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buybuydandavis comments on LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm not entirely convinced that the relationship between crafting a rational argument and crafting a persuasive argument is nearly as inverse-correlational as implied. On average, lies have a higher manufacturing cost (because you have to tread carefully and be more creative), a greater risk (since getting caught will lower your overall persuasiveness), and a smaller qualitative gain (while lies probably persuade more people, I suspect that they persuade less rationalists than civil debate and are therefore less qualitative overall). There are other means of persuading people without making deliberately irrational arguments. If sound reasoning alone isn't tasteful enough for you, why not season your truth with charm instead of coating it in sophistry? Why not leverage charisma or cordiality? You know - the dark art of sucking up?
While fear is often heralded in psychological communities as the most effective mechanism of persuasion, that doesn't mean it's the mechanism of persuasion with the greatest utility. A well-beaten child might obey best, but obedience isn't the only goal of discipline - nor agreement the only goal of argumentation. Personally, I'd rather treat every worthy cause as an opportunity for non-rationalists to exercise rationality than as an excuse for rationalists to manipulate non-rationalists. This tactic might not win every argument now, but it lays a surer foundation on which to build our arguments in the future.
Hardly. It's much easier to throw bullshit at the wall than to clean it off.
In many public debates, people shovel outright lies again and again. In the time it takes for you to properly evaluate their lie, they've shoveled 50 more.
Also, their are lies, and then there is conceptual muddle that's not even false. Try cleaning that up. Conceptual muddle takes centuries to clean up.
Since when? With whom? Who has paid enough attention to keep track? This is one of the fundamental problem with public debates - nobody is keeping score.
If the people who already agree with you even notice, they'll likely shrug it off as a tactic, or just shift their attention to the next piece of bullshit supporting their views that they haven't yet seen through.
It looks like you're suggesting that rationalists count more - somehow? Even if they do, they don't have the numbers.
Rationalists are good if you want someone to produce useful epistemic truths. If you want to persuade masses of people, probably not so good. They don't persuade, and their numbers are so small persuading them doesn't take you very far in the aggregate.
People use the Dark Arts because they're effective. Otherwise they'd be called the Dark Incompetencies.