'Keep it simple stupid'? Not if you're asking for help:
The toughest sell in business isn't a sell at all, strictly speaking. Convincing others to donate valuable time or resources to your cause, without any tangible compensation, is the rarest and most prized of communications skills. That is especially true in our age of digital mass communication, when written appeals jostle for attention in our email inboxes and social-media feeds every day.
[...] Jiyeon Hong, assistant professor of marketing at George Mason University School of Business, recently published a paper in Marketing Science (co-authored by Paul R. Hoban of Amazon) shedding light on why soliciting uncompensated help is so difficult for most of us. These solicitations may flout one of the most well-known rules of business writing: namely, "keep it simple stupid" (KISS).
The assumption behind "KISS" is that readers respond most strongly to lean prose that makes minimal mental demands. But Hong's research, including algorithmic analysis and a randomized controlled trial (RCT), suggests that simple, punchy writing is not always the most convincing for donors.
[...] "More concrete and specific content tended to be in the beneficial sentences," Hong says. "Acronyms and insider terms also appeared often in the more persuasive sentences." In direct opposition to the "KISS" rule, beneficial sentences were slightly longer and demanded more of the reader. Their average readability score was 9.51, compared to 8.72 for detrimental sentences. (Readability scores correspond to the grade level required to understand the sentence.)
For example, instead of describing diversity in vague language such as "Our school has a very diverse student population," a beneficial sentence would be densely packed with detail—e.g. "Our school is a Title 1 school serving a diverse and vibrant student population: 80 percent are students of color and nearly half are English Language Learners."
[...] Hong explains, "The readers are in cognitive mindset, trying to compare many options because they also have a limited budget. In this context, objectively delivering information can be more persuasive. Facts win out over emotions."
[...] "We conclude that the most successful appeals for help will not be those that make the simplest and tightest arguments. Instead, they will a) expose the reader to a modest amount of desirable difficulty; and b) put forth a detailed case that is low on emotional coloration," Hong says.
Journal Reference:
Jiyeon Hong et al, Writing More Compelling Creative Appeals: A Deep Learning-Based Approach, Marketing Science (2022). DOI: 10.1287/mksc.2022.1351
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday June 01 2023, @02:25PM (5 children)
On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit [upenn.edu].
A reasonable percentage people are easily swayed by absolute nonsense invoking high level concepts in their vocabulary. And I mean literally garbage nonsensical statements with literally no inherent meaning or interpretive value, intentionally constructed to say nothing with a lot of words.
Now if you're out there trying to get money, these are absolutely some of the people who have it and are willing to part with it. Which overall puts this research into a category where I like to call "Does this still hold if you remove the goddamn idiots from the pool?"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by krishnoid on Thursday June 01 2023, @03:20PM
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you. If you really make them think, they'll hate you [quoteinvestigator.com].
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday June 02 2023, @02:30AM (3 children)
If there were a reliable way of identifying this stuff in some sort of language learning model, it would be interesting to run, say, TED Talk transcripts through that interpreter to see what percentage of these speeches is actually saying something of substance. My guess is not much. And your typical marketing driven website, filtering out the fluff, would be pretty much blank I suspect.
Which lends itself to another aspect of this: Should we be deciding which charity projects get funded on the basis of who can flim-flam some rich idiots? Because there are quite a lot of rich idiots out there who mostly inherited their money and power and have done very little of consequence to suggest they have the slightest idea of what does and doesn't work in the real world, including non-profit stuff.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Friday June 02 2023, @01:11PM (2 children)
I present to you, "bullshit-ratio.sh":
#!/usr/bin/env bash
while [ ! -z $1 ]; do
htmlpage=$(curl -sSL "$1")
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "error"
exit
fi
htmlbytes=$(echo "$htmlpage" | wc -c)
txtbytes=$(echo "$htmlpage" | html2text | wc -c)
echo -e "Bullshit ratio for \e[1m\e[4m${1}\e[0m: " $(echo "$txtbytes / $htmlbytes" | bc -l)
unset htmlpage txtbytes htmlbytes
shift
done
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday June 03 2023, @02:16AM (1 child)
That doesn't quite work, though, because there is some data that are likely to appear on a web page that aren't bullshit, e.g. the organization's name and a mailing address.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 03 2023, @04:42AM
On the other hand, for a JS-only page this may give a bullshit ratio of zero despite it being full of bullshit.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Thursday June 01 2023, @03:48PM
It works best if they don't notice that you're conning them out of money.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 01 2023, @08:10PM (2 children)
The text argues that the first explanation fails because it is too simple.
But 'simplicity' isn't the problem.
It's that it doesn't have the specifics that engage the reader's emotions.
The reader's emotions can be evoked by phrases like "of color" and "English language learners".
Most of us have some idea of the effort that goes into learning a language, and that awareness translates into some kind of emotional connection.
By contrast, the first sentence just abstractly refers to diversity, which provides almost no specifics to hang feelings on. The article says the problem is that it's too simple and lacks technical detail. That's not the problem. The problem is that it provides no valence for emotional bonding.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Friday June 02 2023, @12:32PM (1 child)
Beyond emotional connection, there's still a need for technical details. You can't just say, "I need help" and expect help. You need to be clear about what help you need, and possibly why you need it.
Which of the following questions is the most likely to actually get someone to help you?
Without some of that technical detail, you don't even know if you can help. That said, it's entirely possible to go overboard with rambling appeals to emotion or including irrelevant details. There's a balance to be struck, and the fine art of persuasion depends on your audience as well. I wouldn't ask things in exactly the same way when dealing with friends vs. coworkers vs. family.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday June 02 2023, @06:55PM
The second one is both too specific and not specific enough at the same time. If you need the ramps, it is irrelevant what part of your car you have to repair, the relevant information is that you need the ramps for repairing.
"I need to fix my car, but have no way to get under it. Could I borrow your portable ramps please?"
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday June 01 2023, @08:49PM (5 children)
I think our primary mode of communication conditions us to comprehend things more easily when there is some superfluous information.
English missing some words, comprehensible. Just sounds odd.
APL falls right through the floor of this, and is probably why it was never too popular. It seems better to err on the side of verbosity in that department too. I think COBOL is quite verbose, although I've never used it, and it's far more successful than APL.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday June 02 2023, @02:05AM (4 children)
Cobol was there first. It was well-established for commercial databases (and that term wasn't invented either) by the time APL showed up on restrictive interactive terminals.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday June 02 2023, @04:37PM (3 children)
Late arrival wouldn't have prevented APL from rising in that space if it was a good idea. Consider Java. Much later arrival (1990s vs. 1960s), more in line with the way people think, and perhaps the most popular migration path for legacy COBOL applications; although simply leaving them alone and running COBOL on new hardware might be more popular.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday June 03 2023, @03:32AM (1 child)
If people are happy with COBOL, why change it?
Extend it if you may, but, don't break it.
This fashion crap has got to go. Just because something is old does not mean it's of less utility.
Note I post as one who does not use COBOL. I only recognize the utility of a useful tool, even if I don't know how to use it, but know others do.
I'm a C++ / assembler guy. But I recognize COBOL is just as useful to those who know how to use it as my tools are to me.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 03 2023, @04:59AM
There are of course other questions to consider (note that I don't know the actual situation with COBOL, but those are points that could apply even if the current developers are completely happy with COBOL):
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Saturday June 03 2023, @05:51PM
APL became quite popular among actuaries, a much more mathematically oriented group. They were quite familiar with matrix algebra, and found that the expressiveness of APL matched their way of thinking. A very different community from the users of commercial data bases.