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shokwave comments on Dark Arts 101: Using presuppositions - Less Wrong
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Seconding HughRistik's comment. If possible, use dark arts to convince people to play positive-sum games. But often you must play zero-sum games (status, winning over third parties, securing the correct apartment); use dark arts to dominate these games. Defense against the dark arts is good epistemology; using dark arts against people increases the chance they will seek out rationality training. Probably does not increase the chance enough to justify using it outside of zero-sum games though.
Also, beating up my son makes him tougher so that he can handle himself better in a dangerous neighborhood.
Scamming investors out of their savings makes them smarter and more discerning. They have to learn the lesson sometime, might as well be from me.
Stealing from the local 7-Eleven makes them improve their security. I'm really doing them a favor.
Not applicable. I said
So if your son picks a fight with you ... beating him up makes him tougher.
Voted down because this is a really bad way to make a point.
On the other hand, the basic point is a good one: "they'll learn from it" is not in general a good reason for doing things that hurt people in whatever sense.
"They'll learn from it" is most definitely a good reason for doing things that hurt people in the specific case of people trying to hurt you (and learning not to). That is why I specified zero-sum games above.
Status isn't zero-sum.
Controversial. Status games in conversation are zero-sum; you gain attention by taking it off someone else, and social dominance / ranking hierarchies are ordinal as far as I have observed - so moving up a rank involves moving someone else down a rank.
If I'm the 5th wealthiest person in my cohort and I move up to 4th, that means someone else moved from 4th to 5th; absolutely agreed. And as long as we don't pay attention to anyone outside our cohort, that's a zero-sum game; also agreed.
Of course, if I do look at the rest of the world, I might discover that in going from 5th to 4th in our cohort she also went from Nth to N+1000th in the world... in which case it's less clearly zero-sum.
Similarly, if you join my conversation and end up getting most of the attention, I lose status within the conversation. If in the process the conversation becomes more interesting to others, I may gain status within the community
Of course, the same thing goes the other way... I can gain status locally while we both lose it globally. I can take over a conversation while making everyone dismiss me as a crank not worth listening to.
And I appreciate that recalibrating ranks to the local group is often useful; I don't mean to say one should never do that. Merely that it's worth being aware of both the local and the global context.