You’re so vain.
You probably think this song is about you.
Don’t you?
Don’t you?

Look at the New York City Health Department’s latest vanity.

A stout guy with an amputation and one of those groovy new Sophistical Statistical Science graphics that proves sugary soda drinks caused it. This. Changes. Everything.

The persuasion vanity of this approach jumps off the screen like an apricot scarf. The Health Department is required by law to operate from science and there is no science in this ad. It’s rhetorical and metaphorical, fearful and false. They’ve admitted digitally altering the image of the overweight model to create a Photoshopped amputation. The faux figure of the linear relationship as depicted with the drink size has no scientific support. The ad taken as a whole and analyzed in each part is dishonest, untrue, and deliberately so.

Worse still, the scientific literature on these kind of persuasion tactics demonstrates a recurring record of applied failure. These badly done fear appeal campaigns have a terrible record of changing Other Guys and typically do little more than make the persuasion source the topic of conversation. If you want to get attention and media time for yourself, run a campaign like this. If you want to actually change the Other Guy, do something else.

Worser yet, the Health Department knows this.

But it is not the health department’s first brush with controversy: In 2009, it ran an ad that suggested drinking a can of soda a day could add 10 pounds of fat a year. Internal e-mails exposed dissent about that claim among officials of the department.

If a government agency was running ads like this to encourage a war with Iran, people to sue banks over bad mortgages, or even be more energy efficient, that agency would be overrun with lawsuits. Really. Remember what happened to the FDA? A court killed their advertising campaign about smoking that employed these same tactics precisely on the issue of science, or in this instance the absence of science in an agency charged with operating from science.

Sure, make the notations to All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere, but this time in song. You’re So Vain. And the sincere zealots in NYC Health will prove their failure again and again as sincere zealots always do. It’s never about the Other Guy; it’s always about Them and how smart, concerned, and helpful They are.

You’re so vain.
You probably think the campaign is about you.
Don’t you?
Don’t you?

With no consensus among the delegates, officials at the International Telecommunication Union, part of the United Nations, kicked the issue into the future and sent it back to a panel of experts for further study. A revised proposal will be introduced no earlier than 2015. Mr. Beaird characterized the delay as “a significant step forward” and said that the burst of interestgreater prominence in surrounding leap seconds “should allow for a decision that will have the widest possible backing.”

One second. Every four years. People meeting. Plane reservations. Hotel stays. Itineraries. Parlimentary procedure. Votes to delay. For three years.

Let’s start simple then get to the all important nuance.

LA public schools revamped their school lunch program this year to provide healthier food to make healthier kids. Hey, If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It, so what’s the Count?

The new menu, introduced this fall, was hailed as a revolutionary step by the nation’s second-largest school district to combat the growing epidemic of youth obesity, diabetes and other health problems. It was the latest healthful food initiative by the district, which banned sodas on campus in 2004, nixed the sale of junk food during the school day and called for more produce and less salt and fat to be served. This year, L.A. Unified, which serves 650,000 meals daily, has received awards for improving its school lunches, including one last week from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and another from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Hail! Expert Acclaim! Awards!

Any other Counts?

But Barrett said the debut was a “disaster.” Participation plunged by more than 13%, he said. About two-fifths of the loss was tied to 99 schools that temporarily resumed requiring lunch tickets; typically, a drop-off is expected when this occurs. In the last month or so, the overall program has begun to recover; participation is down by about 5% or 6%, Barrett said.

Barrett is Dennis Barrett, L.A. Unified’s food services director. By his own Count student participation dropped 13% immediately, a Small Windowpane effect, but has recovered to only a 5% drop. In other words, a program that is supposed to help people has instead lost people from program participation.  Sure, all those drop outs are no longer buying bad food, at least from the school.  They are getting it somewhere else.

So, things are not getting better. What to do?

Acknowledging the complaints, L.A. Unified’s food services director, Dennis Barrett, announced this month that the menu would be revised. Hamburgers will be offered daily. Some of the more exotic dishes are out, including the beef jambalaya, vegetable curry, pad Thai, lentil and brown rice cutlets, and quinoa and black-eyed pea salads. And the Caribbean meatball sauce will be changed to the more familiar teriyaki flavor. The district is even bringing back pizza — albeit with a whole wheat crust, low-fat cheese and low-sodium sauce, according to food services deputy director David Binkle.

