Influence
Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say "yes"—and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book. You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success. Some images that appeared in the print edition of this book are unavailable in the electronic edition due to rights reasons.
Stats for nerds
214recommend
408mentions
303people
2007–2026years
67% recommend32% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Not nearly all prompt injections are by any means that absolute unless starting from the exact same state. Many of them will also work only probabilistically unless you turn temperature to 0 for exactly that reason.
And at the same time, whole books have been written about how reliably we can induce certain behaviours from humans.
E.g. the Blue-seven phenomenon [1] - I've personally experienced that second hand and it was how I learned about it by searching for it subsequently because I suspected it was a known thing, having read about cold reading before. A co-worker came back from lunch and recited a story about a cold reader that had run a routine on him exploiting the blue-seven phenomenon, and I knew before the story finished that the answer would be "blue" and "seven".
See also Cialdini's book "Influence" which is full of examples of just how predictable peoples reactions are to a whole lot of things.
That there isn't a perfect overlap does not mean there aren't plenty of similar "hacks" that causes us to respond in very predictable ways.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93seven_phenomenon
- I've learned this by reading Influence by Robert Cialdini.The trick is find something to which they say yes. If they do it their brain kind of tells them: If I did him/her a favor it's because I like him/her.... and liking opens other doors
- You might like these too:
High Output Management (Andrew Grove) https://vectree.io/c/high-output-management-andrew-grove
Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss) https://vectree.io/c/never-split-the-difference-chris-voss
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini) https://vectree.io/c/influence-the-psychology-of-persuasion-...
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Nir Eyal) https://vectree.io/c/hooked-how-to-build-habit-forming-produ...
Thinking in Systems (Donella Meadows) https://vectree.io/c/thinking-in-systems-donella-meadows
- Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath, and Influence by Cialdini are classics for a reason. Influence in particular made it shockingly clear how our environment shapes not only our decision process, but our personality.
- The pedagogy you describe has a name and it is called "Lying to Children" by the people who came up with this, and its based in Paulo Freire's work (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), hitting a peak around late 1990s. The same Marxist groups that brought wokeism to the masses.
This has largely taken over starting in the lax hiring standards that came about as a result of Sputnik late 60s. By 1978 most teaching books abandoned the First-principled approach favoring this approach instead.
The First-principled approach to teaching began with the Greeks/Rome (Trivium/Quadrivium); the process starts with an objective real system which you break observations down into core relationships, from such intuitive relations you then build up the model of relationships to predict future states within that same system, checking each time for correctness, and deviations to eliminate falsehoods/assumptions made.
The "Lying to Children" approach, is an abominable deviation of that process, or what many referred to without proper definition, as by-rote teaching, starts with an inherently flawed/fake system where you must learn to competency true and false things at the same time to progress to the next level of gnosis or mastery.
Upon each iteration in the path you are taught increasingly more useful versions of the ultimate model expected, but are subjected to psychological torture in the unlearning of false things which were learned to competency and will stonewall further progress; while relearning the true principles. Those who can put perceptual blinders on are able to pass this filter at the cost of intuition, as are those who tend towards lying/deceit. The process is by purposeful intent torturous, and intelligent people are most susceptible to this kind of torture (it is exactly that).
In Electronics, the water pipe analogy is one such example of this type of teaching method when the behavior of diffusion of charge is much more appropriate.
There are also induced failure points that operate on a lag, to plausibly prevent people from going into science backgrounds using this same methodology. Setting them up to fail through devious changes in grading and structure designed to burn the bridge (so you can't go backwards and are left stranded unable to move forward).
You are right to distrust teachers that do this. They are truly evil people (no hyperbole). Good people don't torture people and gaslight them into thinking its teaching. It doesn't matter if they didn't know the origin of the things they were taught, part of the responsibility for positions of such trust is to understand and comprehend what you do; and many just believe you aren't learning until you are struggling.
Evil people can seem nice, but what makes them truly evil is the wilful blindness towards the consequences of their evil actions; where its to the point where they repeat such actions unless stopped by external force.
Evil actions being defined as anything that does not result in the long-term beneficial growth of self or others (action or inaction).
They get to this point through repeated acts of self-violation until they no longer resist those evil choices (non-resistance), and then in fact accept it, subjorning themselves to it and becoming its plaything.
False justification for example is one such self-violation.
There are a lot of evil people out in the world today because society has followed Tolstoy's approach to non-resistance to evil in much of the policy.
These people think they are good, or at worst not bad, and you recognize them by that blindness, and inability to choose differently.
Torture is the imposition of psychological stress beyond a certain individual threshold. From that point, rational thought degrades, involuntary hypnosis occurs, eventually culminating in psychological break towards disassociation or a semi-lucid state of psychosis seeking annihilation (suicide or mass shooter types).
