Eugine_Nier comments on Trying to hide bad signaling? To the Dark Side, lead you it will. - Less Wrong

6 [deleted] 16 January 2011 07:12AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2011 05:54:20AM -2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 18 January 2011 01:37:11PM 1 point [-]

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.