narcissistic. ... The second strategy for finding status or esteem in relationships is admiration. ... Again, most humans seek admiration, but it's particularly true for narcissists, and it can happen in a variety of ways. > Page 119 Another strategy for esteem, albeit more negative, is domination. This can come across as bullying or even abuse and can translate into physical, emotional, or mental domination. > Page 120 narcissists overestimated their performance, and when they watched it on videotape, their self-admiration increased even more. Grandiose people, in particular, are more likely to rate their attractiveness higher on a scale by a point or two. > Page 120 While most people overestimate, narcissists do so even more. > Page 121 Narcissism and attractiveness were found to be related. > Page 121 Personality scientists developed another explanation related to self-regulation, which posed that narcissists put more effort into their looks since they care about appearance, and that seems to accurately reflect what's happening. > Page 122 Their appearance is flashy and intriguing -- think of colorful dresses and charming facial expressions. They come across as engaged and likable, not grumpy. Their body movements are also more self- assured, so their posture is straighter, and they have more dominant body language, so they exhibit more expansive body gestures. It makes sense that someone who is well- groomed, poised, and energetic is attractive. > Page 123 What doesn't show initially is the antagonism and neuroticism, which won't make an appearance until the relationship progresses. ... Narcissists are built for shallow, lukewarm, and extraverted relationships. ... They can leave one relationship or friendship group and move to the next easily, but they often leave others emotionally drained. With family, the challenges are much tougher. It is hard to leave family and move on, and narcissistic family members often can charm and manipulate others outside (and even inside) the family, which can lead to exhaustion and strained relationships. > Page 124 The similarity-attraction hypothesis suggests that people like others who share similar political, religious, and value beliefs, which makes relationships easier. People with the same beliefs tend to get along and have discussions without conflict. In the case of narcissism, similar attitudes about materialism, public displays of worth, and showing off could be mutually admired. Extraversion and confidence likely bring narcissistic people together as well. > Page 127 The final downside to narcissism in relationships is neuroticism, which comes out as neediness and relational insecurity. Studies show that vulnerable narcissism, in particular, is associated with insecure attachment styles, and vulnerable narcissists tend to need a partner who reassures them, makes them feel accepted, or ensures that they are connected in the relationship. Chapter 8: Leadership and Narcissism > Page 142 Pride can be expressed through dominance, which focuses on being better than someone else, or prestige, which looks for an internal surge of well-being. > Page 144 Context matters a great deal for narcissistic leadership effectiveness as well. When times are good, and when things are stable and working the way they should, there is no demand for narcissistic leadership. People in those situations want a good king, a competent manager, or a jovial boss who keeps the ship sailing. However, when things become chaotic and unstable, when people feel that the economy or their life doesn't make sense, or when things feel out of control, people gravitate toward narcissistic leaders who make promises of stability, confidence, and direction, whether or not they can actually provide it. > Page 150 Classic Machiavellians might be able to navigate a web of social power, so it likely depends on the network and those who are employed. Studies show that even organizations themselves can be narcissistic, with the culture focused on power, success, and devotion, which can create an imbalance in workers' lives to achieve corporate demands at the expense of employees. hapter 9: Social Media and Narcissism > Page 161 Research from the past decade tells us that social media is used by narcissistic individuals in self-promoting and self-enhancing ways. The evidence for this is strong and varied. > Page 161 My best guess is that using social media does not turn people into grandiose narcissists. To the contrary, I now think that social media is actually leading to increased insecurity in people. ... social media use predicts less happiness. Chapter 11: Using Narcissism Strategically > Page 188 The lesson here is that when you're looking for benefits from narcissism, consider what's necessary for short-term success -- winning an individual competition, getting a job, finding a date, or performing in public. The use of narcissism needs to be strategic, so it's limited to the context where it actually helps > Page 193 Agreeable men and women earned less -- to the tune of $5,000 per year at that time -- than the "disagreeable men" who were aggressive and confirmed conventional gender roles. ... In fact, the agreeableness-income relationship was surprisingly negative for agreeable men, who earned an average of $7,000 less than disagreeable men. Agreeableness affected future income as well. Part of this, they found, was explained by the value that disagreeable men placed on high earnings rather than relationships. Chapter 12: Reducing Another's Narcissism > Page 200 agentic extraversion, and the drive that comes with it, is one of the most attractive features of narcissism. It captures confidence and social boldness, as well as the ability to achieve goals, ascend to leadership, and achieve other positive outcomes. > Page 201 it's important to remember that even antagonism has some benefits. It's useful for rule breaking. It's useful for demanding more pay. It's useful for being aggressive in sports. There are times when people need to break through a system to make change, and aggressiveness is important for that. > Page 201 However, aggressiveness also has a dark side. Antagonism is linked to emotional and physical abuse, cheating, numerous antisocial behaviors, rape, sexual assault, and partner abuse. > Page 204 Neurotic people are hard to be around because they need more support, have negative thoughts about the present and the future, see more threat in the environment, and are hard to comfort. ... When we think of neuroticism, we typically talk about sadness and depression, which is internalizing, but hostility leads to anger, which is externalizing.	Walter Lippmann Notable Quotations Full screen view Full text (pdf)	Wendell Potter Notable Quotations Full screen view Foreword Deadly Spin is a revelation about America's health care system unlike anything else you've seen. There are a lot of books and articles about health care reform, but none of them provide the insider's perspective like this one. Introduction As a senior public relations executive, or "spinmeister," for two decades with two of the largest for- profit health insurance companies in the United States -- Humana and CIGNA -- it was my job to enhance those firms' reputations. But as one of the industry's top public relations executives and media spokesmen, I also helped create and perpetuate myths that had no other purpose but to sustain those companies' extraordinarily high profitability. --- I was a behind-the-scenes leader in every industry effort to kill any reform legislation that threatened insurance company profits. ... Although I told people during that period that I never lied to a reporter, the reality is that I often did -- but in such subtle ways that I could never even acknowledge to myself that I was purposely trying to mislead. The health insurance industry today is dominated by a cartel of large, for- profit corporations. By necessity and by law, the top priority of the officers of these companies is to "enhance shareholder value." I will also attempt to explain why it is vital to understand the role of the public relations industry -- the spin machine -- in our public discourse and in our lives, how to recognize it, and what we can do about it. What I hope to accomplish in this book is to pull the curtain back to reveal the techniques employed by practitioners of the dark arts of PR -- from the use of "third- party advocates" to the creation of front groups, from the staging of PR "charm offensives" to the selective disclosure of information and misinformation -- which influence people's thoughts and actions in ways that advertising cannot. PR people do not create ads that can be seen or heard or touched. They create perceptions without any public disclosure of who is doing the persuading or for what purposes. Chapter I After handling dozens of horror stories and keeping many others out of the media, I was rewarded with a promotion to the corporate PR staff, To ensure that the bills would never pass, my peers and I hired some of Washington's biggest PR firms to plan and implement stealth campaigns to manipulate public opinion on one issue or another as part of a broader strategy to kill any legislation the industry didn't like. Using a PR firm, Porter Novelli, we formed a front group called the Health Benefits Coalition, which conducted a fearmongering campaign to convince the public -- and lawmakers -- that enactment of a Patient's Bill of Rights would lead to a tidal wave of frivolous lawsuits that would cause health insurance premiums to skyrocket. Chapter II APCO was founded in 1984 by one of Washington's biggest law firms, Arnold & Porter, which is well known for its representation of the tobacco industry. From one office in Washington, APCO has grown into an international operation with offices in twenty-nine locations throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. On its Web site, APCO has referred to itself as "a global communications consultancy" specializing in "influencing decision-makers and shaping public opinion by crafting compelling messages and recruiting effective allies." One of the deceptive practices of which APCO has a long history is setting up and running front groups for its clients. The tobacco industry paid APCO almost a million dollars in 1995 to implement behind-the-scenes tort reform efforts and specifically to create chapters of "grassroots" citizens' groups called Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. … [We] apply tactics usually reserved for political campaigns to target audiences and recruit third-party advocates. Our staff has the political field experience and has written the direct mail, managed the telephones, crafted the television commercials and trained the grassroots volunteers. Tuffin said that when any of us talked to the media about Sicko, we should acknowledge the compelling stories and personal tragedies in the film but then try to change the subject to how insurers contribute to the American health care system. While Health Care America and the industry's allies would be doing the fearmongering, AHIP and insurers would try to persuade the public as well as lawmakers that the industry had a legitimate reason to exist. One of the key messages AHIP would stress in every media interview about health care reform during the coming months was that this time the industry would be "bringing solutions to the table," and would be willing to make certain concessions when Congress began drafting reform legislation. This would be the part of its PR charm offensive that insurers would want the public to see. If Sicko showed signs of being as influential in shaping public opinion on health care reform as An Inconvenient Truth had been in changing attitudes about climate change, then the industry would have to consider implementing a plan "to push Moore off the cliff." They didn't elaborate, and no one asked what they meant by that. We knew they didn't mean it literally -- that a hit man would be sent to take Moore out. Rather, an all-out effort would be made to depict Moore as someone intent on destroying the free-market The phrase "government takeover" is one that has tested extremely well over the years and has been central to every campaign the industry has conducted in recent decades to defeat reform efforts, including the Clinton proposal in 1994. Chapter III [First I] should explain how public relations evolved into such a powerful yet largely invisible force in our society. Human beings have distorted information for as long as they've communicated -- with gestures, sounds, nuanced words, or whatever it takes to bring other people around. Whether it's as brazen as a pyramid or as subtle as a white lie, this art form -- often called spin -- has become as much a part of our culture as the media we depend upon to connect and inform us. They are experts in every medium, and they use their considerable resources to build and maintain strong, positive images for their clients. They cultivate contacts and relationships among journalists and other media gatekeepers. They walk a fine line between contributing to the so-called marketplace of ideas and warping public understanding to their clients' ends. Oftentimes, this line is so creatively blurred as to disappear. Cutlip & Center's Effective Public Relations, the encyclopedia, if not the bible, of the industry, defines PR as "the management function that establishes and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and the publics on whom its success or failure depends." ... That definition emphasizes the two-way nature of PR, as opposed to the one-way communication that characterizes propaganda or advertising. To be sure, PR has been -- and is being -- used to good ends. Even the noblest of causes can benefit from the services of a communications expert to clarify facts, disseminate information, and counter unfair arguments. And there are plenty of ethical PR people out there to do this. But with PR so intricately woven into every major industry and movement in today's mass media reality, the stakes of spin have become incredibly high. And ethics do slip. PR often crosses the line into misleading, withholding, or simply lying. And when it does, society suffers -- sometimes tragically Gossip, innuendo, and deception were common in publications and politics in the earliest years of the United States. Businesses manipulated the new nation's mass media as early as the 1830s, when the New York Sun, one of the early penny presses, offered to publish free "puff" stories (promotional material presented as regular news) for its advertisers. In the same period, American showman P. T. Barnum regularly pushed the limits of spin to a point that seems shocking even today. One of the first and most notable public relations men was Ivy Lee, who is credited with developing the concept of "crisis management," the organized, orchestrated communications response to a negative event -- one of the basic practices of today's PR. Lee issued his famous "Declaration of Principles," emphasizing the public's need for accurate information. The statement (now part and parcel of most modern public relations textbooks) proved to be a milestone in establishing the new field of PR -- separating it from the old image of publicity pushers, who by then were considered little more than hucksters and snake oil salesmen. The declaration, which Lee sent to newspapers, read in part, "This is not a secret press bureau. All our work is done in the open. In brief, our plan is, frankly, and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public nstitutions, to supply to the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about." ... Lee reportedly advised Rockefeller to improve his personal image by carrying dimes in his pockets and giving them to children in public. ... While Lee is considered by many to be the father of modern public relations, a contemporary of his, the flamboyant Edward Bernays, engineered some of the most far-reaching, successful, and outlandish PR campaigns in history. Bernays was said to think of himself as a "unique counselor" to organizations, someone who melded the influence of the media with the science of psychology. He is generally credited with coining the term "public relations counselor," which he used in his 1923 book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, the first book devoted to PR. Bernays orchestrated a campaign that equated cigarettes with slenderness, grace, and beauty. He enlisted third-party "experts" to warn against the adverse effects of desserts, in terms of both weight gain and tooth decay, and to declare that cigarettes were a great alternative and could do everything from clean your teeth to make you a better dancer. Between 1937 and 1942, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis worked to expose domestic propaganda that the group considered a potential threat to American democracy. Although the group was disbanded during World War II (reportedly because of the wartime conundrum of examining not only enemy propaganda but Allied tactics as well), the IPA left a notable legacy: its list of eight "Rhetorical Tricks" used by propagandists remains strikingly relevant to PR today. It includes the following basic propaganda/PR ploys: 1. Fear Organizations with the most to lose are most likely to resort to fearmongering. Their information may mention the loss of jobs, a threat to public health, or a general decline in social values, standard of living, or individual rights. It may also vilify a specific cause or even a specific person in order to create the desired point of view. 2. Glittering generalities This approach arouses strong, positive emotions by using words and phrases like "democracy,""patriotism," and "American way of life." Virtually all types of organizations use the tactic to create support for themselves, but when combined with negative messaging, the implications can be insidious. 