I myself would like to be part of such a community. But I wouldn’t like colleges to offer courses in it, because it seems to be a negative-sum game. What would the world look like now if we had a million graduates of such a curricula in the US? I suspect most people taking the courses would do so in order to go into marketing or politics, and thus reduce the signal-to-noise ratio when choosing products or politicians even more.
How can you disavow Dark Arts? This is the Dark Arts.
I am skeptical that we can win without the Dark Arts.
There are lots of people out there with bad goals and wrong beliefs and powerful skills at persuading and manipulating people to take on those beliefs and help those goals. Like marketers and politicians. If we want resources for our goals, and to spread our beliefs, we need to learn the techniques of persuasion and memetics.
This isn’t a video game, the world doesn’t care about Light and Dark, and it isn’t set up so that the good guys can win. Those who employ the best techniques for achieving their goals are more likely to achieve their goals. In a world where good people refuse to learn how to persuade others and gain power, the world will be ruled by bad people. That’s how it is now, and I’m sick of it.
I’m Gray and proud of it. Shades of gray matter—a lot—but White is for losers.
Sure; but you’re not addressing the question, which is: Would teaching a whole lot of randomly-chosen people how to manipulate other people be good on balance?
Especially considering the selection bias: What sort of people are more likely to sign up for the course?
I would rather have EVERYONE know the dark arts, instead of only the people who want to learn it now in order to gain political power and sell merchandise. Sine you cannot teach everyone right now, you have to start somewhere, and the people who I don’t want to know these tricks already seem to have a good handle on the ones they need for their profession anyway. Imagine how much harder it would be to persuade someone to join a fanatical cult, buy the more expensive of two identical products based purely on advertising, or put unreasonable trust into a charismatic politician if they actually understood enough about human psychology to see every single manipulative tactic which was being used.
Yes, but a world where one person in a thousand can expertly manipulate people looks ten times worse than a world where one person in ten thousand can expertly manipulate people.
Knowing how advertising and propaganda works does not mean you can actually use these tools in real life, especially on the level that most people interact socially. Once one in a thousand people understand the mind games which are very common today, we are not going to see a wide scale revolution, because very few people have access to millions of dollars for advertising. instead, I would expect the information to just start leaking to their friends, and before long become common knowledge even to those who never heard of the course.
In a world where good people refuse to learn how to persuade others and gain power, the world will be ruled by bad people. That’s how it is now, and I’m sick of it.
I’m Gray and proud of it. Shades of gray matter—a lot—but White is for losers.
Very well said. I’d take it one step further and say that when the only practical options are shades of Gray, then Gray is the new White.
Options that aren’t practically viable should never end up in the moral calculus to begin with. Morality should be the thing we use to select between the practical options.
Sure, on average it’s negative sum. But I have to guess that society as a whole suffers greatly from having many (most?) of its technically skilled citizens at the low end of the social-ability spectrum. The question would be whether you could design a set of institutions in this area which could have a net positive benefit on society. (Probably not something I’ll solve on a Saturday afternoon...)
How can you disavow Dark Arts? This is the Dark Arts.
Influencing other humans is hugely beneficial to almost any goals a human can have. I don’t think the techniques of effectively influencing people are Dark Arts. If you use them to make people believe falsehoods, or act against their own interests, that would be Dark. Otherwise, it’s just Arts.
Your claim that most people who studied these Arts would use them in Dark ways seems likely to me. But, if I expect to master these Arts myself, I will still support their research by default. I don’t know how to truly calculate the net utility here; I’m very interested in learning. What do you think?
It’s negative-sum if it results in lots of people, say, obtaining sex by deception and creating lots of annoyed or hurt partners. But if it makes people more attractive and gives them better social skills? Sounds good to me.
I disagree. This is Magic, perhaps, but at most a subset of this is the Dark Arts.
Taking the list as a starting point, seperate it into the first seven and then the remaining twelve. I would claim that the remaining twelve are all positive sum and I would prefer a world in which more people had those skills, although I wish we could move off of the golf equilibrium. I can also personally vouch for hypnosis.
The top part of the list is more troubling, no doubt, especially cults and propaganda which are clearly Dark. You can go too far. But it’s a poor art that can’t be turned Dark.
