Black Jack System Before the advent and widespread use of facial recognition technology, a group of MIT students developed a very lucrative blackjack system. They made a movie about it, but the movie was necessarily altered to make room for good guys and bad guys and back stories and character arcs. But the […]
Invisible Violin Player
Water Boy A few years ago some guy came by selling some water filters. He tried the puppy dog close, which is a pretty good closing technique, as it leverages commitment and consistency, as well as liking. But it does require you present your offer well, and you actually have a product that […]
Doppelganger Apocalypse
Artificial Scarcity A very common and old marketing strategy is to create and manage a level of artificial scarcity just enough to calibrate and maintain the desired purchasing level. For example, a company will be getting ready to release a new product, and advertise like crazy, building up massive demand. Then they purposely […]
Circle Origin Story
Trigonometry is Magic One of the coolest discoveries in mathematics is that of trigonometry. Since cycles are a deep part of the natural world, and trigonometry deals in cycles, its discovery helped humans to understand a lot more than they did previously. It all started by wondering about the mathematical descriptions of the […]
Mental Brain Illusions
What You See Isn’t Real There are a lot of cool optical illusions. They are, of course, based on mismatch between what you see, and what you think you are seeing. Our eyes and our visual cortex need to make a lot of assumptions about what we think we see, and up to […]
Social Proof Frame Strength
Persuasion Experiments There have been a lot of cool experiments done to demonstrate the various triggers of influence that operate outside of our conscious awareness. In a social proof experiment, they had a guy stand on a corner, and stare up into an empty sky, but pretending that he was looking at something incredibly […]
Peak Brain
Tension and Release Tension and release can be found everywhere, from inorganic matter, to large celestial objects like the sun. Books, movies and music all have tension and release built into the structure. Even humor is based on tension and release, and is thought to bring many health benefits, such as lower blood […]
Hypnotic Stranger Parties
Door To Door Wizard I used to know this guy that was always looking for ways to make money. He only sometimes broke the law, but he was always skating the boundaries of moral and ethical norms. He loved to make money, but he absolutely hated to be part of any organization. […]
Reverse Engineered Cult
Free Seminar The other day I went to a free seminar at a local community center. Since it was free, I didn’t expect much. Usually at these things, they have some basic ideas in the first half, and then the second half is some kind of upsell. Only at this one, there […]
Holographic Disaster
Educational Documentary I saw this documentary about how messed up the school systems are, and as an example, they used this algebra teacher that was trying his hardest to get fired. If he got fired, he’d get his full salary and benefits but if he quit, he wouldn’t get squat. So he decided […]
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