3. Testimonials Celebrities or recognized experts are frequently recruited or hired to provide testimonials about a product, cause, company, organization, or candidate. Good examples are the photos of famous athletes on Wheaties boxes and the endorsements of causes of all stripes (from animal rights to the right to own guns) by actors and musicians. 4. Name-calling Blatant insults can be a very effective public relations tool. The organization doing the name-calling may associate the target of the insults with a negative or unpopular cause or person. Defending against name-calling can be difficult. Negative terms tend to stick, even if they are undeserved. 5. Plain folks Anytime a business executive poses with rank-and-file employees or customers, he or she is claiming to be "of the people." The same goes for politicians who attempt to identify themselves with their constituents; with every election cycle come the candidates who claim to be "Washington outsiders" even if they've been in office for years. Being identified with "plain folks" is both good business and good politics, but it raises the possibility of being labeled a hypocrite. 6. Euphemisms PR practitioners often select words that obscure the real meaning of actions or concepts. The tactic is sometimes called "doublespeak." For instance, an employee may be "transitioned" rather than "fired," and a "lie" may be called a "strategic misinterpretation." 7. Bandwagon The overriding bandwagon message is that everyone else is doing or supporting this -- and you should, too. Opinion polls can create the impression that a large percentage of people are on the bandwagon, but poll results may reflect only a designated sliver of the population, and they can be shaped in advance by structuring questions to trigger an expected response. 8. Transfer Similar to testimonials, the transfer approach involves the approval of a respected individual or organization. The IPA described transfer as "a device by which the propagandist carries over the authority, sanction, and prestige of something we respect and revere to something he would have us accept." When skilled PR professionals do their jobs ethically, society benefits. For example, initiatives to end disease and poverty, to find missing children, to promote literacy, and to reduce violence have benefited from well-designed and well-executed PR campaigns. But PR tactics are also used to create subversive front groups, discredit legitimate individuals or organizations, spread false information, distort the truth, and instill fear. "Astroturfing." The term means creating a false grassroots movement so that a carefully crafted campaign or event seems to be happening spontaneously. PR also crosses the line when trying to repress or create doubt about information that could be harmful to a client. Hitler wrote, "The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered." The best public relations is invisible. Good PR usually gets free media space because it is presented as unbiased information. News releases explaining what happened at an event are commonly written before the event takes place. Corporate executives go through "media training" to prepare them for speaking directly to reporters. Mock press conferences are held to give execs practice. All good executives, like politicians, are taught the cardinal rule: Stay on message. PR people are good at manipulating news media because they understand them. A large number of practitioners are former reporters -- like Lee and Bernays (and me) -- who know what kinds of stories get attention, as well as who decides what gets coverage and what doesn't. Conversely, news outlets are increasingly dependent on public relations departments and agencies for content. As budgets drop, especially at newspapers, there are fewer reporters and fewer resources for investigative journalism. Canned information from companies is used "as is" more frequently, often without fact-checking. With years of practice, I had learned how to respond with a pithy remark if I wanted to be quoted and how to "baffle them with bullshit" if I didn't. Soon after I joined the company, a colleague gave me a framed E. B. White quote as an inside joke: "Be obscure clearly." I became a master at doing just that. My staff and I also compiled a news summary every morning of all significant stories about CIGNA and the insurance industry that had appeared in the media over the preceding twenty-four hours. I never wanted any of our executives to be out of the loop or blindsided because they hadn't seen an important story. As chief gatekeeper, I decided who was worthy of interviewing our CEO and how much time they got with him once I'd determined the access to be in the company's best interest. Chapter IV The industry's spin, in other words, was going to be something like this: Health care costs are out of control because new treatments and technologies are more expensive than ever, the population is getting older and sicker, too many people are seeking care they don't really need, and health care providers are all too willing to provide this care that people don't need. Chapter V Strong conservative governments in Europe called this "turning benevolence into power" -- a strategy generally credited with creating the social welfare measures that actually kept Communism from becoming a dominant force. Chapter VI According to a study by the Commonwealth Fund, the number of underinsured Americans reached twenty-five million in 2007 -- up 60 percent since 2003.1 As an insurance industry PR executive, I had the responsibility of helping create the perception that the high-deductible and so-called limited-benefit plans that insurers and employers were forcing Americans into were consumer-friendly and essential weapons in the industry's battle against escalating health care costs. Knowing that doctors were much better liked and respected than HMO executives, the consultants recruited physicians to appear in a series of ads and commercials to testify why they thought managed care was a good thing for their patients. Rather than admit responsibility for the failures, insurance executives pointed the finger of blame at their customers, the "consumers" of health care, and, of course, the providers of care. Hanway, who left CIGNA in 2009 at age fifty-seven with a $111 million retirement package,3 was a leader in what Yale University political science professor and author Jacob Hacker calls the "personal responsibility crusade" -- a euphemism for pushing risks, and costs, formerly borne by institutions onto individual Americans. Proponents of HSAs argued that by spending their own money for care instead of relying on an insurance company, people would become more prudent "shoppers" of health care. Knowing that studies on the underinsured like the ones from the Commonwealth Fund and the Center for Studying Health System Change would slow -- if not halt -- the trend toward consumerism, the big insurers began churning out their own "store-bought studies" to counter reality. the selective disclosure of information to support a particular point of view, With cutbacks in newsrooms, there were fewer reporters covering the health insurance industry than in years past, and the ones who were left were often so busy that they had little time to probe. I was frequently amazed at how little media scrutiny there was of the industry and at how much my colleagues and I could get away with in dealing with reporters. More often than not, they were quite willing to settle for what we fed them, even if it was pabulum.
William Lutz Notable Quotations Full screen view Doublespeak (Rebel Reads) Lutz, William Page 1 Doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn't. It is language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable. Doublespeak is language that avoids or shifts responsibility, language that is at variance with its real or purported meaning. It is language that conceals or prevents thought; Page 1 rather than extending thought, doublespeak limits it. Doublespeak is not a matter of subjects and verbs agreeing; it is a matter of words and facts agreeing. Basic to doublespeak is incongruity, the incongruity between what is said or left unsaid, and what really is. It is the incongruity between the word and the referent, between seem and be, between the essential function of language--communication--and what doublespeak does--mislead, distort, deceive, inflate, circumvent, obfuscate. Page 2 Who is saying what to whom, under what conditions and circumstances, with what intent, and with what results? Page 2 The first is the euphemism, an inoffensive or positive word or phrase used to avoid a harsh, unpleasant, or distasteful reality. Page 2 When you use the euphemism "passed away," no one is misled. Page 2 the euphemism functions here not just to protect the feelings of another person, but to communicate also your concern Page 3 when a euphemism is used to mislead or deceive, it becomes doublespeak. Page 3 euphemism constitutes doublespeak, since it is designed to mislead, Page 3 to cover up the unpleasant. Its real intent is at variance with its apparent intent. It is language designed to alter our perception of reality. Page 3 A second kind of doublespeak is jargon, the specialized language of a trade, profession, or similar group, such as that used by doctors, lawyers, engineers, educators, or car mechanics. Jargon can serve an important and useful function. Within a group, jargon functions as a kind of verbal shorthand that allows members of the group to communicate with each other clearly, efficiently, and quickly. Indeed, it is a mark of membership in the group to be able to use and understand the group's jargon. Page 4 Jargon as doublespeak often makes the simple appear complex, the ordinary profound, the obvious insightful. In this sense it is used not to express but impress. Page 4 when a member of a specialized group uses its jargon to communicate with a person outside the group, and uses it knowing that the nonmember does not understand such language, then there is doublespeak. Page 5 A third kind of doublespeak is gobbledygook or bureaucratese. Basically, such doublespeak is simply a matter of piling on words, of overwhelming the audience with words, the bigger the words and the longer the sentences the better. Page 5 Sometimes gobbledygook may sound impressive, but when the quote is later examined in print it doesn't even make sense. Page 6 The fourth kind of doublespeak is inflated language that is designed to make the ordinary seem extraordinary; to make everyday things seem impressive; to give an air of importance to people, situations, or things that would not normally be considered important; to make the simple seem complex. Page 7 Thucydides wrote in The Peloponnesian War Page 7 Words had to change their ordinary meanings and to take those which were now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent, a man to be suspected. Page 8 A pencil sharpener was an "Appliance for milling wooden dowels up to 10 millimeters in diameter," and a typewriter was an "Instrument for recording test data with rotating roller." Page 8 "Politics and the English Language," Page 8 "great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink." Page 9 Newspeak, the official state language in the world of 1984, was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of human thought, to make only "correct" thought possible and all other modes of thought impossible. It was, in short, a language designed to create a reality that the state wanted. Page 9 doublethink, the mental process that allows you to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time and believe in both of them. The classic example in Orwell's novel is the slogan, "War Is Peace." Page 9 At its worst, doublespeak, like newspeak, is language designed to limit, if not eliminate, thought. Page 10 Military doublespeak seems to have always been around. In 1947 the name of the Department of War was changed to the more pleasing if misleading Department of Defense. Page 13 Business magazines, corporate reports, executive speeches, and the business sections of newspapers are filled with words and phrases such as "marginal rates of substitution,""equilibrium price,""getting off margin,""distributional coalition,""non-performing assets," and "encompassing organizations." Much of this is jargon or inflated language designed to make the simple seem complex, but there are other examples of business doublespeak that misleads or is designed to avoid a harsh reality. Page 14 make ordinary actions seem complex. Page 14 Education has more than its share of doublespeak. Page 15 There are instances, however, where doublespeak becomes more than amusing, more than a cause for a laugh. Page 17 there is insincerity, and again there is a gap between the speaker's real and declared aims. Page 19 By using such vague wording as "would lead one to believe" and "may accidentally have been perceived to have been doing so," he avoids any direct assertion. Page 19 indeed language.in defense of the indefensible; language designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable; language designed to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. Page 19 doublespeak should make it clear that doublespeak is not the product of carelessness or sloppy thinking. Page 19 most doublespeak is the product of clear thinking and is carefully designed and constructed to appear to communicate when in fact it doesn't. Page 19 language designed not to lead but mislead. Page 20 Doublespeak has become so common in everyday living that many people fail to notice it. Page 21 Doublespeak is insidious because it can infect and eventually destroy the function of language, which is communication between people and social groups. Page 23 The airlines, I am sure, think that the word "equipment" sounds much more solid, reliable, and far less frightening than the simple, common, ordinary word "airplane." Page 24 Airlines never speak of first-class passengers, but always of "passengers in the first-class section." Page 33 Diet beer was around for years, Page 33 Miller Brewing Company, who changed the word "diet" to "lite," hired a bunch of ex-jocks to extol the virtues of "less-filling" beer, and sales history was made. Page 33 We may not know what light foods really are or what makes them light, but when it comes to buying light foods in the supermarket we know one thing: They cost more. Page 33 The Cooperative Extension of New York State warned consumers in 1984 that, just because such words as "natural,""light,""life,""health,""nutrition,""country,""nature,""harvest,""fair," and "farm" appear on packages (along with pictures of sheaves of wheat, farms, green valleys, streams of clear running water, and farmers toiling in the field), it does not mean the contents are farm fresh, wholesome, organic, or healthy. Page 35 According to the Code of Federal Regulations there are twenty- seven chemicals that can be added to bread, but the food manufacturer doesn't have to list any of them on the label. Page 35 In 1985, the Center for Science in the Public Interest revealed that the source of "fiber" in a number of popular "high-fiber" breads was nonnutritional wood pulp. Page 36 You can't even say you're getting a lemon when you buy foods like lemon pudding or lemon cake mix, because the lemons in these products are fake. In fact, you don't need any lemons to make lemonade. Page 37 If you look at all those products that use the word "lemon" on their packages, you'll find few if any lemons were used to make any of them. Page 37 Some "food technologists" (as fake-food inventors like to be called) don't even call their products food; they call them "food systems." Page 38 The U.S. Department of Agriculture allows food processors to combine 135 parts of water with one part meat stock and still use the words "beef stock" instead of water on their ingredient labels. Page 38 A number of Japanese companies