PDF Summary:Win Bigly, by Scott Adams

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• You may think that you can will a successful future into being by envisioning it. Confirmation bias will highlight the times this worked and discard the failures. That’s fine - as long as it makes you happy and it works some of the time, it’s a decent filter for life.
• Multiple filters or interpretations of reality may explain the existing data. You won’t know which one is true until you see how it predicts future results.

Evolutionarily, the reason we don’t need to see reality objectively is that objectivity isn’t always necessary for survival. Any illusion that keeps humans alive enough to procreate is good enough.

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Cognitive Dissonance

What it is: When people perform actions that are inconsistent with their underlying beliefs, they rationalize the action in the context of their beliefs, often forming delusions.

Examples

• (Shortform example: one classic experiment showed that people who were paid nothing for a tedious task enjoyed it more than people who were paid more for the same task. The ones who were paid nothing had to reason subconsciously, “well this task is boring. But clearly I’m not doing it for money since I’m not getting paid. So maybe I enjoy it more than I thought I did?”)
• If you believe you’re an honest person but you do something dishonest, you rationalize the action as justified in a tortuous way.

According to Scott Adams, a “tell” for cognitive dissonance is the absurdity of the rationalization, and how many there are.

• Someone claims smoking won’t hurt him because a person smoked a pack a day and lived to be 100. This is a personal illusion where he is one of the few people alive who is immune to lung cancer.

Another tell is responding with an absurd absolute position, combined with a personal insult. This person doesn’t have a rational reason...

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• Trump reminded voters they were Americans first. Clinton appealed to women, minorities, and LGBTQ.

Rank 3: Aspirations

While a person’s aspirations don’t trigger as strong a reaction as fear, they still create powerful, uplifting feelings. To persuade, graft your story onto people’s existing aspirations.

Examples:

• Apple stresses personal creativity.
• Financial services companies stress being financially independent.
• Trump played to voter aspirations of being wealthier, safer, and greater. In contrast, Clinton used the weaker “Stronger Together,” which is more defensive than aspirational.

Rank 4: Habit

Instead of changing habits, try to piggyback onto existing habits.

Examples:

• Turn vitamins into once-a-day morning rituals like brushing teeth and shaving.
• Morning shows tie to the time period specifically. “Good Morning America,” “Morning Joe,” “Coffee with Scott Adams.”

Rank 5: Analogy

Analogies are relatively weak persuasion methods. They’re useful to explain a new unfamiliar concept and to be directionally correct.

However, analogies are so imprecise that they invite criticism on narrow grounds - “that analogy doesn’t...

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Combining multiple skills together is rare. Being pretty good at multiple skills makes you more valuable than being very good at one skill.

• Scott Adams notes that he is nowhere near the best cartoonist nor the best comedian, but he is one of the best comedian cartoonists.

Visual Imagery

Images stick more stably in people’s minds, making them more readily available and thus thought about more.

Use simple imagery.

Leave it vague enough to let people fill in their own blanks.

Examples

• Trump’s “big, beautiful wall.” If you’re like most people, you pictured a large concrete wall 15 feet high.
  • Obviously, this would be impractical - a metal fence or digital sensors would be better - but the imagery was powerful. “The wall” was obviously more persuasive and catchy than “border control using a variety of security technologies.”
  • He didn’t provide his own renderings or descriptions of the wall. He let people imagine it, which made them more attracted to their own conception of the idea.
• Trump cultivated his visual identity:
  • On SNL, a skit imagined him as the president sitting in the Oval Office giving an address. This was a huge...

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• People with status have the freedom to act however they like, including like assholes. People without status need to grovel and be excessively nice to get what they want.
  • This causes the perception that assholes are more likely to be of high status. Thus causing the misperception that girls prefer to date assholes, when it is something else associated with assholes - money, social standing, confidence - that is the actual attractive thing
  • The dating tactic of “negging” tries to signal quality through being slightly rude.

Be the Voice of Certainty in Times of Uncertainty

In mass confusion, people gravitate to the strongest, most confident voice.

Offer clarity and simple answers, even if the answers are wrong or incomplete.

Use Occam’s Razor to your advantage. Simple explanations look more credible than complicated ones with lots of variables and assumptions.

• While this might not be factually, scientifically true, it does appear to many to be the right explanation especially in times of uncertainty.
• Often, two things rising together look like they cause one another, rather than being merely correlated.
  • Example: Illegal...

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*   It has sinister character but is vague enough to allow the person to fill in the blank with whatever scares them most. It captures all of our fears into a tidy package.
*   It’s unusual in politics and easily used in conversation

• Scott Adams himself uses plenty of key terms in his book - “Master Persuader,” “weapons-grade persuasion skills”

Because of availability bias and confirmation bias, these visual catchphrases become more powerful over time as we receive evidence that fits the name. All that people needed to confirm “Lyin’ Ted” was some evidence that he had been less than truthful at one time, and the nickname would stick.

Furthermore, because they are simple, they are more likely to be used often, making them more available in people’s minds. These effects can form a virtuous cycle.

Create Effective Slogans

Like Linguistic Kill Shots, slogans are short phrases that convey your message.

Principles

• Make the slogan about the highest ideals you are striving for, not about your independent company or team.
• Each word should have a positive connotation or symbolism.
• Have good rhythm, like iambic pentameter or percussion through...

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• Given that Trump had previously disavowed support of the KKK and did so a day after the interview, Adams believe there was some chance Trump actually had earpiece trouble. But this was a clear persuasive error.
• If it was strategic, Trump may have been simply waiting until the last moment to dissociate from a possible ally.
• Adams considers this the biggest error in the campaign, as it fed the narrative of him as a dark racist.

Judge Curiel

• A lawsuit against Trump University reached a court whose judge was of Mexican heritage. Trump said he wasn’t sure the judge could be impartial because she was Mexican. Trump explained that he meant the judge that because of Trump’s illegal immigration policies, the judge would indirectly be biased.
• Taken least graciously, Trump was literally saying that Mexican judges couldn’t be objective.
• Adams considers this a win-win. After his (clumsy) statement, the judge would either rule against Trump and he would seem validated; or the judge would overcorrect for the bias and allow the extension Trump sought, which would remove the toxic Trump U from the election cycle.

Khan Controversy

• At a DNC convention, a...