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Persuasion
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
We manipulate constantly — but few of us want to be called “manipulative.” Here, ex-Google executive Jenny Wood redefines an unfairly maligned trait.
Conversational AI agents will have a major advantage over human salespeople.
"Okay, dad, but GMOs help feed the world."
"I have a friend who thinks vaccines cause autism," writes Nina. "What can I do?"
The first of these devices is already on the market — the AI-powered Ray-Bans from Meta.
Why the best entrepreneurs should be more Obi-Wan Kenobi than Luke Skywalker.
After almost a century in print, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" still has lessons to teach us.
Rhetorical mastery is within everyone’s reach — equipped with some basic techniques you can rock it like Aristotle.
Marketing expert Jonah Berger explains how simple tweaks to your word use can have a huge impact on team communication.
Bertrand Russell shows us how to recognize emotional arguments smuggled into presumed statements of fact.
If someone can make you feel insecure, incomplete, and inadequate, they then can present themselves as the solution you need.
Debate is a verbal sport with winners and losers. As such, it is less about the truth and more about who looks and sounds the best.
Self-help gurus for the digital age.
Intellectual humility demands that we examine our motivations for holding certain beliefs.
John Templeton Foundation
The danger posed by conversational AI isn't that it can say weird or dark things; it's personalized manipulation for nefarious purposes.
By exposing people to small doses of misinformation and encouraging them to develop resistance strategies, "prebunking" can fight fake news.
If you want to share the truths about our Universe with others, don't fall into the trap of arguing with a misinformer. Do this instead.
Inside the metaverse, your emotions and physical responses will be monitored, and AI will use that data to influence you in real time. Is that essentially mind control?
The Metaverse could be the most dangerous tool of persuasion humanity has ever created.
If argumentation led to nothing, it would soon be thrown into the evolutionary dustbin.
The metaverse may leave us perpetually unsure whether the people we encounter are authentic or high-quality fakes.
In spreading politics, videos may not be much more persuasive than their text-based counterparts.