ship large amounts of fake frozen crab meat (or, more precisely, a "surimi-based crab analog") to the United States. Surimi is a fish paste made by pressing and repeatedly washing deboned fish. The fake crab comes in the form of sticks or shredded meat and is made from cheap cod plus starch, salt, chemical seasoning, "essence of crab" (which is derived from boiling down crab shells), and polymerized phosphate. Sales of imitation crab meat exceeded $100 million a year in 1984 and were growing rapidly. Page 43 I still use a toothbrush, and not an "oral hygiene appliance" or a "home plaque removal instrument." Page 44 Statistical doublespeak is a particularly effective form of doublespeak, since statistics are not likely to be closely scrutinized. Moreover, we tend to think that numbers are more concrete, more "real" than mere words. Quantify something and you give it a precision, a reality it did not have before. Page 45 the world of numbers is not as accurate as you think it is, especially the world of the public opinion poll. Page 47 How do you read a poll? Actually, it's not all that hard, but the problem is that most poll results don't give you enough information to tell whether the poll is worth anything. In order to evaluate the results of a poll, you need to know the wording of the question or questions asked by the poll taker, when the poll was taken, how many people responded, how the poll was conducted, who was polled, how many people were polled, and how they were selected. That's a lot of information, and rarely does a poll ever give you more than just the results. Page 48 You have to ask a lot of questions if you really want to understand a graph or chart. Page 53 doublespeak flows pretty thick in the world of education, where it is used to make what is pretty ordinary--teaching children and running a school--sound very complex and difficult. Doublespeak in this realm can also be used to avoid some harsh realities and to soothe some hurt feelings. Page 59 Although English teachers like to say they prefer the clear, simple style in writing, when given a choice they tend to choose the heavy, ponderous style. Page 62 Remember the old days when there were physical education classes? Well, physical education is out of date; it's now called "human kinetics" or "applied life studies." Page 65 education doublespeak is particularly depressing because, more than anyone, teachers should be aware of doublespeak. They should be leading the fight against doublespeak by teaching their students how to spot it, how to defend themselves against it, and how to eliminate it in their own writing and speaking. Unfortunately, too many in education have found that using doublespeak can advance their careers and their pay, so they have decided to give in to it. Page 157 When Russian publishers produced a special Russian edition of the Oxford Student's Dictionary of Current English, they changed the definitions of several political words in the Russian edition. Among the words redefined were "communism,""imperialism,""Marxism,""fascism,""Bolshevism,""internationalism,""socialism," and "capitalism." For example, the Russian edition defines capitalism as "an economic and social system based on private ownership of the means of production operated for private profit, and on the exploitation of man by man, replacing feudalism and preceding communism." The Russian edition also defines socialism as "a social and economic system which is replacing capitalism." By comparison, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary gives the following definitions: "Capitalism: the condition of possessing capital or using it for production; a system of society based on this; dominance of private capital.""Socialism: a theory or policy of social organization which advocates the ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land, property, etc. by the community as a whole, and their administration or distribution in the interests of all." So much for looking up a word in the dictionary to find out what it really means. Page 166 General Pinochet continues a long tradition of those who would overthrow democracy in order to protect it, those who would destroy democracy in order to save it. Page 166 So many rulers seem to think that the people they rule are never quite ready for democracy and only a nondemocratic form of government can preserve democracy. Even those rulers who claim their goal is the establishment of democracy have a strange way of going about it. Page 212 The discovery of the term "user fee" for "tax increase" really opened up all kinds of opportunities for raising taxes without raising them. Page 213 The Tax Reform Act of 1986 calls chicken coops and pigpens "single-purpose agricultural structures," thereby giving farmers a special depreciation deduction denied other businesses. The act also declares that Don Tyson and his sister-in-law Barbara Tyson run a "family farm." Their "farm" has twenty-five thousand employees and grosses $1.7 billion a year, but because the bill calls them a "family farm" they get tax breaks that save them $135 million. Page 217 First the State Department had to legitimize the Nicaraguan guerrillas by giving them the right kind of name, and the right kind of definition to that name. So instead of calling them guerrillas, the State Department called them Contras, and then "Freedom Fighters," after President Reagan used that term. Page 218 The State Department is required by Congress to prepare each year a full report on the status of human rights in 163 countries around the world. Now the State Department had a problem because some of the governments that the United States supports engage in the systematic abuse of the human rights of their citizens. It's hard to come up with a positive report on the status of human rights in countries like South Africa, Guatemala, El Salvador, Iran, and Chile, especially when some governments kill a lot of their citizens. To smooth over the problem a little, the State Department announced in its 1,485-page 1984 report that it would no longer use the word "killing" in its reports. Instead it will use the phrase "unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life.""We found the term ‘killing' too broad and have substituted the more precise, if more verbose, ‘unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life,'" Page 223 In 1987, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that pollution control efforts had been so effective that parts of the Delaware River in Philadelphia were suitable for "primary recreational contact," meaning you could go swimming in the river. Page 226 Doublespeak can also mean redefining widely used words, giving them a new meaning that is the opposite of their generally accepted meaning. Page 226 can do? The redefinition of words is a particularly powerful form of government doublespeak. Page 229 Getting a job with the CIA is no easy task. In its help-wanted ads, the CIA never uses words like "spying,""wiretapping,""breaking and entering," or "killing," nor do its ads mention illegally over-throwing governments, recruiting mercenaries, bribing foreign officials, lying to Congress, or all those other exciting things the CIA does. What the ads do stress is "intercultural sophistication,""communication skills," and "solid ethical standards," plus "a gift for dealing with people" and "integrity of performance." Best of all is the doublespeak used to describe the major function of the CIA, which is spying. The ads say that "Prudent foreign policy decisions depend on solid knowledge. The most important decisions depend on information our adversaries seek to conceal. A truly extraordinary group of men and women serve abroad as the key players in our national effort to fill these critical information gaps." You won't be spying; you'll just be "filling critical information gaps." Page 262 The function of nuclear doublespeak is to avoid reality, to control and direct any discussion of nuclear power and weapons, and ultimately to make any real public discussion of nuclear power, weapons, and war impossible. Page 263 Nuclear doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but doesn't, that makes the negative aspects of nuclear power appear positive and the unpleasant side-effects and possible disasters appear tolerable. It is language designed to conceal the realities and dangers of nuclear power. Page 263 the doublespeak of nuclear power, the official language designed to make "our friend the atom" seem like just another technological advance. Page 263 level cities." By the 1970s, the word "atomic" had lost its magic glow, so it was replaced by the more acceptable and less frightening "nuclear." Nothing is atomic anymore, now everything is nuclear, from "nuclear devices" (instead of atomic bombs) to "nuclear" (not atomic) power plants. Sometimes the preferred doublespeak is "energy," as in the Energy Research and Development Administration. Page 268 A reactor accident is an "event," an "unusual event," an "unscheduled event," an "incident," an "abnormal evolution," a "normal aberration," or a "plant transient." In one report on accidents at nuclear power plants, one "abnormal occurrence" occurred so frequently that it was called a "normally expected abnormal occurrence." Nuclear power plants need never be concerned about earthquakes, just "seismic events." Plutonium contamination at a nuclear power plant is referred to as "infiltration,""migration," a "breach of containment," or "plutonium has taken up residence." A meltdown at a nuclear power plant is a "core disruptive accident." Page 277 Doublespeak is useful when the government wants to get around a treaty that it no longer wants to honor.	Yuval Noah Harari Notable Quotations Full screen view Page xiii The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans. Page xiv The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem. Information is the glue that holds networks together. But for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions-about gods, about enchanted broomsticks, about AI, and about a great many other things. While each individual human is typically interested in knowing the truth about themselves and the world, large networks bind members and create order by relying on fictions and fantasies. Page xv in sufficient quantities information leads to truth, and truth in turn leads to both power and wisdom. Ignorance, in contrast, seems to lead nowhere. Page xvi Of course, the naive view acknowledges that many things can go wrong on the path from information to truth. However, the naive view assumes that the antidote to most problems we encounter in gathering and processing information is gathering and processing even more information. Wisdom is commonly understood to mean "making right decisions," but what "right" means depends on value judgments that differ among diverse people, cultures, and ideologies. Page xx the naive view of information sees only part of the picture, Page xxi AI could destroy our civilization.[ Such a scenario is unlikely, and it merely distracts people from the real dangers. Rather, experts warn about two other scenarios. First, the power of AI could supercharge existing human conflicts, Page xxii Second, the Silicon Curtain might come to divide not one group of humans from another but rather all humans from our new AI overlords. a web of unfathomable algorithms that manage our lives, AI is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. Knives and bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill. AI isn't a tool-it's an agent. Page xxiii Can we trust computer algorithms to make wise decisions and create a better world? In 2016, I published Homo Deus, the real hero of history has always been information, rather than Homo sapiens, and that scientists increasingly understand not just history but also biology, politics, and economics in terms of information flows. The book warned that while we hope better information technology will give us health, happiness, and power, it may actually take power away from us and destroy both our physical and our mental health. Page xxiv populism views information as a weapon.[20] Page xxiv In its more extreme versions, populism posits that there is no objective truth at all and that everyone has "their own truth," which they wield to vanquish rivals. Whenever and wherever populism succeeds in disseminating the view of information as a weapon, language itself is undermined. Page xxv Karl Marx, who argued in the mid-nineteenth century that power is the only reality, that information is a weapon, and that elites who claim to be serving truth and justice are in fact pursuing narrow class privileges. Page xxvi as a mouthpiece for the capitalist class, and that scientific institutions like universities spread disinformation in order to perpetuate capitalist control, populists accuse these same institutions of working to advance the interests of the "corrupt elites" at the expense of "the people." Page xxvii One of the recurrent paradoxes of populism is that it starts by warning us that all human elites are driven by a dangerous hunger for power, but often ends by entrusting all power to a single ambitious human. Page xxviii populists are eroding trust in large-scale institutions and international cooperation just when humanity confronts the existential challenges of ecological collapse, global war, and out-of-control technology. If we wish to avoid relinquishing power to a charismatic leader or an inscrutable AI, we must first gain a better understanding of what information is, how it helps to build human networks, and how it relates to truth and power. it explores key dilemmas that people in all eras faced when trying to construct information networks, and it examines how different answers to these dilemmas shaped contrasting human societies. Page xxix What we usually think of as ideological and political conflicts often turn out to be clashes between opposing types of information networks. Page xxix large-scale human information networks: mythology and bureaucracy. Institutions and societies are often defined by the balance they manage to find between the conflicting needs of their mythmakers and their bureaucrats. another contrast-between distributed and centralized information networks. Page xxx rise of AI is arguably the biggest information revolution in history. History isn't the study of the past; it is the study of change. Page xxxi Silicon chips can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget, and despots that never die. How will this change society, economics, and politics? Page 3 In everyday usage, "information" is associated with human-made symbols like spoken or written words. Page 7 the naive view argues that information is an attempt to represent reality, and when this attempt succeeds, we call it truth. truth is an accurate representation of reality. Most information in human society, and indeed in other biological and physical systems, does not represent anything. Throughout this book, "truth" is understood as something that accurately represents certain aspects of reality. Underlying the notion of truth is the premise that there exists one universal reality. While different people, nations, or cultures may have competing beliefs and feelings, they cannot possess contradictory truths, because they all share a universal reality. Anyone who rejects universalism rejects truth. Page 8 Another problem with any attempt to represent reality is that reality contains many viewpoints. Reality includes an objective level with objective facts that don't depend on people's beliefs; Page 9 Reality also includes a subjective level with subjective facts like the beliefs and feelings of various people, but in this case, too, facts can be separated from errors. Page 10 The point is that even the most truthful accounts of reality can never represent it in full. There are always some aspects of reality that are neglected or distorted in every representation. Truth, then, isn't a one-to-one representation of reality. Rather, truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring other aspects. No account of reality is 100 percent accurate, but some accounts are nevertheless more truthful than others. the naive view sees information as an attempt to represent reality. It is aware that some information doesn't represent reality well, but it dismisses this as unfortunate cases of "misinformation" or "disinformation." The naive view further believes that the solution to the problems caused by misinformation and disinformation is more information. Page 12 errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too. Page 12 what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things- Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, Information doesn't necessarily inform us about things. Rather, it puts things in formation. Page 14 Information is something that creates new realities by connecting different points into a network. This still includes the view of information as representation. Page 15 Viewing information as a social nexus helps us understand many aspects of human history that confound the naive view of information as representation. Page 16 To conclude, information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn't. