One issue is the matter of “persuasion” and “manipulation”. Some people see them as words describing things that are different in kind, others see them as words describing different areas of a continuum.
See my comments here. These are some of the more common things meant by the term.
claiming to possess some set of conversational techniques that will make almost anyone believe almost anything.
I think similar sounding claims come from people claiming to be far better at manipulation than others as a means of selling you the knowledge. For this to be plausible, the skill has to come from a few simple key insights that universally apply.
The claim here is different, it’s that for each person, there are ways to manipulate them beyond persuading them or more generally influencing them as they would wish to be influenced. As we are not trying to sell a simple technique that always does this, the claim is far less ambitious—it isn’t that manipulation is something so simple it’s easy to buy and learn, and so universal that you don’t need anything else. The claim is similar in that it is about people being manipulable, but the discussion is about the morality and efficacy of pushing those levers consciously at all. Sellers of manipulation have to claim it works every time or nearly so, the discussion here is relevant if one tactic works once in a hundred tries—and the consensus here is that yes, people are somewhat manipulable, and there are many tactics.
Thanks lessdazed and others, that was very informative. In retrospect, I totally should’ve searched the wiki, but I kind of forgot this site had a wiki—sorry about that.
I can see at least one problem with using the Dark Arts for the purpose of persuading people to learn about rationality: breach of trust. If your target person ever finds out that you manipulated him—as he is in fact likely to do, assuming that he actually does learn more about rationality due to your successful manipulation attempt—you will lose his trust, possibly forever. As the result, he may come to view rationality as a sort of seedy mind-game that evil people (such as, in his newly acquired opinion, yourself) play on each other for sport, and not as a set of generally useful mental techniques.
Holding off on proposing solutions.
Dark Arts. And here and here.
One issue is the matter of “persuasion” and “manipulation”. Some people see them as words describing things that are different in kind, others see them as words describing different areas of a continuum.
See my comments here. These are some of the more common things meant by the term.
I think similar sounding claims come from people claiming to be far better at manipulation than others as a means of selling you the knowledge. For this to be plausible, the skill has to come from a few simple key insights that universally apply.
The claim here is different, it’s that for each person, there are ways to manipulate them beyond persuading them or more generally influencing them as they would wish to be influenced. As we are not trying to sell a simple technique that always does this, the claim is far less ambitious—it isn’t that manipulation is something so simple it’s easy to buy and learn, and so universal that you don’t need anything else. The claim is similar in that it is about people being manipulable, but the discussion is about the morality and efficacy of pushing those levers consciously at all. Sellers of manipulation have to claim it works every time or nearly so, the discussion here is relevant if one tactic works once in a hundred tries—and the consensus here is that yes, people are somewhat manipulable, and there are many tactics.
Thanks lessdazed and others, that was very informative. In retrospect, I totally should’ve searched the wiki, but I kind of forgot this site had a wiki—sorry about that.
I can see at least one problem with using the Dark Arts for the purpose of persuading people to learn about rationality: breach of trust. If your target person ever finds out that you manipulated him—as he is in fact likely to do, assuming that he actually does learn more about rationality due to your successful manipulation attempt—you will lose his trust, possibly forever. As the result, he may come to view rationality as a sort of seedy mind-game that evil people (such as, in his newly acquired opinion, yourself) play on each other for sport, and not as a set of generally useful mental techniques.