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TheOtherDave comments on Trying to hide bad signaling? To the Dark Side, lead you it will. - Less Wrong
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On the wiki the dark arts are defined as exploiting the biases of others so that they behave irrationally. This is morally wrong - I want others not only to accept the right answers, but to accept them for the right reasons.
Also, the dark arts are, well, dark.
If you're classifying the intentional use of human biases as wrong in a terminal moral sense, there's not much more to be said other than that I don't share your moral values, not even when you format them in italics.
If you're instead claiming they are wrong in some instrumental sense -- that is, that they lead to bad results -- I'd like to understand how you derive that.
In other words: suppose I want to convince people to do something, or to stop doing something, or to feel a certain way or stop feeling a certain way, or some other X. Suppose I then convince people to X by using the "dark arts" and "exploiting the biases of others."
For example, suppose I want someone to think that making use of human biases is a bad thing, and so I label that activity using words with negatively weighted denotations like "exploit" and "dark."
What have I made worse, by so doing?
Let's say I'm working with Bob. By exploiting his cognitive biases, I can convince him to do two things that I value. Without such exploitation, I can only convince him to do one. If I do exploit his biases, these bad things happen:
I have less confidence that either of the two things were actually worthwhile.
It is more likely that my enemy will be able to convince Bob to undo the valuable things he did.
I have less trust in Bob in the future, and his total value to me is reduced.
In some cases these effects might outweigh the value of getting two things done rather than one.
I agree that manipulating Bob makes it hard to rely on Bob for "sanity checks" of my motives, and that that's a significant loss if Bob would otherwise have been useful in that capacity.
And I can sorta see how it might be true in some cases that manipulating Bob might render him more manipulable by others, and therefore less valuable to me, than he would have been had I not manipulated him. (I have trouble coming up with a non-contrived example, though, so I'm not convinced.)
So, yes, agreed: in cases like those, it makes things worse.
Nobody doubts that doing stupid or ill-considered things with the dark arts could have undesirable consequences.
Note: the parent is another example of a dark arts persuasion technique.
I think your problem, is you have too broad a notion of what constitutes "dark arts".
I don't accept disagreement with Eugine_Nier as a 'problem'.
There is a time and a place for each of the following:
Further, there are instances in each category where the use of dark arts is pro-social. It seems that the term 'dark arts' has become a hindrance to understanding instead of a help. It does not mean evil!
You seem to be confusing rationality with suppression of emotion. As Eliezer points out here, there is nothing wrong with feeling emotions that accurately correspond to the territory. There is similarly nothing wrong with promoting such emotions in others. The "dark arts" really are things humans should avoid using, as such there is nothing wrong with associating them with negative emotions.
I'm not sure where you got that from, at all. I am talking neither about rationality nor emotion.
I am talking about "exploiting the biases of others so that they behave irrationally" -- in this example, influencing someone's decision about whether or not to do something based neither on the consequences of doing it nor their pre-existing deontological commitments, but rather on the connotations of the metaphorical language I've chosen to describe it with.
That those connotations are emotional is incidental.
Now that was well done. Although technically you would have counter-factually made the universe worse according to your values. You will have lost a small measure of respect from your audience and by so doing reduced your social influence - a critical instrumental resource. Even worse your credibility will have decreased most specifically when it comes to moral authority.
(nods) Agreed, given that my audience is such that I lose more respect/influence/authority than I gain. Which some audiences are.