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic. "How well does it connect people? What new network does it create?" Page 17 When we look at the history of information from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, we therefore see a constant rise in connectivity, without a concomitant rise in truthfulness or wisdom. Contrary to what the naive view believes, Homo sapiens didn't conquer the world because we are talented at turning information into an accurate map of reality. Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. We'll discuss how, over tens of thousands of years, humans invented various information technologies that greatly improved connectivity and cooperation without necessarily resulting in a more truthful representation of the world. Page 19 In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story. A story can thereby serve like a central connector, with an unlimited number of outlets into which an unlimited number of people can plug. Page 20 The social media accounts are usually run by a team of experts, and every image and word is professionally crafted and curated to manufacture what is nowadays called a brand.[5] A "brand" is a specific type of story. Page 22 It should be stressed that the creation of the Jesus story was not a deliberate lie. the result of emotional projections and wishful thinking. By gaining all those believers, the story of Jesus managed to have a much bigger impact on history than the person of Jesus. Page 23 the whole purpose of the Passover meal is to create and reenact artificial memories. Page 24 The Jewish Passover story builds a large network by taking existing biological kin bonds and stretching them. It creates an imagined family of millions. Page 27 Of all genres of stories, those that create intersubjective realities have been the most crucial for the development of large-scale human networks. Page 30 In fact, all relations between large-scale human groups are shaped by stories, because the identities of these groups are themselves defined by stories. Contrary to Marxist thinking, large-scale identities and interests in history are always intersubjective; they are never objective. Page 31 History is often shaped not by deterministic power relations, but rather by tragic mistakes that result from believing in mesmerizing but harmful stories. The naive view of information says that information leads to truth, and knowing the truth helps people to gain both power and wisdom. This sounds reassuring. Page 32 history, power stems only partially from knowing the truth. It also stems from the ability to maintain social order among a large number of people. If you build a bomb and ignore the facts of physics, the bomb will not explode. But if you build an ideology and ignore the facts, the ideology may still prove explosive. Page 33 What the people at the top know, which nuclear physicists don't always realize, is that telling the truth about the universe is hardly the most efficient way to produce order among large numbers of humans. When it comes to uniting people, fiction enjoys two inherent advantages over the truth. First, fiction can be made as simple as we like, whereas the truth tends to be complicated, because the reality it is supposed to represent is complicated. Second, the truth is often painful and disturbing, and if we try to make it more comforting and flattering, it will no longer be the truth. In contrast, fiction is highly malleable. Page 34 The choice isn't simply between telling the truth and lying. There is a third option. Telling a fictional story is lying only when you pretend that the story is a true representation Page 35 the U.S. Constitution was fundamentally different from stories that denied their fictive nature and claimed divine origin, such as the Ten Commandments. Page 37 to survive and flourish, every human information network needs to do two things simultaneously: discover truth and create order. Having a lot of information doesn't in and of itself guarantee either truth or order. It is a difficult process to use information to discover the truth and simultaneously use it to maintain order. What makes things worse is that these two processes are often contradictory, because it is frequently easier to maintain order through fictions. Page 38 What happens when the same bit of information reveals an important fact about the world, and also undermines the noble lie that holds society together? In such cases society may seek to preserve order by placing limits on the search for truth. While over the generations human networks have grown increasingly powerful, they have not necessarily grown increasingly wise. If a network privileges order over truth, it can become very powerful but use that power unwisely. Page 43 The big problem with lists, and the crucial difference between lists and stories, is that lists tend to be far more boring than stories, which means that while we easily remember stories, we find it difficult to remember lists. Page 44 Kendall Haven writes in his 2007 book, Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, Page 45 Unlike national poems and myths, which can be stored in our brains, complex national taxation and administration systems have required a unique nonorganic information technology in order to function. This technology is the written document. Page 46 Like stories and like all other information technologies in history, written documents didn't necessarily represent reality accurately. But whether true or false, written documents created new realities. documents changed the method used for creating intersubjective realities. Humans couldn't forge an intersubjective reality that their brains couldn't remember. This limit could be transcended, however, by writing documents. Page 47 In a literate state, to own a field increasingly came to mean that it is written on some clay tablet, bamboo strip, piece of paper, or silicon chip that you own that field. Page 48 As people produced more and more documents, finding them turned out to be far from easy. Written documents were much better than human brains in recording certain types of information. But they created a new and very thorny problem: retrieval. Page 49 Another common rule is that apples grow on apple trees, whereas figs grow on figs trees. So if you are looking for an apple, you first need to locate an apple tree, and then look up. It is very different with archives. Since documents aren't organisms, they don't obey any biological laws, and evolution didn't organize them for us. Bureaucracy is the way people in large organizations solved the retrieval problem and thereby created bigger and more powerful information networks. Page 50 But like mythology, bureaucracy too tends to sacrifice truth for order. Page 50 Many of the problems of our twenty-first-century information networks-like biased algorithms that mislabel people, or rigid protocols that ignore human needs and feelings-are not new problems of the computer age. They are quintessential bureaucratic problems that have existed long before anyone even dreamed of computers. Bureaucracy literally means "rule by writing desk." Bureaucracy seeks to solve the retrieval problem by dividing the world into drawers, and knowing which document goes into which drawer. Divide the world into containers, and keep the containers separate so the documents don't get mixed up. bureaucracy is often busy imposing a new and artificial order on the world. Page 51 The urge to divide reality into rigid drawers also leads bureaucrats to pursue narrow goals irrespective of the wider impact of their actions. Page 54 intersubjective conventions are themselves part of reality. Page 54 In defense of bureaucracy it should be noted that while it sometimes sacrifices truth and distorts our understanding of the world, it often does so for the sake of order, without which it would be hard to maintain any large-scale human network. Page 56 Mythology and bureaucracy are the twin pillars of every large-scale society. Yet while mythology tends to inspire fascination, bureaucracy tends to inspire suspicion. For all bureaucracies-good or bad-share one key characteristic: it is hard for humans to understand them. Page 57 In tribal societies that lack written documents and bureaucracies, the human network is composed of only human-to-human and human-to-story chains. Authority belongs to the people who control the junctions that link the various chains. These junctions are the tribe's foundational myths. Charismatic leaders, orators, and mythmakers know how to use these stories in order to shape identities, build alliances, and sway emotions. Page 58 As documents became a crucial nexus linking many social chains, considerable power came to be invested in these documents, and experts in the arcane logic of documents emerged as new authority figures. In bureaucratic systems, power often comes from understanding how to manipulate obscure budgetary loopholes and from knowing your way around the labyrinths of offices, committees, and subcommittees. For better or worse, literate bureaucracies tended to strengthen the central authority at the expense of ordinary citizens. Page 59 biological drama, sibling rivalry, romantic triangle "Boy meets girlc and "boy fights boy over girl" tension between purity and impurity, Page 61 The list of biological dramas that press our emotional buttons includes several additional classics, such as "Who will be alpha?""Us versus them," and "Good versus evil." Page 62 Storytellers like Franz Kafka, who focused on the often surreal ways that bureaucracy shapes human lives, pioneered new nonbiological plotlines. In Kafka's The Trial, the bank clerk K. is arrested by unidentified officials of an unfathomable agency for an unnamed crime. Whereas stories about heroes who confront monsters-from the Ramayana to Spider-Man-repackage the biological dramas of confronting predators and romantic rivals, the unique horror of Kafkaesque stories comes from the unfathomability of the threat. Page 63 The difficulty of depicting and understanding bureaucratic realities has had unfortunate results. On the one hand, it leaves people feeling helpless in the face of harmful powers they do not understand, like the hero of The Trial. On the other hand, it also leaves people with the impression that bureaucracy is a malign conspiracy, even in cases when it is in fact a benign force providing us with health care, security, and justice. Page 66 government stepped in to offer a solution to the imaginary problem invented by its own propaganda. Page 68 All powerful information networks can do both good and ill, depending on how they are designed and used. Merely increasing the quantity of information in a network doesn't guarantee its benevolence, or make it any easier to find the right balance between truth and order. That is a key historical lesson for the designers and users of the new information networks of the twenty-first century. AI is taking up the role of both bureaucrats and mythmakers. AI systems know how to find and process data better than flesh- and- blood bureaucrats, and AI is also acquiring the ability to compose stories better than most humans. We have now seen that information networks don't maximize truth, but rather seek to find a balance between truth and order. Bureaucracy and mythology are both essential for maintaining order, and both are happy to sacrifice truth for the sake of order. The way human information networks have dealt with the problem of errors Page 69 Holy books like the Bible and the Quran are an information technology that is meant to both include all the vital information society needs and be free from all possibility of error. Page 71 In our personal lives, religion can fulfill many different functions, like providing solace or explaining the mysteries of life. But historically, the most important function of religion has been to provide superhuman legitimacy for the social order. At the heart of every religion lies the fantasy of connecting to a superhuman and infallible intelligence. Page 72 Religion wanted to take fallible humans out of the loop and give people access to infallible superhuman laws, but religion repeatedly boiled down to trusting this or that human. Page 73 Holy books like the Bible and the Quran are a technology to bypass human fallibility, and religions of the book-like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-have been built around that technological artifact. Page 75 The Bible as a single holy book didn't exist in biblical times. King David and the prophet Isaiah never saw a copy of the Bible. Page 79 A second and much bigger problem concerned interpretation. Even when people agree on the sanctity of a book and on its exact wording, they can still interpret the same words in different ways. Page 80 More problems resulted from the fact that even if the technology of the book succeeded in limiting changes to the holy words, the world beyond the book continued to spin, and it was unclear how to relate old rules to new situations. As Jews increasingly argued over the interpretation of the Bible, rabbis gained more power and prestige. Writing down the word of Jehovah was supposed to limit the authority of the old priestly institution, but it gave rise to the authority of a new rabbinical institution. Page 81 The dream of bypassing fallible human institutions through the technology of the holy book never materialized. Page 86 It is crucial to note that the people who created the New Testament weren't the authors of the twenty-seven texts it contains; they were the curators. Page 88 Just as most Jews forgot that rabbis curated the Old Testament, so most Christians forgot that church councils curated the New Testament, and came to view it simply as the infallible word of God. Page 89 As time passed, problems of interpretation increasingly tilted the balance of power between the holy book and the church in favor of the institution. Page 90 the church couldn't prevent the occasional freethinker from formulating heretical ideas. But because it controlled key nodes in the medieval information network-such as copying workshops, archives, and libraries-it could prevent such a heretic from making and distributing a hundred copies of her book. Page 91 If infallible texts merely lead to the rise of fallible and oppressive churches, how then to deal with the problem of human error? Page 91 The naive view expects that if all restrictions on the free flow of information are removed, error will inevitably be exposed and displaced by truth. Page 92 In the history of information networks, the print revolution of early modern Europe is usually hailed as a moment of triumph, breaking the stranglehold that the Catholic Church had maintained over the European information network. But print wasn't the root cause of the scientific revolution. In fact, print allowed the rapid spread not only of scientific facts but also of religious fantasies, fake news, and conspiracy theories. Page 96 While it would be an exaggeration to argue that the invention of print caused the European witch-hunt craze, the printing press played a pivotal role in the rapid dissemination of the belief in a global satanic conspiracy. Page 98 Nobody in early modern Europe had sex with Satan or was capable of flying on broomsticks and creating hailstorms. But witches became an intersubjective reality. Like money, witches were made real by exchanging information about witches. Page 99 The new intersubjective reality was so convincing that even some people accused of witchcraft came to believe that they were indeed part of a worldwide satanic conspiracy. Page 101 "there were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about."[ Page 102 The history of print and witch-hunting indicates that an unregulated information market doesn't necessarily lead people to identify and correct their errors, because it may well prioritize outrage over truth. The curation institutions that played a central role in the scientific revolution connected scholars and researchers both in and out of universities, forging an information network that spanned the whole of Europe and eventually the world. For the scientific revolution to gather pace, scientists had to trust information published by colleagues in distant lands. Page 103 In other words, the scientific revolution was launched by the discovery of ignorance.