I'm a new reader, and I thought you might like to know that this is the post that made me feel like it might be okay to get involved in the LW community. My initial instinct when I started looking around here was trepidation--it reminded me of some people I know who are very smart, intellectual, and rational, who love to debate and analyze ... and to argue with people who might not want to, and who are hopeless at understanding people less rational than themselves, don't acknowledge their own emotions, and don't see how irrational it is to think and behave that way. Before joining the conversation, I needed to hear that this place was not for those people--not an intellectual wankfest but something actually practical, even when it comes to the less reasoned parts of ourselves. So, thanks for that.

Now to salvage the relevance of this comment.

As a practical suggestion for ourselves and each other, it might be interesting to experiment with non-argumentative ways of conveying a point of view: tell an illustrative story, express your idea in the form of an epigram, or even quote a poem or a piece of music or a photograph.

I would have worded this more strongly, myself. In my experience, people who are themselves inclined towards reasoned debate, even civilly, drastically overestimate how much other people are also inclined towards debate and argument. They are of course generalizing from one example, but in this particular case they're also doing intense harm to their social relationships and to the point they're trying to communicate. In their minds, they're engaging in a way which displays and encourages intelligent thought, but to people who dislike a heavily oppositional mode of conversation, they come off as belligerent prats.

The point here is that those who enjoy an adversarial style of heated conversation might find their communication more effective and more readily listened to by a dissimilar audience if they choose to present their ideas in a way that seems to them to be more indirect--perhaps not quite to the level of writing a sonnet about it, but by speaking in general terms, avoiding language which invokes an accusatory tone whether or not personal accusation is intended, and so on. In short, intellectuals that no one will listen to have a lot to learn from poorly-educated but widely-admired poets.

Also, at the risk of exposing my unintellectual taste, my "O Isis Und Osiris" is the bassline of Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl." I briefly worked in QA at EA (many of you know the reputation of that job and also that company, and those who don't can infer it from the tone of this parenthesis). I was testing the original Rock Band, and when I was having a rough morning and didn't want to be there, I'd play through that bassline a couple of times and I'd be doing all right.

Related: http://www.slate.com/id/2267299/ "Priming" people by making them write an essay about either "Tyrone Walker" or "Brad Walker" has powerful effects. (Tyrone being a stereotypically black name and Brad a stereotypically white one.) The subjects who wrote an essay about "Tyrone Walker" were more likely to believe an editorial painting Obama as the Antichrist.

I found this rather shocking. All you have to do to get the effect is to prime people to write about an imaginary, supposedly black man. The prompt is just "Tyrone Walker"! The mind must be incredibly frail.

I suspect – though I have no basis beyond anecdote – that art is a particularly effective way of inducing sentiments and attacking the affect heuristic. You don’t hear a lot about art on LW, but we probably should be thinking more about it, because art is powerful. Music moves people: think of military marches and national anthems, and also think of the humanistic impulse in the Ode to Joy. Music is not an epistemic statement, but acts at the more primitive level of emotion. You can deploy music to change yourself at the pre-rational level; personally, I find that something like “O Isis Und Osiris” from The Magic Flute can cut through fear and calm me, better than any conscious logical argument.

Poetry also seems relevant here – it’s verbal, but it’s a delivery system that works at the sub-rational level. I’m convinced that a large part of the appeal of religion is in poetic language that rings true. (It’s interesting what happens when scientific or rationalist ideas are expressed in poetic language – this is rarer, but equally powerful. Carl Sagan, Francois Jacob, Bertrand Russell.) The parable, the fantasy, and the poem can be more effective than the argument, because they can reach emotional heuristics that arguments cannot touch.

Imagine there's no heaven...

I can't remember where I read this anecdote, but it pertains to a student who became obsessed with the Implicit Awareness Test to the point where he completed it on a daily basis. One day, out of nowhere, it came back with a net positive association with black faces. He struggled to account for this until he realised he'd been watching coverage of the Olympics that morning.

As for expressing points with non-argumentative methods, the general idea makes me a little uneasy. Some time ago, after attending a folk festival, I came to the conclusion that music shouldn't be the dialectic of politics. It's too easy for the uninitiated to conflate a good piece of music with a good argument. Artistic flair is both a useful and fun tool for presenting ideas, but too much flair and you have to start wondering if the ideas could stand up by themselves

You can deploy music to change yourself at the pre-rational level; personally, I find that something like “O Isis Und Osiris” from The Magic Flute can cut through fear and calm me, better than any conscious logical argument.

Thanks for setting me on that scent. My magic bullet is the (somewhat overplayed, but who cares?) adagio from Beethoven's 5th piano concerto.

I've found that a certain posture of bemusement at the world is useful in fighting negative affect when it starts to get misanthropic. As in taking a deep breath, smiling & thinking something like "Wow, look at all these talking monkeys!"

(N.B. This post is NOT about the content of the arguments surrounding that question.)

But whenever you use it as an example, people will talk about it whether that was the intent or not. At least we should prime them for extreme caution against flame wars.

I don't want to address the introductory scenario much, but there's debate about what the IAT actually predicts.

Nearly everyone, of every race, shows some implicit association of black with “bad.”

The tested subjects were all living in a predominantly white society, or is the black=bad association found also among Africans who have no or little contact with whites? I would be quite surprised if the latter were true.

I get these cafeteria moments too when reading about this subject :( My only saving grace is that most of the non-white population of my city is East-Asian so (until I snap out of it) I get to ponder the putative superiority, rather than inferiority, of the Other.

Very interesting post! As you have stated implicitly the more popular attempts at outreach as well as raising the sanity waterline on LW have already used affects for the purpose you describe.

However one needs to be very careful. First off it can be hard to measure if the affect is too strong or too weak to offset the bias, actually how exactly can one measure this? I feel like I'm perhaps unfair on this or that because I learned something less flattering about it. Belief in belief works just as well for "identified" cognitive biases as it does for angry old men in the sky.

Secondly every time you use a affect as a tool to help you correct for biases you are begging to be hit on the head by a unknown unknown or even a unknown known. We form subconscious associations very easily, we like our archetypes neat and boexd and like you mention we tend to have a cloud of things all associated with each other that are "bad" and another cloud for "good".

But I can't help but wonder if perhaps using boos and yay's to correct for these things just pushes the bias elsewhere.

Thirdly, creating or consuming art is powerful self modification. This means it can be dangerous. I would perhaps put truly sublime experiences of art and the beautiful right up there with religious experiences and sex when it comes to potential for rewiring. I hope I don't need to explain how for example fetishes or a sudden case of Bible fever can induce auto-catalytic rewiring.