Epiphany comments on New study on choice blindness in moral positions - Less Wrong

73 Post author: nerfhammer 20 September 2012 06:14PM

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Comment author: shminux 20 September 2012 05:07:56PM *  16 points [-]

An instrumental question: how would you exploit this to your advantage, were you dark-arts inclined? For example, if you are a US presidential candidate, what tactics would you use to invisibly switch voters' choice to you? Given that you are probably not better at it than the professionals in each candidate's team, can you find examples of such tactics?

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 07:50:09AM *  1 point [-]

Dark Tactic:

  1. An unwitting research company could be contracted to do a survey by an unethical organization.
  2. The survey could use the trick where by asking some question that people will mostly say "yes" to and then ask a similar question later where the wording is slightly changed to agree with the viewpoint of the unethical organization.
  3. Most people end up saying they agree with the viewpoint of the unethical organization.
  4. The reputation of the research company is abused as the unethical organization claims they "proved" that most people agree with their point of view.
  5. A marketing campaign is devised around the false evidence that most people agree with them.

They already trick people in less expensive ways, though. I was taught in school that they'll do things like ask 5 doctors whether they recommend something and then saying "4 of 5 doctors" recommend this to imply 4 of every 5 doctors when their sample was way too small.

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