This is just a haphazard sampling, but with an Effect Size this Stupendous, even a focus group will demonstrate it. Start with a recent article about the Obama re-election effort.

CHICAGO — With a “chief scientist” specializing in consumer behavior, an “analytics department” monitoring voter trends, and a squad of dozens huddled at computer screens editing video or writing code, the sprawling office complex inside One Prudential Plaza looks like a corporate research and development lab — Ping-Pong table and all.

Now, the popularity of hiring statisticians in business.

Arcane statistical analysis, the business of making sense of our growing data mountains, has become high tech’s hottest calling. There are billions of bytes generated daily, not just from the Internet but also from sciences like genetics and astronomy. Companies like Google and Facebook, as well as product marketers, risk analysts, spies, natural philosophers and gamblers are all scouring the info, desperate to find a new angle on what makes us and the world tick. Computing has become cheap and available enough to process any number of formulas.

Finally, a scientific breakthrough for data mining.

Are there subtle patterns lurking in data that can foretell of a coming financial-system crash? What can explain the variations in sports-star salaries? How about the complex relationship between genes and certain diseases? Scientists in various fields have been searching for better ways to analyze large piles of data for such patterns, but the difficulty has always been that they need to know what they’re looking for in order to find. A new software program, described in the latest issue of Science, is designed to find the patterns in data that scientists don’t know to look for.

You’ve read variations on the Big Numbers theme. There’s Truth in them thar Hills of Data and if you know how to Mine Them, you can Change the Other Guys, win elections, earn trillions, and sit at the Cool Table. Particularly among aspiring persuasion mavens, Big Numbers with Big Data and Big Statistics is the New New Thing. Since everyone is living in Web 2.0 everyone has torrents, tides, and tsunamis of information about Other Guys which has got to lead to Change. Right?

While there’s a ton of nuance in the answer to that question, the First Nuance for me is:

Numbers without Theory is just a million Monkeys at the Abacus.

Just as those monkeys at the typewriter won’t produce Shakespeare, neither will these monkeys at the abacus produce Fishbein and Aizen or Petty and Cacioppo or, to be more famous about it, Kahneman and Tversky. Yet, the New New Thing rush to Big Numbers pretends you can drop the theorist and as long as you have monkeys with degrees from Stanford or Carnegie Mellon armed with quantum computers, you can discover like Einstein.

You see my bias. I’m a theory guy and that reflects both my nature and nurture. Without a schematic, a blueprint, scribbles on a paper cocktail paper, you will not find Truth whether for elections, business, or science. Theory is the One Ring that binds all other Rings. And the better your Theory, the better everything else about your persuasion.

Sure, If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It. But remember.

Just Because You Can Count It, Doesn’t Mean You Can Change It.

The NY Times speaks truth to power and comes away with a mouthful of apple. Voice recognition technology is upon us!

VLAD SEJNOHA is talking to the TV again. O.K., maybe you’ve done that, too. But here’s the weird thing: His TV is listening. “Dragon TV,” Mr. Sejnoha says to the screen, “find movies with Meryl Streep.” Up pops a list of films like “Out of Africa” and “It’s Complicated.” “Dragon TV, change to CNN,” he says. Presto — the channel flips to CNN.

Mr. Sejnoha runs a voice recognition firm that is changing the world through spoken interaction between humans and computers.

It is a wildly disruptive idea. But such systems are already beginning to change the way we interact with the world and, for better and worse, how we think about technology. Until now, after all, we’ve talked only to one another. What if we begin talking to all sorts of machines, too — and, like Siri, those machines respond as if they were human?

How disruptive?

Humans are wired for speech and tend to respond to talking devices as if they were kindred spirits, says Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I’m not saying voice recognition is bad,” Professor Turkle says. “I’m saying it’s part of a package of attachments to objects where we should tread carefully because we are pushing a lot of Darwinian buttons in our psychology.”

The first voice recognition software I used was Dragon which was going to revolutionize writing sometime back in the 1990s. You talk, it understands, the computer screen fills with your words: an essay, poem, or novel, a textbook, the Gettysburg Address. I fought the Dragon until I saw him smile and then I grabbed the keyboard.