[ Page 104 The trademark of science is not merely skepticism but self-skepticism, and at the heart of every scientific institution we find a strong self-correcting mechanism. As an information technology, the self-correcting mechanism is the polar opposite of the holy book. Page 105 Self-correcting mechanisms are ubiquitous in nature. Institutions, too, die without self-correcting mechanisms. These mechanisms start with the realization that humans are fallible and corruptible. But instead of despairing of humans and looking for a way to bypass them, the institution actively seeks its own errors and corrects them. All institutions that manage to endure beyond a handful of years possess such mechanisms, but institutions differ greatly in the strength and visibility of their self-correcting mechanisms. Page 110 Scientific institutions maintain that even if most scientists in a particular period believe something to be true, it may yet turn out to be inaccurate or incomplete. Page 110 Crucially, scientific institutions are willing to admit their institutional responsibility for major mistakes and crimes. Page 115 An institution can call itself by whatever name it wants, but if it lacks a strong self-correcting mechanism, it is not a scientific institution. Page 116 order by itself isn't necessarily good. Page 116 Scientific institutions have been able to afford their strong self-correcting mechanisms because they leave the difficult job of preserving the social order to other institutions. Page 118 democracy and dictatorship as contrasting types of information networks. Dictatorial information networks are highly centralized.[ the center enjoys unlimited authority; Page 119 The second characteristic of dictatorial networks is that they assume the center is infallible. To summarize, a dictatorship is a centralized information network, lacking strong self- correcting mechanisms. A democracy, in contrast, is a distributed information network, possessing strong self- correcting mechanisms. Page 121 while a dictatorship is about one central information hub dictating everything, a democracy is an ongoing conversation between diverse information nodes. Page 122 democracy is not a system in which a majority of any size can decide to exterminate unpopular minorities; it is a system in which there are clear limits on the power of the center. Page 123 The most common method strongmen use to undermine democracy is to attack its self-correcting mechanisms one by one, often beginning with the courts and the media. The typical strongman either deprives courts of their powers or packs them with his loyalists and seeks to close all independent media outlets while building his own omnipresent propaganda machine.[5] The strongmen don't usually take the final step of abolishing the elections outright. Instead, they keep them as a ritual that serves to provide legitimacy and maintain a democratic facade, as happens, for example, in Putin's Russia. Page 125 least from the viewpoint of information flows, what defines a system as "democratic" is only that its center doesn't have unlimited authority and that the system possesses robust mechanisms to correct the center's mistakes. Page 126 Democratic networks assume that everyone is fallible, and that includes even the winners of elections and the majority of voters. Page 126 Elections establish what the majority of people desire, rather than what the truth is. And people often desire the truth to be other than what it is. Democratic networks therefore maintain some self-correcting mechanisms to protect the truth even from the will of the majority. Page 127 the majority should at least acknowledge its own fallibility and protect the freedom of minorities to hold and publicize unpopular views, which might turn out to be correct. the one option that should not be on offer in elections is hiding or distorting the truth. Page 128 Naturally, academic institutions, the media, and the judiciary may themselves be compromised by corruption, bias, or error. But subordinating them to a governmental Ministry of Truth is likely to make things worse. Allowing the government to supervise the search for truth is like appointing the fox to guard the chicken coop. academic institutions, the media, and the judiciary have their own internal self-correcting mechanisms for fighting corruption, correcting bias, and exposing error. the existence of several independent institutions that seek the truth in different ways allows these institutions to check and correct one another. For example, if powerful corporations manage to break down the peer-review mechanism None of these mechanisms are completely fail-safe, but no human institution is. Government certainly isn't. Page 129 If all this sounds complicated, it is because democracy should be complicated. Simplicity is a characteristic of dictatorial information networks in which the center dictates everything and everybody silently obeys. The term "populism" derives from the Latin populus, which means "the people." In democracies, "the people" is considered the sole legitimate source of political authority. Only representatives of the people should have the authority to declare wars, pass laws, and raise taxes. Populists cherish this basic democratic principle, but somehow conclude from it that a single party or a single leader should monopolize all power. Page 130 Even if they win just a small share of votes, populists may still believe they alone represent the people. populists can believe that the enemies of the people have deceived the people to vote against its true will, which the populists alone represent. "the people" is not a collection of flesh-and-blood individuals with various interests and opinions, but rather a unified mystical body that possesses a single will-"the will of the people." Page 131 The Nazi case is of course extreme, and it is grossly unfair to accuse all populists of being crypto-Nazis with genocidal inclinations. What turns someone into a populist is claiming that they alone represent the people and that anyone who disagrees with them-whether state bureaucrats, minority groups, or even the majority of voters-either suffers from false consciousness or isn't really part of the people. This is why populism poses a deadly threat to democracy. Page 132 Having claimed that they alone represent the people, populists argue that the people is not just the sole legitimate source of political authority but the sole legitimate source of all authority. Any institution that derives its authority from something other than the will of the people is antidemocratic. populists consequently seek to monopolize not just political authority but all types of authority and to take control of institutions such as media outlets, courts, and universities. By taking the democratic principle of "people's power" to its extreme, populists turn totalitarian. populists to be skeptical of the pursuit of truth, and to argue-as we saw in the prologue-that "power is the only reality." The result is a dark and cynical view of the world as a jungle and of human beings as creatures obsessed with power alone. Page 133 Biologists, climatologists, epidemiologists, economists, historians, and mathematicians are just another interest group feathering its own nest-at the expense of the people. Page 133 Populism offers strongmen an ideological basis for making themselves dictators while pretending to be democrats. Page 134 Once people think that power is the only reality, they lose trust in all these institutions, democracy collapses, and the strongmen can seize total power. Of course, populism could lead to anarchy rather than totalitarianism, if it undermines trust in the strongmen themselves. When trust in bureaucratic institutions like election boards, courts, and newspapers is particularly low, an enhanced reliance on mythology is the only way to preserve order. Strongmen who claim to represent the people may well rise to power through democratic means, and often rule behind a democratic facade. Rigged elections in which they win overwhelming majorities serve as proof of the mystical bond between the leader and the people. Page 135 If one person dictates all the decisions, and even their closest advisers are terrified to voice a dissenting view, no conversation is taking place. Such a network is situated at the extreme dictatorial end of the spectrum. The focus on conversations rather than elections raises a host of interesting questions. Page 136 Scathing public attacks on the government are a daily occurrence. But where is the room where the crucial conversations happen, and who sits there? Based on the above definition of democracy, we can now turn to the historical record and examine how changes in information technology and information flows have shaped the history of democracy. Page 138 In the millennia following the agricultural revolution, and especially after writing helped create large bureaucratic polities, it became easier to centralize the flow of information and harder to maintain the democratic conversation. As the size of polities continued to increase, and city-states were superseded by larger kingdoms and empires, even Athenian-style partial democracy disappeared. All the famous examples of ancient democracies are city-states such as Athens and Rome. In contrast, we don't know of any large-scale kingdom or empire that operated along democratic lines. Page 140 By the third century CE, not only the Roman Empire but all other major human societies on earth were centralized information networks lacking strong self-correcting mechanisms. Thousands of more small-scale societies continued to function democratically in the third century CE and beyond, but it seemed that distributed democratic networks were simply incompatible with large-scale societies. Page 141 How do we know whether democracies fail because they are undermined by strongmen or because of much deeper structural and technological reasons? The key misconception here is equating democracy with elections. Tens of millions of Roman citizens could theoretically vote for this or that imperial candidate. But the real question is whether tens of millions of Romans could have held an ongoing empire-wide political conversation. In the present-day United States the democratic conversation is endangered by people's inability to listen to and respect their political rivals, yet this can presumably still be fixed. Page 142 To hold a conversation, it is not enough to have the freedom to talk and the ability to listen. There are also two technical preconditions. First, people need to be within hearing range of one another. with the help of some kind of information technology that can swiftly convey what people say over long distances. Second, people need at least a rudimentary understanding of what they are talking about. The only way to have a large-scale political conversation among diverse groups of people is if people can gain some understanding of issues that they have never experienced firsthand. In a large polity, it is a crucial role of the education system and the media to inform people about things they have never faced themselves. If there is no education system or media platform to perform this role, no meaningful large-scale conversations can take place. Page 144 The lack of a meaningful public conversation was not the fault of Augustus, Nero, Caracalla, or any of the other emperors. They didn't sabotage Roman democracy. Given the size of the empire and the available information technology, democracy was simply unworkable. It should be stressed that in many large-scale autocracies local affairs were often managed democratically. Page 145 Even in empires whose rulers never had any democratic pretensions, democracy could still flourish in local settings. In tsarist villages and Roman cities a form of democracy was possible because a meaningful public conversation was possible. Page 146 Mass media are information technologies that can quickly connect millions of people even when they are separated by vast distances. Page 148 The newspaper is a periodic pamphlet, and it was different from earlier one-off pamphlets because it had a much stronger self-correcting mechanism. Unlike one-off publications, a weekly or daily newspaper has a chance to correct its mistakes and an incentive to do so in order to win the public's trust. Newspapers that succeeded in gaining widespread trust became the architects and mouthpieces of public opinion. They created a far more informed and engaged public, which changed the nature of politics, first in the Netherlands and later around the world.[ Page 151 You may wonder whether we are talking about democracies at all. At a time when the United States had more slaves than voters (more than 1.5 million Americans were enslaved in the early 1820s),[50] was the United States really a democracy? As noted earlier, democracy and autocracy aren't absolutes; they are part of a continuum. voting is not the only thing that counts. stronger self-correcting mechanisms. Page 152 It was these self-correcting mechanisms that gradually enabled the United States to expand the franchise, abolish slavery, and turn itself into a more inclusive democracy. Page 153 to press a button while sitting in their homes. Large-scale democracy had now become feasible. Millions of people separated by thousands of kilometers could conduct informed and meaningful public debates about the rapidly evolving issues of the day. Mass media made large-scale democracy possible, rather than inevitable. Page 154 an autocratic network, there are no legal limits on the will of the ruler, but there are nevertheless a lot of technical limits. In a totalitarian network, many of these technical limits are absent.[58] Page 155 Totalitarianism is the attempt to control what every person throughout the country is doing and saying every moment of the day, and potentially even what every person is thinking and feeling. Page 155 Emperors, caliphs, shahs, and kings found it a huge challenge to keep their subordinates in check. Rulers consequently focused their attention on controlling the military and the taxation Page 160 Full-blown totalitarianism might have been dreamed about by the likes of the Qin, but its implementation had to wait for the development of modern technology. Just as modern technology enabled large-scale democracy, it also made large-scale totalitarianism possible. Page 162 While in most polities throughout history the army had wielded enormous political power, in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes the regular army ceded much of its clout to the secret police-the information army. what made the secret police powerful was its command of information. Page 164 Totalitarian regimes are based on controlling the flow of information and are suspicious of any independent channels of information. key tenet of totalitarian regimes is that wherever people meet and exchange information, the regime should be there too, to keep an eye on them. Page 168 created an entire nonexistent category of enemies. Page 176 We see then that the new information technology of the late modern era gave rise to both large-scale democracy and large-scale totalitarianism. differences between how the two systems used information technology. it allows many independent nodes to process the information and make decisions by themselves. Information freely circulates In contrast, totalitarianism wants all information to pass through the central hub and doesn't want any independent institutions making decisions on their own. The biggest advantage of the centralized totalitarian network is that it is extremely orderly, which means it can make decisions quickly and enforce them ruthlessly. Page 177 if the official channels are blocked, the information cannot find an alternative means of transmission. fearful subordinates hide bad news from their superiors. Another common reason why official channels fail to pass on information is to preserve order. Page 178 "Americans grow up with the idea that questions lead to answers," he said. "But Soviet citizens grew up with the idea that questions lead to trouble." in a distributed democratic network, when official lines of communication are blocked, information flows through alternative channels. Page 179 Totalitarian and authoritarian self-correcting mechanisms tend to be very weak. Nobody can challenge the leader, and on his own initiative the leader-being a human being-may well refuse to admit any mistakes. Page 184 The relentless barrage of fake news and conspiracy theories helped to keep hundreds of millions of people in line. Page 185 Once we learn to see democracy and totalitarianism as different types of information networks, we can understand why they flourish in certain eras and are absent in others. Page 186 Technology only creates new opportunities; it is up to us to decide which ones to pursue. Totalitarian regimes choose to use modern information technology to centralize the flow of information and to stifle truth in order to maintain order. Democratic regimes choose to use modern information technology to distribute the flow of information between more institutions and individuals and encourage the free pursuit of truth. They consequently have to struggle with the danger of fracturing. Page 187 The pressure to live up to the democratic ideals and to include more people and groups in the public conversation seemed to undermine the social order and to make democracy unworkable. Page 188 Western democracies not only surged ahead technologically and economically but also succeeded in holding the social order together despite-or perhaps because of-widening the circle of participants in the political conversation. Page 189 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it accordingly seemed that the future belonged to distributed information networks and to democracy. This turned out to be wrong. Democracies in the 2020s face the task, once again, of integrating a flood of new voices into the public conversation without destroying the social order. As humankind enters the second quarter of the twenty-first century, a central question is how well democracies and totalitarian regimes will handle both the threats and the opportunities resulting from the current information revolution. As in previous eras, information networks will struggle to find the right balance between truth and order. Some will opt to prioritize truth and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms. Others will make the opposite choice. Page 190 Hitherto, every information network in history relied on human mythmakers and human bureaucrats to function. Page 193 the current information revolution, Page 193 is the computer. Everything else-from the internet to AI-is a by-product. Page 194 the moment it is enough to say that in essence a computer is a machine that can potentially do two remarkable things: it can make decisions by itself, and it can create new ideas by itself. The rise of intelligent machines that can make decisions and create new ideas means that for the first time in history power is shifting away from humans and toward something else. Page 195 A paradigmatic case of the novel power of computers is the role that social media algorithms have played in spreading hatred and undermining social cohesion in numerous countries.