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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Persuasiveness vs Soundness - Less Wrong
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Comments (19)
This is the Dark Side root link. In my opinion it's a useful chunked concept, though maybe people should be hyperlinking here when they use the term, to be more accessible to people who haven't read every post. At the very least, the FAQ builders should add this, if it's not there already.
Actually, the term "Dark Side Epistemology" seems to be tending towards over-generalization (being used to describe any persuasive art, say, rather than explicitly defended systematized bad rules of reasoning). "Dark Arts" isn't even a term of my own invention; someone else imported that from Harry Potter. It seems to be trending towards synonymy with "Dark Side". I may have to deprecate both terms as overly poetic and come up with something else - I'm thinking of Anti-Epistemology for systematically bad epistemology.
I have to say that I like the term "Dark Arts". It's kind of... cute.
I enjoy the sort of warm-and-fuzzy atmosphere that poetic vocabulary like this tends to foster.
We do actually need a term for "persuasion by cold blooded dirty tricks, even though possibly for noble ends"
Okay, in this case, how about this :
We have persuasive arguments in general, that which may be used to efficiently change someone else's opinion in a predictable way (for instance to bring their opinion or beliefs closer to yours).
Those persuasive arguments may or may not be, intellectually honest or epistemically correct ones. The subset of persuasive arguments which are thusly wrong, overlaps with the set of arguments and techniques that are used in "anti-epistemology", which is more general and contains methods and arguments that are not only wrong and deceptive, but also of no use to us.
As to the subset of arguments and methods which are epistemically wrong or dishonest, their specificity is that they are instrumentally right, and therefore whether the end result of their use is instrumentally rational, hinges on the epistemic rationality, and honesty, of the one who uses them.