wedrifid comments on Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 15 September 2012 04:41AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 22 September 2012 01:26:32AM *  2 points [-]

What I meant was, for example, if success at convincing people on any given political issue is linearly proportional to effort, you should spend all your effort arguing just one issue.

But this isn't at all likely. For one thing you probably have a limited number of family and friends who highly trust your opinions, so your effectiveness (i.e., derivative of success) at convincing people on any given political issue will start out high and quickly take a dive as you spend more time on that issue.

Comment author: wedrifid 22 September 2012 06:56:16AM 1 point [-]

But this isn't at all likely. For one thing you probably have a limited number of family and friends who highly trust your opinions, so your effectiveness (i.e., derivative of success) at convincing people on any given political issue will start out high and quickly take a dive as you spend more time on that issue.

I'm inclined to agree. A variant of the strategy would be to spend a lot of time arguing for other positions that are carefully selected to agree with and expand eloquently on the predicted opinions of the persuasion targets.