Magic and persuasion share a common core:
Visit a magic shop in your city and spend a half an hour or so watching the owner demonstrate some tricks. Pick the one that baffles you the most and buy it. Then go out to your car, open up the instructions (if you’re like me, you won’t be able to wait till you get home) and discover how the trick works. If you will do this, I can predict with 99.9% accuracy what will happen.
You will be disappointed.
The “secrets” behind many magic tricks, even some of those that seem like miracles, are often so mundane that one cannot help but feel disappointed upon their discovery. Now for another prediction: your next thought will be, “This is ridiculous. This wouldn’t fool anyone.”
At this point, if you’re like most people, you’ll put the trick away and consider your $20 investment a bust. But if you’re honest with yourself (and few people are), you will have another thought that can transform the way you look at life. No joke. That thought goes something like this:
“Wait a minute. It must not be that ridiculous if it fooled me.”
And with this one thought you will have risen to a level of intellectual honesty and understanding that few people ever experience; you will have discovered that the most magical things in life — on and off the stage — are often the result of the correct application of the most basic principles imaginable.
That’s from Blair Warren’s One-Sentence Persuasion Course, recommended by Scott Adams.
Or to quote Ryu from Eradica, who put it this way:
“It’s always the basics that are important and where the slip-ups happen. There are no magical secrets in this world – that is a trick employed to intimidate the uninitiated. The only trick is being very good at the basics.”
Things like how surprisingly weirdly helium can behave when you cool it near absolute zero, or how surprisingly usefully silicon can behave when you purify it to substantially less than 1 ppb impurities, or how surprisingly excitingly uranium behaves when you purify away the relatively dull isotope 238 and leave only 235, are not magical secrets in some sense, but they seem to me to be well into Clarke’s ‘indistinguishable from magic’. And they do depend on the basics of the universe, but those parts of the basics of the universe that resist being expressed in English (as opposed to PDEs with complex-valued functions and/or integrals in infinite-dimensional spaces) are not basic in the ordinary conversational sense of the word.
You can get more with the basics and a laser than you can with the basics alone.