pjeby comments on A social norm against unjustified opinions? - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 29 May 2009 11:25AM

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Comment author: pjeby 01 June 2009 05:14:52PM 2 points [-]

Now, I have no idea how one would go about altering the S1 response of someone who didn't want their response altered,

Tell them stories. If you'll notice, that's what Eliezer does. Even his posts that don't use fiction per se use engaging examples with sensory detail. That's the stuff S1 runs on.

Eliezer uses a bit more S2 logic in his stories than is perhaps ideal for a general audience; it's about right for a sympathetic audience with some S2+ skills, though.

On a general audience, what might be called "trance logic" or "dramatic logic" works just fine on its own. The key is that even if your argument can be supported by S2 logic, to really convince someone you must get a translation to S1 logic.

A person who's being "reasonable" may or may not do the S2->S1 translation for you. A person who's being "unreasonable" will not do it for you; you have to embed S1 logic in the story so that any effort to escape it with S2 will be unconvincing by comparison.

This, by the way, is how people who promote things like intelligent design work: they set up analogies and metaphors that are much more concretely convincing on the S1 level, so that the only way to refute them is to use a massive burst of S2 reasoning that leaves the audience utterly unconvinced, because the "proof" is sitting right there in S1 without any effort being required to accept it.