If you’re trying to help a group have accurate beliefs on aggregate, stay nonjudgmental so that the forces pulling people towards conventional wisdom will be lower, and they’ll be more influenced by the evidence they encounter as opposed to the incentives they encounter. You may say “well, I’m only judgmental towards peoples’ beliefs when they’re incorrect.” But even if you happen to be perfect at figuring out which beliefs are incorrect, this is still a bad idea. If I’m trying to figure out whether to officially adopt some belief as part of my thinking, I’ll calculate my expected social cost of holding the belief using the probability that it’s incorrect times the penalty in the case where it’s incorrect. So even punishing only the incorrect beliefs will counterfactually decrease the rate of people holding unusual beliefs.
There are already some heuristics that allow you to nudge people in a direction where they are more likely to accept your arguments. However, these techniques are all about getting people to like you, in effect, taking advantage of their cognitive biases, so it might seem to straddle that line of Dark Arts. One was actually posted pretty recently: Have the person tell a self-affirming thing about themselves before trying to convince them of your point of view. Or ask them for a favor or their opinion on something. Another way to get people to like you is to uncover likable things about the person; the Dark Arts version of that would be something like Barnum statements.
If anything, these persuasion techniques will increase your social capital so that you have more to spend on having beliefs that don’t quite mesh with the group’s center.
One was actually posted pretty recently: Have the person tell a self-affirming thing about themselves before trying to convince them of your point of view.
Hm, complimenting people right before telling them they’re wrong about something seems like a good idea and not very dark arts-ish.
There are already some heuristics that allow you to nudge people in a direction where they are more likely to accept your arguments. However, these techniques are all about getting people to like you, in effect, taking advantage of their cognitive biases, so it might seem to straddle that line of Dark Arts. One was actually posted pretty recently: Have the person tell a self-affirming thing about themselves before trying to convince them of your point of view. Or ask them for a favor or their opinion on something. Another way to get people to like you is to uncover likable things about the person; the Dark Arts version of that would be something like Barnum statements.
If anything, these persuasion techniques will increase your social capital so that you have more to spend on having beliefs that don’t quite mesh with the group’s center.
Hm, complimenting people right before telling them they’re wrong about something seems like a good idea and not very dark arts-ish.