"As with so many problems of social science, marketing has been grappling with this for ages. The legend is that all new products in the UK are tested in Reading (extremely median, if it succeeds there it will likely succeed everywhere) or in Newcastle (if it’s a flop, nobody outside the North East will hear about it)."
Trump is really testing this hypothesis to destruction. Resentment against schoolteachers is a central part of the MAGA dynamic. If Obama's policy motto was "don't do stupid stuff", Trump's is "doing stupid stuff feels good"
I think the smartest thing I ever saw wrote about Trump was in the 2016 primary when he annihilated Jeb Bush, and someone (I forget who, sadly) said "the thing about Trump is that he bullies people that you really like to see bullied". Although as you say, as his faculties have degraded, he's now just lashing out and the audience is shrinking to people whose experience of the education system is just as atypical in a different way.
"the thing about Trump is that he bullies people that you really like to see bullied"
He went after Jeb Bush for the simple reason that he was a competitor in the Republican primary, nothing more nothing less. Ambition required that he attack him. Assuming that Trump would somehow start picking the side of right generally was either a) based on ignoring much of what he openly said and did, which was stupid, or b) based on hoping that although he would harm boringly earnest people it wouldn't be you who got deported or otherwise harmed, which was either stupid if you were wrong, or else demonstrated a nasty combination of smug entitlement and taking pleasure in cruelty for its own sake.
I think this sentence from Dan's post is relevant here: "Similarly, poor people have lived experience of difficult interactions with the state, but that doesn’t mean that they understand how to fix them, and they might be quite likely to focus on things which are immediately irritating rather than actually causing the problems." While the 2016-era thinkpiece identification of the Trump base as the "white working class" has largely been debunked, it does seem that a big part of his success has been due to capitalizing in a similar way on "immediate irritants". Some of those irritants happened to be smug politicians like Jeb Bush who richly deserved to be bullied, but mostly they were social phenomena that were experienced as irritants just because they were unfamiliar and could therefore be presented by rage-bait grifters as both symptoms and causes of the country's "not working": windmills, immigrants, "wokeness", trans people, etc.
Not sure if you have this in mind but the idea of meritocracy, which you touched on some weeks ago, is a clear example of this. People who have been very successful within any system are going to be predisposed to think the system selects accurately for merit and the role of luck or other unearned advantages is very limited.
Upton Sinclair nailed this when he said ""It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I would just add that self-image/ego probably counts as much as salary.
As someone who's done a lot of UX research--spot on.
Interesting thing is, it's WEIRD all the way down. Products smaller than Coca-Cola are purchased disproportionately by some niche (behavioral/psychographical). Identifying these niches is the hardest thing I do, the most valuable, and the least likely to be accepted by my clients. It's gotten easier in the past 20 years of practice insofar as we have a lot more recorded data, but harder insofar as most of the data is either irrelevant or actively harmful.
To run a business you need models, and by definition those are abstract. I've found that the most abstract tends to be "customers," and it should be the least.
The problem is that "customers" tends to be far the *biggest* group you ever deal with* so aggregation, modelling, and abstraction is unavoidably more necessary with regard to customers than it is with, say, suppliers, employees, or government.
You hire buyers, managers, and lobbyists to deal with those groups on an individualised basis, but you usually need to be a big customer indeed to get a named account manager and a really big one for that to be a reality rather than just a sliver of a generic sales guy's time.
Terry Leahy-era Tesco was famous for the Clubcard program and Dunnhumby but they classified customers into 7 groups. Of course, if 1 in every 7 pounds of GDP goes through your till there's going to be a limit to how much a subgroup of customers can diverge from the national averages while still being of a size that has material impact on revenue.
*provided that you're not an investment banker, TSMC, or Rolls-Royce - the B2B world is very different to retail, it's enormously more likely that you have a relatively few customers, all of whom are important, and with whom you deal on an individualised basis. Even right in the middle of the industrial value network, though, this is still a minority. Arm deals with Apple like that but it also has literally hundreds of licensees on the Flexible Design programme who basically give them money, agree to the terms, and download the files they were after. It's not completely golf-free** but it's close. Then there are the cloud companies who definitely will deal with you on a supermarket basis if that's what you want.
