markrkrebs comments on Great Product. Lousy Marketing. - Less Wrong
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The linked page specifies that the "dark arts" specifically take advantage of biases for persuasion. So it's a bit misleading to say "We actually label persuasive strategies that can be used…", because we do not label all strategies as such. Our goal should be to snap people out of their biases, so that they can naturally accept anything that turns out to be true. That could be taken as a "persuasive strategy", but it is not a dark one.
I'd favour attempts to develop bias-busting techniques intended to be used on general audiences. (Have there been any discussions about this — developing, as it were, a Defense Against the Dark Arts curriculum?) I would oppose attempts to evangelize our conclusions to general audiences without imparting to them the underlying framework of rationality that would allow them to independently discover or at least verify these conclusions. Using sophistry to persuade someone of a truth isn't much better than using the same tricks to persuade them of a falsehood, and even if we ignore moral issues, it is nearly useless, because if a person ends up with better ideas but all the same biases, their heads can later just as easily be filled with whole new sets of bad ideas by other Dark Arts practitioners.
Edit: I'd like to add that I don't mean that I believe biases can be countered with Pure Reason — which, I suppose, is what makes them bisaes in the first place. As the saying goes, we can't reason people of what they were never reasoned into. Debiasing techniques will not consist solely of rational arguments based on evidence, because the goal is to get people to the point where they can accept such things in the first place. But that does not mean that we have to, or ought to, resort to actively bad reasoning. (Especially to someone with an anti-reason worldview — serious anti-epistemology — invalid logical arguments don't work any better than valid ones anyway.) That, I think, is something that the prominent members of the "New Atheist" movement (it's not all that new, I know) are getting right (for the most part). This movement is unapologetic, it's emotional, it can be abrasive and offensive at times, but it's not dishonest. As one example of that, see, for instance, PZ Myers strongly criticizing a recent study which, in part, appears to show a positive correlation between IQ and atheism. He didn't have to criticize it. He could have been among those "patting [them]selves on the back". But he sided with intellectual honesty over embracing a potentially flawed argumentative tool. If we want to spread rationality, we should be thinking along the same lines.
Saying there are white arts as well as dark ones is conceding the point, isn't it? One should be allowed to be persuasive as well as right, and sometimes just being right isn't enough, especially if the audience is judging the surface appeal of an argument (and maybe even accepting it or not!) prior to digging into it's meat. In such situations, attractive wrapping isn't just pretty, it's a prerequisite. So, I love your idea of inventing a protocol for DAtDA.