I guess an ending where I throw my hands up and say “oh no my reasoning” was simultaneously the most likely and the most beneficial outcome to finally wading in to throw up a post of my own. Critique is fair enough, and it would seem that least to some degree I have in fact missed the point.
I still think there’s something here beyond just privileging a hypothesis and Orwell’s complaint about double negation as euphemism. Perhaps the real thrust I was trying to make here was that double negation makes it harder to notice that you’ve privileged a hypothesis. Socratic questioning is good but tends to bore an audience, takes a long time, and doesn’t lead to the kind of decisive rhetorical victory you need to win a manoeuvring competition. There might be something in rephrasing socratic questions as propositions instead, but I’m not currently sure what that would look like.
There’s a wealth of valid insight amongst the rationalism community, but it goes unusable if you can’t win the frame in the first place. It’s not sufficient to be right in many contexts, you must also be rhetorically persuasive. I’ve not yet come across a convincing framework for melding the two.
I am always impressed by how much insight LW users can cram into a small number of words. One angle I feel has been underdiscussed on LW is effective rhetorical devices for dealing with people who are very good at using the dark arts. This post was inspired by my experience with an old colleague with whom we many times had the exact conversation in the green-purple example.
I somehow missed Setting the Zero Point, and it’s extremely thorough, but I wish it were more like Proving Too Much—advice on how to convince an audience that rationality is valuable.
This is the opposite conclusion to the one I reached—that positive values are evaluated on balance, while negative values are evaluated by their exclusivity. I think we’re talking about subtly different phenomena though, I’m not considering euphemism here, just scaling the rigidity. I do agree that self-deceit is an important part of framing conflicts though. It might be worth whole new post, but I theorize that mental resistance to using rhetorical dark arts is strongly associated with openness to experience and one’s personal relationship with doubt and learning.
Do you know of any particularly good essays that focus on countering the dark arts performatively for an audience beyond just being aware of them?
I’ve spent several years competing in university debating and I’ve learned a lot about practical application of a very specific kind of dark arts, but interpersonal dark arts are a different sort I want to learn more about.