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Title: Lexicon Authors: Max Barry Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 33 Date: 2025-11-12 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
âWords arenât just sounds or shapes. Theyâre meaning. Thatâs what language is: a protocol for transferring meaning. When you learn English, you train your brain to react in a particular way to particular sounds. As it turns out, the protocol can be hacked.â
âThe most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and Iâll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them. You canât be persuaded. Ergo, you donât feel desire.â
Tags:desire,negotiation
You might be an intelligent person, but once you let someone else filter the world for you, you have no way to critically analyze what youâre hearing. At best, absolute best case scenario, if they blatantly contradict themselves, you can spot that. But if they take basic care to maintain an internal logical consistency, which they all do, youâve got nothing. Youâve delegated the ability to make up your mind.
Tags:favorite,influence,misinformation,perception
âA similar term is proselyte. Typically used in a religious sense, to denote a person converting from one faith to another. Like a whore, a proselyte is persuaded to perform an act. The difference is that a whore does what she knows is wrong for reward, while a proselyte does what she has been persuaded to believe is right.â
Civilizations rose and fell; what caused them to be remembered was not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they exerted upon the landscape.
Tags:perspective
The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.
Tags:favorite,negotiation
This was what they were teaching her. How to craft a string of words that would disable the filters one by one, unlocking each mental tumbler until the mindâs last door swung open.
We attempt to conceal ourselves, Emily, but the truth is we do not entirely want to be concealed. We want to be found. Every poet, sooner or later, discovers this: that within perfect walls, there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.â
Tags:communication
She had been taught chess at the school, years ago, and the point was the pieces differed only in terms of their attacking power. They were all equally easy to kill. It was called capturing. The lesson was that you should be cautious about deploying your most powerful pieces, because it only required one dumb pawn to take them down.
Tags:leadership,negotiation,security
People still fell to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allowed identification of their personality typeâtheir true name, basicallyâand the attack vectors for these techniques were primarily aural and visual.
Everyoneâs making pages for themselves. Imagine a hundred million people clicking polls and typing in their favorite TV shows and products and political leanings, day after day. Itâs the biggest data profile ever. And itâs voluntary. Thatâs the funny part. People resist a census, but give them a profile page and theyâll spend all day telling you who they are.
She felt stunned in some important part of her brain, stunned as in estoner, the French root that also meant astonished, a word used to describe sorcery.
They didnât teach persuasion. Your ability to persuade is the single most important determinant of your quality of life, and they didnât cover that at all.
At night, she sat by the window of her cloister room, books piled on her desk. She studied with her hair pinned up and her school tie slung. She didnât really enjoy reading but she liked how the books were clues. Each one a piece in a puzzle. Even when they didnât fit together, they revealed a little more about what kind of picture she was making.
Iâm not a privacy nut, and I donât care that much if these organizations want to know where I go and what I buy. But what bothers me is how HARD theyâre all working for that data, how much money theyâre spending, and how they never admit thatâs what they want. It means that information must be really valuable for some reason, and I just wonder to who and why.
Tags:technology
There was no past or future when you milked a cow. You were just milking.
Tags:intentional
âThatâs because you donât know what words are.â âTheyâre sounds.â âNo, theyâre not. You and I are not grunting at each other. Weâre transferring meaning. Neurochemical changes are occurring in your brain at this very moment, because of my words.â
Tags:communication
Technically, none of it was essential; you could accomplish the same end by manually constructing circuits and moving wires, manipulating pixels one by one. But what the layers did was distill that power into commands. They let you make electrons flow and logic gates close, phosphorous glow and metal magnetize, all by typing words.
Tags:technology
You developed a sense of what a mark desired or feared and used that to compel them. It was the same, only with more theory. So that was why you shouldnât talk about yourself, and why the older students were so aloof and inscrutable: to avoid being identified. To guard against persuasion, you had to hide who you were.
Tags:communication
She was a person who needed to know things. She didnât want to guess what was in his head. She wanted to hear him say it. This was how she avoided surprises.
This is just the beginning. Third major advantage: People who use a site like this tend to ramp up their dependence on it. Suddenly all those other news sources, the ones that arenât framing every story in terms of the userâs core beliefs, they start to seem confusing and strange. They start to seem biased, actually, which is kind of funny.
Tags:cognition,perspective
âPersuasion stems from understanding. We compel others by learning who they are and turning it against them.
âAll empires fall, eventually.â âBut why? Itâs not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.
Now when Ra, the greatest of the gods, was created, his father had given him a secret name, so awful that no man dared to seek for it, and so pregnant with power that all the other gods desired to know and possess it too.
âCause has changed. The definition used to be âto make something happen.â Now theyâve added, âespecially something bad.ââ âTheyâve changed cause?â âTheyâve noticed a change. Dictionaries record common usage.â
There was a joke, or puzzle, that went like this: A woman meets a man at her motherâs funeral. They hit it off, but the woman never gets the manâs name, and afterward she canât find him. A few days later, she murders her sister. You were supposed to figure out why. But if you did, it meant you were a psychopath, because the reason was the woman wanted to meet the man again.
âBusiest part of any store, always the new releases,â said the tall man. âThatâs what attracts people. Not the best. Why is that, Wil, do you think?â
Body parts telegraphed complaints from faraway places.
That hourglass in the lobby, she realized, that didnât tilt. It was someoneâs job to come by twice a day and replace the fish.
He did love her. She was sure of it. All evidence pointed to yes. So why not say it? This was the part that nagged at her. Yes, okay, in Harryâs world, you didnât need to say something to make it real. But come on.
It was a tumor, of course. Oligodendroglioma, a cancerous growth in an area associated with feelings of enlightenment. The feelings it aroused could be reproduced through electrical stimulation. It wasnât fatal, but it would need to be removed, his surgeon told him, as Yeats looked over the black-and-white scans, because it would continue to grow. Over time, there would be less and less of him and more of the tumor. His brain was being eaten by God.
The girl with the chain came at her in pure rage, and despite the imminent ass whipping Emily felt a mild pleasure at successfully pushing her beyond precortex control. That wasnât easy. You really had to sock a person in the core of what they believed to do that.
Maybe after a certain size, a building had more rooms than uses.