Very interesting. This describes my coursework at Stanford almost exactly.
My major was STS (Science, Technology, and Society) with a minor in psychology. Then I studied sociology in grad school.
What I focused on was social influence, persuasion, and behavioral change. I took courses on negotiation, deception, cults, magic, minority influence, organizational development, group dynamics, arbitration, personality/social psychology, persuasive technology, and a ton more. I was a researcher in the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab for years.
And I mixed it with practical applications of negotiations in the field.
The coursework has helped me dramatically in understanding the motivations, attitudes, and behaviors of others.
I still remember one of my Comm professors talking about how other technical disciplines tend to look down on areas like psych/comm. She said something I'll never forget: "The value isn't in the difficulty of the material, but the usefulness."
I use my social psychology background in my work with people on iwillteachyoutoberich every day.
The difference between the hard sciences and soft sciences is where the difficulty comes in. Grasping the concepts of say, quantum physics, is ridiculously difficult. Once you fully understand it, it is relatively easy to apply. The principles of negotiation are easy to understand, but very difficult to apply.
People in hard sciences are typically elitist because they've had to prove themselves right up front. Making it through school is a more concrete accomplishment. Who knows if that psyc major will ever amount to anything.
It seems like a double-major in STS and CS would pretty much make for the ultimate entrepreneur.
Need to raise money, get customers, convince great people to work for you, or sell the company? Draw on your STS skills. Need to write amazing software? Draw on your CS skills.
I'll have to look into STS and consider that, but unfortunately, I don't really want to double major because I want time to do other stuff (like hack and maybe have a social life).
Hey Ramit, great comment. I think your educational experience was unique in how applicable it is to what you now do--for a non pre-professional degree.
For someone outside of college, how'd you recommend people learn those topics?
As I was reading your comment, I thought to myself that this sounds a lot like the make-up of the book I'm currently reading. Then I got to the final sentence and understood why.
I'm finding that these awkward "manipulation" skills that Adams describes are simply leverage to multiply the impact of one's technical skills within a company.
I work in the IT organization of a Fortune 100. Due to our size and modularization the skills of persuasion and influence (and consensus building, presentation skills, social skills, name recognition) are very important if I hope to have an impact here beyond that of my own code quality.
Being "right" on a technical matter is worthless if no one takes you or your ideas seriously.
OK, but that's not value adding to the organization; it's friction that you have to overcome in order to do your main job. Your company, when it needs to do this, employs full-time specialists to do it, they're called salesmen. Not to knock your skills, but technical and presentational skills are often uncorrelated. There simply isn't time to master both. Where do you think PHBs actually come from?
It's also why huge organizations are often running obsolete technology, no-one can generate enough "activation energy" to overcome the molasses.
It's even worse than that. If you work in a large hierarchical company you can be right and be able to present your correctness in a very clear and useful way. But it is unlikely that your superior is going to allow you speak directly to his superior. That is how politics work. Which brings us back to the original article.
This is why you build a consensus. Selling your idea directly to the person in charge of making the decision is less convincing than disseminating the idea across the organization. Arrange for the superior's superior to hear it from his/her trusted associates and then hand it back down to you as a managerial directive.
As always, the only way to make someone do what you want them to do is to convince them that they want to do it because it's in their interest. Simply presenting a good idea directly to the person in charge won't be enough if the idea represents a change to entrenched organizational policies.
I was once surprised to see how many high-ranking salespeople had technical degrees like engineering or a hard science. But it makes sense -- they just struck the right balance, with enough technical knowledge to be able to talk to anyone, and then persuasion/influence skills to amplify that influence.
This is a great idea. It's also a two-thousand year-old idea, updated to include golf and "art (specifically design)." Missing from the list of possible courses is a study of elevated language as a tool of persuasion (as in Longinus' On the Sublime), but aside from that it looks like the study of Rhetoric in the most generalized sense.
