Election as gaming; Artificial dumbness; writing as a discipline

Newsletter 66: Why polls captivate us; AI fails at reasoning; the valued discipline of writing, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and a free report on how business books generate revenue and profit.

About that presidential horse race

Why are we so fascinated with polls?

Well, put that aside for a minute. Instead, let's think for a moment, not about polls, but about sports.

If you want to actually play a sport -- like pickleball, pickup basketball, or golf, for example -- you need to find some willing teammates and opponents; invest in equipment; go to a court, field, or course; actually use your muscles; and risk injury.

Spectator sports have none of these requirements. All you need is a couch, a TV, and a subscription to a service that carries the match. You'll be watching the most skilled players in the world, not just a random collection of your friends. And you'll have an incredible view of the action, with instant replays and expert analysis and features far superior to what you'd get if you were there in person, like those virtual first-down lines on the football broadcasts.

But there's more to it than just entertainment. Games are more entertaining if you have a rooting interest in one team or the other. There's evidence that the portions of your brain actually react as if you are competing on the field. From NBC News:

According to David Ezell, licensed professional counselor and clinical director and CEO of therapy provider Darien Wellness, adult humans have specialized neurons in their brains called mirror neurons that allow us to understand points of view outside of our own. These neurons enable us to put ourselves in another person’s shoes and imagine what they are going through in a particular moment.

“These feelings are magnified when we are watching a football team or player we are fans of because we ‘know’ them,” says Ezell. “When we see them on the field we are experiencing a portion of the feelings they are having because our mirror neurons are at work.”

So we get a lot of the mental experience of actually playing, just by watching. And of course, there is the euphoria of watching your team win and the agony of watching them lose:

According to Dr. Richard Shuster, clinical psychologist and host of The Daily Helping podcast, when your team wins or is playing well, your brain starts releasing the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is directly involved in regulating the brain’s reward and pleasure centers.

Conversely, when your team performs poorly or loses, your brain produces cortisol, a hormone made in your adrenal glands that your body releases when you’re under stress.

“Worse, our brains may produce less serotonin, which can lead to increased anger and depression,” Shuster says.

These days, of course, we can intensify our engagement with the game by betting, not just on who wins and by how much, but on whether the team scores on the next play, or which player gets the most tackles, or on the length of the longest field goal. So we have a potential rooting interest in every play and how it might pay off for us.

And the sports coverage has been atomized. Every interesting play is turned into a video clip and shared endlessly, so we can keep watching that home run or three-point-shot or touchdown catch or tackle and share it with our friends to demonstrate our commitment and get another little tickle of neurotransmitters.

The result of all of this intense interest is a massive industry built on analyzing sports. For every match there are thousands of words written about who might be injured, which players match up better with which other players, whether the coaches are able to motivate the players, and how much difference the weather or the referees might make. So you can stimulate the parts of your brain that sports engages even when the game is not on.

Together, the best word for all that activity is "gaming" -- that is, watching the game, analyzing the game, betting on the game, and rooting for the game.

This set of addictive behaviors -- like anything else that tickles your neurotransmitters -- is so well established by now that it stands ready to be stimulated by other types of competition.

Which is exactly what is happening with the presidential election. It is an exact parallel.

As with sports, we identify with one team or the other. We are Trumpers or Harris fans.

As with sports, we scour the news for information about what our team is doing and what the other team is doing. Instead of watching NESN for its perspective on the Red Sox and YES network on the Yankees, we're watching MSNBC or Fox News.

We also read the media that's biased for the other team just because it makes us angry, and that's part of the appeal.

We share clips of "plays" -- interviews, rallies -- on social media.

There is, of course, endless analysis of every move and countermove, with opinions and perspectives from an army of journalists and commentators -- the "commentariat" -- even more massive than the sports-media industrial complex.

From the perspective of our neurotransmitters, there is sadly only one "game" that matters, the November 5 election. But we crave matchups, and the "horse race" media (a sports metaphor, of course) rewards us with endless news about polls, movements in polls, voting of subgroups in polls, trends, comparisons to past election trends, interviews with undecided voters (how can anyone still be undecided?), and probabilistic modeling so we can tell at any moment who is "winning." Even though no one wins anything until the election is decided and polls reach an oddball collection of people who may not even be that much like the rest of the electorate.

