I’m reading a frustrating/fascinating article about Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin has been writing various blogs for close to 20 years, in which — so says the article — he advocates for shutting down the American experiment in democracy, and a return to monarchy.
You might think, so what, another Internet kook.
The difference is that Yarvin has the ear of the rich and powerful.
He’s apparently buddy-buddy with Vice President J.D. Vance, and, according to the article, he has become a kind of Machiavelli for Silicon Valley billionaires Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
And that’s where the trouble, or rather the sloppiness, starts.
Says the article, after Thiel wrote his book Zero to One and went on a publicity blitz, he reached out to Yarvin for advice. How to handle the inevitable question he would get from journalists, about getting more women into tech?
(Thiel apparently thinks this is a misguided question, and that the numbers of women in tech are fine as is.)
Here’s Yarvin’s advice, from the article:
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Yarvin suggested that Thiel deploy a pickup-artist tactic called “agree and amplify” — that is, ask a journalist, who probably had no solution in mind, what she would do to tackle the problem. “The purpose here is not to get the interlocutor to sleep with you, but to get her to fear this issue and run away from it — and ditto for future interviewers,” he wrote.
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I’m not sure who’s to blame for this nonsense — Yarvin, or the author of the article I’m reading, or both. But this is 100% not what agree & amplify is. It doesn’t even make sense when you think about the name:
Agree & amplify = First you agree, and then you amplify, or exaggerate, to make the whole thing absurd. For example:
JOURNALIST: Don’t you agree we need more women in tech?
THIEL: I absolutely do. I also think we need more women in coal mines, in slaughter houses, and on oil rigs, all of which are places of employment where women are vastly underrepresented.
I suspect Yarvin still hasn’t read my 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, etc. But it seems he needs to. He’s getting his commandments confused, and he’s giving out bad advice as a result.
Agree & amplify, and the strange psychology of why and when it works, is Commandment VI.
I have another commandment, Commandment VIII, about what Yarvin recommended to Thiel, to take the journalist’s question and reverse it.
Thing is, reversing a question is unlikely to have the effect Yarvin predicted, but the technique can be used to get people to work with you instead of against you, and to sell themselves on your plan, as if they came up with it on their own.
If you’d like more (properly researched and fact-checked) detail on all this, or you simply want to learn some powerful communication techniques that straddle the world of pickup artists, political propagandists, con men, and other savory and unsavory types: