Nice that you brought this up. I largely agree with the direction of the post (we need to learn how to use and deal with emotional appeals), but I'd make some stronger claims.
the strength of an emotional appeal to believe X and do Y doesn't correlate with the truth of X or the consequences of Y. In fact, we are surrounded by emotional appeals to believe nonsense and do useless things.
Agreed
So, in our environment, emotional appeal is a strong indicator against rational argument.
In the memetic environment one may explain away the other (in Bayes nets once you take two independent things and have them both cause a third thing, when you condition on the third thing, the two become correlated). This means that the presence of one changes your estimate of the probability of the other (in this case, emotion makes you think that it's less likely to be rational), but it does not mean that making something emotional makes it less rational. The causality does not work that way.
If we condition on being in LW, I'd actually say that emotional appeal would positively correlate with rationality. Lukeprog is a better writer and better rhetoritician than most LWers, because he's also more rational in terms of actually going out and doing things to make him better at communicating his ideas. Like rhetoric.
Avoiding emotional appeals entirely helps you avoid irrationality by helping you avoid the problem of separating emotional appeal from veracity, but I think that in the long run learning the mental process of separating the emotional and factual aspects from each other makes you a stronger rationalist. Running away from the problem makes you weaker and less effective.
Can you somehow otherwise filter for emotional appeals that are highly likely to have positive effects?
I think that positive emotional appeals are generally better than negative or reactionary appeals.
In a comment elsewhere, BrandonReinhart asked:
I suspect that we percieve a dichotomy between emotional appeal and a well-reasoned, well-evidenced argument.
I have a just-so story for why our kind can't cooperate: We've learned to distrust emotional appeal. This is understandable: the strength of an emotional appeal to believe X and do Y doesn't correlate with the truth of X or the consequences of Y. In fact, we are surrounded by emotional appeals to believe nonsense and do useless things. The production and delivery of emotional appeal is politics, policy, and several major industries. So, in our environment, emotional appeal is a strong indicator against rational argument.
In order to defend against irrationality, I have a habit of shutting out emotional appeals. I tune out emotive religious talk. I remain carefully aloof from political speeches. I put emotional distance between myself and any enthusiastic crowd. In general, my immediate response to emotional appeal is to ignore the message it bears. It's automatic now, subverbal -- I have an aversion to naked emotional appeal.
I strongly suspect that I'm not only describing myself, but many of you as well. (Is this true? This is a testable hypothesis.)
If we largely manage to broadly ignore emotional appeal, then we shut out not only harmful manipulations, but worthwhile rallying cries. We are motivated only by the motivation we can muster ourselves, rather than what motivation we can borrow from our peers and leaders. This may go some way towards explaining not just why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, but why we seem to so often report that Our Kind Can't Get Much Done.
On the other hand, if this is a real problem, it suggests a solution. We could try to learn an alternative response to emotional appeal. Upon noticing near-mode emotional appeal, instead of rejecting the message outright, go to far mode and consider the evidence. If the argument is sound under careful, critical consideration, and you approve of its motivation, then allow the emotional appeal to move you. On the other hand, I don't know if this is psychologically realistic.
So, questions:
I hypothesize that we are much more averse to emotional appeals than the normal population. Does this stike you as true? Do you have examples or counterexamples?
How might we test this hypothesis?
I further hypothesize that, if we are averse to emotional appeals, that this is a strong factor in both our widely-reported akrasia and our sometimes-noted inability to work well together. How could we test this hypothesis?
Can you postpone being moved by an emotional appeal until after making a calm decision about it?
Can you somehow otherwise filter for emotional appeals that are highly likely to have positive effects?