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Dahlen comments on Open thread, May 17-31 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Look. The basic assumption here is that people would rather not be the targets of a hysterical person's fits, that it's unpleasant to them, and if there were anything they could do to discourage it, they would do it. Another assumption is that people remember which strategy worked on a certain person when they tried to achieve a certain goal in their interaction with them. Therefore, if someone wants to get you to stop being angry at them, and they throw you a hissy fit, and it works, and when they tried to reasonably talk things through with you it didn't work, then they'll remember that the best way to get you to stop being angry at them is to throw you a hissy fit. The next time they'll want you to stop being angry at them, they'll probably throw you another. You don't want this. You're uncomfortable when they do that. Therefore the rational thing to do is not to reinforce that sort of behavior, and reinforce instead the behavior that makes you feel comfortable.
I didn't say anything about the rationality of responding to anger per se. I just said that reinforcing a behavior you don't want to be subject to is irrational (and I thought any audience could agree with me on that) and that this particular case belongs to that class of irrational things to do.
Why, yes. I earnestly believe that evolution has a sense of humour which influences its "decisions" regarding what sorts of behavioral tendencies to implement in humans.
It's disingenuous to suggest an answer to your question which you expect no reasonable person to give.
Possibly, but I am not very tempted to fault the quality of my logos for the failure of my attempt at mediation, since the obstacle it had to overcome was of the kind "I don't want to listen to you. (I want to indulge in my anger.)". The only response that the other person would accept of me was to shut up, admit to not quite qualifying as a human being because of my moral faults, feel horrible about it and leave the room. I am inclined to believe that moderately unpersuasive arguments don't block the way towards eventual reconciliation quite as much as that kind of attitude.
I was very much able to discern what they were angry about. I just said I couldn't agree to their reasons, i.e. that I don't believe their anger was in the least bit justified. So, this ruled out the possibility of internalizing their accusations and feeling guilty.
Stop this. Seriously.
Holy shit is this the wrong way to try to reason someone out of being angry. It's like, the exact opposite of how to talk a person down.
It's called a rhetorical question.
It is called a rhetorical question by people who want to frame the matter in a certain way, and de-emphasize the disingenuous aspect of it: Oligopsony said something witty, props to him for that, we should appreciate good rhetoric (and you're a humourless curmudgeon if you disagree). Really, what was your point -- so what if it may belong to the category of rhetorical questions? That is no reason for me to judge it more favourably.
Also, that's a very condescending way to make your point, it has this connotation of "Ah, but you lack the proper term for it; here, let me illuminate you with my objective definition." Thanks, but no thanks.
It's a connotatively fallacious rhetorical question. Your "arguments expressed indirectly should not be rejected conditional on (lack of) merit" heuristic is flawed.
As opposed to what? AFAICT, questions whose straight reading isn't implausible aren't rhetorical question.
The intended meaning of “Did evolution prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny?”, IIUC, is ‘obviously, evolution didn't prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny’ (which seems correct to me), with the implication that we respond to that behaviour for a different reason, in a context where Oligopsony was mentioning or alluding to a few plausible candidate reasons for that.
As opposed to a rhetorical question which conveys a point as valid as implied. Obviously. Neither the argument implied by the original question nor the one you have made here are good arguments. Phrasing them as rhetorical questions doesn't make up for that.
I took the argument implied by the original question to be “Humans respond to pathos in such-and-such way; humans don't respond to pathos in such-and-such way because evolution found it funny; therefore, humans respond to pathos in such-and-such way for some other reason. Possible such reasons include this, this and this.” Did you take it to be something else?