(My unpopular thesis is that both in sports and polls, random chance has a whole lot more to do with the advantage one side or the other appears to have than actual changes in skill. Why do so many games come down to a point or two at the last second, and so many elections to a few thousands votes in a swing state?)

It's endlessly entertaining and every citizen, even the non-sports-fan, has a stake in it.

But it's a freaking side show. Elections are not entertainment. The policies that Trump or Harris will put in place regarding spending, tariffs, taxes, the independence of the Justice Department, deploying the military, the Middle East, and judicial appointments will affect all of us long after the horse race is over.

Policy, of course, is boring and hard to understand. Our training from watching sports can't help us there.

But the horse race is what our brains are primed for. So the horse race gets the airtime.

I know you almost certainly identify with one side or the other. I know you're rooting for your favorite. But please stop a minute and remember, if you secretly cast a ballot for the other side, no one will know. So maybe think about the policies that matter to you instead of who you identify with and whose yard sign is on your lawn.

We know why the horse race thrills us. But if you read my newsletter, you're smarter than that.

Right?

News for writers and others who think

Several researchers from Apple tested Gen AI tools to see how well they appear to "think" and reason. Results: they're easily confused and can't think the way people do. Yet.

Amazon announced a color Kindle reader for $279.99. It's no iPad, but the screen is easier on your eyes.

TikTok owner ByteDance is becoming a publisher (gift link). "Brand new publisher with no publishing experience" is not the description you should look for in your publishing partner.

Alexandra Samuel, Ph.D. extols the value of a disciplined, regular writing practice.

Awesome author Laura Gassner Otting wants to know what you think of your job. Please join nearly 10,000 other people who have taken ten minutes to dive deep with her free assessment here. You'll get useful feedback immediately, and she'll get to assemble the most comprehensive and insightful survey of people and jobs.

Three people to follow

Dries Buytaert , founder of Drupal, the open-source software that forever changed the web.

Carl Doty , deep thinker about how technology can improve your business and your marketing.

Blake Morgan who expertly predicts how customer experience is changing.

Three books to read

The Last Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison and J Michael Straczynski (Blackstone Publishing, 2024). Decades ago, Harlan Ellison collected boundary-challenging original stories by other science fiction authors in two Dangerous Visions story collections. The third installment was tangled in intrigue as Ellison's creativity and orneriness battled it out in his brain, at the cost of his author-contributors. Now, six years after his death and 42 years after the previous installment, this collection including both new and originally commissioned stories has just been published.

Metaphors We Live by by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (University of Chicago, 2003). A deep reading of our understanding of metaphor.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (Vintage, 1995). Still one of the best books every written about the process of writing.

New free report on the ROI of Business Books

Together with four sponsoring organizations (Amplify, Gotham Ghostwriters, Smith Publicity, Thought Leadership Leverage), I've finally completed my report of the profitability of writing business books. It's free to download here.

And you can hear me share insights from the report at 1PM ET on Thursday 24 October. Sign up here.

Highlights:

• 64% of business books showed a gross profit. The median profit for books out for at least 6 months was $11,350.
• Launch PR, ghostwriters, and revenue strategy were correlated with profit. Books with launch PR teams had a median gross profit of $55,500; those with a strong revenue strategy, over $96,000. The median ghostwritten book was four times as profitable as other books.
• Authors spent money to make their books successful. The median spending was $7,000 across all expense categories.
• The median book generated $18,200 in revenue. Traditionally published books more than tripled that amount, and hybrid-published books nearly doubled it. Among authors with books out 6 months or more, 18% reported $250,000 or more in income. Speaking, consulting, and workshops generated much more income than book sales and royalties.
• Authors boosted their brands. More than 90% reported some form of nonmonetary value in their books, and 89% said writing a book was a good idea.
• The top marketing tactics were email campaigns and Amazon reviews. The most popular social media tactics were posting on LinkedIn and promoting on blogs. X was one of the worst marketing channels.
• Book sales rarely met expectations. Median sales were 4,600 for traditionally published books, 1,600 for hybrid-published books, and 700 for self-published books. But book sales didn’t predict success or ROI.
• Hybrid publishers delivered better service. Authors with hybrid publishers were more than twice as likely to strongly agree that they were satisfied with their publishers.