Steve Kirsch, There Is A Better Way

Convincing Someone To Switch Sides; Or How Psychology Is Weaponised

Readers voted for this in the polls on the previous article. Become a subscriber to vote on the next article The Daily Beagle covers. This is the de-conditioning article that was requested.

This is a pre-cursor article that explains the methods and tactics used in “read this to save lives” to convince people to change their minds, and should be read first before reading and sharing the other article.

Steve Kirsch has been recently promoting his book, ‘Turtles All The Way Down’, where he offers people money if they can find an error in his book, in an attempt to get people to read his book and learn more. [Edit: There appears to be confusion in the wording I used. It does not say he authored the book. It is his book in the sense that he is promoting it. I have a copy of the book ‘how to can’, it is my book, but saying the book is mine does not mean I authored the book.]

It is a financial risk Kirsch is taking, and it isn’t how you typically convince people to switch sides. To see why, we must understand more about influence operations. Notice money is rarely a factor, nor evidence, but emotions and psychology.

Government Tactics

In 2015, the UK government’s Behavioural Insights team published a document how they intended to manipulate people and get them to do what they want. They listed 9 different categories:

Messager is effectively a reference to the Milgram experiment, where a person who looks authoritative commands more influence than someone who doesn’t. And this isn’t some light influence, Milgram was able to get people to administer what would have been lethal electric shocks, although the ‘victim’ in the experiment was acting and the shocks administered were fake, the participants did not know this. Very few refused.

Incentives refers to a psychological phenomena called ‘risk aversion’, where it was found the human brain is wired to avoid losses much more strongly than it was wired to seek rewards, even if the rewards greatly outweighed the loss. This is why many propaganda campaigns involve fear ‘don’t kill granny’, ‘the risk of death from X is higher than Y’, etc.

Norms includes the Asch conformity experiment, where people would conform with the group on wrong answers. Experimenters set up a group of actors, one participant, and made the easiest solveable task - comparing line lengths. If actors picked the wrong answer, then the participant typically would too. If a ‘helper’ picked the right answer, they were less conformist.

Similar to Asch conformity, in a study involving a room filling with smoke, if a person was alone, 75% of the people would report it within 2 minutes. If there were two actors who ignored it also in the room, it dropped the reporting rate dropped to 10%.

This is similar to the dangerous ‘Bystander effect’, where the more people who are watching someone in need of help, the less likely they are to actually assist. This is due to a ‘diffusion of responsibility’, which reasons ‘if it truly was an emergency, someone would have spoken out about it by now’, missing the point they may be the only ones to perceive it is an emergency.

Defaults refers to an NLP (neurolinguistic programming) phenomena where if you ask a person a series of questions they will answer yes to, they are much more likely to also answer yes to the last question. It also refers to the fact humans are lazy and prefer less work rather than more.

Salience was referenced in the book Neil Struss’s ‘Game Theory’ (which in the book is called ‘peacock theory’), where people’s attention is drawn to the unusual and distinct (‘novel’) - like how a peacock looks. Relevance refers to the mind’s mental filtering mechanisms, we often ignore ‘fluff’ and seek only what confirms our own bias.

Priming is a phrase used to mean the series of yes questions, and I believe the Behavioural Insights team meant ‘mirroring’, in which subconscious cues made by another person can influence the way someone thinks about us. A person who mirrors your behaviours shows they like you, and you in turn, like them more as a result.

Affect refers to the fact emotional manipulation is dominant, so thinks like fear, joy, sadness, etc all exhibit an undue effect on the human mind - even when people believe they are mentally resistant to it.

Commitments is a reference to Saul Alinsky’s ‘12 rules for radicals’ on ‘how to create a socialist state’, which under Rule 4 says “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”. In this case, humans are compelled to be consistent with their own actions, and being inconsistent causes cognitive dissonance which generates a sort of phantom pain, meaning they will want to resolve the cognitive dissonance as quickly as possible.

Ego is a person’s self-perception, how they feel about themselves, how they see themselves in the world. They move towards tasks, objectives and goals that make them feel valued and validated, and away from ones that don’t. Many phamplets and propaganda pieces will talk about ‘saving lives’ or ‘doing what is right’, the ‘greater good’ etc - these are all ego appeals.

Governments have used other tactics to control people’s thoughts in the past. Quoting the book The Crown of Life by Isa Blagden in 1869:

If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.

Becoming the line ‘a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth’, it is ironically often falsely attributed to Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister, due to repetition.

A study confirmed that repetition reinforces the perception of truthfulness, even for known falsehoods. And it gets worse, humans think something sounds more true if it is a rhyming phrase. Our language is littered with such phrases, for example ‘early to bed, early to rise, will make a man healthy, wealthy and wise’, which is reportedly seen as early as 1486.

