Hacker News Reader

Comment by hendler | Hacker News Reader

Scientifically proven; with no proofs.

"The authors take the position that persuasion is a science, not art, hence with the right approach anybody can become the master in the skill of persuasion."

My approach is a bit simpler than 50 tactics. My two favorite forms of persuasion are to be honest, and be correct. Maybe it's obvious I'm not in marketing.

The closest thing in the text to "be honest" was "Admitting you’re wrong makes people more trustworthy."

I didn't read the article carefully - maybe the book is a good read.

View on HN

You're right about the proofs, there should have been sources included. The book might be more thorough...

I think you're oversimplifying a field you're not familiar with though, it's like a non-hacker saying that all you need to store data is to set up a microsoft Access database, and you're good to go. It's correct, but misses a lot of problems and subtleties.

The book is well footnoted and uses as its examples the actual experiments performed.

Sources for all the research are quoted in the appendix to the book.

honesty is always the best policy, but how you present your honesty can be the deciding factor in whether your ideas are taken on board.

i enjoyed influence by cialdini, it helped a lot in getting my ideas across in my job.

Scientifically proven; with no proofs.

Yup. Exhorting people to conserve electricity with smiley face postcards caused a meaningful change in power use? Maybe, but I doubt it. (And if it did, may God help the people in that neighborhood.)

Peoples' minds do not function like your computer. The reference you cite was part of a study that was properly sourced in the book, so yes, it is true.

If you look more broadly and read introductory psychology books, you will discover the many quirks that our (and I mean all of ours -- yours and mine included) brains have. Whether that means that all the world's population needs God's help to survive because of the way our brains function is a question that we won't be able to answer in our lifetime.

"The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body.

I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic.

The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have."

From Milton Glaser's "Ten Things I have learned" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592580

Reply on news.ycombinator.com