Aurini comments on Shut Up And Guess - Less Wrong

79 Post author: Yvain 21 July 2009 04:04AM

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Comment author: Aurini 21 July 2009 04:40:34PM *  6 points [-]

Dear lord, I just pooped myself. I'm thoroughly familiar with this bias - and I just fell into it.

Isn't this sort of language manipulation exactly what the PUAs do? Hmm... a potential way of strengthening one's arguments occurs to me. While in conversation with somebody IRL it should be more effective to phrase things as "Well, Eliezer said..." than "According to Eliezer's article on..." so as to give the impression of possible first hand knowledge, or at least thorough familiarity with the relevant material.

This is a dark art no doubt, but with most people I find that this is the only way of dealing with them.

(I am not above name-dropping Eliezer to pick up chicks.)

Comment author: ciphergoth 25 July 2009 10:38:24AM 1 point [-]

I sincerely doubt that namedropping Eliezer is an effective chick-picking-up technique except under very unusual circumstances! OTOH I have pulled at least once by talking about cryptography, so you never know :-)