Holding off on proposing solutions.
Dark Arts. And here and here.
One issue is the matter of "persuasion" and "manipulation". Some people see them as words describing things that are different in kind, others see them as words describing different areas of a continuum.
See my comments here. These are some of the more common things meant by the term.
claiming to possess some set of conversational techniques that will make almost anyone believe almost anything.
I think similar sounding claims come from people claiming to be far better at manipulation than others as a means of selling you the knowledge. For this to be plausible, the skill has to come from a few simple key insights that universally apply.
The claim here is different, it's that for each person, there are ways to manipulate them beyond persuading them or more generally influencing them as they would wish to be influenced. As we are not trying to sell a simple technique that always does this, the claim is far less ambitious - it isn't that manipulation is something so simple it's easy to buy and learn, and so universal that you don't need anything else. The claim is similar in that it is about people being manipulable, but the discussion is about the morality and efficacy of pushing those levers consciously at all. Sellers of manipulation have to claim it works every time or nearly so, the discussion here is relevant if one tactic works once in a hundred tries - and the consensus here is that yes, people are somewhat manipulable, and there are many tactics.
Thanks lessdazed and others, that was very informative. In retrospect, I totally should've searched the wiki, but I kind of forgot this site had a wiki -- sorry about that.
I can see at least one problem with using the Dark Arts for the purpose of persuading people to learn about rationality: breach of trust. If your target person ever finds out that you manipulated him -- as he is in fact likely to do, assuming that he actually does learn more about rationality due to your successful manipulation attempt -- you will lose his trust, possibly forever. As the...
You're talking with someone you like, and they ask you what you mean by rationality, or why you keep going to LessWrong meetups. Or you meet someone who might be interested in the site.
What do you say to them? If you had to explain to someone what LW-style rationality is in 30 seconds, how would you do it? What's your elevator pitch? Has anyone had any success with a particular pitch?
My Current Pitch:
My current best one, made up on the spot, lacking any foreplanning, basically consists of:
"Basically, our brains are pretty bad at forming accurate beliefs, and bad in fairly systematic ways. I could show you one, if you want."
Playing the triplet game with them, then revealing that the numbers just need to be ascending
Upon failure, "Basically, your brain just doesn't look for examples that disprove your hypothesis, so you didn't notice that it could have a been a more general rule. There are a bunch of others, and I'm interested in learning about them so that I can correct for them."
My Thoughts on That:
It's massively effective at convincing people that cognitive biases exist (when they're in the 80% that fails, which has always been the case for me so far), but pretty much entirely useless as a rationality pitch. It doesn't explain at all why people should care about having accurate beliefs, and takes it as a given that that would be important.
It's also far too dry and unfun (compared to say, Methods), and has the unfortunate side effect of making people feel like they've gotten tricked. It makes it look non-cultish though.
I suspect that other people can do better, and I'll comment later with one that I actually put thought into. There's a pretty good chance that I'll use a few of the more upvoted ones and see how they go over.