Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

April 11, 2018

Lagging on Balisage Paper? PsyOps Advice

Filed under: Conferences,Persuasion — Patrick Durusau @ 3:19 pm

Are you lagging on your Balisage paper for submission on 22 April 2018?

Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion, at pages 116-120, details how to build a persuasive geography that focuses you on a Balisage submission.

The “trick” is to create geography/surroundings that remind you of Balisage, along with the great people, papers and conversations.

How?

Go to the Balisage Social Pages to grab pics of people, social gatherings, etc., from Balisage and make them into screen savers, posters, make your work space a mini-Balisage den.

Try it! You will be thinking about and working on your Balisage paper nearly constantly!

PS: The same trick works for other things but I would reserve it for Balisage papers. 😉

February 26, 2018

#7 Believing that information leads to action (Myth of Liberals)

Filed under: Advertising,Persuasion,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 3:29 pm

Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change

Slides from Stanford University’s Persuasive Tech Lab, http://captology.stanford.edu.

A great resource whether you are promoting a product, service or trying to “interfere” with an already purchased election.

I have a special fondness for mistake #7 on the slides:

Believing that information leads to action

If you want to lose the 2018 mid-terms or even worse, the presidential election in 2020, you keep believing in “educating” voters.

Ping me if you want to be a winning liberal.

February 27, 2017

#ProtectTheTruth [Reframing Opposition to Energy Transfer Partners]

Filed under: #DAPL,Government,Persuasion,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 5:17 pm

#ProtectTheTruth by George Lakoff.

From the post:

Journalists are bravely standing up to Trump’s attacks on the free press, as they should. Yet one way in which they’re expressing their solidarity and resistance shows how little most journalists know about political framing and messaging.

Case in point: Trump has labeled journalists as “enemies.” So, journalists have responded by labeling themselves “#NotTheEnemy.” This hashtag is currently trending on Twitter, which is unfortunate. Adopting this slogan is a big mistake that helps Trump.

Anyone who has read my books or taken my classes at Berkeley will immediately understand why. For those new to political framing and messaging, I’ll explain briefly here.

Quick: Don’t think of an elephant!

Now, what do you see? The bulkiness, the grayness, the trunkiness of an elephant. You can’t block the picture – the frame – from being accessed by your unconscious mind. As a professor in the cognitive and brain sciences, this is the first lesson in framing I have given my students for decades. It’s also the title of my book on the science of framing political debates.

The key lesson: when we negate a frame, we evoke the frame.

I don’t know current characters known to both children and parents, but what if instead of:

#NoDAPL

we said:

#SaveSmokeyTheBear

would that be a better framing?

Or even better:

#SaveBambi

What are some more current memes to swell support to stop the ecocide promised by Energy Transfer Partners?

February 2, 2017

The Power of Big Data and Psychographics [Fact Checking]

Filed under: Government,Personalization,Persuasion,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 8:42 pm

From the description:

In a 10 minute presentation at the 2016 Concordia Summit, Mr. Alexander Nix discusses the power of big data in global elections. Cambridge Analytica’s revolutionary approach to audience targeting, data modeling, and psychographic profiling has made them a leader in behavioral microtargeting for election processes around the world.

A highly entertaining but deceptive presentation on the state of the art for marketing political candidates.

Nix claims that most marketing companies base their advertising on demographics and geographics, sending the same message to all women, all African-Americans, etc.

Worse than a “straw man,” that’s simply false. If you know the work Selling Blue Elephants by Howard Moskowitz and Alex Gofman, then you know that marketers tweak their pitches to very small market slices.

But you don’t need to find a copy of Selling Blue Elephants or take my word for that. On your next visit to the grocery store see for yourself how many variations of a popular shampoo or spaghetti sauce are offered. Each one is calculated to attract a particular niche of the overall market.

Nix goes on to describe advertising in the 1960’s as “top down,” “hope messages resonant,” etc.

Not only is that another false claim, but the application described by Nix was pioneered for the 1960 presidential campaign.


Ithiel de Sola Pool, with others, developed the Simulmatics program for the computation of a great variety of factors thought to influence voting, for specific use in the 1960 presidential election. A multitude of influences can be introduced into the program, together with modifications of a strategic nature, and the results bear on both prediction and choice of strategy, much in the manner that elaborate market research influences business decision on manufacture and sale of a new product. The Simulmatics project assembled a basic matrix of voter types and “issue clusters” (480 of the former and 52 of the latter, making a total of 24,960 cells), consolidating as values the accumulated archives of polling on all kinds of questions. The records of the Roper Public Opinion Research Center at Williamstwon were used as source material. With no data later than 1958, the simulation achieved a correlation by states of .82 with the actual Kennedy vote.

