To have this attitude, you need a strong presumption of your own superiority. Instead of engaging them in a conversation where you can both better discover the truth, with you also remaining open to info they may offer, you decide this is war and "all is fair in love and war." You know what is true and what is good for the world and you've decided it is important enough to the world for them to believe your truth that you will force it upon them in any way you can. No doubt this is a possible situation, and there is possible evidence that could reasonably convince you that this is your situation. But do pause and consider whether your confidence might be overconfidence, biased by arrogance, and also consider the consequences of their hearing that this is in fact your attitude toward them.
About the use of dark arts, and the magic paragraph... Maybe there's an important difference between:
Let's imagine for a moment, the most convincing paragraph ever written. It was truly a world-wonder of persuasion - it converted fundamentalist Christians into atheists, suicide bombers into diplomats, and Ann Coulter-4-President supporters into Less Wrong sycophants.
Would it produce people who could explain the differences between Pascal's Wager and the expected utility argument for cryonics and why they should produce different answers? Or who could accept Many Worlds without thinking that they make all available decisions "equally"? Or who ...
Someone believes that the Singularity is a sack of absurdities and is sad about the fact that we're all deluded into believing it. To help pry us loose from our little cult, they post an argument that's really persuasive on a gut level: A photoshopped picture of me killing Meredith Kercher. (Shortly after, I am arrested by the Italian police.)
Is there a moral difference between that and what you're proposing besides, "Oh, but they're wrong and we're right?" If so, what do you think it is?
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 ...
The post and comments -- all very interesting so far -- tend to assume that a rationalist's goal in conversation with someone else is always a first-order one, where success and failure are represented only by whether the interlocutor changes his/her mind with respect to rationality or truth-seeking. There might be a limited category of cases where this assumption isn't good.
For example, if there were a young-earth creationist who was also a fourth-grade teacher, and who was in the habit of subtly undermining scientific truth with talk of "controvers...
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 t...
The very definition of the "dark arts" is those arts of persuasion that don't particularly correlate well to truth. So if such a super-persuasive paragraph existed, there's no reason to expect it to be one that favoured our beliefs over those of Ann Coulter. If we abandon those persuasive techniques that favour truth, we throw away the one advantage we believe we have over the many others that wish to persuade.
Also, don't throw around boo lights like "almost religiously entrenched" without evidence.
I use self-promotion techniques that I know are more flair and feeling than rational points to convince people of how good I am at certain things; I then follow through by showing that I am, in fact, as good or better than my marketing material showed me to be. This combination works very well, and I do not feel deceptive for properly calibrating their expectations before I am able to provide true evidence.
I suppose I'm more concerned with how well they're calibrated (beliefs) than with their methods of calibration (rationality); the latter provides far more benefits, but is also far more difficult to change.
This post seems predicated on the notion that we've established a gospel to preach, and we're just not preaching it. What's the gospel? "Rationality"? "Truth"? The Sequences? I don't buy it. There's no finished product here to sell.
I'm reminded of conversations I've had with people who express deep frustration with Obama's inability to cajole Congress into moving quickly on health care reform, but don't have a good answer to the question, "Why do you think Congress will come up with a workable solution to the problem?"
If you persuade people with bad reasons-- and if people are persuaded more by eloquence than they would have been by the substance of the argument, they are persuaded for bad reasons -- in the end they will be worse off than before with respect to truth, even if they change their minds about some particular errors.
You shouldn't mistake the convention that people aren't supposed to use the Dark Arts here on LessWrong, to mean that the LW community rejects the Dark Arts.
I've spoken with dozens of people who are involved with SIAI or read/post on LessWrong. I would not characterize them as being slow to embrace the Dark Arts when compared with American intellectuals in general.
I like the metaphor of the peacenik wanting to rid the world of violence by suggesting that police not use weapons. Let's elaborate on the analogy between Dark Arts and violence.
Tit For Tat is a common policy for trying to control violence. One obvious and much lamented flaw in the strategy is that it tends to foster cycles of violence, with each side claiming that the other side started it and that "they" use more vicious tactics.
To get past the problems of biased measurement of proportional response and so on, and thereby break the cycle of v...
It's tough to market existential risk because you end up sounding like a crazy doomsday prophet if the sell is too hard. Most people don't like to think about it and don't like being reminded that the world could suddenly end, unless it's a religion reminding them.
The desire to persuade people isn't necessarily rational, especially when it comes to "enlightening" people on the superiority of rational thought. I think a truly rational person's allegiance should always rest in truth. Truth, in it self, is a very powerful notion that doesn't need the help of manipulative persuasive tactics to inspire people.
I think persuasive techniques can be adapted to help discover the truth, as long as the parties involved completely respect each other and are willing to ask questions that help the other better articulat...
I like the metaphor of the peacenik wanting to rid the world of violence by suggesting that police not use weapons. Let's elaborate on the analogy between Dark Arts and violence.
Tit For Tat is a common policy for trying to control violence. One obvious and much lamented flaw in the strategy is that it tends to foster cycles of violence, with each side claiming that the other side started it and that "they" use more vicious tactics.
To get past the problems of biased measurement of proportional response and so on, and thereby break the cycle of v...
This may have some connection to the akrasia discussions-- what are non-destructive methods (or even beneficial methods) for getting from thought to action? I'm assuming that thinking well is as much an action as physical movement-- there's some difference since a lot of people have preferences and talent for one or the other-- but subjectively, I find there's an overlap.
Is there a qualitative difference between the methods that work to change your own behavior and methods to change other people's?
The product of Less Wrong is truth. However, there seems to be a reluctance of the personality types here - myself included - to sell that product. Here's my evidence:
We actually label many highly effective persuasive strategies that can be used to market our true ideas as "dark arts". What's the justification for this negative branding? A necessary evil is not evil. Even if - and this is a huge if - our future utopia is free of dark arts, that's not the world we live in today. Choosing not to use them is analogous to a peacenik wanting to rid the world of violence by suggesting that police not use weapons.
We treat our dislike of dark arts as if it's a simple corollary of the axiom of the virtue of truth. Does this mean we assume the ends (more people believe the truth) doesn't justify the means (persuasion to the truth via exploiting cognitive biases)? Or are we just worried about being hypocrites? Whatever the reason, such an impactful assumption deserves an explanation. Speaking practically, the successful practice of dark arts requires the psychological skill of switching hats, to use Edward de Bono's terminology. While posting on Less Wrong, we can avoid and are in fact praised for avoiding dark arts, but we need to switch up in other environments, and that's difficult. Frankly, we're not great at it, and it's very tempting to externalize the problem and say "the art is bad" rather than "we're bad at the art".
Our distaste for rhetorical tactics, both aesthetically and morally, profoundly affects the way we communicate. That distaste is tightly coupled with the mental habit of always interpreting the value of what is said purely for its informational content, logical consistency, and insight. I'm basing the following question on my own introspection, but I wonder if this almost religiously entrenched mental habit could make us blind to the value of the art of persuasion? Let's imagine for a moment, the most convincing paragraph ever written. It was truly a world-wonder of persuasion - it converted fundamentalist Christians into atheists, suicide bombers into diplomats, and Ann Coulter-4-President supporters into Less Wrong sycophants. What would your reaction to the paragraph be? Would you "up-vote" this work of genius? No way. We'd be competing to tell the fundamentalist Christian that there were at least three argument fallacies in the first sentence, we'd explain to the suicide bomber that the rhetoric could be used equally well to justify blowing us all up right now, and for completeness we'd give the Ann Coulter supporter a brief overview of Bayesianism.