[ Page 197 The crucial thing to grasp is that social media algorithms are fundamentally different from printing presses and radio sets. Facebook's algorithms were making active and fateful decisions by themselves. Page 198 The algorithms could have chosen to recommend sermons on compassion or cooking classes, but they decided to spread hate-filled conspiracy theories. Page 199 But why did the algorithms decide to promote outrage rather than compassion? As user engagement increased, so Facebook collected more data, sold more advertisements, and captured a larger share of the information market. human managers provided the company's algorithms with a single overriding goal: increase user engagement. outrage generated engagement. Page 200 AI algorithms. can learn by themselves things that no human engineer programmed, and they can decide things that no human executive foresaw. Page 201 intelligence and consciousness are very different. Intelligence is the ability to attain goals, such as maximizing user engagement on a social media platform. Consciousness is the ability to experience subjective feelings like pain, pleasure, love, and hate. Bacteria and plants apparently lack any consciousness, yet they too display intelligence. Page 202 Of course, as computers become more intelligent, they might eventually develop consciousness and have some kind of subjective experiences. Then again, they might become far more intelligent than us, but never develop any kind of feelings. Page 205 Prior to the rise of computers, humans were indispensable links in every chain of information networks like churches and states. In contrast, computer-to-computer chains can now function without humans in the loop. Another way to understand the difference between computers and all previous technologies is that computers are fully fledged members of the information network, whereas clay tablets, printing presses, and radio sets are merely connections between members. Page 207 power depends on how many members cooperate with you, how well you understand law and finance, and how capable you are of inventing new laws and new kinds of financial devices, then computers are poised to amass far more power than humans. Page 208 By gaining such command of language, computers are seizing the master key unlocking the doors of all our institutions, from banks to temples. We use language to create not just legal codes and financial devices but also art, science, nations, and religions. What would it mean for humans to live in a world where catchy melodies, scientific theories, technical tools, political manifestos, and even religious myths are shaped by a nonhuman alien intelligence that knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency the weaknesses, biases, and addictions of the human mind? Page 209 Equally alarmingly, we might increasingly find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions with entities that we think are humans but are actually computers. This could make democracy untenable. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. By hacking language, computers could make it extremely difficult for large numbers of humans to conduct a meaningful public conversation. Page 210 When we engage in a political debate with a computer impersonating a human, we lose twice. First, it is pointless for us to waste time in trying to change the opinions of a propaganda bot, which is just not open to persuasion. Second, the more we talk with the computer, the more we disclose about ourselves, thereby making it easier for the bot to hone its arguments and sway our views. By conversing and interacting with us, computers could form intimate relationships with people and then use the power of intimacy to influence us. In the 2010s social media was a battleground for controlling human attention. In the 2020s the battle is likely to shift from attention to intimacy. Page 211 What we are talking about is potentially the end of human history. Not the end of history, but the end of its human-dominated part. Page 212 What will happen to the course of history when computers play a larger and larger role in culture and begin producing stories, laws, and religions? Within a few years AI could eat the whole of human culture-everything we have created over thousands of years-digest it, and begin to gush out a flood of new cultural artifacts. At first, computers will probably imitate human cultural prototypes, writing humanlike texts and composing humanlike music. This doesn't mean computers lack creativity; after all, human artists do the same. computers too can make cultural innovations, These innovations will in turn influence the next generation of computers, which will increasingly deviate from the original human models, Page 213 But in order to manipulate humans, there is no need to physically hook brains to computers. For thousands of years prophets, poets, and politicians have used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now computers are learning how to do it. Page 214 In theory, the text you've just read might have been generated by the alien intelligence of some computer. As computers amass power, it is likely that a completely new information network will emerge. Of course, not everything will be new. Page 215 computer-to-computer chains are emerging in which computers interact with one another on their own. Page 216 In computer evolution, the distance from amoeba to T. rex could be covered in a decade. Page 219 we humans are still in control. Tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, and Alibaba aren't just the obedient servants of customer whims and government regulations. They increasingly shape these whims and regulations. Page 221 Local newspapers, TV stations, and movie theaters lose customers and ad revenue to the tech giants. Page 222 In tax literature, "nexus" means an entity's connection to a given jurisdiction. In the words of the economist Marko Köthenbürger, "The definition of nexus based on a physical presence should be adjusted to include the notion of a digital presence in a country."[ Page 223 money will soon become outdated as many transactions no longer involve money. rather than as dollars, taxing only money distorts the economic and political picture. Page 224 Taxation is just one among many problems created by the computer revolution. The computer network is disrupting almost all power structures. Democracies fear the rise of new digital dictatorships. Dictatorships fear the emergence of agents they don't know how to control. Everyone should be concerned about the elimination of privacy and the spread of data colonialism. Page 224 technology is moving much faster than the policy. Page 225 The people who lead the information revolution know far more about the underlying technology than the people who are supposed to regulate it. Page 226 How would it feel to be constantly monitored, guided, inspired, or sanctioned by billions of nonhuman entities? The most important thing to remember is that technology, in itself, is seldom deterministic. Yes, since human societies are information networks, inventing new information technologies is bound to change society. humans still have a lot of control over the pace, shape, and direction of this revolution- Page 228 Engineers working for authoritarian governments and ruthless corporations could develop new tools to empower the central authority, by monitoring citizens and customers twenty-four hours a day. Hackers working for democracies may develop new tools to strengthen society's self-correcting mechanisms, by exposing government corruption and corporate malpractices. Both technologies could be developed. The knife doesn't force our hand. Though radio sets in East Germany could technically receive a wide range of transmissions, the East German government did its best to jam Western broadcasts and punished people who secretly tuned in to them.[55] The technology was the same, but politics made very different uses of it. Page 229 To understand the new computer politics, we need a deeper understanding of what's new about computers. In this chapter we noted that unlike printing presses and other previous tools, computers can make decisions by themselves and can create ideas by themselves. That, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. What's really new about computers is the way they make decisions and create ideas. Page 230 When centralized bureaucratic networks appeared and developed, one of the bureaucrats' most important roles was to monitor entire populations. Page 230 Of course, surveillance has also been essential for providing beneficial services. Page 231 In order to get to know us, both benign and oppressive bureaucracies have needed to do two things. gather a lot of data about us. analyze all that data and identify patterns. However, in all times and places surveillance has been incomplete. In democracies like the modern United States, legal limits have been placed on surveillance to protect privacy and individual rights. In totalitarian regimes like the ancient Qin Empire and the modern U.S.S.R., surveillance faced no such legal barriers but came up against technical boundaries. Page 234 By 2024, we are getting close to the point when a ubiquitous computer network can follow the population of entire countries twenty-four hours a day. Page 235 Just as the computer network doesn't need millions of human agents to follow us, it also doesn't need millions of human analysts to make sense of our data. In 2024 language algorithms like ChatGPT and Meta's Llama can process millions of words per minute and "read" 2.6 billion words in a couple of hours. The ability of such algorithms to process images, audio recordings, and video footage is equally superhuman. Page 237 course, pattern recognition also has enormous positive potential. we must first appreciate the fundamental difference between the new digital bureaucrats and their flesh-and-blood predecessors. As fish live in water, humans live in a digital bureaucracy, constantly inhaling and exhaling data. Each action we make leaves a trace of data, which is gathered and analyzed to identify patterns. Page 239 In theory, the dictators of the future could get their computer network to go much deeper than just watching our eyes. If the network wants to know our political views, personality traits, and sexual orientation, it could monitor processes inside our hearts and brains. The necessary biometric technology is already being developed by some governments and companies, nobody yet has the biological knowledge necessary to deduce things like precise political opinions from under-the-skin data like brain activity. Page 240 biometric sensors register what happens to the heart rate and brain activity of millions of people as they watch a particular news item on their smartphones, that can teach the computer network far more than just our general political affiliation. The network could learn precisely what makes each human angry, fearful, or joyful. Page 241 In a world where humans monitored humans, privacy was the default. But in a world where computers monitor humans, it may become possible for the first time in history to completely annihilate privacy. The post-privacy era is taking hold in authoritarian countries ranging from Belarus to Zimbabwe,[23] as well as in democratic metropolises like London and New York. or able to install cameras inside people's homes, algorithms regularly watch us even in our living rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms via our own computers and smartphones.) Page 243 Facial recognition algorithms and AI-searchable databases are now routinely used by police forces all over the world. Page 250 Peer-to-peer surveillance systems typically operate by aggregating many points to determine an overall score. Page 251 For scoring those things that money can't buy, there was an alternative nonmonetary system, which has been given different names: honor, status, reputation. What social credit systems seek is a standardized valuation of the reputation market. Social credit is a new points system that ascribes precise values even to smiles and family visits. Page 252 Some people might see social credit systems as a way to reward pro- social behavior, punish egotistical acts, and create kinder and more harmonious societies. The Chinese government, for example, explains that its social credit systems could help fight corruption, scams, tax evasion, false advertising, and counterfeiting, and thereby establish more trust between individuals, between consumers and corporations, and between citizens and government institutions.