No one wants a foolish consistency. Hobgoblins of little minds and weak Arguments. But this?

Investor Argument Set 1 for Facebook value.

It’s grossly over-valued.
It won’t unleash corporate capital spending.
It doesn’t change much for Facebook insiders.
It won’t boost the overall venture financing market.

Investor Argument Set 2 for Facebook value.

Facebook is becoming one of the biggest sources and referrers of traffic on the internet—and on the internet traffic is money.
Facebook has oodles of data on you, including your identity.
Facebook is the biggest social platform.
Facebook is unstoppable because it has a network effect.

When you’re getting contrasting Arguments on the same thing at the same time from the same kind of experts, you know you are in a persuasion rich environment. Facebook is worth what I convince you it is worth!

Facebook could have paid both guys to write opposite Arguments just to keep things uncertain, ambiguous, and fluid. Confusion favors persuasion over information.

More sand! More sand! More sand!

Neil Young wrote it and sang it with Buffalo Springfield  (YouTube).  The opening lyric exactly expresses the act of persuasion.

Oh hello, Mr. Soul, I dropped by to pick up a reason.
For the thought that I’d caught in my head is the event of the season.
Why in crowds just a trace of my face should seem so pleasin’.
I’ll cop to the change but a stranger is putting the tease on.

“A stranger is putting the tease on” nicely sings the Rule:

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

P.S.  Hey, kids.  Neil Young, the artist, is a stranger putting the tease on.  Consider that.

P.P.S. Guitar players know why the song riff sounds like a couple of Rolling Stones songs (Satisfaction, Let’s Spend the Night Together), plus other near hits. It’s in E with a movement from B to C# to D, a classic blues boogie line. You can show newbies that trick and within a couple of minutes they sound like a blues man. It’s hard to get good on guitar (just listen to me play!), but it’s easy to get okay which explains why you see so many guitars in people’s houses.

There’s something happenin’ here.
What it is, ain’t exactly clear.

Let’s turn Buffalo Springfield inside out and follow their classic, For What It’s Worth (YouTube), into climate change. The Wall Street Journal has published a signed editorial with sixteen scientists who affirm that Global Warming does not exist and that CO2 poses no threat to the environment.

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

The sixteen signers then note the risks for public disagreement with Global Warming advocates. They cite one outstanding case.

In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

Of course, Buffalo Springfield anticipated this outcome when they sang.

Paranoia strikes deep,
Into your heart it will creep.
It starts when you’re always afraid,
Step out of line and the man comes and takes you away.

This may be the largest public retort to the scientific consensus claim from Global Warming advocates. While there have always been scientists who disputed those advocate claims, they tended to do science rather than persuasion and felt no need to sign silly petitions as if they were voting on gravity. Now, at least 16 are willing to make a high profile persuasion play in public.

Even still, the Buffalo Springfield lyric hits it.

There’s something happenin’ here.
What it is, ain’t exactly clear.

Something is happening both in the science and persuasion of climate change, but it ain’t exactly clear. This editorial is a terrible challenge to the Scientific Consensus Cue so beloved of advocates. They now must devolve into a credentials swamp, shouting My Experts Are Experts and Your Experts Aren’t! an argument no citizen wishes to hear. When advocates are fighting over CVs, they have lost whether they realize it or not.

The safest persuasion play for advocates is Silence. Don’t even acknowledge the signed editorial exists. Just keep flowing on the great wave of Truth. Ignore that Other Guy Behind the Curtain. Persist with the Al Gore PowerPoint Show and all those confident claims of Scientific Consensus. This editorial and each contrary voice changes nothing.

That’s the persuasion play. And, best of all, it requires no science!

Stop, children, what’s that sound,
Everybody look what’s going down.

Ignore that man behind the curtain!

My experience as the persuasion guy on health and safety projects quickly taught me to understand as well as I could the basic science behind any intervention I served.  Part of that drive to knowledge was due to my unfortunate temperament that compels a ceaseless need to think about everything.  The bigger part, however, came from getting burned by zealots parading as scientists who fooled me into thinking they had a Big TACT when all they had was either a Big Heart or a Big Ego.  When you work in health and safety, you need to know the difference because you can waste limited resources feeding a fool rather than Changing the World.  Consider this great example of plain old science.

A team of researchers took a sample of 99 zebra finches born from randomly paired adult birds in a captive population at a research facility.  These 99 birds were then tracked from hatchlings to the natural end of their lives.  Along the way this team studied the impact of diet and reproduction in one experiment, then kept the birds in safe cages until all naturally died.  They waited 9 years.  Throughout the study period, the researchers regularly took blood samples from each bird and measured the length of telomeres.  I suspect you know as much about telomeres as I do, so you’ll appreciate an expert quotation rather than Sayings from Chairman Steve.

Telomeres are highly conserved, noncoding, repetitive sequences of DNA that, together with a number of shelterin proteins, form caps at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, enabling chromosome ends to be distinguished from double-stranded breaks (3). In the absence of restoration, telomeres shorten during each round of normal somatic cell division because RNA polymerase cannot completely replicate the lagging strand (3, 4). The loss of DNA from the telomeric cap protects the coding sequences from attrition and also limits cell replicative potential; once telomeres reach a critically shortened length, cells stop dividing and enter a state of replicative senescence (3, 5).

Telomeres are DNA contents that play a role in aging.  As cells replicate normally across the lifespan, telomeres get shorter until they lose their protective function and the cells stop working.  That’s basically why after a certain age you can’t touch your toes, eat or drink like you did, or remember where you put your keys.  The telomeres run out which starts a cascade of change leading to cell death.  The interesting question here is just how important telomeres are to the lifespan.  The zebra finch study provides insight.

There was a highly significant relationship between early life telomere length and longevity: individuals that had longer telomeres at 25 d had a significantly longer lifespan (F1, 86.11 = 16.75, P < 0.001, Fig. 3).

You can translate the F = 16.75 into an effect size and you get a Large Windowpane of nearly 20/80.  Birds born with longer telomere sequences through 25 days lived a lot longer than birds with shorter sequences.  It’s also interesting to note that the length difference in telomeres exists at very young ages and does not carry over across the adult life span.

Telomere length declined with age (F [5, 158.92] = 20.92, P < 0.001), with loss being most marked during the first year (Fig. 1).

I cannot compute an effect size from this test, but the magnitude is not Small.  Here’s a graph to illustrate it.

This suggests that if we can do anything to affect telomere size or depletion, we better do it young.  If ever there was an interesting and potentially useful area for More Research, this must be it.

Let’s consider now longer life.  Assuming that our cells are like zebra finch cells and that a telomere is a telomere is a telomere, it’s apparent that the cards you are dealt determines the hand you can play at a Large Windowpane.  Now, contrast that against all the various Fairy Tale effects from the Lifestyle Drum and Bugle Corps.  As I’ve frequently noted in the Persuasion Blog, people will cry out for a Change that isn’t even Small, yet something that requires Congressional action.  Call this the Mallomar Redemption.  Make laws about diet to Save the World.

Now, contrast the Mallomar Redemption with the Telomere Limit.  A variety of well done lab studies creates a growing research literature that documents the Very Large impact of the factor.  For now, the operation of telomeres is not widely understood and we certainly are forever and a day away from the pill.  But, for now we can usefully quote Shakespeare, ” . . . the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves . . . ”

See the feeble and foolish attempt to change telomeres with mallomars, as if we can affect this DNA function with broccoli and bean sprouts.

You Cannot Persuade a Falling Apple.