Nice example of Bliks in action. Literature is powered by such dramas, where people's individual mindset shifts the spectrum of every photon right or left of the reader, or the other protagonists, and the tragedy is that too few rays of light fall true, through a clear eye.

Ferris I suppose has seceded, too advanced to bother with the various foolish repercussions she knows will ring through the world under her feet from this new data. That's fine, she's too far ahead to go back anyway. (</sardonic>)

I worry that we (denizens of this website) are too confident that OUR vision is so sure. I'm a noob of course and not sure that I feel myself at home but I suggest caution. All those fools who see blue or green... they're sure they're right, too. Hubris is the danger.

You correctly decry popularity as a non-rational measure of veracity, but to the extent that it expresses a sort of straw poll, it may be a good indicator anyway. The idea of expert futures markets comes to mind.

My point is related: is it not also a fallacy to assert it's GOT to be simple? That's awful close to demanding (even believing?) something's true because it ought to be, because we want it so bad. Occam's razor has worked like a champ all these years but inference is risky and maybe now, we find ourselves confronted with some hard digging. I too hope some crystalline simplification will make everything make sense, but I don't think we've a right to expect that, or should. What you and I want doesn't matter.

TL;DR: Help me go less crazy and I'll give you $100 after six months.

I'm a long-time lurker and signed up to ask this. I have a whole lot of mental issues, the worst being lack of mental energy (similar to laziness, procrastination, etc., but turned up to eleven and almost not influenced by will). Because of it, I can't pick myself up and do things I need to (like calling a shrink); I'm not sure why I can do certain things and not others. If this goes on, I won't be able to go out and buy food, let alone get a job. Or sign up for cryonics or donate to SIAI.

I've tried every trick I could bootstrap; the only one that helped was "count backwards then start", for things I can do but have trouble getting started on. I offer $100 to anyone who suggests a trick that significantly improves my life for at least six months. By "significant improvement" I mean being able to do things like going to the bank (if I can't, I won't be able to give you the money anyway), and having ways to keep myself stable or better (most likely, by seeing a therapist).

One-time tricks to do one important thing are also welcome, but I'd offer less.

We actually label persuasive strategies that can be used to market our true ideas as "dark arts".

The linked page specifies that the "dark arts" specifically take advantage of biases for persuasion. So it's a bit misleading to say "We actually label persuasive strategies that can be used…", because we do not label all strategies as such. Our goal should be to snap people out of their biases, so that they can naturally accept anything that turns out to be true. That could be taken as a "persuasive strategy", but it is not a dark one.

I'd favour attempts to develop bias-busting techniques intended to be used on general audiences. (Have there been any discussions about this — developing, as it were, a Defense Against the Dark Arts curriculum?) I would oppose attempts to evangelize our conclusions to general audiences without imparting to them the underlying framework of rationality that would allow them to independently discover or at least verify these conclusions. Using sophistry to persuade someone of a truth isn't much better than using the same tricks to persuade them of a falsehood, and even if we ignore moral issues, it is nearly useless, because if a person ends up with better ideas but all the same biases, their heads can later just as easily be filled with whole new sets of bad ideas by other Dark Arts practitioners.

Edit: I'd like to add that I don't mean that I believe biases can be countered with Pure Reason — which, I suppose, is what makes them bisaes in the first place. As the saying goes, we can't reason people of what they were never reasoned into. Debiasing techniques will not consist solely of rational arguments based on evidence, because the goal is to get people to the point where they can accept such things in the first place. But that does not mean that we have to, or ought to, resort to actively bad reasoning. (Especially to someone with an anti-reason worldview — serious anti-epistemology — invalid logical arguments don't work any better than valid ones anyway.) That, I think, is something that the prominent members of the "New Atheist" movement (it's not all that new, I know) are getting right (for the most part). This movement is unapologetic, it's emotional, it can be abrasive and offensive at times, but it's not dishonest. As one example of that, see, for instance, PZ Myers strongly criticizing a recent study which, in part, appears to show a positive correlation between IQ and atheism. He didn't have to criticize it. He could have been among those "patting [them]selves on the back". But he sided with intellectual honesty over embracing a potentially flawed argumentative tool. If we want to spread rationality, we should be thinking along the same lines.