Wouldn't it be sad if the majority of intelligent people are actually killing themselves because of these things.
Most people today don't recognize torture because its become so sophisticated and their individual education of things have been deprived by past generations, purposefully so.
Torture includes elements, structures, and clustering, and if you'd like to know more about the process to recognize it you can read the following books (in order), most of this is common knowledge in certain fields (foundational back in the 1950s).
Robert Cialdini - Influence (psychological blindspots leveraged for clustering without distorted reflected appraisal)
Joost Meerloo - Rape of the Mind (1950s) - Overview and related factors
Robert Lifton - Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism - Case Studies of PoWs returning from Mao's China during Korean Conflict covers structuring and elements.
- Its actually quite a bit worse than you think, but to recognize what's happening you have to understand how torture and the developing mind work to some small degree.
Thought reform, which is sophisticated science based techniques that impose stress and increase suggestability, almost to the point of mindlessness,are torture that have been imposed in varying ways to kids and teens. The entire process of centralized education embraces this through Paulo Freire's pedagogy which is most National Teachers Union members; like "Lying to Children", or by-rote teaching (two faces same coin).
When you succumb to torture, you adopt characteristics of the torturer that are reflected. The torturer can distort that reflection for purpose, and in general its a state of involuntary hypnosis. This same state can be induced through distorting reflected appraisal through media. Its not the type of torture you see caracicaturized in media. It leverages perceptual blindspots to induce psychological instability.
When the girls are taught that attractive qualities in men are unattractive or crazy, and the guys are taught the same thing; there is an age range where those core identity beliefs are adopted and crystallized to carry forward the rest of their lives. It takes great personal suffering to overcome any of these, let alone recognize them.
The behavior promoted is almost and mimics similar behaviors or mannerisms that occur in schizophrenics, and is one sign that a person may have been tortured. In addition to what you mention, this has been occuring for decades, and the economic consequences have only gotten worse, and the environment has only ever marched toward disadvantaged.
The world created by the aggregate of older adults today is a hellscape for their children, but most of these slothful (complacent) people have willfully blinded themselves to the reality of their actions.
For example dating websites where you are never matched up to someone that is long-term compatible, effectively being pigeonholed into a eugenics experiment since the strategy the company uses to guarantee profit is the same strategy the USDA uses to eradicate parasites through sterility.
Whenever these type of dynamics occur, chaos sustainably grows until the systems involved can no longer correct, as a positive feedback system. All the way to catastrophe.
Aside from food security, when you make social life unlivable and intolerable. When you deprive children who become adults, of lifes joy through conditioned indoctrination and torture. You have as a group stolen their future. The ones that did nothing are equally responsible as the ones that moved it towards that state.
There is a critical point where they will realize what has been done to them, because you can't fool everyone always. When that occurs, the law won't save the old. Absent a functioning rule of law (which we don't have), violence will be the only option to these people, and they will have nothing to lose.
Chickens come home to roost eventually. Evil doesn't need to know its evil to be evil. All it needs to do is be willfully blind. Thomas Paine said it best when he referred to "Dead Men Ruling."
Books:
Robert Cialdini (1990s) - Influence - Covers perceptual blindspots
Robert Lifton (1950s) - Thought Reform & Totalism - Detailed Case Studies of Torture
Joost Meerloo (1950s) - Rape of the Mind - Covers the broad topic of torture and thought reform; has some dating.
Chase Hughes - Ellipsis - The material in this domain is highly fragmented across many subfields, he aggregates most of the important parts of modern thought reform (1970s+) into NCI, including Cults, Cointelpro, Kubark, and others. Author was a professional military interrogator/behavioral modification expert (iirc).
Torture/Modern Thought Reform is recognized by its Elements, Structuring, and Clustering, and the last group is often addiction linked following lines of Narco-synthesis/analysis through dopamine triggering/conditioning.
Unfortunately, you probably won't see this post long. HN has a lot of bots, automatons, or despicable people that don't want harsh truths to see the light of day. Almost without fail within 30 minutes of linking to the reference material included, the posts get downvoted to invisibility despite being science backed and true.
Mind you nothing said here changes the reality of the dynamics. It will all happen the same regardless. The hiding is only an action that prevents a general forewarning to others as preparable time ahead of the associated collapse occurring.
There are a lot of people alive today that want to destroy everyone and everything they can.
Ivan Illyin seems to have been right with regards to his refutation of Tolstoy, and outcomes of evil.
Related
Influence, New and Expanded
1 recommend · 4
How to Win Friends and Influence People
579 recommend · 1,071
Pre-Suasion
10 recommend · 23
Human behavior
2 recommend · 4
How to make friends and influence people
39 recommend · 78
How to Influence People
2 recommend · 8
