Credibility

I almost spit up my coffee when I got to the punchline on this one.

From Tony Pratt:

I’m a first year teacher (4th Grade) in the New Orleans Recovery School District. The one common thread that I’ve noticed between the lessons that have stuck was a relation to something the kids were familiar with or interested in. I frequently relate math lessons to the beloved Saints and create bizarre scenarios to maintain student interest. The best and most interesting story, however, came from a colleague. He was teaching the concept of probability and went into a long monologue about how small of a probability you have to win the lottery. He relayed the particularly sticky stat that it is more likely that you will be struck by lightning than win the lottery. The lesson was memorable enough that several students went home and told family members.

One student, Jarred, relayed his story, “I saw my uncle buying lottery tickets last night. I told him that he was more likely to be struck by lightning than he was to win the lottery and that buying lottery tickets was a bad idea because of probability.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to get the F out of his face.”

I conducted a workshop recently for high school science and math teachers. We were working together to find ways to make their lesson plans stickier. My favorite example came from a couple of teachers who were trying to revamp the oceanography unit. Below is my own paraphrasing of what they said:

“We weren’t happy with how our unit on oceanography went last year. So we’ve put a lot of energy into how to make it better. Here’s what we’ve come up with.

In the first class in the unit, we start with a mystery: Let’s say you put a message in a bottle, drive out to the coast, and throw it as far as you can into the ocean. Where will the bottle end up? We let students make their guesses. (‘The waves will bring it right back to shore.’ ‘It’ll end up in Antarctica.’ ‘It’ll sink.’ Etc.) But we don’t give an answer (since there isn’t a clear answer).

Then we began to explore this same mystery in a more dramatic form. We’ll have students read a wonderful article from Harper’s magazine. What happened is this: In January 1992, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, a cargo ship hit a severe storm lost a container overboard which held 7,200 packages of plastic toys, including thousands of rubber duckies. Years later, we know where many of these rubber duckies ended up. In fact, many of them ended up on the same beach! By tracing the paths that these duckies swam, we learn a lot about the way ocean currents work.

Next, we let the kids do some hands-on experimentation. We’ll set up tanks of water with different salinities and different temperatures, and let them see how those variables change the water current. In essence, we are letting them create their own ocean currents.

Finally, we’ll pivot to the critical role that oceans play with global climate. We’ll start by asking them: What determines the weather of a city, like New York City? Inevitably, students say it depends on the latitude of the city ‘ the closer to the equator the city is, the warmer it is, and the closer to the poles it is, the colder it is. There is much truth to that, but there are huge discrepancies: For instance, New York City and Madrid are at roughly the same latitude. Yet it snows every winter in NYC and doesn’t snow in Madrid. What’s the difference? That paves our way to talk about the way that ocean currents influence climate.

We will be trying this ‘new & improved’ sequence this fall, and we’re hopeful it will make the unit much more vivid for students!”

How do you make your idea believable? You can get an external authority (the C. Everett Koop of your field) to vouch for it. You can use data and statistics. Or you can find a way to make your idea credible on its face. One technique for doing that is to use what we call a testable credential. A classic testable credential was Ronald Reagan’s line from the 1980 presidential debate: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Reagan didn’t use statistics, and he didn’t cite influential economists. (It would have been easy to do either.) Instead, he simply let the audience judge for itself: Is my idea credible? Do you believe the economy has worsened?

A great example of a testable credential hit my inbox this week. A graphic designer named John Burns, who created the Ruffles logo (among others), used one against me. And it worked. Here’s what he said:

“As a career-long graphic designer, I love your book cover and website.
I have one suggestion for you, after reading a few of your blog
entries. Unlike the old days of the typewriter, where you would hit the
space bar twice after a sentence, the current typographic practice on
the computer is to hit it only once. In the typewriter days, there was
mono-spacing. Each letter, whether it was an i or a W, or even a .
(period), was given the same amount of space. That lead to uneven
spacing. The only way to make the end of sentences obvious, was to add
two spaces. Current technology, however, has given us proportional
spacing. So, now the type looks better, and the extra space after a
sentence is extraneous.

I’m now going to copy and paste below the above paragraph, to prove my
point. In the top paragraph, I used only one space after a sentence.
Below, I’ve added an additional space. Note how the extra space
actually creates a distractive hole in the text.

As a career-long graphic designer, I love your book cover and website.
I have one suggestion for you, after reading a few of your blog
entries. Unlike the old days of the typewriter, where you would hit
the space bar twice after a sentence, the current typographic practice
on the computer is to hit it only once. In the typewriter days, there
was mono-spacing. Each letter, whether it was an i or a W, or even a .
(period), was given the same amount of space. That lead to uneven
spacing. The only way to make the end of sentences obvious, was to add
two spaces. Current technology, however, has given us proportional
spacing. So, now the type looks better, and the extra space after a
sentence is extraneous.”

I have to admit, after I read the first few sentences, I was skeptical. A little annoyed. But then Burns said, basically, “See for yourself.” And he was right (see for *your*self). He has made me a one-space believer. What an ingenious way to make the case.

As a side note, I am finding it incredibly difficult to break this habit. (Even as I typed up this story, I continually had to backtrack and delete the double-spaces my fingers had imperiously inserted.) Learning to limit myself to one space feels about as natural as learning to end sentences with a comma.

From an article on nice-but-cheap bottles of wine in the NYT:

Let’s face it, you can find hundreds if not thousands of bottles in [the $10 or under category], down to the lowest of the low. We cannot try them all and say, “Here are the 10 best.” But we can give you some suggestions as to where to look, while offering up some good examples. …

Here’s what I find remarkable about this: The writer, Eric Asimov, isn’t saying anything that should be shocking when he points out the impossibility of finding the 10 best wines under $10. And yet it stopped me in my tracks. In saying the obvious, he became much more credible to me. Because most of the other “best-of” lists you see don’t concede their obvious limitations. “Hey, look, it’s absurd to think that we’ve found the best 10 albums of the year, out of thousands that were released…” Asimov’s admission made me more curious, not less, to hear what he had to say.

It reminds me of the sales world. We’ve all come across salespeople who are reluctant to admit any weakness in their product or service, no matter how insignificant. As many a sales guru has pointed out, building trust involves being candid, and being candid involves admitting that your products aren’t flawless.

Admitting weakness can, oddly enough, make your core ideas more powerful.

The research is in on Baby Einstein videos: “For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as “Brainy Baby” or “Baby Einstein,” they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.”

Concrete enough for ya? But if the enduring appeal of the discredited “Mozart Effect” is any guide, we’re still in for a long debate on this one. It takes parents a long time to become as disillusioned as they should be.

Here’s MojoMom explaining why Gen X parents love Baby Einstein (and why they shouldn’t). And here’s Chip debunking the Mozart Effect.