**in Internet engineering the DFZ or Default-Free Zone is the core subset of the Internet made up of those networks that have a complete set of routes to all other networks through peering and don't rely on a service provider to carry a default route. in the economic value network I guess the GFZ or Golf-Free Zone is the opposite, the subset of interactions that happen on transactional retail terms without anyone having to play golf or otherwise schmooze.
In my admittedly limited experience of it, I have found that poor people often have quite a sophisticated view of how the state behaves towards them and ways in which changing that behaviour could be done for the better. (Just as front line customer representatives often have a sharp understanding of the behaviour of the system they are representing.) The problem the poor people had was believing that there was any way in which the system might (a) hear them and (b) do anything even if it did hear them.
This post brought back some memories. I remember being at a policy-making session in the late 1990's that was dealing with issues of consumer law. There were over 50 people in the room. In the middle of the day, I realized that everybody in the room except maybe the sole consumer advocate was worth seven or low eight figures: USD. And we were discussing the behavior of repo men. Gulp.
The "little people" have almost no representation at policy making levels anywhere. Even in the so-called "People's" republics. And they know it.
We can thank Leona Helmsley for popularizing the term "little people", which forever puts her in the same league of cluelessness (with a side of nasty) as Marie Antoinette:
These days, if you don't ride around in a private jet you just aren't living, apparently. Your feet seldom touch the same ground as the plebs. You won! And of course your children go to a private school. Having them mixing it up with lower class city kids is unthinkable.
One thing that has changed is social media making everyone very aware of how the luxury class lives, or at least how the "pretender" class pretends to live.
In Britain don't they have a thing called "Yes, Minister"? We have that too in the USA. Praising upwards has always been a good career move.
One thing about Trump is he is an equal opportunity bully. He bullies the working class just as much as the Ivy Leaguers. Read "Commander in Cheat" to learn how he offered pennies on the dollar for venders working on one of his golf courses. Even if he were given better information, he just wouldn't care. Ditto Elon "Toxic Empathy" Musk. Ditto Jeff "Thanks for paying for my rocket ride!" Bezos.
Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. Shamelessness is the victory lap!
Those people are rarer than hens teeth. Good middle managers don't stick around in bad institutions. Bad institutions certainly do have lots of people who love nothing more than talking about what is wrong with the institution but they cannot be relied on to identify correctly
Am currently mired in this paradigm - we're working on a project to reshape a whole load of public services locally, and *trying* to do this using the lived experience of clients and workers as our guide. In the main, services are normally designed by senior managers (who fit the WEIRD criteria and then some) or even worse, devised in Whitehall by even more remote people. So this is a huge opportunity to do things differently.
The "paradox of hierarchy" is that we routinely give the most decision-making power to people with the least *actual* knowledge/experience of the system AND the least stake in it if things go wrong.
“Policy and business are for the most part run by The Very Special, and there is no getting away from that.”
Are they? Run by people substantially different to the the average perhaps (which seems like your main point), but having just emerged out of Oxbridge where you’d expect to see these Very Special People congregate (and certainly having met some future politicians) I can’t say your descriptions of them overly resonate.
Certainly in politics my impression is more that things are run by a subset of 40-50 year old men and women with expensive bikes and national trust memberships whose engagement with politics would ideally be reading the Times or Guardian and making the appropriate grunting noises. Policywise they may be supported by 20-30 year olds who did well in exams, and will sometimes be interested to have things explained, but having spent significant time amongst these people, even they seem unlikely to be engaging in issues much deeper than what crosses their YouTube feeds from channels like TLDR or RealLifeLore (which admittedly is still dramatically more than Joe Bloggs), nor would I expect them to react that much more enthusiastically to the offer of training than the average person.
It takes a very particular type of high IQ autistic person to be reading the the disclosure statements or spending your free afternoons researching the mechanics of CPTPP’s plurilateral trade negotiation system or whatever, and having spent the last three years hunting for them only to turn up a grand total of two, I can say from experience that there aren’t all that many. This sub seems to do a remarkably good job of tapping into a world where they all congregate (indeed a lot of my engagement is with the hopes of getting an invite) but from someone who has thus far not managed to join the club, I really don’t think you have to go that far down in order to see some of these assumptions break down.
I missed a footnote!
"As with so many problems of social science, marketing has been grappling with this for ages. The legend is that all new products in the UK are tested in Reading (extremely median, if it succeeds there it will likely succeed everywhere) or in Newcastle (if it’s a flop, nobody outside the North East will hear about it)."