So, let’s add bad food to the menu and then when participation rates get back to normal or perhaps even increase, let’s declare victory, throw a parade, and go home, like we did in Iraq . . . except for the parade . . . and the declaration . . . so, just go home!

Nuance time.

Unified has virtually eliminated canned and frozen fruits and vegetables, boosting spending on fresh produce from $2 million in 2006 to $20 million in 2010.

So, we drop the bad food, spend 10 times as much money on good food, get a 5% drop in participation, then add bad food like we had before. Spend a bazillion dollars on something most people don’t use and provokes other people to quit, then keep spending a bazillion while going back to the Old Thing? Thus, the detail shows even dumber persuasion effects. More cost for less effect!

And, where’s the evidence that this will make a large, practical, and beneficial impact on kids’ health? Hey, consider this meta-analysis on the mortality benefits of vegetarian diet.

We combined data from 5 prospective studies to compare the death rates from common diseases of vegetarians with those of nonvegetarians with similar lifestyles. Data for 76172 men and women were available. Vegetarians were those who did not eat any meat or fish (n = 27808). Mortality from ischemic heart disease was 24% lower in vegetarians than in nonvegetarians. There were no significant differences between vegetarians and nonvegetarians in mortality from cerebrovascular disease, stomach cancer, colorectal cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, or all other causes combined.

If you’re just joining us a Small Effect would be 50%, so, gee, 24% is half of Small, about a 48/52 Windowpane. For everyone always eating broccoli their whole lives we could increase life span about 1-2 years.  Maybe.  Remember these are Observational Studies with no randomization or control and a ton of self selection bias in the convenience samples.  A half of a Small Effect under these conditions is not a ringing endorsement of the Research Hypothesis.

So, in this great field persuasion project, LA is spending more money for fewer participants while returning to old ways and likely producing no detectable mortality effect.  By their own numbers!

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Only with zealots is it possible to count losing as winning.

P.S. Here’s the citation for the veggie meta: Key TJ, Fraser GE, Thorogood M, Appleby PN, Beral V, Reeves G, Burr ML, Chang-Claude J, Frentzel-Beyme R, Kuzma JW, Mann J, McPherson K. (1998). Mortality in vegetarians and non-vegetarians: a collaborative analysis of 8300 deaths among 76,000 men and women in five prospective studies. Public Health Nutrition, March 1(1), 33-41.

P.P.S. Persuasion Bonus!  Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is mixed into this LA persuasion farce.  We’ve seen Jamie’s play before – he sells his cookbooks and restaurants as solutions to the obesity epidemic . . . with a straight face.  Oliver let the LA Food Services people draw a large crowd, then he showed up, and started blowing raspberries at them.  It’s a pure Reception play, Stepping Into Somebody Else’s Spotlight.

The image combines two Rules:  All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere and Persuasion Is Strategic Or It Is Not.  We have the maternal combination of mother and child, but mom is smoking hot.  Does she or doesn’t she . . . do what exactly?  Pick whatever TACT you prefer and the Blonde can deny it, confirm it, or ask you to move closer.

Now consider this word picture.

During the Bush Administration many former generals appeared on TV to provide expert comment on actions in the War On Terror.  Some observers cried foul, perceiving the dark hand of SecDef Donald Rumsfeld as the man behind the curtain, manipulating public opinion.  Sure, they are retired and independent.  Sure, they are unbiased and objective purveyors of fact.  Well, according to the story, a two year investigation conducted by the Obama Administration (!!! aka, not the Bush Administration !!!) has found no such conspiracy.

I have always admired the persuasion and power skill of the Bush Administration.  They used words to accomplish change in freely choosing Other Guys and no one was sure whether the Administration was run by Idiots or Propagandists.

There’s a Difference between Persuasion, and Smoke and Mirrors; With Persuasion the Illusion Lingers.

Ms. Hersman said she understood that this recommendation would be unwelcome in some circles, given the number of drivers who talk and text. But she compared distracted driving to drunken driving and even smoking, which required wholesale cultural shifts to change behavior.

As we’ve noted before at the Persuasion Blog, state laws that ban these devices show no change in traffic fatalities compared to states that allow the devices, so there’s no strong science to support the hypothesis that the ban saves lives.