[ 50] Others may find systems that allocate precise values to every social action demeaning and inhuman. Even worse, a comprehensive social credit system will annihilate privacy and effectively turn life into a never- ending job interview. Page 254 network of computers can always be on. Computers are consequently pushing humans toward a new kind of existence in which we are always connected and always monitored. Page 258 the computer networks of the twenty-first century, which might create new types of humans and new dystopias. Page 258 radicalizing people. Page 261 We have reached a turning point in history in which major historical processes are partly caused by the decisions of nonhuman intelligence. Page 261 Computer errors become potentially catastrophic only when computers become historical agents. Page 264 To tilt the balance in favor of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth telling. These self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them. Page 265 Instead of investing in self-correcting mechanisms that would reward truth telling, the social media giants actually developed unprecedented error-enhancing mechanisms that rewarded lies and fictions. Page 266 I don't want to imply that the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories is the main problem with all past, present, and future computer networks. Page 266 We also shouldn't discount the huge social benefits that YouTube, Facebook, and other social media platforms have brought. Page 267 When computers are given a specific goal, such as to increase YouTube traffic to one billion hours a day, they use all their power and ingenuity to achieve this goal. Page 272 the more powerful the computer, the more careful we need to be about defining its goal in a way that precisely aligns with our ultimate goals. Page 274 As we give algorithms greater and greater power over health care, education, law enforcement, and numerous other fields, the alignment problem will loom ever larger. Page 274 In theory, when humans create a computer network, they must define for it an ultimate goal, which the computers are never allowed to change or ignore. Page 274 Then, even if computers become so powerful that we lose control over them, we can rest assured that their immense power will benefit rather than harm us. Unless, of course, it turned out that we defined a harmful or vague goal. Page 276 alignment. A tactical maneuver is rational if, and only if, it is aligned with some higher strategic goal, which should in turn be aligned with an even higher political goal. Page 277 Tech executives and engineers who rush to develop AI are making a huge mistake if they think there is a rational way to tell AI what its ultimate goal should be. They should learn from the bitter experiences of generations of philosophers who tried to define ultimate goals and failed. For millennia, philosophers have been looking for a definition of an ultimate goal that will not depend on an alignment to some higher goal. They have repeatedly been drawn to two potential solutions, known in philosophical jargon as deontology and utilitarianism. Deontologists (from the Greek word deon, meaning "duty") believe that there are some universal moral duties, or moral rules, that apply to everyone. These rules do not rely on alignment to a higher goal, but rather on their intrinsic goodness. If such rules indeed exist, and if we can find a way to program them into computers, then we can make sure the computer network will be a force for good. Page 280 rules often end up the captives of local myths. This problem with deontology is especially critical if we try to dictate universal deontologist rules not to humans but to computers. Computers aren't even organic. So if they follow a rule of "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you," why should they be concerned about killing organisms like humans? Page 281 The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham-another contemporary of Napoleon, Clausewitz, and Kant-said that the only rational ultimate goal is to minimize suffering in the world and maximize happiness. If our main fear about computer networks is that their misaligned goals might inflict terrible suffering on humans and perhaps on other sentient beings, then the utilitarian solution seems both obvious and attractive. Unfortunately, as with the deontologist solution, what sounds simple in the theoretical realm of philosophy becomes fiendishly complex in the practical land of history. We don't know how many "suffering points" or "happiness points" to assign to particular events, so in complex historical situations it is extremely difficult to calculate whether a given action increases or decreases the overall amount of suffering in the world. Page 284 while utilitarianism promises a rational-and even mathematical-way to align every action with "the ultimate good," in practice it may well produce just another mythology. Page 284 How then did bureaucratic systems throughout history set their ultimate goals? They relied on mythology to do it for them. Page 285 The alignment problem turns out to be, at heart, a problem of mythology. one of the most important things to realize about computers is that when a lot of computers communicate with one another, they can create inter-computer realities, analogous to the intersubjective realities produced by networks of humans. These inter-computer realities may eventually become as powerful-and as dangerous-as human-made intersubjective myths. Page 286 Just as intersubjective realities like money and gods can influence the physical reality outside people's minds, so inter-computer realities can influence reality outside the computers. The Google algorithm determines the website's Google rank by assigning points to various parameters, such as how many people visit the website and how many other websites link to it. The rank itself is an inter-computer reality, existing in a network connecting billions of computers-the internet. Page 288 Increasingly, however, understanding American politics will necessitate understanding inter-computer realities ranging from AI-generated cults and currencies to AI-run political parties and even fully incorporated AIs. The U.S. legal system already recognizes corporations as legal persons that possess rights such as freedom of speech. Page 288 In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) the U.S. Supreme Court decided that this even protected the right of corporations to make political donations.[ What would stop AIs from being incorporated and recognized as legal persons with freedom of speech, then lobbying and making political donations to protect and expand AI rights? Page 289 The problem we face is not how to deprive computers of all creative agency, but rather how to steer their creativity in the right direction. Page 291 As computers replace humans in more and more bureaucracies, from tax collection and health care to security and justice, they too may create a mythology and impose it on us with unprecedented efficiency. In a world ruled by paper documents, bureaucrats had difficulty policing racial borderlines or tracking everyone's exact ancestry. People could get false documents. For example, social credit systems could create a new underclass of "low- credit people." Such a system may claim to merely "discover" the truth through an empirical and mathematical process of aggregating points to form an overall score. But how exactly would it define pro- social and antisocial behaviors? Page 294 The fundamental principle of machine learning is that algorithms can teach themselves new things by interacting with the world, just as humans do, thereby producing a fully fledged artificial intelligence. AI is not a dumb automaton that repeats the same movements again and again irrespective of the results. Rather, it is equipped with strong self-correcting mechanisms, which allow it to learn from its own mistakes. Page 296 if real-life companies already suffer from some ingrained bias, the baby algorithm is likely to learn this bias, and even amplify it. Page 297 But getting rid of algorithmic bias might be as difficult as ridding ourselves of our human biases. Page 298 A social media algorithm thinks it has discovered that humans like outrage, when in fact it is the algorithm itself that conditioned humans to produce and consume more outrage. We saw in chapter 4 that already thousands of years ago humans dreamed about finding an infallible information technology to shield us from human corruption and error. Holy books were an audacious attempt to craft such a technology, but they backfired. Since the book couldn't interpret itself, a human institution had to be built to interpret the sacred words and adapt them to changing circumstances. Page 299 But in contrast to the holy book, computers can adapt themselves to changing circumstances and also interpret their decisions and ideas for us. Some humans may consequently conclude that the quest for an infallible technology has finally succeeded and that we should treat computers as a holy book that can talk to us and interpret itself, without any need of an intervening human institution. Page 299 algorithms are independent agents, and they are already taking power away from Page 300 One potential guardrail is to train computers to be aware of their own fallibility. As Socrates taught, being able to say "I don't know" is an essential step on the path to wisdom. And this is true of computer wisdom no less than of human wisdom. Baby algorithms should learn to doubt themselves, should keep humans in the loop, Page 301 To conclude, the new computer network will not necessarily be either bad or good. All we know for sure is that it will be alien and it will be fallible. We therefore need to build institutions that will be able to check not just familiar human weaknesses like greed and hatred but also radically alien errors. Page 309 the end of the twentieth century, it had become clear that imperialism, totalitarianism, and militarism were not the ideal way to build industrial societies. Despite all its flaws, liberal democracy offered a better way. The great advantage of liberal democracy is that it possesses strong self-correcting mechanisms, which limit the excesses of fanaticism and preserve the ability to recognize our errors and try different courses of action. Given our inability to predict how the new computer network will develop, our best chance to avoid catastrophe in the present century is to maintain democratic self-correcting mechanisms that can identify and correct mistakes as we go along. Page 310 Democracies can choose to use the new powers of surveillance in a limited way, in order to provide citizens with better health care and security without destroying their privacy and autonomy. Page 311 The first principle is benevolence. When a computer network collects information on me, that information should be used to help me rather than manipulate me. Having access to our personal life comes with a fiduciary duty to act in our best interests. Page 312 the tech giants cannot square their fiduciary duty with their current business model, legislators could require them to switch to a more traditional business model, of getting users to pay for services in money rather than in information. The second principle that would protect democracy against the rise of totalitarian surveillance regimes is decentralization. the survival of democracy, some inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. To protect the privacy and liberty of individuals, it's best if neither the police nor the boss knows everything about us. Page 313 A third democratic principle is mutuality. If democracies increase surveillance of individuals, they must simultaneously increase surveillance of governments and corporations too. What's bad is if all the information flows one way: from the bottom up. Page 314 A fourth democratic principle is that surveillance systems must always leave room for both change and rest. New surveillance technology, especially when coupled with a social credit system, might force people either to conform to a novel caste system or to constantly change their actions, thoughts, and personality in accordance with the latest instructions from above. Page 315 So an alternative health-care system may instruct its algorithm not to predict my illnesses, but rather to help me avoid them. But before we rush to embrace the dynamic algorithm, we should note that it too has a downside. Human life is a balancing act between endeavoring to improve ourselves and accepting who we are. If the goals of the dynamic algorithm are dictated by an ambitious government or by ruthless corporations, the algorithm is likely to morph into a tyrant, relentlessly demanding that I exercise more, eat less, change my hobbies, and alter numerous other habits, or else it would report me to my employer or downgrade my social credit score. Page 316 Surveillance is not the only danger that new information technologies pose to democracy. A second threat is that automation will destabilize the job market and the resulting strain may undermine democracy. Page 317 Unfortunately, nobody is certain what skills we should teach children in school and students in university, because we cannot predict which jobs and tasks will disappear and which ones will emerge. intellectuals tend to appreciate intellectual skills more than motor and social skills. But actually, it is easier to automate chess playing than, say, dish washing. Page 318 Another common but mistaken assumption is that creativity is unique to humans so it would be difficult to automate any job that requires creativity. A third mistaken assumption is that computers couldn't replace humans in jobs requiring emotional intelligence, from therapists to teachers. AI doesn't have any emotions of its own, but it can nevertheless learn to recognize these patterns in humans. Page 320 In sports, for example, we know that robots can move much faster than humans, but we aren't interested in watching robots compete in the Olympics.[15] The same is true for human chess masters. Page 321 Yet even professions that are the preserve of conscious entities-like priests-might eventually be taken over by computers, because, as noted in chapter 6, computers could one day gain the ability to feel pain and love. Even if they can't, humans may nevertheless come to treat them as if they can. Page 322 Chatbots and other AIs may not have any feelings of their own, but they are now being trained to generate feelings in humans and form intimate relationships with us. Page 324 numerous democracies have been hijacked by unconservative leaders such as Donald Trump and have been transformed into radical revolutionary parties. Page 324 the Trumpian program talks more of destroying existing institutions and revolutionizing society. Nobody knows for sure why all this is happening. One hypothesis is that the accelerating pace of technological change with its attendant economic, social, and cultural transformations might have made the moderate conservative program seem unrealistic. If conserving existing traditions and institutions is hopeless, and some kind of revolution looks inevitable, then the only means to thwart a left-wing revolution is by striking first and instigating a right-wing revolution. This was the political logic in the 1920s and 1930s, when conservative forces backed radical fascist revolutions in Italy, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere as a way-so they thought-to preempt a Soviet-style left-wing revolution. Page 325 When both conservatives and progressives resist the temptation of radical revolution, and stay loyal to democratic traditions and institutions, democracies prove themselves to be highly agile. Page 326 The most important human skill for surviving the twenty-first century is likely to be flexibility, and democracies are more flexible than totalitarian regimes. Page 330 By the early 2020s citizens in numerous countries routinely get prison sentences based in part on risk assessments made by algorithms that neither the judges nor the defendants comprehend.[31] And prison sentences are just the tip of the iceberg. Page 331 Computers are making more and more decisions about us, both mundane and life-changing. In addition to prison sentences, algorithms increasingly have a hand in deciding whether to offer us a place at college, give us a job, provide us with welfare benefits, or grant us a loan. They similarly help determine what kind of medical treatment we receive, what insurance premiums we pay, what news we hear, and who would ask us on a date. Page 333 The rise of unfathomable alien intelligence undermines democracy. If more and more decisions about people's lives are made in a black box, so voters cannot understand and challenge them, democracy ceases to function. In particular, what happens when crucial decisions not just about individual lives but even about collective matters like the Federal Reserve's interest rate are made by unfathomable algorithms? Human voters may keep choosing a human president, but wouldn't this be just an empty ceremony? Page 334 The increasing unfathomability of our information network is one of the reasons for the recent wave of populist parties and charismatic leaders. when they feel overwhelmed by immense amounts of information they cannot digest, they become easy prey for conspiracy theories, and they turn for salvation to something they do understand-a human. Page 336 How can a human mind analyze and evaluate a decision made on the basis of so many data points? Page 337 There is, however, a silver lining to this cloud of numbers. While individual laypersons may be unable to vet complex algorithms, a team of experts getting help from their own AI sidekicks can potentially assess the fairness of algorithmic decisions even more reliably than anyone can assess the fairness of human decisions. Page 338 To vet algorithms, regulatory institutions will need not only to analyze them but also to translate their discoveries into stories that humans can understand. Because computers will increasingly replace human bureaucrats and human mythmakers, this will again change the deep structure of power. Page 340 The new computer network poses one final threat to democracies. Instead of digital totalitarianism, it could foster digital anarchy. To function, a democracy needs to meet two conditions: it needs to enable a free public conversation on key issues, and it needs to maintain a minimum of social order and institutional trust. Now, with the rise of the new computer network, might large-scale democracy again become impossible? One difficulty is that the computer network makes it easier to join the debate. In the past, organizations like newspapers, radio stations, and established political parties acted as gatekeepers, deciding who was heard in the public sphere. Social media undermined the power of these gatekeepers, leading to a more open but also more anarchical public conversation. Page 342 So, what happens to democratic debates when millions-and eventually