Trump is really testing this hypothesis to destruction. Resentment against schoolteachers is a central part of the MAGA dynamic. If Obama's policy motto was "don't do stupid stuff", Trump's is "doing stupid stuff feels good"
I think the smartest thing I ever saw wrote about Trump was in the 2016 primary when he annihilated Jeb Bush, and someone (I forget who, sadly) said "the thing about Trump is that he bullies people that you really like to see bullied". Although as you say, as his faculties have degraded, he's now just lashing out and the audience is shrinking to people whose experience of the education system is just as atypical in a different way.
Like immigrants?
"the thing about Trump is that he bullies people that you really like to see bullied"
He went after Jeb Bush for the simple reason that he was a competitor in the Republican primary, nothing more nothing less. Ambition required that he attack him. Assuming that Trump would somehow start picking the side of right generally was either a) based on ignoring much of what he openly said and did, which was stupid, or b) based on hoping that although he would harm boringly earnest people it wouldn't be you who got deported or otherwise harmed, which was either stupid if you were wrong, or else demonstrated a nasty combination of smug entitlement and taking pleasure in cruelty for its own sake.
Well yeah, when I say "people who had a different experience of the education system" I'm being euphemistic obviously.
I think this sentence from Dan's post is relevant here: "Similarly, poor people have lived experience of difficult interactions with the state, but that doesn’t mean that they understand how to fix them, and they might be quite likely to focus on things which are immediately irritating rather than actually causing the problems." While the 2016-era thinkpiece identification of the Trump base as the "white working class" has largely been debunked, it does seem that a big part of his success has been due to capitalizing in a similar way on "immediate irritants". Some of those irritants happened to be smug politicians like Jeb Bush who richly deserved to be bullied, but mostly they were social phenomena that were experienced as irritants just because they were unfamiliar and could therefore be presented by rage-bait grifters as both symptoms and causes of the country's "not working": windmills, immigrants, "wokeness", trans people, etc.
Not sure if you have this in mind but the idea of meritocracy, which you touched on some weeks ago, is a clear example of this. People who have been very successful within any system are going to be predisposed to think the system selects accurately for merit and the role of luck or other unearned advantages is very limited.
Upton Sinclair nailed this when he said ""It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I would just add that self-image/ego probably counts as much as salary.
Agree 100%
As someone who's done a lot of UX research--spot on.
Interesting thing is, it's WEIRD all the way down. Products smaller than Coca-Cola are purchased disproportionately by some niche (behavioral/psychographical). Identifying these niches is the hardest thing I do, the most valuable, and the least likely to be accepted by my clients. It's gotten easier in the past 20 years of practice insofar as we have a lot more recorded data, but harder insofar as most of the data is either irrelevant or actively harmful.
To run a business you need models, and by definition those are abstract. I've found that the most abstract tends to be "customers," and it should be the least.
The problem is that "customers" tends to be far the *biggest* group you ever deal with* so aggregation, modelling, and abstraction is unavoidably more necessary with regard to customers than it is with, say, suppliers, employees, or government.
You hire buyers, managers, and lobbyists to deal with those groups on an individualised basis, but you usually need to be a big customer indeed to get a named account manager and a really big one for that to be a reality rather than just a sliver of a generic sales guy's time.
Terry Leahy-era Tesco was famous for the Clubcard program and Dunnhumby but they classified customers into 7 groups. Of course, if 1 in every 7 pounds of GDP goes through your till there's going to be a limit to how much a subgroup of customers can diverge from the national averages while still being of a size that has material impact on revenue.
*provided that you're not an investment banker, TSMC, or Rolls-Royce - the B2B world is very different to retail, it's enormously more likely that you have a relatively few customers, all of whom are important, and with whom you deal on an individualised basis. Even right in the middle of the industrial value network, though, this is still a minority. Arm deals with Apple like that but it also has literally hundreds of licensees on the Flexible Design programme who basically give them money, agree to the terms, and download the files they were after. It's not completely golf-free** but it's close. Then there are the cloud companies who definitely will deal with you on a supermarket basis if that's what you want.
**in Internet engineering the DFZ or Default-Free Zone is the core subset of the Internet made up of those networks that have a complete set of routes to all other networks through peering and don't rely on a service provider to carry a default route. in the economic value network I guess the GFZ or Golf-Free Zone is the opposite, the subset of interactions that happen on transactional retail terms without anyone having to play golf or otherwise schmooze.
