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army1987 comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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My reaction to that would likely be to stop worrying about them thinking that I'm evil, and possibly to start pissing them off on purpose just for the fun of it.
Hehe. Once you realize that someone has condemned you guilty a priori, there's all kinds of nifty semi-Dark Arts tricks you can do.
My favorite is to begin agreeing with them more and more anyway, granting them authority and righteousness inch by inch even though it fuels their knowledge that I'm Evil, until I've lured them all the way into a fanatical position that is obviously absurd even to them.
At which point a simple "Yes, you've been right all along!" with a smile is usually all it takes for them to shut up and start agreeing with me instead - their mind is too busy trying to figure out what went wrong to protest, and the autopilot tells them to comply with whatever authority happens to bother telling them anything.
Of course, the effect is temporary, but you usually manage to slip in a few positive beliefs into their subconscious during that window of opportunity.
I'm curious what other LWers think of behaviors like this. I don't trust myself enough yet to ask myself the question (i.e. do a proper crisis of faith), and I fear more rationalization might make me sink into a very dangerous hole if this happens to be a Very Bad™ thing to do. It's something I've been doing (and enjoyed doing) since my early teens, after all. I even have a 'nickname' for it: Shadowdancing.
Roughly, I think it's usually an example of using other people for my own entertainment at a sometimes marginal, sometimes significant cost to them. There are many worse things I can do, and it's not worth a lot of drama, but on balance I don't endorse it, I tend to disengage with people I perceive as trying it on me or people I care about, and I tend to think less of people I perceive as habitually doing it.
That said, I think the skill can be extremely valuable as a teaching technique under the right circumstances, if one chooses to (and is able to) use it that way.
A variation of this is to start with a more radical position to begin with, such as "all men should be segregated and kept in stud farms, with the sperm artificially extracted as needed". This helps them define the far boundary of their own radicalism.
You had me up until "artificial".
Oh my... I don't think I've ever intentionally done anything like that, though something similar might have happened by accident (e.g., because I had failed Poe's law and had people not recognize my sarcasm as such).