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emr comments on Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Random thought: revealing something personal about yourself is a very powerful "dark art". People will feel strong pressure to reciprocate.
I confess that I've sort of used it before. Ie. if I want to get information out of someone, I might reveal something personal about myself (I'm comfortable talking about a lot of things, so often times it really isn't even that personal).
I can't recall ever having had bad intentions though. I recall using it to get a friend to open up about something that I think would be beneficial for them, but that is difficult for them to do.
Whenever you discover a social "dark art", look for a countermeasure.
Of course, in most cases this isn't a "dark art" at all: It can just be a signal that you're okay talking about X or moving the conversation in the direction of X, without explicit requesting to talk about X, because an explicit request would require an explicit refusal in the case where they truly didn't want to talk about X. Whereas if you use the ambiguous signal, you're giving them the option of an ambiguous refusal (often by reciprocating with a superficially equal but actually trivial "yeah me too" disclosure). I think this holds for the case of "difficult" issues between friends, and well as things like flirting (ambiguous introduction of a sexual topic), and moving to informal topics from a formal context.