NancyLebovitz comments on Memes and Rational Decisions - Less Wrong

23 Post author: inferential 09 January 2015 06:42AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (17)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 09 January 2015 03:01:20PM 10 points [-]

You should not: 1) expect that other people will become more rational, if you yell at them enough;

I think the rest of your summary is accurate, but Vassar actually said that you can't use to rational argument to convince people of much of anything. Now that I think about it, carefully judged yelling probably works better than rational argument.

Comment author: BrassLion 12 January 2015 04:54:48AM 2 points [-]

"You can't convince anyone of anything using rational argument" is one of those cached thoughts that makes you sound cool and mature but isn't actually true. Rational argument works a hell of a lot worse than smart people think it does, but it works in certain contexts and with certain people enough of the time that it's worth trying sometimes. Even normal people are swayed by facts from time to time.