I recently finished with Scott Adams’ book ‘Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter’.
I made the decision to give the book my time because of my curiosity with the author borne out of his somewhat unexpected appearance on Sam Harris’ Waking Up podcast. Adams’ performance in that podcast was outstanding, and it was a great trial for Harris’ epistemological pretensions of objectivity (whatever we take that to mean). So I went ahead and got the book because of the author, knowing next to nothing about its content.
Unfortunately, this book wasn’t as good as Adams’ performance in debates. He introduces a few heuristics that could have been interesting, like ‘master persuasion’, but is ultimately unable to do anything with these heuristics because of his rapid bouncing from topic to topic between section and chapter, all of which have very little of coherence or narrative to speak of. The book is part anecdote, part self-help book, peppered throughout with justificatory factoids by way of ‘evolutionary psychology’, and by ‘inverted commas evolutionary psychology’ I mean speculative nonsense in the style of Sex at Dawn, rather than genuine work a la Dunbar or Kanazawa. There lack of substance or structure makes it a leap and bound from one ramble to another, some of which is (verbatim) copy-pasted from Scott Adams’ own blog.
Some of what Adams says is useful. His simplistic and story-like explanations for why free will is an illusion, for example, would probably be much more effective for the layperson some than arguments from Harris or genetic determinists (incidentally, I’m not sure that’s a good thing or not). He also makes some interesting statements in favor of Jamesian pragmatism, such as his assertion that the only ‘filter’ (read: schema, ideational paradigm, cognitive map etc) that works is one that makes you happy and does a good job at predicting the future. For those who occupy themselves with the ‘postmodern conundrum’ of how exactly to live with the fact of the death of God, this could be a useful insight that could be interpreted as supportive of the Christianity Adams renounces. And in case you wonder just how many people that is, Pew Research states that about half of Americans have changed religious affiliation at least once, suggesting that finding what ‘filter’ to live with is actually a challenge that quite a lot of people face.
Coming in with no expectations, I still feel a keen sense of disappointment at having wasted precious hours of my life. The book reads like an ADHD-driven series of blogposts stitched together to make sales rather than a coherent narrative from start to finish. Overall, I think the only ‘persuasion’ skill Adams has is in getting gullible people to buy his book.
2 out of 5 stars.
★★
