I love American football and if I could have been anything besides who I am, I would have been a middle linebacker like Dick Butkus, hitting running backs in the hole so hard that their heads pop up like the Robot Boxer’s after a well aimed upper cut.  Despite my affection for the game, I simply cannot understand the appeal of Fantasy Football, but do see the persuasion angle on this little game.

Fantasy Football is based in reality. Real people form leagues then draw from a list of real NFL players to create their own imaginary teams. You score points each week depending upon the actual on-field performance of the players you selected under a complex scoring system defined by your Fantasy League. Thus, you function as an owner, general manager, and coach of your own imaginary NFL team.

What makes all this possible is Counterfactual Thinking. Human nature has the interesting ability to think about reality with thoughts that are counterfactual, literally against the facts. My linebacker alternative life is nothing but Counterfactual Thinking.  While quick and fast, I also stood 5’8″ at 135 pounds.  My best bench press?  160.  It requires no imagination on your part to predict what would have happened to me on professional football field. Steve as Butkus Linebacker is pure Counterfactual.

You see the intricate operation of Counterfactuals in this serious story about Fantasy Football.  The lockout is over and we’ll are ready for some football including the Fantasy.  Here we see the story writer worrying about the impact of DeAngelo Williams resigning for $43 million.  Knowing only that some guy is in line for a $43 million pay day would seem to be all the fantasy that reality can produce, but you’d be wrong.

Sadly, signing a five-year, $43 million extension with the Panthers Wednesday, spurning more fantasy desirable locations Denver and New York, the Little Napoleon’s value may remain in exile . . . Craptastic (I’m absolutely heartbroken. Almost inconsolable. Feel like someone just drank my last Deschutes. Sniff.).

The story writer is unhappy in reality over the counterfactual thinking that Williams, while earning up to a gazillion bucks, will not be the Fantasy Star he should be because he plays on a lousy team that will hurt his production. Certainly some of this is pure jest and irony, but keep one eye blink on Fantasy NFL this season and you’ll see near suicidal Fantasy Owners standing on a bridge railing because DeAngelo had a sure touchdown taken away when a cheap free agent missed his block on that sweep.

The human ability to think thoughts that run counter to the facts and reality is both funny and useful.  Almost all art and science requires counterfactual thinking at some point. Hey, Robert Kennedy lifting GB Shaw gets it with:

Some people see things as they are and ask, Why? I dream things that have never been and say, Why Not!

Persuasion mavens see the play here. When the Other Guy is counterfactual, control the fantasy, then you control the reality!

Like Butkus.

P.S.  If you look closely, you can see me inside #51. Takes some imagination and vision to see me, but I’m there. Really.

P.P.S.  Hey, CIA, consider the persuasion box of Fantasy Football.  Is there a Fantasy Soccer League?  Oh, baby, tell me you’ve already thought of this.

P.P.P.S. Leetle Reeky and I pounded each other on Rock ‘em Sock ‘em when we were kids. Loved the noise when the head popped. Later I got a Batman versus the Penguin version of the game and used it as a prop in my large lecture Mass Media course. I’d dress up the like Caped Crusader and Melanie came in like Vickie Vale with the short tight black dress, blonde hair, and Wayfarer sunglasses while the auditorium PA system pumped out Prince’s Batdance (YouTube). Sounds over the top, but this was my lead in for the unit on the Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham and the Great Comic Scare in the 1950s.

During the last week in July 2011, President Barack Obama started a twitter war of words over Debt Ceiling legislation.  While no one is sure what he exactly or even kinda prefers in the bill, he wants something to sign and to get this he’s taken to twitter and the hashtag #compromise to convince voters to convince Republicans to produce the kind of bill the President can sign.  (That sentence reads grammatically, but if you think about it, it makes no sense, but that’s part of good politics.)  Obama seeks to mobilize the forces of good, change a handful of Other Guy Republicans, and get a bill that he can sign and we can all believe in.  Here’s the play.

“Tweet at your Republican legislators and urge them to support a bipartisan compromise to the debt crisis,” Obama’s campaign staff wrote on his account before launching the day-long Twitter campaign.

As the resident expert on this Blog, I have to question Obama’s twitter tactic.  If you visit the source, you find one of the worst outcomes possible:  Your opponents are hitting you on your own hashtag.

All Obama has done here is create yet another public soapbox where everyone can shout past each other.  If you want to move Other Guys, a free spirited debate among all comers is certainly democracy in action, but an ineffective persuasion play.