The Third Wave Experiment

This experiment is so important it bears standing by itself. A university professor had difficulty explaining to his students why the German public would adopt Nazi Germany ideology, so to demonstrate how easy it was, he implemented a “Third Wave” in his classroom, teaching order and discipline, assigning students to tasks and more.

Despite only keeping it to the classroom of his history students, it quickly spread beyond his control, with additional students joining his classroom, and another 200 other students outside his classroom adopting the ‘Third Wave’. Realising it was likely to grow beyond his control, he ended the experiment early and revealed what he was doing, before playing a tape on the acts committed by Nazi Germany.

Although the professor did not promote the majority of the ideology, it shows how quickly an idea can spread amongst students indoctrinating a specific ideology.

Sociology Discoveries

The Stanford Prison experiment, designed to see if people just adopt the labels and expectations given to them by society, found the desire to conform to roles was so powerful, it was shut down after only six days. Students acted exactly like either prisoners or prison guards roles.

Another phenomena, ‘FOMO’ (fear of missing out), where people fear others are having rewarding experiences without them, inclining them to conform with the group.

The False Consensus Effect is where people generally believe the majority agree with their decision, regardless of what that decision is, and reflects a bias cognitive perception that makes them think they’re in the majority when they are not.

Cult Tactics

Cults will often use a variety of tactics to indoctrinate someone into a cult. The most classic version is ‘love bombing’, where they shower the individual with large amounts of attention and praise. Gangs will use the same for members, as will human traffickers for their victims.

Cults will get people to shun their family and friends who are hostile to the cult. For example, telling them to ‘reject anti-vaxxers’. This has the intended effect of isolating the victim from the people that can help them, and the less exposure they have to dissenting views, the less likely they are to break rank. This also has the intended effect of making the person trying to talk to them to stop criticising the cult.

Once someone is indoctrinated into a cult, the cultists will threaten to take everything away from a person if they try to leave. This might include trying to publicly embarass or shame them, threatening to take their jobs if they don’t get a jab, denying them access to education, preventing them from leaving an area (or in this case, entire country), stealing their money (‘fines’) or even going so far as to imprison them if they disobey.

Scammers’ Tactics

Scammers have a number of tactics they deploy on victims. The most common one is a sense of urgency or threat used in what’s called a ‘419 scam’. ‘If you don’t hurry now you will miss out’ or ‘if you don’t act now, people could die’.

Most people would call these ‘pressure’ tactics, and scammers use the sense of urgency to shut down your brain’s ability to think, because it activates your adrenal response (crudely called ‘fight-or-flight’) which essentially shuts down your ability to think.

An example of this is in the video below, where a guy goes up to a woman, and urgently offers them a dollar if they ‘name any woman’, which causes them to panic, their brain to shut down, and to forget they themselves are a woman:

The type of threat scammers use is an ‘urgent threat’, like ‘your computer is being hacked’. This threat urgency can be seen in government propaganda, ‘you could die if you don’t go out and get the jab now’. It seems like it shouldn’t work, but it is extremely effective.

Scammers will also adopt really obvious lies - because their scam is calibrated to a specific, gullible type of audience - so they’ll often send out typo-ridden, grammatically incorrect and blatantly false emails or messages, so they can filter out the smart people who spot flaws and would waste their time, and hone in on the people who aren’t paying attention and thus much more likely to fall for a scam.

Business Tactics

Sales tactics are another type of persausion, effectively asking you to buy their product. One common tactic is the ‘Big Ask’, where someone asks for a big request knowing it’ll get refused, so they can make their normal request which seems less absurd by comparison. Usually, people who refuse the big request will acquiesce to the smaller one.

The inversion of the ‘Big Ask’ is the ‘foot-in-the-door’ strategy where someone makes a small, easily serviceable request, and if the person accepts, the salesperson makes another, slightly larger request, and keep repeating it until the person stops them.

According to an experiment, people were ‘135%’ more likely to comply with a request after a ‘foot-in-the-door’ small request was made, which likely has something to do with people wanting to remain consistent with themselves.

Charity Tactics

You probably have seen this a dime-a-dozen on numerous charity adverts, leaflets, and campaigns - they will show a picture of a miserable looking child with flies in their eyes, or some horribly abused looking animal, as a somber voiceover talks about the horrors of which they face. Typically they will pick shots where they’re looking at the camera - and thus at you.

Example ‘charity’ ad from unicef; click the image for the actual atrocity.

This is kind of the visual and audible form of emotional manipulation. Having them look at you is explained in one study that found if eyes were put on a poster near an ‘honesty box’, people were more honest in donations.