Adams’ list is a jump-off point, and was included for illustrative purposes only. Cults and propaganda won’t make the cut. I wouldn’t think hypnosis would either (although I’d be interested hearing your anecdote).
“Dark Arts” on LessWrong has a specific meaning. The accusation has merit; this program intends to influence others based on factors other than rationality. However, I (and others) have argued that learning this type of material is:
It is also a good exercise in epistemic rationality. Neglecting or corrupting whole swathes of your map not epistemically rational, even if you suspect that part of the territory contains dragons.
I couldn’t find a formal discussion group, like one has been suggested on these threads, but I think it would help me a lot. Can you point me in the direction of one?
Sure, an increased scientific understanding of our weaknesses could be used for negative purposes, but it could just as easily lead to societal improvements designed to prevent manipulation (i.e. laws banning the use of certain manipulative techniques in advertisements).
This is a good point. To the extent that social competency is zero-sum, we want to learn an exclusive, secret art (I am sure it is not, taken as a whole, for the same reason that trade and cooperation aren’t only zero-sum, but individual skills as actually employed may be).
The desire for powerful secrets biases us—for example, toward accepting nonsense from a cult leader. I’d rather instead include all the available similarly-minded smart people (who may occasional offer fresh insights), even though they would also be my most effective competition.
So the worry is that if this community gains many adepts, most of them will use the Art in Dark ways, making the world a less pleasant place to live overall? Then perhaps the founder of such a community should take care to make the community as obscure and low-status as possible, to prevent it from gaining a wide following.
The problem with a small community is that it might not acquire sufficiently many clever ideas to become a useful tool for achieving any goals, Dark or otherwise. So it might make sense to become part of a larger community, whose goals are similar enough to be worth learning from, yet different enough that its adepts are not dangerous.
In short, it might make sense to disguise this community as PUA. Perhaps even become part of the existing PUA community, whose members, after all, seem to have improved success in other social arts as well.
You don’t start an organization of supervillains! People who are up to no good will have too many conflicting goals and will not be sufficiently willing to trade and share and compromise. (Hell, even people who are up to good are usually not good enough at agreeing on how to do it.) You start an organization with yourself as the supervillain plus as many minions as you need. And you read the Evil Overlord List until you can recite it from memory.
Edit: Or, if you don’t want to take on that much responsibility, you’re welcome to be my minion.
The most important thing I learned from Buzzlightyears cartoon is that if you’re a villain, never waste time boasting, explaining what you are going to do, or still crave acceptance from the society that has in some way rejected you (or so you percieve).
People who are up to no good will have too many conflicting goals and will not be sufficiently willing to trade and share and compromise.
This might be true of supervillains, but certainly isn’t true of lesser villains. There are lots of organizations around of people willing to help others inflict harm in return for help in inflicting their own harm. We call many of these organizations “parliament” or “congress”. ;)
But the clown-suit-wearing community isn’t particularly likely to be a good setting for developing social arts.
The relationship may not be causal but I suspect clown-suit-wearing communities currently in existence are extremely good settings for developing social arts. And I’m not even including ‘Mystery’ in that category!
I was also under the impression that the entire field of PUA was basically a giant Dark Arts grimoire. Now I’m not sure what it is. But even if PUA is Dark Arts, an argument could still be made for teaching it in college—in order to build the students’ skills at Defending against these Dark Arts.
I think people here don’t distinguish enough between “X is a socially harmful arms race but given something to protect it’s an obvious good idea to participate” and “X is not a socially harmful arms race”.
I myself would like to be part of such a community. But I wouldn’t like colleges to offer courses in it, because it seems to be a negative-sum game. What would the world look like now if we had a million graduates of such a curricula in the US? I suspect most people taking the courses would do so in order to go into marketing or politics, and thus reduce the signal-to-noise ratio when choosing products or politicians even more.
How can you disavow Dark Arts? This is the Dark Arts.
I am skeptical that we can win without the Dark Arts.
There are lots of people out there with bad goals and wrong beliefs and powerful skills at persuading and manipulating people to take on those beliefs and help those goals. Like marketers and politicians. If we want resources for our goals, and to spread our beliefs, we need to learn the techniques of persuasion and memetics.