If you do even a little reading you know that various experts have been trying voice recognition since the 1960s and Bell Labs. (Jeepers, do you remember when Bell Labs and telephones were the cutting edge of technology?) In other words, the science here is almost as old as I am and Siri is the crowning achievement. Sure, if you have a highly restricted vocabulary of words and further ensure that the sounds of each word are distinct, unique, and easy to produce, you can get voice recognition that works about as well as my Spanish does when we’re in Mexico. You can get a taxi, a drink, or a hat.

Beyond a few real-time missions there’s nothing close to normal conversational voice recognition. And, after 50 years of smart people whacking at this, you’d have to say it’s not coming to a home theatre near you anytime soon.

Here’s the persuasion pivot. We can’t create functional, easy to use, practical voice recognition software that any healthy person can use. The science just isn’t there.

But, we do have the science for Global Warming, Health Care Reform That Works, Green Energy, and on and on with the Cool Table litany of scientific science. The next time you read a Tooth Fairy tale about soda pop or red meat or glaciers or flooded cities or solar powered cars, just ask yourself. If we understand galactic weather, why doesn’t Siri understand me all the time?

And, if you want to see why we’ll never have practical voice recognition, watch this YouTube video.

All Bad Science Is Persuasive!

P.S. What happened to journalism speaking truth to power? This NYT article is nothing more than a PR puff piece for Nuance which is apparently French for Dragon.

The Heartland Institute strikes back in the latest installment of the Climate Change Wars. Coming soon to a billboard near you.

While you consider the image, recall the backstory with Heartland. As a sworn enemy of Global Warming advocates, the Heartland Institute runs a professional persuasion shop aimed at persuasion and lobbying with the Other Guys who really count: members of Congress, for example. You are not surprised to learn that GW advocates take a dim view of Heartland, so much so that one masqueraded as a Heartland director to obtain unethically, and maybe even illegally, Heartland documents which he then doctored and put up on advocacy websites to discredit Heartland. The advocate confessed his theft and resigned from a post at a Global Warming advocacy institute.

Heartland runs an annual conference on Global Warming from their point of view and this billboard is running right now in Chicago, IL where the next meeting will occur later in May, 2012. Motorists there get the early treat of seeing this billboard . . . and then trying to figure out what it means.

Frankly my first take on it missed. I did not recognize the man in the image. That’s Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. I thought the image ripped off the play with those ubiquitous Internet ads with goofy looking people that sells insurance.

I then read the text about global warming and got confused. After thinking about it for a couple of seconds, I thought that it was a warning from a Global Warming advocate, just badly done. Then I saw the Heartland.org source on the bottom, remembered who Heartland is, then, finally, got the point. Ohhhh! This is an anti-Global Warming ad. And, ha-ha-ha, they are mocking the Consensus Authority play we’ve seen from Global Warming advocates before.

Put another way, this ad failed for me. You need to get it in about 2 seconds because you are driving on the Eisenhower expressway around Chicago with nine thousand of your closest friends all going 75 miles per hour. I get the point Heartland is trying to make, but the execution is awful.

You can tell these guys use persuasion as lobbyists and not as public persuasion mavens. Even sitting comfortably in my house with limited traffic around me, I didn’t get the ad on my first, second, or third attempt. Imagine how little impact it’s having on the Interstate.

I applaud Heartland’s attempt to mock that foolish Consensus Authority play. Heartland is apparently reading the Persuasion Blog because they criticize the bad peer review research that I’ve mocked here. While presented as science, it is not. A couple of different research teams did about a bad a job you can do trying to measure opinion and attitudes in a population and invented numbers that could reasonably qualify as Consensus if there was any kind of science behind the data collection. That bad research then gets passed around as some kind of truth when it is nothing but error. You’d flunk a grad student who wrote a paper doing what these guys did . . . unless you were an advocate.

So, it’s smart for Heartland to attack GW advocates on this case because their published work is so bad. Yet, the attack ad from Heartland is just awful.