Of course, if he’s clever, he’s running a persuasion campaign on a different channel that aims at the unknowing Other Guys and this twitter tactic is merely a diversion.  Draw the Bad Guys into the valley of twitter while the Good Guys gather in the heights of . . . something else.  Of course, if you know anything about Clausewitz, you know that’s a bad metaphor to pursue because hills are islands and when you take to the heights you are playing Siege Me which is a virtual pun for Seize Me.  Hey, baby, no man is an island complete unto himself and clearly I’m wandering in the web of spreading activation in my mind.  Focus, Steve.  Focus!

twitter wins for the twitter VC, otherwise it is just a network of stumps.  If you want to try and persuade all the stumps, twitter could work, but targeting like this with twitter isn’t working.  This is little more than an CSPAN call-in show or an older fashioned town hall meeting.  And Web 2.0 is the New New Thing?

Maneuver.  Firepower.  Get there the firstest with the mostest.  Let the Other Guy die for Her country.

How hard is this?

Or to be more polite about it and drop the war metaphors . . . the Rules.

If You Can’t Succeed, Don’t Try.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

Persuasion Is Strategic or It Is Not.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.  WB Yeats, Anima Huminis

 
Thus, for the mind of perpetual motion, reflect upon both persuasion and poetry to understand all the quarrels in this life.

One of the more interesting observations I learned from a teacher is this:  If you think you understand something, change it.

The power of the observation is apparent.  Your knowledge should permit you to move an idea forward and backward, up and down, inside out and outside in, if you truly understand it.  You can make it do your bidding because you understand.

Push this observation and you realize that a persuasion orientation is a crucial part of science.  If you know something, then you can take your knowledge and change things.  The proof of what you know is not simply you know it, but that you can change it and change with it.  If you think you know something, but you cannot change it or change with it, then you don’t know after all.  As in the case of preventing Alzheimer’s.

Here’s the table.  Click to enlarge if needed.

According to the analysis that produced this table, 50% of Alzheimer’s cases worldwide are preventable.  Preventable.  That means they don’t happen.  Ever.  People don’t get Alzheimer’s.  Ever.  Half of all cases of Alzheimer’s don’t happen.  Talk about knowing something that makes a change!

Now, just take a moment and reflect.  First, realize that this is not original research, but a quantitative review of the literature.  Second, virtually all of that review is from Observational Research with no randomization, comparison, or control, in other words, little experimental data.  Third, see the Small Windowpane effects for all the risk factors.  Fourth, and hold on to your head for this.

Barnes cautioned that the findings assume that the individual risk factors actually cause Alzheimer’s, which has never been proved. “We are assuming that when you change the risk factor, you change the risk,” she said in a statement. “What we need to do now is figure out whether that assumption is correct.”

Can you imagine standing in front of your family or coworkers or neighbors and saying something like that?  “There’s no proof that this works, but dammit, I think we should all pull together and . . .”

Barnes is more than willing to assert that she understands something and understands it so well that she can change half of the outcomes from a negative state to a positive state all the while asserting that her knowledge has no proof.  Furthermore, realize that all of these numbers are pure speculation, that back of the envelope economics you read in advocacy columns with assumptions, historical trends, available data sets, and what ifs.  There is no good scientific evidence in this report that a particular factor, like physical activity, is actually causal for Alzheimer’s prevention.  And, the authors admit this.

Think about this report from another direction.

You are the persuasion maven tasked with an intervention to prevent 50% of Alzheimer’s case based on this research.  Barnes and colleagues confidently assert they understand how to prevent Alzheimer’s which means we know how to change it.  Okay.  What you would do to create this change?

Low education is a risk factor.  Think about that intervention.

Now, diabetes.  Think about that intervention.

See any difference in the scale at which you’d plan and execute?  Education requires a total organized effort at the national level and in the US at the state level.  Changing education is essentially changing the political and cultural institutions of the nation.  And, countries vary on that.  Diabetes, by contrast, is slightly more under the control of specific individuals, particularly lifestyle behavior like diet and exercise.  Changing that is essentially what we’ve been doing already since we know that diabetes is a serious health problem and does have controllable elements.

The list of seven factors operate at different levels of abstraction (global, cultural, individual, behavior, heredity), yet are all in the same basket called Preventable Risk Factors.  The factors are so different from one another that it makes a mockery of the term, Risk Factor.  There’s no rigor, clarity, or unity in the classification.  Thinking about the persuasion implications of this report makes you realize just how bad the science is behind it.

