About The Rhetorical Lab

The Rhetorical Lab is a place where we engineer arguments to make them better, with all those terms imply: we look at how something works today, take it apart into pieces, experiment with those pieces. We pour, I don't know, solvents on them. Metaphorically. See what happens when you swap some parts out for others. It's where we run experiments. With rhetoric. At the end we put a better argument back together.

I hope you're sitting down, Neo, because: "authenticity" is a rhetorical good, not an objective good. But we get your point. There's always been a view, going right back to Socrates, that people should just say the truth and not try to persuade anyone. This makes a lot of sense if you're measuring lumber (be accurate) or considering dumping toxic waste into an aquifer (don't), but breaks down in all sorts of situations [LINK TO WHAT WE DO]. Also, not for nothing, but Socrates would go on long rants about the evils of rhetoric and then hang around for hours talking people's ears off trying to persuade them he was right.

Another of the long-term projects here is tracking the various themes and words whose persuasive values rise and fall in response to what we might call market dynamics. Language is a medium of exchange. Like any commodity, what a word is worth fluctuates based on how many people are piling into it or getting sick of it. And yes, right now the stock price of what comes across as plainfolks straighttalk has been on a good long run.

Strictly speaking, probably not. Food and water and wifi and Netflix are "necessary." The Rhetorical Lab is more a nice-to-have. But there are some things that, so far as we know, make us unique.

First, toiling away in the fields of rhetoric, opinion and persuasion research, and cognitive science have led to some conclusions about what works and why that make us better at designing experiments that answer questions and replicate in the real world.

Second, the twin black holes of the A.I.pocalypse and modern data psychosis have made most full stack research and insights teams compete over the same things. If you want to know as fast as possible what makes the largest number of people click a button or give you a better NPS score, you've got a lot of options already. But if you, like us, look at a lot of modern research through skeptically narrowed eyes, and think, "This seems at best a tautology and at worst maybe fake?" then you might be more interested in what we're doing here.

Leading to, third, we didn't see another rhetorical research laboratory out there, and are betting some people would rather use it than All The Data.

Finally — and this one is admittedly a little personal, perhaps bordering on petty — but the tone of voice and vocabulary of the modern Bid'niss Insights squad has become insufferable. One of the quickest ways to get fired around here is to talk about "Strategic Alignment" or "Accelerating the Business for Optimized Impact." It's easy to make fun of other people's jargon, sure, but quitting your own jargon is harder than heroin. (We've heard.) The Rhetorical Lab is all about clean living. We consider it unethical to wallpaper over a lack of insight with a bunch of buzzwords. Also we prefer not to sound like a-holes.