This is free advice to Heartland. One quote from one guy, even a mad bomber, misses the Consensus Cue. You need to have pictures and quotes from several odious guys to visually depict Consensus. Why not mock up a petition with a Heading of “I Believe In Global Warming” then the actual signatures along with pictures of the odious ones? The collection of many bad guys communicates both the Consensus and the failure.

Better still . . . why not a billboard with something like: Consensus? Then pictures and signatures of people who’ve publicly disputed the Climate Change hypothesis.

Best . . . Follow the Herd to Global Warming.

P.S. Man, that was quick. While I composed this post, Heartland dropped the ad from the Chicago billboard with an apology.

“We know that our billboard angered and disappointed many of Heartland’s friends and supporters, but we hope they understand what we were trying to do with this experiment,” the institute said late Friday afternoon said in a statement. “We do not apologize for running the ad, and we will continue to experiment with ways to communicate the ‘realist’ message on the climate.”

No one, it seems, in the Climate Change wars knows anything about persuasion.

“As a human being, we have marginalized him, but as an artist, he has no sense of himself as an outsider, or an insider for that matter, because he has no sense of what these categories mean. He has no sense of the an audience at all, critical or otherwise. He simply needs to express something. Compulsion without ambition. Not only can this not be faked, it cannot be willed either. He could not stop what he is doing or change it, or tailor it to someone else’s expectations, if he wanted to.”

This from Jonathan Dee’s novel, The Privileges, page 180. Spoken by Agnew, the art professor, it describes a fictional street artist outside the Art Institute of Chicago doing Art Brut, raw art, an art unschooled, untrained, and nearly mad. The key element of Art Brut glows in the sentence,

Compulsion without ambition.

And, as well observed,

. . . a condition that can neither be faked nor willed.

Shade off these meanings just a bit and you must find related concepts like Sincerity and Authenticity. Authenticity often feels compulsive; you just have to say it regardless of the consequence. And, it is an act that cannot be faked or willed – another great way to see Authenticity.

Persuasion is never compulsive and is always ambitious. And, it Changes best when both faked and willed. Persuasion cannot be Art Brut. Persuasion is only Art.

And since you can do Science with Persuasion, Science is Art!

P.S. The Privileges is a great metaphor of persuasion and self-persuasion. Jonathan Dee shows how people Change Other Guys and in so doing Change themselves. And while Adam, Cynthia, Jonas, and April Morey understand the Changes in the Other Guys, they do not see it in themselves. I find parallels to the Great Gatsby, another who aspired to Change and in so doing doomed himself. While none of the Morey’s end up floating dead in a pool, all of them have died in ways they cannot see.

Psychological science makes the New York Times again . . . on the opinion pages with the delightfully headlined, “Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay.” The opinion writers who also play psychological scientists in their day job offer a couple of familiar anecdotes about notorious gay-bashers like Ted Haggard who had strong gay tendencies themselves. They then narrate quickly their scientific science that demonstrates why folks with repressed gay tendencies respond with anti-gay prejudice: It’s implicit, baby, implicit.

But, as careful, thoughtful, and cool scientists and opinion writers they are quick to note limitations to their science and opinions.

It’s important to stress the obvious: Not all those who campaign against gay men and lesbians secretly feel same-sex attractions. But at least some who oppose homosexuality are likely to be individuals struggling against parts of themselves, having themselves been victims of oppression and lack of acceptance. The costs are great, not only for the targets of anti-gay efforts but also often for the perpetrators. We would do well to remember that all involved deserve our compassion.

Aren’t you glad there are people like this who do the hard work of science to figure this out for you?

Don’t hate the haters, baby. Wouldn’t be compassionate. And besides, the haters can’t help themselves because their parents were haters. Except for the haters who don’t fit our data, but still feel the compassion.

So, says psychological science.

Do I exaggerate? A writer at Slate reads the editorial, oops, the science and says . . .

Their argument—summed up in the Times headline as “Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay”—promises to resolve a long-running debate in the field. For at least 15 years, scientists have been trying to use objective laboratory measures to prove the he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it theory of human sexuality.

Again, who wants their science on the opinion page of a newspaper? And who wants two handed science – here’s why, on the other hand, here’s why not – anywhere? The Rules.

All Bad Science Is Persuasive.