Among the many talents, skills, tricks, dazzles, and steps I possess, the strongest is probably teaching.  My bachelor’s degree is in education as is my doctorate.  I have a lot of undergrad and grad course work aimed specifically at the theory and practice of teaching, lots of supervised internship work, a year of substitute teaching from K-12, then over 20 years of classroom experience, combined with a well established research and publication record on teaching.  I taught and trained teachers, wrote textbooks, and designed advanced curriculum for teachers.  All this led to an honorable and serious collection of awards and recognition.  It was my profession, I worked at it, and I was good at it.

And, it appears I wasted a lot of time.

Did you know that you can become a teacher with five weeks of training?  According to Teach For America if you attend an elite university or test at a high EQ, all you need is five weeks training with TFA and you’re ready to hit the toughest teaching assignments in areas blighted with poverty, fear, and despair.

And, best of all if you are one of the few elites chosen for this elite program, you get a great vita hit.

Teach for America has become an elite brand that will help build a résumé, whether or not the person stays in teaching. And in a bad economy, it’s a two-year job guarantee with a good paycheck; members earn a beginning teacher’s salary in the districts where they’re placed.

Where’s Doonesbury when you really need him?

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Persuaders Can Be Famous or Effective, but Not Both.

Great Persuaders Don’t Need Rich Uncles, Kindness from Strangers, or Third Party Vote Splitters.

There’s a Difference between Persuasion, and Smoke and Mirrors; With Persuasion the Illusion Lingers.

Consider those who say more than they know:  FauxItAlls.

FauxItAlls presume for themselves a credential of knowledge, insight, or perspective that passes Low WATT or Biased High WATT inspection, but not Objective High WATT.  Many are bright, have good undergraduate educations, and probably had a respected professor tell them they’d excel as scholars or scientists, poets or politicians.  That puts you in the Club, right?

FauxItAlls beguile with expressiveness that passes for knowledge, talking the talk, but not walking the walk.  FauxItAlls may also be deceptive, rhetorical frauds covering ignorance with illusion, but generally they are justified.  They believe themselves.  And, they are also able to convince others, mainly other FauxItAlls, who don’t want to die in a lab or library or garret or election.  It’s just so much more rewarding to write for the New Yorker or appear on Charlie Rose or simply bedazzle the boys and the girls around the bar.  Consider this exemplar.

Steven Pinker provides a takedown of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book and, along the way, Gladwell’s approach.  I cringed while also agreeing with every vowel and consonant Pinker wrote.  And, of course, Gladwell is only a poster boy for those who say more than they know.

FauxItAlls pretending to elevation in scientific fields like Malcolm Gladwell are not reliable for one great reason:  They do not write for peer review.  If you are a scholar, a researcher, a scientist, one who lives on, by, and with the Edge of Truth, you must survive peer review.  FauxItAlls never write for peer review, but only for editorial review, market review, or legal review, certainly external standards of judgment, but standards aimed at style sheet, popularity, or lawsuits, not the anonymous approval of proven peers.

Peer review is a brutal process wherein you submit your writing to a proven, competent, and trustworthy peer chosen from a large, cantankerous association who then passes it on to several other proven peers for their anonymous opinion.  If the editor (the first peer) and the reviewers (the other peers) accept your writing, it goes into print as both a statement of possible truth and a statement for further consideration.  Other peers may then cite your writing as authority, take it as a launching point for further development, or laugh you out of the field.  Peer review does not guarantee the Truth.  But it is the closest thing to a guarantee we’ve discovered to date.

Pinker crushes Gladwell on one word, “igon.”  Gladwell uses the word in the authoritative manner of a FauxItAll in describing a mathematical concept and procedure of importance in one of his articles.  Gladwell clearly implies in his writing that he understands the igon, grasps why it is important to the people in his article, and that he could have done this himself if he wanted.  He implies, too, that he learned this from reading about it which is impossible if you know what an “igon” is.

See, it is “eigen,” which is pronounced in conversation as “i-gon.” If you only hear it (as Gladwell probably did when he interviewed people for his article) and don’t read it (which Gladwell may have, but did not realize that “igon” is “eigen”) then you can confidently write about igons.  If you are a top drawer FauxItAll, you can drop it meaningfully in conversation with other FauxItAlls, and no one will be the wiser all the while approving of your wisdom.  Thus “eigen” becomes “igon.”

Except for anyone who has survived peer review in a field that uses eigenvalues as part of its vocabulary.  Pinker knows about eigenvalues because he’s trained as a quantitative, experimental psychologist.  Eigenvalues are useful statistics for understanding factor analysis, interpreting brain scan data, and just plain fun for those who like to invert matrices in their heads rather than solve crossword puzzles in ink.  Otherwise, Igon’s may be interpreted as the name of Igor’s twin brother.