This isn’t a video game, the world doesn’t care about Light and Dark, and it isn’t set up so that the good guys can win. Those who employ the best techniques for achieving their goals are more likely to achieve their goals. In a world where good people refuse to learn how to persuade others and gain power, the world will be ruled by bad people. That’s how it is now, and I’m sick of it.
I’m Gray and proud of it. Shades of gray matter—a lot—but White is for losers.
Sure; but you’re not addressing the question, which is: Would teaching a whole lot of randomly-chosen people how to manipulate other people be good on balance? Especially considering the selection bias: What sort of people are more likely to sign up for the course?
I would rather have EVERYONE know the dark arts, instead of only the people who want to learn it now in order to gain political power and sell merchandise. Sine you cannot teach everyone right now, you have to start somewhere, and the people who I don’t want to know these tricks already seem to have a good handle on the ones they need for their profession anyway. Imagine how much harder it would be to persuade someone to join a fanatical cult, buy the more expensive of two identical products based purely on advertising, or put unreasonable trust into a charismatic politician if they actually understood enough about human psychology to see every single manipulative tactic which was being used.
Yes, but a world where one person in a thousand can expertly manipulate people looks ten times worse than a world where one person in ten thousand can expertly manipulate people.
Knowing how advertising and propaganda works does not mean you can actually use these tools in real life, especially on the level that most people interact socially. Once one in a thousand people understand the mind games which are very common today, we are not going to see a wide scale revolution, because very few people have access to millions of dollars for advertising. instead, I would expect the information to just start leaking to their friends, and before long become common knowledge even to those who never heard of the course.
Very well said. I’d take it one step further and say that when the only practical options are shades of Gray, then Gray is the new White.
Options that aren’t practically viable should never end up in the moral calculus to begin with. Morality should be the thing we use to select between the practical options.
I acknowledge that this appears to be on the Dark Side of the Arts Spectrum, but I’d like to keep it as light a gray as possible.
I just want to be effective at something that is important to achieving my goals. I’ll do good with my powers, honest!
This wins the award for “comment I’d think was Clippy’s if I had the anti-kibitzer turned on”.
Thank you.
I think two ideas from the field of security are relevant here.
1) In order to design good security, one must be willing and able to think like a criminal.
2) Security through obscurity generally doesn’t work.
Applied to the current discussion this suggests that:
in order to be able to successfully defend against the Dark Arts one must be able to think like a Dark Artist.
Attempting to reduce the use of the Dark Arts by attempting to quarantine knowledge about them isn’t going to work.
Also, maybe if more people understood the methods by which politicians and marketers manipulated them, they’d be less taken in by them.
Sure, on average it’s negative sum. But I have to guess that society as a whole suffers greatly from having many (most?) of its technically skilled citizens at the low end of the social-ability spectrum. The question would be whether you could design a set of institutions in this area which could have a net positive benefit on society. (Probably not something I’ll solve on a Saturday afternoon...)
Influencing other humans is hugely beneficial to almost any goals a human can have. I don’t think the techniques of effectively influencing people are Dark Arts. If you use them to make people believe falsehoods, or act against their own interests, that would be Dark. Otherwise, it’s just Arts.
Your claim that most people who studied these Arts would use them in Dark ways seems likely to me. But, if I expect to master these Arts myself, I will still support their research by default. I don’t know how to truly calculate the net utility here; I’m very interested in learning. What do you think?
It’s negative-sum if it results in lots of people, say, obtaining sex by deception and creating lots of annoyed or hurt partners. But if it makes people more attractive and gives them better social skills? Sounds good to me.
I disagree. This is Magic, perhaps, but at most a subset of this is the Dark Arts.
Taking the list as a starting point, seperate it into the first seven and then the remaining twelve. I would claim that the remaining twelve are all positive sum and I would prefer a world in which more people had those skills, although I wish we could move off of the golf equilibrium. I can also personally vouch for hypnosis.
The top part of the list is more troubling, no doubt, especially cults and propaganda which are clearly Dark. You can go too far. But it’s a poor art that can’t be turned Dark.
Adams’ list is a jump-off point, and was included for illustrative purposes only. Cults and propaganda won’t make the cut. I wouldn’t think hypnosis would either (although I’d be interested hearing your anecdote).
“Dark Arts” on LessWrong has a specific meaning. The accusation has merit; this program intends to influence others based on factors other than rationality. However, I (and others) have argued that learning this type of material is:
a good exercise in instrumental rationality.
necessary to accomplish things in the real world.
possibly a requirement to get people to consider the merit of your ideas at all.