By having them look at you, you feel like you’re being watched which will invoke a sense of guilt, and by showing you an example of the horrors first hand, it is difficult to emotionally deny. This makes it easier to manipulate into a course of action without anyone challenging whether or not it is factually accurate.

Convincing Someone To Switch Sides

Cooperate, Rather Than Compete

In the book ‘How to win friends and influence people’, Dale Carnegie advises cooperation, as arguments will drive people away.

It was shown monkeys prefer cooperation over competition. In human groups, competition is a means of reinforcing cooperative fairness. Only bad actors exploiting differences (such as Robbers cave experiment) will fights and division break out. Even in business, it costs to compete with businesses, so they opt to cooperate, even engaging in illegal actions together like price fixing. Cooperation wastes fewer resources than competition.

Therefore, challenging - either to debate, to find errors, to pass some test - will avoid ‘bringing them onboard’ because it treats them as an outsider. Doing so triggers behaviour I’d call entrenchment. Once entrenched they will not budge. People will even verbally contradict themselves once entrenched, and you must back off.

Example, when I addressed you Mr Kirsch, the article title was ‘A Polite Callout to Steve Kirsch’, which got a response. Notice the polite? This defuses the threatening term ‘callout’, as a callout seems hostile, thus, competitive. To show it was cooperative, polite was used.

Start From Common Ground, Understand The Other Side

Find something you agree with that the ‘other side’ has, and then work from the common ground there. Many people say ‘such-and-such political group has nothing in common with me’, which is a competitive viewpoint and simply not true.

As a test to show the sides are arbitrary, I’ve gotten Liberal parties to adopt Conservative policies, and Conservative parties to adopt Liberal policies. That is because I understood their individual sides, and reframed the policy in their own terminology and words.

To show you just how powerful this is: I got socialist Bernie Sanders to adopt the Conservative policy of ‘jobs for all’ (IE, no handouts) on the basis of workers’ rights, and I got the UK Conservative party to adopt wind farms, a purely Liberal and Green policy, on the grounds of national security.

The party lines are arbitrary and don’t mean anything; humans only agree on ideas or concepts (hence my push for Constitutional Direct Democracy), but they don’t realise it and work with tribalism behaviours rather than on common ground of ideas.

I got BLM to resist vaccine mandates by reminding them of Tuskegee syphilis experiment where the US government exploited black people and conducted unethical tests on them. I managed to convince animal rights activists and vegans to join because of the pharmaceutical companies unethical experimentation.

Scientists joined after referring them to peer-reviewed studies and government statistics. I approached Islamists and pointed out the shots were not Halal, and highlighted to Christians it contained the cells of dead babies used in experimentation, and reminded Jewish people of the forced medical experimentation under Nazi Germany (Pfizer were established by two Germans, after all).

You must learn to understand and emphasise with your target audience if you wish to get them to join you. You must find that common ground between you and them. What do you agree on?

Money debates draw the wrong kind of audience - the selfish only looking to make a quick buck - and not the empathic and moral, who are more likely to receive the message.

What Improvements Could There Be?

I think the title ‘Turtles All The Way Down’ fails to sell the seriousness of the matter, and obscures the focus of the topic. Many studies have shown the importance of first impressions. You have only 7 seconds to convince someone of the importance of your work and they leave.

Many YouTubers make or break themselves based on the title and thumbnail of their video. The title and front cover of your book will determine a number of things: will someone want to read it? Is it important? And does it sound reputable?

If you asked me to evaluate what the book is about by the title alone, I would have thought it was some kooky book of some sort. A title should give a hint to the contents but entice the reader to find out more, like ‘the deaths they don’t want you to hear about’ or ‘medical collusion in the industry’.

Obviously my title ideas are terrible, but there is a model for finding good titles via the use of A/B testing, where you generate a slew of ideas, then compare them to each other in a series of A/B testing rounds. You could either hire people for feedback, or ask your trusted audience to use an A/B testing tool and give you feedback that way.

The book content is likely to contain a lot of facts, but humans are terrible at estimating facts or the proportion of their response. They usually weigh it in the view of ‘how does it affect me, emotionally?’, which seems selfish, but it isn’t, it is how humans are wired. Someone in your own family dying is a greater tragedy than someone who dies halfway across the world that you never knew.

You must personalise the injuries and deaths. Humanise them like the charities do. These are living, breathing human beings, who could be mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children, friends and family. Not statistical percentages or amounts.

How Do You Do It?

I have put together an article using my best understanding of both appealing to people and convincing them to change their minds. Notice the opener starts from common ground and works outwards towards other conclusions. You can view a copy here.

The article is intended for people who do not believe the vaccines cause harms and should be presented to such individuals. It may contain additional insights others are not aware of, although it is primarily aimed at those not already familiar.

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