The best thing IMO is that the authors are all about playing it completely straight. You probably wouldn't guess that from the title of the book. But in fact, each chapter ends with advice on how not to misuse the technique you just learnt.

I highly recommend that you read the book rather than just skimming the summary. The reason is that there are numerous case studies in the book (drawn from actual scientific studies) of counterintuitive human behavior, which the authors then explain. The examples will make the material stick in your head a lot better.

The thing you would realize if you read the book is that all of our normal conversation is "manipulative," in that we are trying to elicit some desired response from the other person. Otherwise we'd speak like a robot, with no emotions or facial expressions, always make pure statements of fact and never get anything accomplished.

Secondly, the "majority of guests ..." is a blatant example of argumentum ad populum, a logical fallacy. Appeal to me based on my self-interest, appeal to me based on the environment -- I may or may not agree -- but simply stating what other people are doing is not sufficient. I disagree with a lot of what other people do. Also, devices like "in your specific room" are transparent and annoying. If I checked-in to a particular room where, by sheer chance, the last 200 people trashed it, would it be then OK to do the same? That's the same argument they're using.

Oh, and one small thing, they're claiming to know why the previous guests picked up their towels up, and therefore to be mind readers since there was no survey. They can't say "well, that's the popular opinion" because they're talking about that specific room.

That depends entirely on the culture of the audience, it'd likely work pretty well on Asians because of their more collective culture where everyone cares very much what other people are doing.

You're likely an outlier, those things that annoy you might be very effective on the general populace. Honesty is not always the most effective strategy.

I can't stand to walk through a mall or browse the web without Adblock because it's like swimming through a sea of lies. Somewhere out there are honest and genuine marketers with a product that is deserving of everything they say about it, but I can't hear them through the noise of all the other marketers using the same exact tactics.

"The authors take the position that persuasion is a science, not art, hence with the right approach anybody can become the master in the skill of persuasion."

My approach is a bit simpler than 50 tactics. My two favorite forms of persuasion are to be honest, and be correct. Maybe it's obvious I'm not in marketing.

The closest thing in the text to "be honest" was "Admitting you’re wrong makes people more trustworthy."

I didn't read the article carefully - maybe the book is a good read.

I think you're oversimplifying a field you're not familiar with though, it's like a non-hacker saying that all you need to store data is to set up a microsoft Access database, and you're good to go. It's correct, but misses a lot of problems and subtleties.

i enjoyed influence by cialdini, it helped a lot in getting my ideas across in my job.

Yup. Exhorting people to conserve electricity with smiley face postcards caused a meaningful change in power use? Maybe, but I doubt it. (And if it did, may God help the people in that neighborhood.)

If you look more broadly and read introductory psychology books, you will discover the many quirks that our (and I mean all of ours -- yours and mine included) brains have. Whether that means that all the world's population needs God's help to survive because of the way our brains function is a question that we won't be able to answer in our lifetime.

I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic.

The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have."

From Milton Glaser's "Ten Things I have learned" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592580

Wouldn't that make them more trustful?

But I see what you're saying.

Want this.

Just, yeah. Don't kill yourself. :P Lethal dose is somewhere between 10 and 20 grams. Rough, spydez-levels of caffeination call for ~1/2 teaspoon of pure caffeine powder per gallon of water or juice or tea or what have you.

Enjoy.

Or, for extra credit, make a caffeinated heavy water ice cube.