Defense Against the Deceptive Arts
It’s come to my attention that people on Lesswrong are really really really bad at defending themselves against even semi competent deceptions. And worse, they massively overestimate their own defenses.
To help against this, this will be the start of a sequence named Defense Against the Deceptive Arts.
I will discuss tactics used by VCs, Lobbyists, Politicians, Marketers, Recruiters and more.
I will begin with something fundamental, but basic—“How to Answer a Question Without Answering The Question”
Where is the rest of the post? Is it a draft which you accidentally released?UPD: this was a teaser for a sequence, Kabir published the first post.How has this come to your attention, and how are you determining whether your sequence is useful to the segment of the audience that needs to hear it?
I think LW readers and participants are somewhat LESS easily deceived than comparable groups (say, Bay Area professionals who don’t read LW), and the majority of LW readers aren’t even that particularly-intense demographic.
Ideally, you’d include very specific examples here—actual cultish-leaders having success with the deceptive arts, and how those that escape did so. I don’t think general advice about deceptive practices will do much good, especially if you haven’t read a number of accounts of such things and analyzed why they remain effective even with fairly-common knowledge of them.
To whom are you comparing them?
We significantly underperform compared to a rock with “Nuh Uh” painted on it at important tasks like not joining cults, not spawning swarms of agents without being able to control them, and not fraternizing with Peter Thiel
what led you personally to take an interest in this sort of skill? Did you learn deliberately, by osmosis, or as defense mechanism?
all of the above. my mother did marketing for a bank, degree in econ, both parents did econ degrees and started businesses, mum took me to business stuff with her growing up, taught me business and marketing since I was 7. I also did a bunch of mental health coaching for people during covid and have a startup that I market and recruit people for.
And in for most of my teenage years and until I was 22, I was a pathological liar.