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"Again, we don’t know for sure, but we suspect that the analogy with biological disease is badly flawed. For example, whereas it is probably true that most people are susceptible to HIV, our susceptibility to any particular idea, product, musical artists, etc. varies tremendously, depending on our tastes, backgrounds, and circumstances. Unlike for influenza, to which you’re either exposed or not exposed, even the ideas you do encounter have to compete for attention with everything else that you’re exposed to. And unlike models of disease, which assume that disease spreads exclusively from person to person, information can be disseminated by the media and advertising as well as by word of mouth.
All of these differences, along with many others, could dramatically alter the prospects for social epidemics, as well as introduce other mechanisms entirely by which social change can come about, yet models of social influence reflect very little of this added complexity"
" My expertise is creating systems to change human behavior. I call this "Behavior Design."
I devote about 50% of my time to Stanford and 50% to industry innovation. For me, working in both worlds makes sense: My Stanford work makes me better in industry. And what I learn in industry improves my Stanford research. I'm always eager to help other innovators. "
"New insights from science and behaviour change could lead to significantly improved outcomes, and at a lower cost, than the way many conventional policy tools are used.
MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy (PDF, 1.6MB) was published by the Institute for Government and the Cabinet Office on 2 March. The report explores how behaviour change theory can help meet current policy challenges,"
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If "pragmatic" is the highest praise one can offer in DC these days, "ideological" is perhaps the sharpest slur. And it is by this twisted logic that the crimes of the Bush cabinet are laid at the feet of the blogosphere, that the sins of Paul Wolfowitz end up draped upon the slender shoulders of Dennis Kucinich.
But privileging pragmatism over ideology, while perhaps understandable in the wake of the Bush years, misses the point. For one thing, as Glenn Greenwald has astutely pointed out on his blog, while ideology can lead decision-makers to ignore facts, it is also what sets the limiting conditions for any pragmatic calculation of interests.
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Principle is often pragmatism's guardian. Particularly at times of crisis, when a polity succumbs to collective madness or delusion, it is only the obstinate ideologues who refuse to go along. Expediency may be a virtue in virtuous times, but it's a vice in vicious ones.
There's another problem with the fetishization of the pragmatic, which is the brute fact that, at some level, ideology is inescapable. Obama may have told Steve Kroft that he's solely interested in "what works," but what constitutes "working" is not self-evident and, indeed, is impossible to detach from some worldview and set of principles. Alan Greenspan, of all people, made this point deftly while testifying before Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee. Waxman asked Greenspan, "Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?" To which Greenspan responded, "Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to--to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not."
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Politics and persuasion, reason and religion, science and success, appearance and reality, belief and knowledge, ethics and egoism. Reason and Persuasion provides a new look at old issues through the lens of three classic dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno and Republic, Book I.
Today I am happy to bring you the long-awaited interview with Ian Bogost who is currently an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech Institute at Technology, a co-founder of Persuasive Games, and a board member at the educational publishing house Open Texture.
But Frankfurt’s essay seems also to have a bearing on the larger question of how the persuasion industry (marketing, advertising, and to some degree, entertainment) scuttles our sense of selfhood, which, Frankfurt argues, hinges on our expression of will. The persuasion industry is seeking always to confuse the communication between our first- and second-order desires; it’s seeking to short circuit the way we negotiate between the many things we can conceive of wanting to come up with a positive will to want certain particular things at certain moments. It seeks to make us more impulsive at the very least; at worst it wants to supplant our innate will with something prefabricated that will orient us toward consumer goods rather than desires that are able to be fulfilled outside the market. This can occur without our having been persuaded directly by the advertising messages, simply by overloading us with information and unleashing the “paradox of choice” and worse, optional paralysis.
This online rhetoric, provided by Dr. Gideon Burton of Brigham Young University, is a guide to the terms of classical and renaissance rhetoric. Sometimes it is difficult to see the forest (the big picture) of rhetoric because of the trees (the hundreds of Greek and Latin terms naming figures of speech, etc.) within rhetoric.
This site is intended to help beginners, as well as experts, make sense of rhetoric, both on the small scale (definitions and examples of specific terms) and on the large scale (the purposes of rhetoric, the patterns into which it has fallen historically as it has been taught and practiced for 2000+ years).
Welcome to ChangingMinds.org, the largest site in the world on all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do.
A Series about Spin, the Spinners and the Spun by Ira Basen for CBC Radio The Sunday Edition
how we know is irreducibly personal.
What does that mean? Well, part of what it means is that when we are actually making decisions, we do not in fact consult principles, best practices, statistics or measurements. Indeed, it is even with some effort that
We believe the difference is in how they engage our attention. Calm technology engages both the center and the periphery of our attention, and in fact moves back and forth between the two.
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