I'd rather ask the question without the word "sometimes". Because what people do is use that word "sometimes" as a rationalization. "We'll only use the Dark Arts in the short term, in the run-up to the Singularity." The notion is that once everybody becomes rational, we can stop using them.
I'm skeptical that will happen. As we become more complex reasoners, we will develop new bugs and weaknesses in our reasoning for more-sophisticated dark artists to exploit. And we will have more complicated disagreements with each other, with higher stakes; so we will keep justifying the use of the Dark Arts.
As we become more complex reasoners, we will develop new bugs and weaknesses in our reasoning for more-sophisticated dark artists to exploit.
Are we expecting to become more complex reasoners? It seems to be the opposite to me. We are certainly moving in the direction of reasoning about increasingly complex things, but by all indications, the mechanisms of normal human reasoning are much more complex than they should be, which is why it has so many bugs and weaknesses in the first place. Becoming better at reasoning, in the LW tradition, appears to consi...
The product of Less Wrong is truth. However, there seems to be a reluctance of the personality types here - myself included - to sell that product. Here's my evidence:
We actually label many highly effective persuasive strategies that can be used to market our true ideas as "dark arts". What's the justification for this negative branding? A necessary evil is not evil. Even if - and this is a huge if - our future utopia is free of dark arts, that's not the world we live in today. Choosing not to use them is analogous to a peacenik wanting to rid the world of violence by suggesting that police not use weapons.
We treat our dislike of dark arts as if it's a simple corollary of the axiom of the virtue of truth. Does this mean we assume the ends (more people believe the truth) doesn't justify the means (persuasion to the truth via exploiting cognitive biases)? Or are we just worried about being hypocrites? Whatever the reason, such an impactful assumption deserves an explanation. Speaking practically, the successful practice of dark arts requires the psychological skill of switching hats, to use Edward de Bono's terminology. While posting on Less Wrong, we can avoid and are in fact praised for avoiding dark arts, but we need to switch up in other environments, and that's difficult. Frankly, we're not great at it, and it's very tempting to externalize the problem and say "the art is bad" rather than "we're bad at the art".
Our distaste for rhetorical tactics, both aesthetically and morally, profoundly affects the way we communicate. That distaste is tightly coupled with the mental habit of always interpreting the value of what is said purely for its informational content, logical consistency, and insight. I'm basing the following question on my own introspection, but I wonder if this almost religiously entrenched mental habit could make us blind to the value of the art of persuasion? Let's imagine for a moment, the most convincing paragraph ever written. It was truly a world-wonder of persuasion - it converted fundamentalist Christians into atheists, suicide bombers into diplomats, and Ann Coulter-4-President supporters into Less Wrong sycophants. What would your reaction to the paragraph be? Would you "up-vote" this work of genius? No way. We'd be competing to tell the fundamentalist Christian that there were at least three argument fallacies in the first sentence, we'd explain to the suicide bomber that the rhetoric could be used equally well to justify blowing us all up right now, and for completeness we'd give the Ann Coulter supporter a brief overview of Bayesianism.