billions-of highly intelligent bots are not only composing extremely compelling political manifestos and creating deepfake images and videos but also able to win our trust and friendship? Page 343 In the face of the threat algorithms pose to the democratic conversation, democracies are not helpless. They can and should take measures to regulate AI and prevent it from polluting our infosphere with fake people spewing fake news. Page 344 Digital agents are welcome to join many conversations, provided they don't pretend to be humans. Another important measure democracies can adopt is to ban unsupervised algorithms from curating key public debates. Page 345 For most of history large-scale democracy was impossible because information technology wasn't sophisticated enough to hold a large-scale political conversation. Page 346 We cannot foretell how things will play out. it is clear that the information network of many democracies is breaking down. Page 348 However, as of 2024, more than half of "us" already live under authoritarian or totalitarian regimes,[2] many of which were established long before the rise of the computer network. enabled the rise of both large-scale democracy and large-scale totalitarianism, but totalitarianism suffered from a severe disadvantage. Page 349 Technologies like the telegraph, the telephone, the typewriter, and the radio facilitated the centralization of information, but they couldn't process the information and make decisions by themselves. This remained something that only humans could do. The rise of machine-learning algorithms, however, may be exactly what the Stalins of the world have been waiting for. Even in democratic countries, a few corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have become monopolies in their domains, partly because AI tips the balance in favor of the giants. Page 352 Russia's human engineers can do their best to create AIs that are totally aligned with the regime, but given the ability of AI to learn and change by itself, how can the human engineers ensure that the AI never deviates into illicit territory? Page 354 In the long term, totalitarian regimes are likely to face an even bigger danger: instead of criticizing them, an algorithm might gain control of them. Page 358 Whereas democracies assume that everyone is fallible, in totalitarian regimes the fundamental assumption is that the ruling party or the supreme leader is always right. Page 361 Computers are not yet powerful enough to completely escape our control or destroy human civilization by themselves. As long as humanity stands united, we can build institutions that will control AI and will identify and correct algorithmic errors. Unfortunately, humanity has never been united. We have always been plagued by bad actors, as well as by disagreements between good actors. The rise of AI, then, poses an existential danger to humankind not because of the malevolence of computers but because of our own shortcomings. Page 362 As we have seen in previous chapters, human civilization is threatened not only by physical and biological weapons of mass destruction like atom bombs and viruses. Human civilization could also be destroyed by weapons of social mass destruction, like stories that undermine our social bonds. Page 369 On September 1, 2017, President Putin of Russia declared, "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind…. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." Page 370 But what began as a commercial competition between corporations was turning into a match between governments, or perhaps more accurately, into a race between competing teams, each made of one government and several corporations. The prize for the winner? World domination. Page 375 It is becoming difficult to access information across the Silicon Curtain, say between China and the United States, or between Russia and the EU. Moreover, the two sides are increasingly run on different digital networks, using different computer codes. Each sphere obeys different regulations and serves different purposes. In the United States, the government plays a more limited role. Private enterprises lead the development and deployment of AI, and the ultimate goal of many new AI systems is to enrich the tech giants rather than to strengthen the American state or the current administration. Page 381 An increasingly important question is, Can people adopt any virtual identity they like, or should their identity be constrained by their biological body? Page 382 it is probable that within a few decades the computer network will cultivate new human and nonhuman identities that make little sense to us. Page 385 Global cooperation and patriotism are not mutually exclusive. Page 386 global cooperation means two far more modest things: first, a commitment to some global rules. Page 386 The second principle of globalism is that sometimes-not always, but sometimes-it is necessary to prioritize the long-term interests of all humans over the short-term interests of a few. Page 387 Forging and keeping international agreements on AI will require major changes in the way the international system functions. Epilogue Page 398 One lesson is that the invention of new information technology is always a catalyst for major historical changes, because the most important role of information is to weave new networks rather than represent preexisting realities. Page 399 The invention of AI is potentially more momentous than the invention of the telegraph, the printing press, or even writing, because AI is the first technology that is capable of making decisions and generating ideas by itself. Page 401 Let's return now to the question I posed at the beginning of this book: If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive? Page 402 This book has argued that the fault isn't with our nature but with our information networks. Due to the privileging of order over truth, human information networks have often produced a lot of power but little wisdom. Page 402 Accordingly, as a network becomes more powerful, its self-correcting mechanisms become more vital. Page 403 Unfortunately, despite the importance of self-correcting mechanisms for the long-term welfare of humanity, politicians might be tempted to weaken them.	Yuval Noah Harari Notable Quotations Full screen view Page 24 Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. Page 32 As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google. Page 32 The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively. But it also did something more. Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths - the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths -- by telling different stories. Page 32 In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people. Page 33 [The ability to tell stories that organize behavior] opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution. Page 33 The behavior of other social animals is determined to a large extent by their genes. DNA is not an autocrat. Animal behavior is also influenced by environmental factors and individual quirks. Nevertheless, i a given environment, animals of the same species will tend to behave in a similar way. Page 34 Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell--and revise--stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenges. Page 44 It stands to reason that the ethnic and cultural variety among ancient hunter-gatherers was equally impressive, and that the 5 million to 8 million foragers who populated the world on the eve of the Agricultural Revolution were divided into thousands of separate tribes with thousands of different languages and cultures. 3 This, after all, was one of the main legacies of the Cognitive Revolution. Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar Page 45 Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn't been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities. Page 46 They exchanged members, hunted together, traded rare luxuries, celebrated religious festivals and joined forces against foreigners. Page 46 Even if in times of crisis the tribe acted as one, and even if the tribe periodically gathered to hunt, fight or feast together, most people still spent most of their time in a small band. Trade was mostly limited to prestige items such as shells, amber and pigments. Page 61 But these are all mere guesses. The curtain of silence is so thick that we cannot even be sure such things occured -- let alone describe them in detail. Page 62 The next chapter explains how the foragers completely reshaped the ecology of our planet long before the first agricultural village was built. Part Two Histories Biggest Fraud: The Agricultural Revolution Page 79 The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translasted into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than tha averate forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. Page 80 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rices and potatoes. The pants domesiticate Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa. Page 81 Moreover the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat, it domesticated us. Page 83 If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. Yet why should individuals care about this evolutionary calculus? Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the Homo Sapiens genome? Page 86 Paradoxically, a series of 'improvements', each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers. Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People are unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Page 88 The foragers could either run away, abandoning their hunting grounds to field and pasture, or take up the ploughshare themselves. Either way, the old life was doomed. The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Page 91 It may well be that foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation, not to increase the normal food supply, but rather to support the building and running of a temple. In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple in the middle. But Gobkeli Tepe suggest that the temple may have been built first, and the village later grew up around it. Page 97 Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. In the following chapters we will see time and again hos a dramatics increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species when hand in hand with much individual suffering. Page 100 And bad years were bound to come, sooner or later. A peasant living on the assumption that bad years would not come didn't live long. Page 101 Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants' surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence. These forfeited food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments and temples. Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced Page 102 The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve. Page 103 Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great foes, motherlands, and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail's pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other even see on earth. Page 104 "Charters of Freedom." All these cooperation networks--from the cities of ancient Mesopotamia to the Qin and Roman empires--were 'imagined orders'. The social norms that sustained them were based on neither on ingrained instincts nor on personal acquaintances, but rather on belief in shared myths. Page 110 But if we believe we are equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.' I have no argument with that. This is exactly what I mean by 'imagined order'. We believe in a particular order not it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Page 111 If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn't there a danger that our society will collapse? ... There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends on myths and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. Page 111 When in 1860, a majority of American citizens concluded that African slaves are human beings and must therefore enjoy the right of liberty, it took a bloody civil war to make the southern states acquiesce. Page 111 To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintain the military order? It is impossible to organize an army solely on coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be it God, honour, motherland, manhood or money. An even more interesting question concerns those standing at the top of the social pyramid. Why should they wish to enforce an imagined order if they themselves don't believe in it? It is quite common to argue that the elite may do so out of cynical greed. Yet a cynic who believes in nothing is unlikely to be greedy. It does not take much to provide the objective biological needs of Homo sapiens. After those needs are met, more money can be spent on building pyramids, taking holidays around the world, financing election campaigns, funding your favourite terrorist organization, or investing in the stock market and making yet more money -- all of which are activities that a true cynic would find utterly meaningless. ... This is why cynics don't build empires and why an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population -- and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces -- truly believe in it. Page 112 The modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism. ... How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. Page 113 Three main factors prevent people from realising that the order organising their lives exists only in their imagination: a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world. ... b. The imagined order shapes our desires. Most people do not wish to accept that the order governing their lives is imaginary, but in fact every person is born into a pre-existing imagine d order, and his or her desires are shaped from birth by its dominant myths. Our personal desires thereby become the imagined order's most important defenses. c. The imagined order is inter-subjective. Page 119 Other animals that engage in strangers in ritualized aggression do so largely by instinct -- puppies throughout the world have the rules for rough-and-tumble play hard-wired into their genes. But American teenagers have no genes for pick-up basketball. They can nevertheless play the game with complete strangers because they have all learned an identical set of ideas about basketball... Each player can easily store them in his brain and still have room for songs, images, and shopping lists. But large systems of cooperation that involve not ten but thousands or even millions of humans require the handling and storage of huge amounts of information, much more than any single human brain can contain and process. ... The large societies found in some other species, such as ands and bees, are stable and resilient because most of the formation needed to sustain them in encoded in their genome. ... Its DNA programmes the necessary behaviours for whatever role it will fulfil in life. Hives can be very complex social structures, containing many different kinds of workers, such as harvesters, nurses and cleaners. But so far researchers have failed to locate lawyer bees. Bees don't need lawyers, because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive constitution. Page 120 Beyond laws, empires have to keep accounts of transactions and taxes, inventories of military supplies and merchant vessels, and calendars of festivals and victories. For millions of years people stored information in a single place -- their brains. Unfortunately, the human brain is not a good storage divide for empire sized databases. Page 134 All of the above mentioned distinctions -- between free persons and slaves, between whites and blacks, between rich and poor--are rooted in fictions. (The hierarchy of men and women will be discussed later.) Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagine hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable. Page 136 Most people claim that their social hierarchy is natural and just, while those of other societies are based on false and ridiculous criteria. Page 137 Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted. Part Three: The Unification of Humankind Highlight (yellow) -9. Page 163 Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of stranger to cooperate effectively. The network of artificial instincts are 'culture'. ... Every culture has its typical beliefs, norms and values, but these are in constant flux. The culture may transform itself in response to changes in its environment or through interaction with neighbouring cultures. But cultures also undergo transitions due to their own internal dynamics. Even a completely isolated culture existing in an ecologically stable environment cannot avoid change. Unlike the laws of physics, which are free of inconsistencies, every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions.