Flatter the gatekeeper. Make him genuinely like you.
Reveal (false) information about yourself. Increase his sympathy towards you.
Consider personal insults as one of the tools you can use to win.
I take it the advice here is “keep your options open, use whichever tactics are expected to persuade the specific target”? Because these strategies seem to be decidedly at odds with each other. Unless other gatekeepers are decidedly different to myself (maybe?) the first personal insult would pretty much erase all work done by the previous two strategies.
pondering
How does the ‘personal insult’ strategy work? Is the idea to make the “don’t release” option seem shameful by insulting based on the decision or is the idea to make the social encounter so unpleasant for the gatekeeper that they can not handle several hours of enduring it. (That is, to munchkin the formal rules of the game in such a way that complying with them would not be worth the hassle of the exercize.)
As I mentioned in another comment, these strategies are consistent with the idea of “traumatic bonding,” the psychological mechanism that powers Stockholm syndrome and keeps people in abusive relationships. The large number of people who stay in abusive relationships seems like good evidence to me that this is a generally effective way to emotionally hack a human.
You also may not be interpreting “personal insult” the way I’m interpreting it. I’m not thinking of a meaningless schoolyard taunt but something that attacks an actual insecurity the gatekeeper has.
I take it the advice here is “keep your options open, use whichever tactics are expected to persuade the specific target”? Because these strategies seem to be decidedly at odds with each other. Unless other gatekeepers are decidedly different to myself (maybe?) the first personal insult would pretty much erase all work done by the previous two strategies.
pondering
How does the ‘personal insult’ strategy work? Is the idea to make the “don’t release” option seem shameful by insulting based on the decision or is the idea to make the social encounter so unpleasant for the gatekeeper that they can not handle several hours of enduring it. (That is, to munchkin the formal rules of the game in such a way that complying with them would not be worth the hassle of the exercize.)
As I mentioned in another comment, these strategies are consistent with the idea of “traumatic bonding,” the psychological mechanism that powers Stockholm syndrome and keeps people in abusive relationships. The large number of people who stay in abusive relationships seems like good evidence to me that this is a generally effective way to emotionally hack a human.
You also may not be interpreting “personal insult” the way I’m interpreting it. I’m not thinking of a meaningless schoolyard taunt but something that attacks an actual insecurity the gatekeeper has.