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katydee comments on The problem with too many rational memes - Less Wrong
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Well, instead of saying "You're wrong" or "I disagree," I've been saying "You're right, but," introduce my objection as an edge case, and then try to generalize it. It really is as simple as that.
This seems to work way better in terms of convincing people of things because the other person remains in "cooperation mode" throughout, and instead of thinking of objections to my points they start thinking of ways to build on what I just said.
My intuitions indicate that as soon as someone hears another person say "you're wrong" or "I disagree" to them, the verbal combat heuristics load up and they enter full-on motivated cognition mode. This trick dodges that response.
That's a neat little bit of psyops. I'll have to think about it and maybe test it.
I'm not quite sure how you would go about executing it for something like "n-dimensional grandma is influencing my life from beyond the grave".
Immediate approximation of how I'd do it (warning: Dark Arts ahead):
"You may be right-- I myself have certainly felt like I've been being watched over by dead relatives before. But one thing that I realized is that this effect might not actually be supernatural.
The human mind and memory are powerful things. It could simply be that I was so close to my dead grandmother (may she rest in peace) that, in times of peril, my brain subconsciously looks to her memory for advice, since I remember so many times that she had good advice for me in the past.
In this way, I think it's possible that in some way our dead relatives really do live on with us, even though it's not really them speaking with us, but merely our memories of them."
I haven't tested this yet but I'm moderately confident that it would work, though part of that is of course in the presentation. There may also be a better way-- I haven't thought about this for five minutes yet-- but if I had to have that conversation right now that's the line I would take.
Comes off as transparent and condescending to me. I'm sure I can tell the difference between my dead grandmother signalling me with spoons and my own memories, thank you very much.
I (sadly) have enough experience with New Agers and the like that I'm pretty sure I can successfully make this work. What would you do differently?