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TheOtherDave comments on Rationality Quotes: December 2010 - Less Wrong
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In my experience, this is true only up to a point.
Yes, there are techniques that work just as well for communicating/understanding truths as for falsehoods. But there are also techniques that work much better for truths than falsehoods.
It would not surprise me if specializing in the latter set of techniques resulted in more progress along those lines than pursuing a more general rhetorical skill.
I'd be very interested to find out more about techniques like that. Would you point me toward a place to start?
Well, one technique that works pretty well along these lines is reporting detailed experimental results demonstrating (or failing to demonstrate) the principle one wants to communicate/understand, and encouraging one's peers to reproduce the experiments.
Not quite as good, but sometimes more accessible, is selecting some theoretical examples of the principle one wants to demonstrate on the basis of a general guideline (rather than a guideline chosen case-by-case so as to return preselected examples) and working one's way rigorously through those examples to see where they lead.
The How to Change Your Mind sequence isn't a bad starting point.