It is also a good exercise in epistemic rationality. Neglecting or corrupting whole swathes of your map not epistemically rational, even if you suspect that part of the territory contains dragons.
Humanity: Thar be dragons!
Hello XFrequentist,
If you missed my comment above, to summarize: Through networks like freethinker or atheist clubs, and OKCupid, I am more likely to find people who win at life and share my values. But I don’t think I’m good enough at talking to them. I want to learn this material so I can do these things: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ul/less_wrong_nyc_case_study_of_a_successful/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/818/how_to_understand_people_better/ and make friends better.
I couldn’t find a formal discussion group, like one has been suggested on these threads, but I think it would help me a lot. Can you point me in the direction of one?
Sure, an increased scientific understanding of our weaknesses could be used for negative purposes, but it could just as easily lead to societal improvements designed to prevent manipulation (i.e. laws banning the use of certain manipulative techniques in advertisements).
This is a good point. To the extent that social competency is zero-sum, we want to learn an exclusive, secret art (I am sure it is not, taken as a whole, for the same reason that trade and cooperation aren’t only zero-sum, but individual skills as actually employed may be).
The desire for powerful secrets biases us—for example, toward accepting nonsense from a cult leader. I’d rather instead include all the available similarly-minded smart people (who may occasional offer fresh insights), even though they would also be my most effective competition.
Then perhaps the focus should simply be on the skills that aren’t zero sum? I doubt the majority of non-malicious social skills are zero sum, so...
So the worry is that if this community gains many adepts, most of them will use the Art in Dark ways, making the world a less pleasant place to live overall? Then perhaps the founder of such a community should take care to make the community as obscure and low-status as possible, to prevent it from gaining a wide following.
The problem with a small community is that it might not acquire sufficiently many clever ideas to become a useful tool for achieving any goals, Dark or otherwise. So it might make sense to become part of a larger community, whose goals are similar enough to be worth learning from, yet different enough that its adepts are not dangerous.
In short, it might make sense to disguise this community as PUA. Perhaps even become part of the existing PUA community, whose members, after all, seem to have improved success in other social arts as well.
Hmm. That doesn’t optimize for “keeping the community obscure” to the degree that, I don’t know, wearing clown suits might.
Or if you’re really worried about that problem, fursuits.
If I ever start a real organization of supervillains we’re going to dress up as LARPers and meet in the woods. No one will ever suspect....
You don’t start an organization of supervillains! People who are up to no good will have too many conflicting goals and will not be sufficiently willing to trade and share and compromise. (Hell, even people who are up to good are usually not good enough at agreeing on how to do it.) You start an organization with yourself as the supervillain plus as many minions as you need. And you read the Evil Overlord List until you can recite it from memory.
Edit: Or, if you don’t want to take on that much responsibility, you’re welcome to be my minion.
See also pjeby’s Everything I Needed To Know About Life, I Learned From Supervillains.
The most important thing I learned from Buzzlightyears cartoon is that if you’re a villain, never waste time boasting, explaining what you are going to do, or still crave acceptance from the society that has in some way rejected you (or so you percieve).
This might be true of supervillains, but certainly isn’t true of lesser villains. There are lots of organizations around of people willing to help others inflict harm in return for help in inflicting their own harm. We call many of these organizations “parliament” or “congress”. ;)
edit: spelling
Supervillains tend to be notoriously bad employers. Their employees also tend to be incompetent. I don’t know which causes the other.
But the clown-suit-wearing community isn’t particularly likely to be a good setting for developing social arts.
The relationship may not be causal but I suspect clown-suit-wearing communities currently in existence are extremely good settings for developing social arts. And I’m not even including ‘Mystery’ in that category!
Why don’t you ask your girlfriend how dark my arts where in the morning?
I was also under the impression that the entire field of PUA was basically a giant Dark Arts grimoire. Now I’m not sure what it is. But even if PUA is Dark Arts, an argument could still be made for teaching it in college—in order to build the students’ skills at Defending against these Dark Arts.
I think people here don’t distinguish enough between “X is a socially harmful arms race but given something to protect it’s an obvious good idea to participate” and “X is not a socially harmful arms race”.