Blogtrek

Influence, Honesty, and being to the point

Yesterday I attended a talk about the strategies of influence. He mentioned how you could influence people to buy toys in January, for instance. You bring the toy out into the market in November. Tout it as a good Christmas gift for your kids. Then suddenly terminate it on December 10 and send every parent to Scare City (because of scarcity of the toy). Then bring it out in the middle of January. All that pent-up demand explodes, and the toy sells in January. He also says that gasoline stations used to charge extra if a credit card was used to buy the gasoline. But then they offered cash discounts instead. That is like six of one and half a dozen of the other. A premium for credit card use is the same as a cash discount: you pay more by charging than by paying cash.

To me this is playing tricks on the public. Confronted with the gasoline station, I would tell them that cash discounts still mean that they are charging a premium for credit card use. When they say that is the usual price of gasoline, I would reply that there is no such thing as a usual price for gasoline!. All prices are relative to each other, and cash discounts are the same as credit card premiums. Tell them like it is. Expose their deception. I'm not sure why they are teaching people to behave like this.

Today we discussed table topics in Toastmasters, where a Topicsmaster gives you a subject to talk about in 1-2 minutes. You learn that if you don't know anything about the subject, that you make something up or change the subject. I.e., you be evasive. I am not sure this is proper training either. But I had to do it today. I was called to tell people what "pterion" meant. I told them honestly that I did not know, and that I could make a good guess by noticing that pter- means wing; for example, a rotating-wing flying machine is a helicopter. I was way off the mark this time (it is a medical term), but at least I was honest about it.

It even debases the language. It means that not has no meaning. It is just a filler word. When Nixon says "I am not a crook", he means that he is a crook. When Gary Hart denies an improper relationship with Donna Rice, that means he had such a relationship. When stock brokers tell customers that Enron is "Buy", they mean it's "Sell". When Iraq says it does not have weapons of mass destruction, and especially when it says it in 12,200 pages, that means that it does have weapons of mass destruction. So if you have a sexually free relationship with your wife, and you hold a public office, such as governor or senator, and you are asked if you had an "improper" relationship with a certain woman last night, change the subject or tell them that you prefer not to discuss it. For if you say you had an affair, then that means you had one. If you say you did not have an affair, that means you had one. The only way you can say you did not have one is not to comment on the subject. If Bill Clinton had done this when he was President, he would have been more effective, and our President today would be Al Gore.