That is indeed the standard viewpoint.
In my admittedly limited experience of it, I have found that poor people often have quite a sophisticated view of how the state behaves towards them and ways in which changing that behaviour could be done for the better. (Just as front line customer representatives often have a sharp understanding of the behaviour of the system they are representing.) The problem the poor people had was believing that there was any way in which the system might (a) hear them and (b) do anything even if it did hear them.
This post brought back some memories. I remember being at a policy-making session in the late 1990's that was dealing with issues of consumer law. There were over 50 people in the room. In the middle of the day, I realized that everybody in the room except maybe the sole consumer advocate was worth seven or low eight figures: USD. And we were discussing the behavior of repo men. Gulp.
That sounds typical.
The "little people" have almost no representation at policy making levels anywhere. Even in the so-called "People's" republics. And they know it.
We can thank Leona Helmsley for popularizing the term "little people", which forever puts her in the same league of cluelessness (with a side of nasty) as Marie Antoinette:
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/05/opinion/leona-and-the-little-people.html
These days, if you don't ride around in a private jet you just aren't living, apparently. Your feet seldom touch the same ground as the plebs. You won! And of course your children go to a private school. Having them mixing it up with lower class city kids is unthinkable.
One thing that has changed is social media making everyone very aware of how the luxury class lives, or at least how the "pretender" class pretends to live.
In Britain don't they have a thing called "Yes, Minister"? We have that too in the USA. Praising upwards has always been a good career move.
One thing about Trump is he is an equal opportunity bully. He bullies the working class just as much as the Ivy Leaguers. Read "Commander in Cheat" to learn how he offered pennies on the dollar for venders working on one of his golf courses. Even if he were given better information, he just wouldn't care. Ditto Elon "Toxic Empathy" Musk. Ditto Jeff "Thanks for paying for my rocket ride!" Bezos.
Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. Shamelessness is the victory lap!
I guess we need more Temples Grandin but for humans?
How about *good* middle-managers from bad institutions? They will be able to articulate what's going wrong (try and stop them).
Those people are rarer than hens teeth. Good middle managers don't stick around in bad institutions. Bad institutions certainly do have lots of people who love nothing more than talking about what is wrong with the institution but they cannot be relied on to identify correctly
Am currently mired in this paradigm - we're working on a project to reshape a whole load of public services locally, and *trying* to do this using the lived experience of clients and workers as our guide. In the main, services are normally designed by senior managers (who fit the WEIRD criteria and then some) or even worse, devised in Whitehall by even more remote people. So this is a huge opportunity to do things differently.
The "paradox of hierarchy" is that we routinely give the most decision-making power to people with the least *actual* knowledge/experience of the system AND the least stake in it if things go wrong.
yet another mental prison to periodically escape from
“Policy and business are for the most part run by The Very Special, and there is no getting away from that.”
Are they? Run by people substantially different to the the average perhaps (which seems like your main point), but having just emerged out of Oxbridge where you’d expect to see these Very Special People congregate (and certainly having met some future politicians) I can’t say your descriptions of them overly resonate.
Certainly in politics my impression is more that things are run by a subset of 40-50 year old men and women with expensive bikes and national trust memberships whose engagement with politics would ideally be reading the Times or Guardian and making the appropriate grunting noises. Policywise they may be supported by 20-30 year olds who did well in exams, and will sometimes be interested to have things explained, but having spent significant time amongst these people, even they seem unlikely to be engaging in issues much deeper than what crosses their YouTube feeds from channels like TLDR or RealLifeLore (which admittedly is still dramatically more than Joe Bloggs), nor would I expect them to react that much more enthusiastically to the offer of training than the average person.
It takes a very particular type of high IQ autistic person to be reading the the disclosure statements or spending your free afternoons researching the mechanics of CPTPP’s plurilateral trade negotiation system or whatever, and having spent the last three years hunting for them only to turn up a grand total of two, I can say from experience that there aren’t all that many. This sub seems to do a remarkably good job of tapping into a world where they all congregate (indeed a lot of my engagement is with the hopes of getting an invite) but from someone who has thus far not managed to join the club, I really don’t think you have to go that far down in order to see some of these assumptions break down.
When 'is' can be replaced by 'is not' and still make sense; you know the thoughts conveyed have a problem.