I went to pull the url for Wiki's page on Rhetoric and noticed this gem half way down: "The Greeks liked to use rhetoric especially if there was a fire."--something Scott Adams might have said. I'm sure it'll be gone tomorrow. Anyway, the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
> The Greeks liked to use rhetoric especially if there was a fire.
Ye gods. Fixed it.
(The edit that introduced that text did nothing else. The user who made that edit has made no other edits to Wikipedia. [EDITED to add: and the account was created 2 minutes before that edit.] Looks like vandalism, though a rather odd sort of vandalism.)
I think he has a great point here. I think the most important part of that kind of education would be to awaken the masses to the fact that they're being manipulated every single day by everything around them, whether someone has constructed the manipulation on purpose or not. Clearly the ideas in most people's heads aren't their own and judging by how canned they sound, I can't imagine they have put much thought themselves into the idea.
This would be immensely useful in creating people who were perhaps more resistant to persuasion strategies of our education system, government, product marketing, and humans in general; and instead create people who are themselves more freely thinking - producers and thinkers instead of pure consumers.
In addition, it's unbelievable that people (including me) are overcome by the simplest of persuasive strategies. If we weren't so poorly (on purpose) educated on rhetoric and debate, and if we had some understanding and dependence on our inner selves and strength, I believe things would be very different.
I think the most important part of that kind of education would be to awaken the masses to the fact that they're being manipulated every single day by everything around them, whether someone has constructed the manipulation on purpose or not.
I'm a grad student in English lit at the University of Arizona, and based on my experience teaching freshmen comp and listening to various other teachers and so on, I'd guess that the world is not particularly interested in being awoken, never has been, and probably will never will be.
A small segment, yes, but definitely not "the masses."
* If we weren't so poorly (on purpose) educated on rhetoric and debate,*
I think this is highly improbable: don't attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance, incompetence, and randomness.
From this kind of comment I remember why I feel sometimes a bit frustrated by the technical environment.
Unfortunately what open most your mind (as Graduating in English vs CS or Engineering) and make you a better person is not what is (probably) valuated more by our society.
And for the SA post:I feel bad reading his thoughts, sometimes. He is so cynic.
I apologize - I should have either not included the parenthesis comment or explained it further. So to explain it a little further, I don't think we give our forefathers enough credit when they devised the school system that they did post-civil war. I agree this thought is a bit conspiratorial at nature, however it does say something when our system is obviously missing certain basic subjects to assist in critical thought, especially with the knowledge that the most intelligent and successful minds created it. I'm still forming an opinion here, but I do find it suspicious.
"the world is not particularly interested in being awoken, never has been, and probably will never will be."
This may be true, however it is in everyone's best interest that they are 'awoken' to the best of their abilities. Also, with the semi-recent discovery/invention of frighteningly-effective persuasion techniques, I believe this is more important than ever.
You don't really need to hypothesize. It isn't a conspiracy theory that schools were designed to produce good factory workers, it is documented historical fact. (Where by "documented historical fact" I mean as factual as any "historical" fact ever is.) See something like http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm . You do not have to agree with Gatto's prescription for what schools should become or agree with his reaction to the fact that schools were designed to produce good factory workers to agree that the proposition is very well grounded in fact, when it comes complete with quotes about the intention from the people who were creating our schools in the first place.
For myself, I do not believe that people still truly intend it this way; I do not believe there is a mass conscious effort to prevent critical thinking skills from being developed or to deliberately hold people back from realizing their true potential. If you find your brain rebelling against the entire idea that schools could have been created for this purpose, remember this was over a hundred years ago, and I for one don't claim this is still the animus behind schools. In fact I suggest that the vast bulk of people's actions demonstrate a true desire to arm children with the best education they can be given, it's just that the average person, even the average person deeply involved with education, is clueless about how to actually bring that result about in the real world. Meanwhile, the pattern of "what a school looks like" was laid down when this was a conscious intention and through literally 5 or 6 generations now has accidentally been enshrined as Gospel, and few people are yet thinking outside the box; those that do are laughed at at best, vilified at worst. Fortunately, the Internet will, eventually, change this, though probably not until the current teen generation, the one that has never known the world without it, is the majority on the PTA.
