Reality Bites Back: A Review of Scott Adams' "Win Bigly"

Scott Adams' latest book, "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter", describes the approach he used to predict Donald Trump's winning of the 2016 election. His thesis is that Trump is a "master persuader," similar to Steve Jobs, who has a "skills stack" (Adams' words) that naturally allows him to persuade people to rally to his side, and this resulted in his victory. This is one theme in "Win Bigly". A second theme that Adams did not intend to include, I believe, is what I'll call "the revenge of reality" theme.

Throughout the election, many people were comparing the policies of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump.

Other people, myself included, were concerned about the candidates' overall ethics and politics as well as those of their supporters. Observing a candidate's supporters is crucial. The candidates themselves are slick and polished; their supporters aren't, so their words and actions are far easier to unravel. The Berkeley riots in response to Milo Yiannopoulos' visit told me all I needed to know about Hillary. I'm a died-in-the-wool America Firster Deplorable, and while I supported Trump, I did not believe he would carry his political philosophy to its natural conclusion, nor would he understand the causes that would block him from reaching that goal.

Regardless, those two approaches (policy and philosophy) attempt to answer the question: who will make the best president, should he or she win? Adams realized that neither of those address another question: who will win? In order to answer that, he examined the techniques each candidate used to persuade the electorate to vote for them.

Adams begins his book by describing his experience as a persuader. He is a trained hypnotist, and a lifelong student of the art of persuasion. He calls himself a "commercial-grade persuader".

To get the art of persuasion off the ground, he believes that it is necessary to take what can be called an "anti-realist" approach to how individuals know the world around them. His theory is that people cannot know the world - that we are living in a world where facts don't matter. By this, he isn't talking about temporary ignorance, or ambiguities, or "fog of war" type nescience, but rather an actual inability to know. In support of this he sites anti-realist philosophers like Kant, various marketing experts, and quantum physicists. "All we have is probability and strangeness," he claims.

Adams goes on to say that this doesn't apply to mundane tasks like balancing your checkbook, only the important things. "...[F]acts and reason don't have much influence on our decisions, except for trivial things, such as putting gas in your car when you are running low. On all the important stuff, we are emotional creatures who make decisions first and rationalize them after the fact." Which side do the steps needed to split the atom, or put men on the moon, or perform open heart surgery, belong - trivial or important? He doesn't answer that.

Instead, Adams claims that people view the world through interpretations or "filters". How does one choose among different filters? He uses two standards:

1. It makes him happy
2. It makes accurate predictions

Left unaddressed: how does he know if a prediction has indeed come true, if facts don't matter? How does he know that he is indeed happy?

One of the funniest chapters is the one where he describes the various filters he went through while growing up - starting with the Santa Claus filter, going through the church filter (which makes predictions only after one has died), through the marijuana filter, finally ending with what he calls the "persuasion filter".

The persuasion filter is not to be underestimated for, as Adams points out, it is sufficiently powerful to undermine even the scientific method. Just look at "climategate".

Adams recognized Trump to be a master persuader very early. He didn't start the campaign as a Trump supporter; rather, he was impressed by Trump's persuasive abilities and entertainment value. This was enough to trigger Hillary supporters and Internet trolls, which resulted in Adams being the target of intimidation.

As the campaigns continued, Hillary used backdoor means to eliminate Bernie Sanders. These would not work on Trump, simply because those techniques would not play well in public. She had to up her game in a manner that would grant her victory without appearing even more slimy in the public light. This is when the "pussygate" recording was made public, which caused Adams to temporarily switch his endorsement to Gary Johnson, as he "is the candidate who touches only himself."

Those of us who are skeptical/cynical of politicians knew that the importance of the recording wasn't in the content, but rather in how it was being used: as a tool to paint Trump as a womanizer. By implication, those on Hillary's side were pure as snow, like Bill Clinton or Harvey Weinstein. Thus pussygate didn't get much traction.

So, Hillary and her supporters began the allegations describing Trump as "dark", racist, Islamophobic, racist, homophobic, racist, sexist, Nazi... racist. Rhetoric of this scorched-earth kind cannot stick only to Trump, but carries over to his supporters. Indeed, it is designed to spill over in that manner: "people believed Trump was as bad as Hitler, and by extension that marked his alleged propaganda chief (me) for death as well."

Adams was genuinely concerned for his safety and for that of his friends and family. He changed his endorsement to Hillary "for his own safety". You can tell that Adams lives in northern California: threatening violence against another would be unacceptable anywhere else, we have too much integrity to tolerate such threats. In other parts of the country, the snowflakes resort to economic retaliation.

A died-in-the-wool anti-realist would say: friends and family are concepts that exist only in my mind. How do I know that they are in danger? And if indeed it is a fact that they're in danger, it doesn't matter, since... facts don't matter. Fortunately, Adams dropped his anti-realism and came out swinging: "this was not politics. This was bully behavior, plain and simple. And it flipped a bit in my brain that couldn't flip back."

We know the rest of the story: Trump won the electoral vote, the snowflakes had a tantrum of seismic proportions, and the media continues as leftist propaganda machines.

Adams ends the book with a discussion about how persuasion relates to casualty: did his predictions actually cause Trump to win? Predictions are but guesses - when they come true, they are prophecies; when they don't, we salvage the situation by calling them allegories. An anti-realist cannot make that distinction.

Would I recommend this book? Yes, because the author expresses interesting insights into the art of persuasion, and applies those insights to electoral politics. Filter out the anti-realism, and a very strong book remains.