In this instance, the word “eigen” functions like Hitchcock’s McGuffin or the one mistake a killer makes on CSI.  You don’t need to know anything about eigenvalues yourself.  You just need to understand that this McGuffin reveals the point of the story, that it accuses and convicts the guilty party.  A FauxItAll hears an unfamiliar word, but rather than admit ignorance and ask for help, the FauxItAll turns a vast, but undereducated,  intellect upon it, determines its true meaning, and pronounces it loudly to the world.

Of course, this coinage reveals my envy and indirectly the envy of other suffering souls dying over data or metaphors or votes.  FauxEnvy, perhaps.  FauxGreen . . . but isn’t that Tom Friedman?

But, note:  no post in this blog has survived peer review.  I know the experience, but I provide here what I think I know without the benefit of the scalding you get from peer review. I just hope that Dr. Pinker approves!

P.S.   While planning this post, I asked Melanie to help me think of a word to describe those who say more than the know.  She thought about it and reeled off a couple of failures, then burst out, “FauxItAlls.”

Dry Vodka Martini

• 1 shot, journalism
• 1 dash, persuasion
  
• 1 ice filled shaker
• stir in shaker, pour, then enjoy!

Like Facebook 1

The forces of Good are gathering, good people, and better Times await us!  A hardy band of four, following the motivation of the West Wing President Josiah Bartlett (”Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world!”) is launching Diaspora* as a privacy-safe, safe haven for your socialized media pleasure.  The Evil One behind the Dark Tower at Facebook shivers!

Like Facebook 2

Of course, there’s no need to join the Diaspora*.  You can protect your privacy and enjoy the pleasures of Facebook through control of your privacy settings!

“There are always trade-offs between providing comprehensive and precise granular controls and offering simple tools that may be broad and blunt,” said Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook. “We have tried to offer the most comprehensive and detailed controls and comprehensive and detailed information about them.”

This is great and InSincere Persuasion.  As the article describes, the Facebook privacy policy is longer than the US Constitution and is still more confusing than the 2nd Amendment.  And, deliberately so.  Facebook gives you choice.  Lots of choice.  As if choice is privacy and freedom when it is only a Low WATT manipulation that makes more people ignore that Man Behind the Curtain.

Like Facebook 3

A kindred spirit details his privacy concerns with Facebook and earns a Huzzah from the HI Blog.  He notes the twists and turns of Facebook policy that’s always offering sensitivity to the user, but always gaining marketing traction for Facebook.  Imagine that.

He points to another post that leads us to . . .

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. . . scroll down about one third of a screen and read the section called Why The Change?  Assuming that everything from the Facebook guys is the Truth and Nothing But the Truth (which would be Sincere; see Facebook 2 above on that), you’re reading a great example of Dissonance in Action.  Facebook is clearly misleading people about privacy, information, and the uses of that privacy and information, but you’d never get a glimmer of that from reading these quotes.  Everyone is concerned about Facebook users and tortured by concerns over quality and privacy.  “We’re just trying to help!”

Nudging with Regulation

“Smart regulation can make people’s lives better off.”

This from the Obama OMB Czar, Peter Orszag.  A nice NYT article details the rise in rule-making with Change We Can Believe In or Smart Democrats Are Back In.  I’ve detailed some of this Cool Table hipster action if you want more on it.  But it matches perfectly my experience as a scientific administrator in the Clinton, then Bush administrations.  Democrats are smart and like rules and regulations.  Republicans are dumb and don’t.

You cannot believe how much time and energy goes into making new rules and regulation, then how much time and energy goes into propagating the new rules and regulations into policy, then how much time and energy goes into litigation over the new rules and regulations, and then how much time and effort goes into ignoring or changing the rules and regulations as the clock expires and a New Administration comes to town.

This is both bad Power and bad Persuasion.  But, it is Democracy in action!

Why Observational Science Is So Cool

The economic world is going to hell in a hand basket, what should we do?  Let’s get expert assistance.  Call in the Economists!

And so the NYT does with a crew of Usual Suspects.  And guess what?

Five different opinions!

Harry Truman was right.  The world needs a one-handed economist . . . on the other hand . . .

David Brooks of the NYT explains important scientific knowledge about human nature and behavior.

The region you live in also makes a gigantic difference in how you will live. There are certain high-trust regions where highly educated people congregate, producing positive feedback loops of good culture and good human capital programs. This mostly happens in the northeastern states like New Jersey and Connecticut. There are other regions with low social trust, low education levels and negative feedback loops. This mostly happens in southern states like Arkansas and West Virginia.

So, West Virginia = Low Social Trust = Bad Culture.

Shoot-fire.

