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 result, he may come to view rationality as a sort of seedy mind-game that evil people (such as, in his newly acquired opinion, yourself) play on each other for sport, and not as a set of generally useful mental techniques.