I have been reading some interesting articles about public opinion and the 2012 campaign. I have also been hearing directly from people in the Obama campaign.
New methods of reaching the public have been developed in the 21st century. The Internet and social media are used to coordinate campaigns, gather support and encourage people to vote. I think we should make use of these techniques to promote cold fusion. Perhaps we do not need to do that now. We don't have the resources. However, if it becomes widely known that cold fusion is real, I predict it will become the focus of intense political activity. We will need to launch public relations campaigns. We should think about this now. We should prepare for it. As a practical matter I hope that I can contact some of the people in the Obama campaign to assist us. I have mixed feelings about using the manipulative methods of political campaigns and Madison Avenue. I find them distasteful. However we need these methods if we are going to win. Cold fusion is inherently political in many ways. We must deal with political realities. Both Republicans and Democrats made use of new techniques, but the Obama campaign in particular hired a cadre of young, hotshot social scientists who are pioneering new methods. These methods are first and foremost pragmatic. They have been refined with field tests and actual data from respondents. These researchers have discovered a number of facts and new techniques about persuasion and public opinion. Some of them overturn widely held conventional ideas. Here's an interesting example. In a campaign the goal should not be to persuade people in the middle so much as to: 1. Hold onto one's own set of supporters; 2. Persuading moderates on the other side. Suppose the range of opinions on a political issue can be quantified such that a range of responses are graded from 1 to 10. Extremists in support of your side are at 1 and 2; people at 5 have no strong opinion; and people at the opposite extreme are at 9 and 10. I mean that when you ask a question people fill out numbers, the way people grade movies at Netflix. Your campaign should strive to hold onto people from 1 to 4, and it should reach out to people at 6 and 7 rather than 5. They are more likely to come over to your side than the people at 5. To take concrete example, in the third debate we saw Romney espouse foreign-policy positions very similar to Obama's. I think it is likely he did this deliberately in response to this recent public opinion research. He was trying to win over moderate Democrats rather than middle-of-the-road people or extremists on either side. In other words, if we say the continuum runs from 1 for extreme Democrats to 10 for extreme Republicans, Romney was trying to appeal to people at 3 or 4, rather than 5. In previous campaigns the target would be people at 5 or 6. Romney was trying to win over moderately conservative Democrats who have stronger opinions than the "undecided middle," or "persuadable man in the street." It turns out that people who already have some opinion on the subject are more persuadable than people who have no opinion, even when the former have an opinion somewhat against the one you wish to sell them. Applying this example to cold fusion, I target the papers and presentations at LENR-CANR.org to persuade physicists and engineers who are moderately opposed to cold fusion, rather than physicists who have no opinion about cold fusion. I should target professionals and those who have some standing and knowledge of physics, rather than people who are in the middle of the road, and people who have no opinions and nothing invested in the question. This may seem counter-intuitive but it has been tested field tested with large groups of people and I think it is probably correct. I will go through my browser history and buy some books, and report more about this in the coming weeks. In the 1980s and 90s, political campaigns about many techniques from Madison Avenue and commercial public opinion research firms. Starting in 2000 for the Democrats in particular began developing their own social science theory and public opinion theories. As I said, Obama has hired some of the most ambitious hotshot talent in this field. The DNC invested millions of dollars in computer databases and analyses. Some of these are superior to the best commercial efforts, and starting this year Madison Avenue is beginning to reach out to the campaigns instead of the other way around. As noted here in previous discussions, some corporations such as Amazon.com and Target have superb data mining and marketing techniques. In some instances described by the New York Times and others, the Target supercomputers were able to identify women who are pregnant before the women themselves realized they were. This is creepy. I have mixed feelings about it. But it is a fact of the 21st century. We do not have the resources to take advantage of this sort of thing, but if cold fusion breaks through to the headlines and engenders a monumental political battle, we might suddenly have such resources. We should think about how we might use them. I do not think it is possible for cold fusion to become a practical source of energy without a monumental political battle. It may succeed technically but if we lose the political battle opponents will block it and prevent it from being used as a practical source of energy. At present there is no opposition from fossil fuel companies and other powerful vested interests, because no one at these organizations is aware that cold fusion exists. Once it becomes generally known that cold fusion is real I am certain the vested interests will spend billions of dollars to prevent commercialization. I find it inconceivable they would not do this. There are number of other interesting new sociological discoveries made by campaign researchers. Plus some old techniques revived from the 1930s. For example, one of the reasons the Obama campaign was so anxious to a gather campaign contributions even small amounts is not so much that they needed the money (although they did need it) but more because after a person donates $5 or $20 to a campaign, he or she is more likely to vote in favor of the candidate. A person who donates a small amount of money feels "invested" in the campaign. A person who spent an hour for one afternoon at the Obama office making phone calls or stuffing envelopes also feels invested and is much more likely to go out and vote. Applying that lesson to cold fusion, if we can persuade people to make a small contribution to promoting cold fusion, such as writing letters to the editor, or writing letters on web sites or to their Congressman, it is more likely they will support a public relations campaign against fossil fuel opposition at a later date. As I said, we may find these things distasteful, but if we ignore them the opposition will beat us to a pulp. The good news from the 2008 Obama campaign is that smart, motivated 20-year-old kids can beat the pants off professional political operatives when the stars are aligned and the motivation is right. We have good hope this will be the case with cold fusion. The Obama kids that year ran rings around middle-aged Republican experts. I saw this first-hand. They Republican experts were 6-figure salaried consultants. They wore $2000 suits. The Obama kids were working for peanuts -- I mean literally, they were paid nothing more than piles of junk food! They were dressed in sweat suits and stocking caps. They knew social media that the middle-aged consultants had never heard of. The kids clobbered the consultants then. They clobbered them again this year in all the swing states. Even if you disagree with everything the Obama campaign stands for, you should take note of the fact they pulled off one of the most technically effective campaigns in U.S. history, and they used every new 21st century tool available. Some comments from CNN today: "When it comes to the use of voter data and analytics, the two sides appear to be as unmatched as they have ever been on a specific electioneering tactic in the modern campaign era," Sasha Issenberg, a journalist and an expert in the science of campaigning, wrote just days before the election proved him right. "No party ever has ever had such a durable structural advantage over the other on polling, making television ads, or fundraising, for example." . . . one top Republican told CNN: "Their (ground game) deal was much more real than I expected." We are going to need those kids. There were plenty of smart kids working for Romney too, and we can use them as well. There was plenty of fraternization -- the two sides know one another well. Getting back to the dark side . . . My mother knew a great deal about manipulating public opinion, persuading people, lying, distortion and the various subterfuges used on Madison Avenue. After she died I went through her papers and found some hilarious correspondence between her and some 1950s Madison Avenue marketing experts who had amateur notions that she debunked in aprofessional journal article and a series of follow-up letters she published. She also recommended the wonderful little book by Derrell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics." This is essential reading to anyone involved in marketing or politics. Just about every cheap shot and stupid trick relating to numbers that you see practiced by advertisers and politicians is described in this book. It is a goldmine condensed to 142 pages. Let me quote the introduction: "This book is a sort of primer in ways to use statistics to deceive. It may seem altogether too much like a manual for swindlers. Perhaps I can justify it in the manner of the retired burglar whose published reminiscences amounted to a graduate course in how to pick a lock and muffle a footfall: The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense." - Jed