Richard, do you believe that the quest for FAI could be framed as a special case of the quest for the Ideal Ultimate Control System (IUCS). That is, intelligence in and of itself is not what we are after but control. Perhaps, FAI is the only route to IUCS but perhaps not?

Note: Originally I wrote Friendly Ultimate Control System but the acronym was unfortunate.

What's the meta-point being made by your obnoxious metaphor-laden text? What's the reason for your abuse of rhetorical questions? It's not effective communication. You demonstrate just how when you're too heavy on simpleton-wowing flash, you risk losing the part of the audience that demands respect.

Here's my gloss of your three paragraphs:

1) "Losers always whine about their best"

2) If you're right, and you don't persuade, then your speech wasn't good enough.

3) It's fine to design your speech so as to mislead the dumb and the inattentive toward your side.

To the last I'd add the obvious caveat that you should consider how much of your audience you lose if you do it gracelessly.

I guess I'm for persuasion, think the ends justify in this case. Otherwise you're all bringing knives to a gunfight and crying foul when you get shot down. Could there be a degree of "sour grapes" here resulting from finding one's self inexplicably unpersuasive next to a velvet tongued dummy? Are we sure we eschew the tactics of rhetoric because they're wrong? Is it even fair to describe "dark arts" as wrong?

I say rather that speech is meant to be persuasive. Better speech would then be more persuasive. As such persuasion backed by truth should be sturdier than mere naked truth, which is only palatable to connoisseurs who like their facts without sauce. Have I mixed enough metaphors for you there?

I think thought, hence communication, is highly model based, so you can be compelling with a metaphor that "fits" and one that's well chosen would fit very well indeed. Then the topic under discussion gets a piggyback ride from the metaphor and the stipulated conclusion from the model is transferred to the new topic. (there must be an established name for that sort of trick?) But what if it's in defense of the truth? I say it's ok. To go back to the first metaphor: you gotta fight fire with fire; facts burn too easily.

Hi! Vectored here by Robin who's thankfully trolling for new chumps and recommending initial items to read. I note the Wiki would be an awesome place for some help, and may attempt to put up a page there: NoobDiscoveringLessWrongLeavesBreadcrumbs, or something like that.

My immediate interest is argument: how can we disagree? 1+1=2. Can't that be extrapolated to many things. I have been so happy to see a non-cocky (if prideful) attitude in the first several posts that I have great hopes for what I may learn here. We have to remember ignorance is an implacable enemy, and being insulting won't defeat it, and we may be subject to it ourselves. I've notice I am.

First post from me is coming shortly. - mark krebs

I love your thesis and metaphor, that the goal is for us all jointly to become rational, seek, and find truth. But I do not "respect the opinions of enough others." I have political/scientific disagreements so deep and frequent that I frequently just hide them and. worry. I resonated best with your penultimate sentence: "humanity's vast stunning cluelessness" does seem to be the problem. Has someone written on the consequences of taking over the world? The human genome, presumptively adapted to forward it's best interests in a competitive world, may have only limited rationality, inadequate to the tasks of altruism, global thinking, and numerical analysis. By this last phrase I refer to our overreaction to a burning skyscraper, when an equal number of deaths monthly on freeways, by being less spectacular or poignant, motivates a disproportionately low response. Surely the difference there is a "gut" reaction, not a cogent one. We need to change what we care about, but we're hardwired to worry about spectacle, perhaps?

"The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap." -Eric Hoffer, <i>the True Believer </i>

Love your post: religion as virulent namb-shub. See also Snow Crash by Stephenson.