Let me end this review by making a prediction of my own: Trump will be stymied throughout his term of office by what is coming to be known as the "deep state". He will be slow to understand the fact that the deep state is what we ourselves are supporting, and that the easiest way to stop the deep state is to excise it like the cancer that it is.

Tinfoil Hats Not Required

A certain portion of the Patriot movement is powered by conspiracy theories, but this isn't unique to the Tea Partiers and III%ers: theories about the assassinations of JFK and MLK were staples of the Left, as global warming is now; Bigfoot aficionados come from all over the political landscape; the Heaven's Gate people were just criminally stupid.

The problem is not the particular subjects of conspiracy theories (Bigfoot, UFOs, chemtrails, etc.) but the conspiracy theorists' methods by which they gain "knowledge" of those subjects (non-observational, non-causal, crowd-sourced, etc.) as well as the consequences of using such magical thinking (division, paralysis, false targets). These will be discussed below.

For any reputable person or organization to be successful, that person's or organization's actions must be based on solid information, not conspiracy theories, not hearsay, not rumors, and certainly not fear mongering. The ultimate standard for solid information is this: is something true or false, and how do you know?

Here's the answer: you have five senses, use them. You have logic and common sense, use them. You feel that that those standards don't leave you too much? Welcome to the real world. That's where training and experience comes in: training and experience are nothing but logic and common sense in action.

Only by these methods do you have knowledge, and along with it that feeling called "certainty". People too often tolerate uncertainty prior to taking action; worse, some people believe that omniscience or infallibility are prerequisites for being certain, so they conclude that certainty (and therefore knowledge) is never possible.

To any person who proclaims that "you can never be certain of anything", ask them: "are you sure?" and watch what happens.

Believers will sometimes try to undermine a skeptic’s position by appealing to a lack of direct experience, e.g. by asking: “how do you know Bigfoot isn’t hiding around the corner...or somewhere in Oregon?” This is where Bertrand Russell and his famous teapot becomes relevant:

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense."

In other words, it isn’t our responsibility as skeptics to either confirm or refute such claims - the burden of proof (and it is a considerable burden) does not lie with the skeptic. Thus, the proper response to the Bigfoot believer is: “It’s not my job to hunt down Bigfoot.”

But the fact remains that we are neither omniscient nor infallible. Sometimes, we attempt to "fill in the facts" - but until proven, these aren't facts, merely guesses. Problems start when we confuse guesses with facts. The best description of this process comes from Victor Hugo's "The Man Who Laughs":

"At the corners of old maps of the world of the 15th century are great vague spaces without shape or name, on which are written these three words: Hic sunt leones. Such a dark corner is there also in man. Passions grow and growl somewhere within us, and we may say of an obscure portion of our souls: 'there are lions here.'"

It is mildly interesting to wonder what these growing and growling passions are that would cause someone to create such lions, to initiate and propagate rumors and conspiracy theories. Some possibilities include:

• To add drama to one's life
• To gain the appearance of experience, without actually having experience
• To press the limits of gullibility, and laugh at the results
• To garner attention - would anybody ever go to Roswell, New Mexico, if a UFO wasn't rumored to crash there?
• To fool the opposition
• To act as a trigger - to start Revolutionary War II based not on intolerable acts but on fictitious deeds

Whatever. Regardless, the end result of rumors and conspiracy theories is to spread FUD - fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The end result of FUD is to paralyze and to divide.

Why paralysis? Conspiracy theories frequently portray vague and shapeless things or events that cannot be sustained by themselves, that appear to be causeless. By being causeless, they must be sustained by some outside magical power. How can we fight something like that? Monsters that live under children's beds have power only because of the child's ignorance. Thus the nonexistent becomes efficacious.

Even if paralysis is NOT achieved, there is the problem of “false targets”. Imagine that someone convinced the Library of Congress to release all documents related to the assassination of JFK. Some people would no doubt hail this as a victory for openness, transparency, and the American Way. No, rumors about a grassy knoll are false targets, and any success against a false target is a false victory, and the American Way has not been advanced. The real acts of a real devil you know have been made acceptable by the fictitious actions of a nonexistent devil that you do not know.

If you can see something, and it is wrong, you can fight it with a reasonable chance of success. Fighting the nonexistent is worse than pointless: Don Quixote tilted at windmills, but at least windmills are real.

Why division? If you’ve ever listened to a conspiracy theorist prattle on for more than a minute, you experience a queasiness, a desire to flee from all the unjustified conclusions, all the leaps of faith, all the bullshit being heaped upon you. And, you would be right to flee, to separate yourself from that person, no matter what else you might share in common.

The advantage to fighting the evils that are in plain sight is the fact that it is quite easy to win-over the "opposition".

A prime example of this is NSA spying. Not too long ago, most people thought that the U.S. government was not spying on its own citizens. Then along came Edward Snowden, and we now have an allegiance between the Tea Party and certain members of the Left on this issue.

Another example is police militarization. Before the Ferguson riots, the receipt of military hardware by civilian police was considered a libertarian issue, ignored by everybody else. Photos and news coverage of the Ferguson riots changed that, so that now the administration seems to be taking steps to curtail this hardware transfer.

A third example happened recently over the non-disclosure by the Obama administration about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. The administration was keeping the TPP secret...why? A bill was introduced with bipartisan sponsorship that requires the TPP’s text be revealed before vote, but at present it appears that we lost this one.

Those issues - NSA surveillance, police militarization, and TPP secrecy - are now three more things that the left and the right have in common. The only way this happened was because we have the evidence of the senses, something that is available to everybody regardless of their political stripe. As for the evil our government does, tinfoil hats are simply not required, and are indeed a detriment. While such allegiances are fragile and fleeting, they make it clear who the real enemy is, and so make victory possible.