> ...making use of physically attractive accomplices, for instance. They can use our deepest desires to blind our reasoning ...
Sounds like standard sales and marketing.
There is currently a bit of a debate in Canada as to whether we should be joining the US and its allies in fighting the Islamic State, and all three of these are being heavily deployed by those in favour:
1) we must act now! 2) experts agree! 3) every decent person agrees IS must be stopped!
There hasn't been any deployment of physically attractive accomplices, although I guess that's pretty much what the Liberal's use of Justin Trudeau in opposition amounts to.
The difficulty is that none of these are actual arguments in favour of the proposed strategy. I am generally opposed to military intervention--because it rarely works and it kills people and costs enormous amounts of money and rarely works--but can see there may be a case to be made here. Unfortunately, by using what are widely recognized as scammer's tactics, the government has alienated itself from any evidence-based support (this would not be a first, for this government nor any of its predecessors.)
It would be lovely to see the actual merits of the mission debated, but it is clear that both the opposition and the government are interested only in deploying scammer's tactics in support of their favoured side.
And now I'm sounding uncomfortably similar to conspiracy theorists ...
Rather than focusing on emotional issues (which of course is what we are supposed to be focusing on), view the economics of the situation, and decide who gains from certain actions on the part of the US military.
I'm not saying ISIS isn't bad. But they don't benefit from antagonizing the west into bombing the bejeus out of Iraq and Syria, then re-occupying the Mideast with troops. So who would benefit from that?
Most likely, there's your terrorists in my opinion. They probably wear suits and stay in very nice hotels.
I have spent a lot of my life in sales. The lying manipulating salesman gets all the attention, the honest guy makes all the money. Why? Customers will figure out if they were lied to, and not buy from that person again. The honest salesperson gets repeat business, and he gets word-of-mouth, and the time to close gets much shorter with repeat customers.
Think of your own life. Do you return to the scammy guy? Probably not. Do you have favorite places to spend money? Those places are staffed with the honest people. You probably go back over and over, spending money for years. I have purchased a new car a dozen times. The last three from Joe at Precision Toyota because he treats me well and he gives me great pricing in 5 minutes with no haggling. So Joe has got about $$100,000 in sales out of me.
I understand the anger people have about manipulative salespeople. I get angry when I see it too, but mostly because I can see bad technique the way most of the readers on HN see bad code. There are plenty of honest salespeople. You just think of them as "My friend at the store, I always get it from him" and that's ok. Your friend at the store is using his honest nature to build a business.
All really good salesmen temporarily believe
whatever bullshit they are selling at the time.
It's kind of like method acting."Most of your neighbours have already signed up," okay... and?
"It's a limited time offer, so we need to know by the end of the week at the latest."