At a common sense level of analysis such outcomes are impossible.  Everyone knows that those idiot Other Guys bombing around the road while texting are an accident waiting to happen, so of course laws banning them will cause a decrease in both accidents and fatalities.  Except, again, I must note, all the available evidence shows this does not happen.  The data suggest that people who text or talk on cell phones will simply find another outlet for distracted driving.  If you ban their use of PEDs then they will go back to fumbling with CDs or radio buttons or Big Macs or even putting on makeup.  Stated another way, texting is a correlate of unsafe driving and not the direct cause of accidents.  Thus, existing state laws and the NTSB ban make the classic error of confusing correlation with causality.  Their recommendations please themselves while having no demonstrable effect.

The interesting question to ask now, is why is this particular NTSB group making a recommendation that clearly has no empirical support and indeed has a lot of data that directly refutes the recommendation?

My first choice is what I call the Politics of the UnElectable or Actions Without Consequences.  This panel, like so many Expert Groups, is in the delightful position of telling everyone else what they should be doing without having to enact or enforce that edict.  They can act Expert, Objective, and Noble, then reach a decision that is impossible in the real world, but still act as if It Is Written, So Shall It Be Done.

They can then wring their hands or scoff dismissively when nothing they recommend is accepted, then silently offer a Told You So the next time a texting teen kills a family in a van.  When you do not receive any Consequences for your Actions, you will behave in entirely self-serving ways, in this case, calling yourself an Expert while ignoring all the scientific information against your hypothesis.  If these guys faced election over passing laws that had no benefit, they would act differently.  That’s why Expert Groups make these kind of stupid decisions more often and why elected Legislators are unlikely to pass new laws.  Regardless of the science, elected officials can count votes and have to face the Politics of the Electable.

Second, I’d argue that the Federalist Papers and their analysis of Factions is the best persuasion theory to explain it.  This particular Board is a reflection of the current President and his progressive politics.  In other words, they are a Faction.

As we followed here at the Persuasion Blog and the health wars, the Obama Administration has pursued a kind of progressive science that operates from persuasion principles rather than anything remotely approaching scientific principles.  Hear the echoes from the shouts of the Food Police hollering for Calorie Counts on Fast Food Menus as part of Health Care Reform We Can All Believe In.  We knew those calorie count persuasion plays had no impact even from the Food Police’s own research and we know that those calorie count laws and regulations have no impact once implemented.  But, if you are a progressive scientist, rather than a scientist, the fact that you could publish your unproven hypothesis in a peer review scientific journal is enough for your to claim scientific status.

It’s a clever persuasion play.  Scientists evaluate that bad progressive science in the journals and move on to the next New New Thing with just a dismissive hoot while reading the journal.  That’s the only consequence progressive scientists face from the scientific community:  Silence.  Progressive scientists can take that silence and move their peer reviewed work into the public domain and call themselves Scientists and their policy proposals Scientific knowing that scientists will remain silent.  Many citizens interpret the lack of noisy public disagreement from scientists as some kind of approval or support for the progressive science, thus misunderstanding the role that silence plays in scientific research.  Scientists don’t kill an idea with disagreement; they kill it with silence.

I’m sure there’s a PED Police counterpart to the Food Police (and the Green Police and the Evolution Police and the Economic Police and all those clever scientific politicians who turn learned silence into public policy).  Now, while foundational psych research on group dynamics informs us here, the better source is the Federalist Papers.  They noted the ubiquitous and nasty effects of Faction with those birds of a feather that flock together and the ingroup-outgroup predations Faction produces.  The PED Police are just another Faction aiming to remake the world in their image.

Fortunately, the combination of these two factors, the Politics of the UnElectable and the Factional Scientific Politicians most often kill the effectiveness of Expert Groups.  You see it most clearly when their political party does not control the White House.  These Experts are reduced to those woeful CSPAN conference rooms audienced with 20 something interns wearing bad suits.  All that great expertise languishes for 4 or 8 and sometimes 12 years which is not something Great Expertise should face.  Experts want to appear like the Queen of Tomorrow who knows all the Laws, but if so, why those late night appearances at CSPAN-3 when their team is out of office?