(“The Mathematical Approach to Political Science” by Oliver Benson, in Contemporary Political Analysis, edited by James C. Charlesworth, The Free Press, 1967, at pp. 129-130)

I’ll grant that Nix has more data at his disposal and techniques have changed in the last fifty-seven (57) years, but there’s no legitimate reason to not credit prior researchers in the field.

PS: If you find a hard (or scanned) copy of The Simulmatics Project by Ithiel de Sola Pool, let me know.

September 29, 2016

Are You A Moral Manipulator?

Filed under: Ethics,Marketing,Persuasion — Patrick Durusau @ 6:58 pm

I appreciated Nir’s reminder about the #1 rule for drug dealers.

If you don’t know it, the video is only a little over six minutes long.

Enjoy!

September 12, 2016

Persuasive Cartography

Filed under: Cartography,Mapping,Maps,Persuasion — Patrick Durusau @ 8:12 pm

Vintage Infodesign [161]: More examples of persuasive cartography, diagrams and charts from before 1960 by Tiago Veloso.

From the post:

A recurrent topic here on Vintage InfoDesign is “persuasive cartography” – the use of maps to influence and in many cases, deceive. We showcased examples of these maps here and here, with a special mention to the PJ Mode Collection at Cornell University Library. The collection was donated to Cornell back in 2014, and until now more than 300 examples are available online in high resolution.

A must for all of those interested in the subject, and we picked a few examples to open this post, courtesy of Allison Meier, who published a rente article about the PJ Mode Collection over at Hyperallergic.

new-black-plague-460

Re-reading The Power of Maps (1992) by Denis Wood, in preparation to read Rethinking The Power of Maps (2010), also by Denis Wood, has made me acutely aware of aspersions such as:

“persuasive cartography” – the use of maps to influence and in many cases, deceive.

I say “aspersion” because Wood makes the case that all maps, with no exceptions, are the results of omissions, characterizations, enhancements, emphasis on some features and not others, for stated and/or unstated purposes.

Indeed, all of The Power of Maps (1992) is devoted to teasing out, with copious examples, where a user of a map may fail to recognize the “truth” of any map, is a social construct in a context shaped by factors known and unknown.

I characterize maps I disagree with as being deceptive, disingenuous, inaccurate, etc., but doesn’t take away from Wood’s central point that all maps are acts of persuasion.

The critical question being: Do you support the persuasion a map is attempting to make?

When I teach topic maps again I will make The Power of Maps (1992) required reading.

It is an important lesson to realize that any map, even a topic map, need only map so much of the territory or domain, as is sufficient for the task at hand.

A topic maps for nuclear physics won’t have much in common with one for war criminals of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

Moreover, even topic maps of the same subject domain, may or may not merge in a meaningful way.

The idea of useful merger of arbitrary topic maps, like the idea of “objective maps,” is a false one that serves no useful purpose.

Say rather that topic maps can make enough information explicit about subjects to determine if merging will be meaningful to one or more users of a topic map. That alone is quite a feat.

January 24, 2015

History Depends On Who You Ask, And When

Filed under: History,Persuasion,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 11:52 am

You have probably seen the following graphic but it bears repeating:

sondage-nation-contribue-defaite-nazis

The image is from: Who contributed most to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945?

From the post:

A survey conducted in May 1945 on the whole French territory now released (confirming a survey in September 1944 with Parisians) showed that interviewees appear well aware of the power relations and the role of allies in the war, despite the censorship and the difficulty to access reliable information under enemy’s occupation.

A clear majority (57%) believed that the USSR is the nation that has contributed most to the defeat of Germany while the United States and England will gather respectively 20% and 12%.

But what is truly astonishing is that this vision of public opinion was reversed very dramatically with time, as shown by two surveys conducted in 1994 and 2004. In 2004, 58% of the population were convinced that USA played the biggest role in the Second World War and only 20% were aware of the leading role of USSR in defeating the Nazi.

This is a very clear example of how the propaganda adjusted the whole nation’s perception of history, the evaluation of the fundamental contribution to the allied victory in the World War II.

Whether this change in attitude was the result of “propaganda” or some less directed social process I cannot say.

What I do find instructive is that over sixty (60) years, less than one lifetime, public perception of the “truth” can change that much.

How much greater the odds that the “truth” of events one hundred years ago are different from the ones we hold now.

To say nothing of the “truth” of events several thousand years ago, which we have reported only a handful of times, reports that have been edited to suite particular agendas.

Or we have some physical relics that occur at one location, sans any contemporaneous documentation, which we would not understand in its ancient context but in ours.

That should not dissuade us from writing histories, but it should make us cautious about taking action based on historical “truths.”

I most recently saw this in a tweet by Anna Pawlicka.

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