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.
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.
Edit: This is old material. It may be out of date.
Or is that just a point of view?
I'm going to assume familiary with the common use of the following two terms on this site:
Otherwise don't worry, I've hanged out here for ages and I still need to update my cache of terms quite often. If you have questions about either after reading the wiki please feel free to ask since there are people much more knowledgeable than me that will probably answer them. I don't know if other users agree, but the Discussion section seems like the best place to ask questions that might have been already covered elsewhere for people who have trouble despite extensive study, in a way this OP is basically an example of this.
I'm also making the following assumptions:
The main question of this thread:
How can one work around 5. without employing Dark Arts to sanitize the feelings accompanying a conclusion? Is it even possible? Can or should we talk about this and try to find and catalogue ways to do this since many of us are not skilled at social interactions (higher than average self identified non-neurotypicals visit LW)?
Notes:
- I also wish to emphasise that not only do some conclusions send bad signals, wanting to open *some* topics to rational inquiry in itself often sends bad signals even if you do eventually end up with a conclusion that sends good signals.
- I feel that, even if it isn't possible to hide bad signalling, the better map of reality one enjoys will off set these costs in other ways. Despite this, considering we are social animals I think many people would like to avoid this particular cost quite strongly, myself included.