What also worries me as the persuasion guy charged with making the Life Saving Intervention, is that bad science like this gives people false hope.  I have no trouble with this getting published in the peer review literature.  People smarter than me are thinking the same kind of critical thoughts about the vaporous analysis, but at least we’re thinking about the problem and how to solve it.  This weak work might stimulate better research from someone else.  Publication in peer review literature is good here.

But, this crew went out of its way to attract media attention and did a notably bad job of explaining the nuance.  This is a fantasy, What If?, kind of research projection that frames a problem.  Seen in that light, it might be useful, although you clearly see that I don’t walk in that light.  The authors contribute to public confusion with their persuasion efforts for media attention.  Various Cool Table FauxItAlls will now confidently assert that if society would wake up, We Could Cut Alzheimer’s By 50% In Our Lifetime!  Of course, you could put a trillion dollars on Alzheimer Prevention and it would probably have little effect on the number of cases because this research is so weak.

Let’s shout “Cure!” in a crowded hospital wardroom.  Some researchers think that their scientific speech functions the same way in public that it does in peer review literature when obviously it doesn’t.  Just folks are in no position to critically evaluate this report and they assume that the Shouting Expert has enough sense, good taste, and prudence to not holler when she should whisper.

All Bad Science Is Persuasive.

P.S.  By dumb luck a new issue of Journal Watch (Aug 1, 2011, vol 31, no 15) arrived with a couple of studies on diabetes reduction.  One tested for more intensive management versus normal clinical care for asymptomatic diabetics and found no improvement in outcomes for the intensive management over 5 years of testing.  The other study tested the impact of adding daily exercise (walking) for type 2 diabetics over 1 year and found no benefit over a control group.   Do you have any other ideas for reducing diabetes to reduce Alzheimers?

Consider these descriptions.

SUBLIME, THE: The Greek rhetorician Longinus wrote a treatise On the Sublime, which argued that sublimity (“loftiness”) is the most important quality of fine literature. The sublime caused the reader to experience elestasis (“transport”).

The author asserts that “the Sublime leads the listeners not to persuasion, but to ecstasy: for what is wonderful always goes together with a sense of dismay, and prevails over what is only convincing or delightful, since persuasion, as a rule, is within everyone’s grasp: whereas, the Sublime, giving to speech an invincible power and [an invincible] strength, rises above every listener”.

Edmund Burke developed this line of thought further in his influential essay, “The Sublime and the Beautiful” (1757). Here, he distinguished the sublime from the beautiful by suggesting that the sublime was not a stylistic quality but the powerful depiction of subjects that were vast, obscure, and powerful. These sublime topics or subjects evoked “delightful horror” in the viewer or reader, a combination of terror and amazed pleasure.

The sublime can be best distinguished in contradistinction to the beautiful. The beautiful is that in nature which can be admired calmly and appreciated for its surface appearance (color, depth, material, balance). The sublime is that in nature which is so much greater than man that its attraction actually includes a certain degree of fear and trepidation on the part of the beholder, although a fear not so immediate that it traumatizes.

These literary critics all agree that the sense of the sublime arises from the combination of inconsistencies, the lovely and the terrible, awe and awful, the beauty and the beast.  As a persuasion maven, I would call this Dissonance.  Those inconsistencies provoke dissonance, the sense of the sublime resolves the dissonance.

Let me quote from the master, Jorge Luis Borges, to illustrate with another’s opinion.

The Russians and their disciples have demonstrated, tediously, that no one is impossible: happy suicides, benevolent murderers, lovers who adore each other to the point of separation, informers who act out of fervor or humility . . . from Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, in Selected Non-Fictions.

My own list of specifics.

Cormac McCarthy provokes dissonance in the reader with Blood Meridian, the Border Trilogy, and The Road.

Walt Whitman walks us along in dissonance with The Sleepers.

Probably everything that Emily Dickinson wrote is dissonance.  It’s not just her constant irony, of never saying exactly and clearly what she means, of always permitting something more or something less than she writes or implies.  She always presses like against unlike.

All of Shakespeare’s tragedies turn on dissonance for their protagonists and antagonists.

Turner’s paintings provoke the sublime from dissonance.

We can find the artistic in the scientific.  In word and image, artists provoke us with combinations of like with unlike, striking cords of inconsistency.  To find the art, you must resolve the dissonance with the sublime.