West Virginia is not a Southern state.  Its citizens left the original colony, Virginia, during the Civil War to form a new State that sided with the Union (the North) to fight the Confederacy (the South).  Culturally, too, as described in David Hackett Fischer’s fabulous book, Albion’s Seed, the territory of West Virginia was settled by the “border people” of Great Britain compared to the “second sons” of England that settled Virginia.  From the beginning, West Virginia has been culturally removed and different from “Southern” traditions.  This is not Mr. Brooks Main Point, but is a curious and common error.

Mr. Brooks enjoys, as we all do, the sunny protection of the First Amendment and is therefore free to speak and write as he pleases.  This, of course, does not remove him from criticism.  He thoughtlessly fails to define “social trust” in his opinion, leaving readers to supply their own meanings.  Unless one seeks to confound two concepts with similar meanings, “social trust” must exclude other things like “education” or “health status” or “income” or “wealth” and so on.  Thus, while West Virginia is a poor, less educated, and less long-lived state, that cannot count as “social trust.”

As I’ve noted before, I’m not a natural citizen of West Virginia, but a Mountaineer by choice.  In my considerable travels across this state as an adult, I’ve been constantly struck at what I would consider high levels of “social trust” everywhere I go.

People are unfailingly polite, friendly, and helpful.  They pull over to help cars stuck on the side of the road.  They provide great directions and will actually drive ahead of you to your destination to get you there.  They spend a lot of time with family and friends and community.  They have a lot of fairs, parades, and festivals, generally taking any opportunity to have a to-do.  Go to any high school gym or field on a Friday night and it will be filled, as will auditoriums, cafeterias, or meeting rooms for nonsports activities like theater, music, or dance.  They take care of each other, watching the house and your pets when your gone, and keeping an eye on your house when you’re there to make sure you’re safe.  If you asked West Virginians about “social trust” they’d say it’s really good around here.

Thus, Mr. Brooks invents a concept to malign folks and lacks anything sensible to support the concept.  I know 2 million folks he could have contacted for evidence about “social trust” but apparently he’s so smart, he doesn’t need data.  It’s just obvious that West Virginia has low social trust because it is less educated, less wealthy, and less healthy.  And all that leads to the dreaded Negative Feedback Loop as we spiral down deeper into Social Despair, Cultural Decline, and Something Worse.

Of course, we have fairly low unemployment compared to the rest of the US, have highly funded childhood health and education programs, and – can’t forget this – have highly ranked football AND basketball men’s teams.  I’m not sure how this all fits in with the Negative Feedback Loop, but I am sure that Mr. Brooks has an answer.

The counter to these concerns about more education, wealth, and health is:  How much do you need to live a good life?  West Virginians seem to seek a different balance than folks like David Brooks who don’t think that there’s an enough that can actually be enough.

Hey, Mr. Brooks.  Thanks for not using the word, “hardscrabble!”

Simply putting the word, “Why,” in a headline is the second greatest way to attract attention exceeded only by that other three letter word, “Sex.”  I’d like to jump on that “Sex” headline more often, but I’m a happily married man and my wife reads my blog.  So, we’ll have to content ourselves with the “Why” game rather than the “Sex” game.

So.

Why.

Or rather, Why “Why?”

“Why?” attracts your attention because clicking on Why? makes you feel intelligent, open-minded, and thoughtful.

You.  Feel.  Intelligent.  Open-minded.  Thoughtful.

If you click on “Why?” you confirm your intelligence even if you don’t carefully read the answer, understand the answer, or think critically about the answer.

If you click on “Why?” you confirm your open-mindedness, even if you don’t consider alternatives, forget past counter-arguments, or avoid additional viewpoints.

If you click on “Why?” you confirm your thoughtfulness, even if you are a prisoner of Low WATT processing, a child following a Cue, just a happy camper on the Peripheral Route.

Stated the Persuasion Way, “Why?” headlines posed to Internet surfers function most frequently as Cues for Low WATTers.  Surfers ride the wave of Thoughtfulness, never diving in, as Thoughtfulness requires, but enjoying the splash and surge of Cognition just beneath the surface.  It’s like watching an intense war movie and thinking you know the agony of combat as a result.

“Why?” is also the perfect hook for the Just So Story – that folk tale like Jack and the Bean Stalk, the Three Little Pigs, and most of the Brothers Grimm tales (the Brothers Grimm would be a great name for a new boy band!).  When you see “Why?” you can be assured that you will read an elegant, clever, and insightful answer that explains the mystery of Why in less than five hundred words.

Isn’t it nice that so many of the mysteries of Why can be answered in elegant, clever, and insightful essays of five hundred words?  It’s as if Shakespeare wrote Cliff’s Notes style rather than that clunky iambic pentameter.  Think how much easier Hamlet would be.  All that poetry and insight compressed into 500 words!

All you have to do is read “Why?” stories and you feel intelligent, open-minded, and thoughtful.

Now, let’s consider the Greatest Headline.

“Why Sex?”