Dark Arts 101: Using presuppositions

65 PhilGoetz 27 December 2010 05:16PM

Sun Tzu said, "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."  This is also true in rhetoric.  The best way to get a belief accepted is to fool people into thinking that they have already accepted it.

(Note, first-year students, that I did not say, "The best way to convince people of a belief".  Do not try to convince people!  It will not work; and it may start them thinking.)

An excellent way of doing this is to embed your desired conclusion as a presupposition to an enticing argument.  If you are debating abortion, and you wish people to believe that human and non-human life are qualitatively different, begin by saying, "We all agree that killing humans is immoral.  So when does human life begin?"  People will be so eager to jump into the debate about whether a life becomes "human" at conception, the second trimester, or at birth (I myself favor "on moving out of the house"), they won't notice that they agreed to the embedded presupposition that the problem should be phrased as a binary category membership problem, rather than as one of tradeoffs or utility calculations.

Consider the recent furor over whether WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange is a journalist, or can be prosecuted for espionage.  I don't know who initially asked this question.  The earliest posing of the question that I can find that relates it to the First Amendment is this piece from Fox News on Dec. 8; but Marc Thiessen's column in the Washington Post of Aug. 3 has similar implications.  Note that this question presupposes that First Amendment protection applies only to journalists!  There is no legal precedent for this that I'm aware of; yet if people spend enough time debating whether Julian Assange is a journalist, they will have unknowingly convinced themselves that ordinary citizens have no First Amendment rights.  (We can only hope that this was an artful stroke made from the shadows by some great master of the Dark Arts, and not a mere snowballing of an ignorant question.)

The Dark Arts - Preamble

44 Aurini 11 October 2010 02:01PM

I’d like to tell you all a story.

Once upon a time I was working for a charity – a major charity – going door-to-door to raise money while pretending it wasn’t sales.

This story happened on my last day working there.  I didn’t know that at the time; I wouldn’t find out until the following morning when my boss called me up to fire me, but I knew it was coming.  For weeks I’d been fed up with the job, milking it for the last few dollars I could pull out, hating every minute of it but needing the money.  The Sudden Career Readjustment would come as a relief.

So on that day, my last day, I was moving slowly.  I knocked on one particular door and there was no response.  I had little desire to walk to the next one, however, and there was an interesting spider who’d built its web below the doorbell.  I tapped its belly with the tip of my pen, and it reacted with aggression – trying to envenom and ensnare the tip of my ballpoint.  I must have been playing with it for a good minute or so when the door suddenly opened.

A distraught woman stood before me.  After a brief period of Relating I launched into my pitch.

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Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational

86 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 October 2012 08:01AM

Followup to: Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms  (minor post)

There's an old anecdote about Ayn Rand, which Michael Shermer recounts in his "The Unlikeliest Cult in History" (note: calling a fact unlikely is an insult to your prior model, not the fact itself), which went as follows:

Branden recalled an evening when a friend of Rand's remarked that he enjoyed the music of Richard Strauss. "When he left at the end of the evening, Ayn said, in a reaction becoming increasingly typical, 'Now I understand why he and I can never be real soulmates. The distance in our sense of life is too great.' Often she did not wait until a friend had left to make such remarks."

Many readers may already have appreciated this point, but one of the Go stones placed to block that failure mode is being careful what we bless with the great community-normative-keyword 'rational'. And one of the ways we do that is by trying to deflate the word 'rational' out of sentences, especially in post titles or critical comments, which can live without the word.  As you hopefully recall from the previous post, we're only forced to use the word 'rational' when we talk about the cognitive algorithms which systematically promote goal achievement or map-territory correspondences.  Otherwise the word can be deflated out of the sentence; e.g. "It's rational to believe in anthropogenic global warming" goes to "Human activities are causing global temperatures to rise"; or "It's rational to vote for Party X" deflates to "It's optimal to vote for Party X" or just "I think you should vote for Party X".

If you're writing a post comparing the experimental evidence for four different diets, that's not "Rational Dieting", that's "Optimal Dieting". A post about rational dieting is if you're writing about how the sunk cost fallacy causes people to eat food they've already purchased even if they're not hungry, or if you're writing about how the typical mind fallacy or law of small numbers leads people to overestimate how likely it is that a diet which worked for them will work for a friend. And even then, your title is 'Dieting and the Sunk Cost Fallacy', unless it's an overview of four different cognitive biases affecting dieting. In which case a better title would be 'Four Biases Screwing Up Your Diet', since 'Rational Dieting' carries an implication that your post discusses the cognitive algorithm for dieting, as opposed to four contributing things to keep in mind.

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Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms

37 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 09:59AM

Followup to: The Useful Idea of Truth

It is an error mode, and indeed an annoyance mode, to go about preaching the importance of the "Truth", especially if the Truth is supposed to be something incredibly lofty instead of some boringmundane truth about gravity or rainbows or what your coworker said about your manager.

Thus it is a worthwhile exercise to practice deflating the word 'true' out of any sentence in which it appears. (Note that this is a special case of rationalist taboo.) For example, instead of saying, "I believe that the sky is blue, and that's true!" you can just say, "The sky is blue", which conveys essentially the same information about what color you think the sky is. Or if it feels different to say "I believe the Democrats will win the election!" than to say, "The Democrats will win the election", this is an important warning of belief-alief divergence.

Try it with these:

  • I believe Jess just wants to win arguments.
  • It’s true that you weren’t paying attention.
  • I believe I will get better.
  • In reality, teachers care a lot about students.

If 'truth' is defined by an infinite family of sentences like 'The sentence "the sky is blue" is true if and only if the sky is blue', then why would we ever need to talk about 'truth' at all?

Well, you can't deflate 'truth' out of the sentence "True beliefs are more likely to make successful experimental predictions" because it states a property of map-territory correspondences in general. You could say 'accurate maps' instead of 'true beliefs', but you would still be invoking the same concept.

It's only because most sentences containing the word 'true' are not talking about map-territory correspondences in general, that most such sentences can be deflated.

Now consider - when are you forced to use the word 'rational'?

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Skill: The Map is Not the Territory

49 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 09:59AM

Followup to: The Useful Idea of Truth (minor post)

So far as I know, the first piece of rationalist fiction - one of only two explicitly rationalist fictions I know of that didn't descend from HPMOR, the other being "David's Sling" by Marc Stiegler - is the Null-A series by A. E. van Vogt. In Vogt's story, the protagonist, Gilbert Gosseyn, has mostly non-duplicable abilities that you can't pick up and use even if they're supposedly mental - e.g. the ability to use all of his muscular strength in emergencies, thanks to his alleged training. The main explicit-rationalist skill someone could actually pick up from Gosseyn's adventure is embodied in his slogan:

"The map is not the territory."

Sometimes it still amazes me to contemplate that this proverb was invented at some point, and some fellow named Korzybski invented it, and this happened as late as the 20th century. I read Vogt's story and absorbed that lesson when I was rather young, so to me this phrase sounds like a sheer background axiom of existence.

But as the Bayesian Conspiracy enters into its second stage of development, we must all accustom ourselves to translating mere insights into applied techniques. So:

Meditation: Under what circumstances is it helpful to consciously think of the distinction between the map and the territory - to visualize your thought bubble containing a belief, and a reality outside it, rather than just using your map to think about reality directly?  How exactly does it help, on what sort of problem?

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