Sharing reasoning is obviously normally good, but we obviously live in a world with lots of causally important actors who don’t always respond rationally to arguments, and there are cases like the grandparent comment when one is justified in worrying that an argument would make people stupid in a particular way, and one can avoid this problem by not making the argument, and doing so is importantly different from filtering out arguments for causing a justified update against one’s side, and is even more importantly different from anything similar to what pops into people’s minds when they hear “psychological manipulation”. If I’m worried that someone with a finger on some sort of hypertech button may avoid learning about some crucial set of thoughts about what circumstances it’s good to press hypertech buttons under because they’ve always vaguely heard that set of thoughts is disreputable and so never looked into it, I don’t think your last paragraph is a fair response to that. I think I should tap out of this discussion because I feel like the more-than-one-sentence-at-a-time medium is nudging it more toward rhetoric than debugging, but let’s still talk some time.
even more importantly different from anything similar to what pops into people’s minds when they hear “psychological manipulation”
That’s fair. Let me scratch “psychologically manipulate”, edit to “persuade”, and refer to my reply to Vaniver and Ben Hoffman’s “The Humility Argument for Honesty” (also the first link in the grandparent) for the case that generic persuasion techniques are (counterintuitively!) Actually Bad.
I feel like the more-than-one-sentence-at-a-time medium is nudging it more toward rhetoric than debugging
I don’t think it’s the long-form medium so much as it is the fact that I am on a personal vindictive rampage against appeals-to-consequences lately. You should take my vindictiveness into account if you think it’s biasing me!
Sharing reasoning is obviously normally good, but we obviously live in a world with lots of causally important actors who don’t always respond rationally to arguments, and there are cases like the grandparent comment when one is justified in worrying that an argument would make people stupid in a particular way, and one can avoid this problem by not making the argument, and doing so is importantly different from filtering out arguments for causing a justified update against one’s side, and is even more importantly different from anything similar to what pops into people’s minds when they hear “psychological manipulation”. If I’m worried that someone with a finger on some sort of hypertech button may avoid learning about some crucial set of thoughts about what circumstances it’s good to press hypertech buttons under because they’ve always vaguely heard that set of thoughts is disreputable and so never looked into it, I don’t think your last paragraph is a fair response to that. I think I should tap out of this discussion because I feel like the more-than-one-sentence-at-a-time medium is nudging it more toward rhetoric than debugging, but let’s still talk some time.
That’s fair. Let me scratch “psychologically manipulate”, edit to “persuade”, and refer to my reply to Vaniver and Ben Hoffman’s “The Humility Argument for Honesty” (also the first link in the grandparent) for the case that generic persuasion techniques are (counterintuitively!) Actually Bad.
I don’t think it’s the long-form medium so much as it is the fact that I am on a personal vindictive rampage against appeals-to-consequences lately. You should take my vindictiveness into account if you think it’s biasing me!