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?
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.
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 It may be out of date.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.