I read that list and see "MBA," especially considering activities both inside and outside the classroom, and the sort of profile top programs want to see from applicants.
I've always wondered about the effectiveness of courses that claim to teach "Management" or "Negotiation" or "Networking." There's certainly theory to these subjects and practicing in a contrived setting may help, but I suspect there are fairly narrow limits on what can be learned about these subjects in the classroom.
Likewise, I'd be suspicious of a program that claims to "create people who can enter any room and make it their bitch."
If you've ever studied persuasion, for example Cialdini, you'll find that there are very specific, concrete concepts and techniques presented. The type of theories Cialdini presents can very easily be taken into practice.
Ideas taught in these subjects would have to be nearly purely conceptual. You get the idea, you make sense of it, and it's in you for life. Because of this I think it only makes sense that a majority of such classes should be spent outside the classroom, experimenting and discovering for yourself what works for you. I somehow doubt they are though.
Good article, but this stuck out "Selling yourself, which sounds almost noble, is little more than manipulating other people to do what is good for you but might not be so good for others."
That's bullshit. There are plenty of opportunities to make money in a mutually beneficial relationship. This is the difference between ethical business and unethical business. If your focus is getting over on other people, then you can rationalize all you want, but you are an unethical person.
You can influence people to do thing that are in their own best interest. Use the force for good, not evil.
Even this may become obsolete. Even management may become automated. Ever try to argue with an automated phone support system? Eventually our boss may be one of those.
What are some outlets that technically-skilled people can partake in to get experience in the "persuasion coursework" he describes? I'm a CS undergrad and dabble in probably half of his list in my downtime, but would like to get more experience with sales, economics, and general persuasiveness. Dabbling in groups like Toastmasters comes to mind, but what are some others?
2. Hang out with persuasive friends. Try to understand the meta-lessons of what they do. You can ask them, but often people don't have cognitive access to explain what they do, so sometimes you'll just have to observe.
When you combine theory with practice, you can get powerful results.
I highly recommend Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People". This book goes a long way towards explaining a bunch of these skills and shows you both how to do them and why they work. It was probably the non-technical book that advanced my programming career the most.
I had a concentration in Human Geography in college. Essentially it was the analysis of populations as effected by economics, politics, the enviroment, space and place, and how they are all connected in explicit and implicit ways. With the exception of the public speaking aspect, I feel that course of study slightly encompasses the topic in the referred post.
Regardless of coursework, a lot of this stuff should be on the to-do list for even experienced people. The further you move through your career, the more second-nature your technical skills, and the more need there is for communication and persuasion.
Personally I spend more time reading up on these things than I do reading up on the latest technical developments.
I've been working on a book called Self Promotion for Geeks for a while now, based upon some support I got through HN comments a year or so ago. It covers several of these topics in the context of image and promoting startups, software, and ideas in respect of technically minded people. I wasn't planning on revealing anything for a few more weeks, but if anyone's interested, feel free to contact me or comment here and I'll contact you later.
(One remaining sticking points is whether I rename and retarget it as "for Software Developers," but my research shows so far that people are generally OK with the term "geek" covering the areas I mentioned. Welcoming opinions here still, though.)
My major was STS (Science, Technology, and Society) with a minor in psychology. Then I studied sociology in grad school.
What I focused on was social influence, persuasion, and behavioral change. I took courses on negotiation, deception, cults, magic, minority influence, organizational development, group dynamics, arbitration, personality/social psychology, persuasive technology, and a ton more. I was a researcher in the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab for years.
And I mixed it with practical applications of negotiations in the field.
The coursework has helped me dramatically in understanding the motivations, attitudes, and behaviors of others.
I still remember one of my Comm professors talking about how other technical disciplines tend to look down on areas like psych/comm. She said something I'll never forget: "The value isn't in the difficulty of the material, but the usefulness."
I use my social psychology background in my work with people on iwillteachyoutoberich every day.