Regarding the separation between “being correct” and “being persuasive” and whether the latter is a “Dark Art”. I think that there are two different types of “being persuasive”. The first type is, being good at communicating your knowledge and ideas to other people. The second type is, being good at getting people to agree with you about something.
To put it differently, the first skill is about playing a game where you win when both you and your rationally combine your evidence and update towards a common position, or at least more similar positions. This might involve either your interlocutor changing eir position, or your changing your position, or both of you changing your positions. The second skill is about playing a game where you win when your interlocutor agrees with your initial position, regardless of its objective merit.
The first is definitely an important skill, because most intellectual projects are collaborative and any intellectual project has to produce comprehensible output in order to be useful for society. The second is very different, since, from its perspective, it doesn’t matter why the interlocutor agrees and it doesn’t even matter whether it’s something you believe yourself or just want other people to believe. In particular, it easily allows for deceit and manipulation as long as you don’t expect it to backfire. I think that the second skill (or, the part of the second skill which is not redundant w.r.t. the first skill) is definitely a “Dark Art” in the sense that, although it is still valuable consequentially, it might easily run into ethical problems and/or harm your own ability to think rationally (since you might start lying to yourself in order to improve your ability to lie to others).
I am reminded of Guided by the Beauty of our Weapons. Specifically, it seems like we want to encourage forms of rhetoric that are disproportionately persuasive when deployed by someone who is in fact right.
Something like “make the structure of your argument clear” is probably good (since it will make bad arguments look bad), “use vivid examples” is unclear (can draw people’s attention to the crux of your argument, or distract from it), “tone and posture” are probably bad (because the effect is symmetrical).
So a good test is “would this have an equal effect on the persuasiveness of my speech if I was making an invalid point?”. If the answer is no, then do it; otherwise maybe not.
If I put on my cynical hat, it looks like there’s going to be lots of (regressional) goodharting on persuasiveness here. If you look at those who are the *most* believed when they say things on important matters, or the people whose ideas *most* dominate the conversation, its probably significantly because they maxed out other variables that go into ‘speaking/writing well’ which aren’t just ‘good communication of true and useful things’.
To point to a concrete example of the former, it seems like Peter Singer makes a number of plain factual errors in his writings that reverse the conclusions of his arguments (1, 2). A friend recently suggested to me that Singer likes to take on the frame of ‘reasonable person against the incoherent, screaming masses’, regardless of the truth of his arguments. I’m not confident in that read of him, but it doesn’t seem obviously implausible to me as a tactic a person of the first type would use in current society.
(Homework is to apply such analysis to other public intellectuals like Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, etc.)
To point to concrete examples of the latter… well, the space of ‘things that successfully grab our attention’ feels super vague to me right now, so instead let me point to examples of fairly good things that nonetheless have had to compete very strongly in that domain. LastWeekTonight feels like the obvious one (while I don’t trust it a great deal, it is better than much of its natural competition in that it learns toward discussing apartisan matters, and often in lots of detail). What’s more, WaitButWhy has found that order to get people to take seriously the destruction of all value forever, you have to be funny and do cutesy drawings, and it seems like Eliezer and Scott have had to be incredibly fun writers in order to be read quite so much.
(And yup, because of regressional goodharting and conservation of expected evidence, this is also Bayesian evidence that their ideas are not as true/novel as you previously thought.)
...I notice my comment doesn’t obviously read as a reply to yours. It was inspired by asking the cynical question “What if there’s an arms race / race to the bottom in persuasiveness, and you have to pick up all the symmetrical weapons others use and then use asymmetrical weapons on top of those?”
Added: Unrelated questions: Why do LastWeekTonight, WaitButWhy, and SlateStarCodex all have three words in their titles? What’s more, why do Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson all have an ‘S’ or a ‘P’ in their initials?!
“What if there’s an arms race / race to the bottom in persuasiveness, and you have to pick up all the symmetrical weapons others use and then use asymmetrical weapons on top of those?”
Doesn’t this question apply to other cases of symmetric/asymmetric weapons just as much?
I think the argument is that you want to try and avoid the arms race by getting everyone to agree to stick to symmetrical weapons because they believe it’ll benefit them (because they’re right). This may not work if they don’t actually believe they’re right and are just using persuasion as a tool, but I think it’s something we could establish as a community norm in restricted circles at least.
Regarding the separation between “being correct” and “being persuasive” and whether the latter is a “Dark Art”. I think that there are two different types of “being persuasive”. The first type is, being good at communicating your knowledge and ideas to other people. The second type is, being good at getting people to agree with you about something.
To put it differently, the first skill is about playing a game where you win when both you and your rationally combine your evidence and update towards a common position, or at least more similar positions. This might involve either your interlocutor changing eir position, or your changing your position, or both of you changing your positions. The second skill is about playing a game where you win when your interlocutor agrees with your initial position, regardless of its objective merit.
The first is definitely an important skill, because most intellectual projects are collaborative and any intellectual project has to produce comprehensible output in order to be useful for society. The second is very different, since, from its perspective, it doesn’t matter why the interlocutor agrees and it doesn’t even matter whether it’s something you believe yourself or just want other people to believe. In particular, it easily allows for deceit and manipulation as long as you don’t expect it to backfire. I think that the second skill (or, the part of the second skill which is not redundant w.r.t. the first skill) is definitely a “Dark Art” in the sense that, although it is still valuable consequentially, it might easily run into ethical problems and/or harm your own ability to think rationally (since you might start lying to yourself in order to improve your ability to lie to others).
I am reminded of Guided by the Beauty of our Weapons. Specifically, it seems like we want to encourage forms of rhetoric that are disproportionately persuasive when deployed by someone who is in fact right.
Something like “make the structure of your argument clear” is probably good (since it will make bad arguments look bad), “use vivid examples” is unclear (can draw people’s attention to the crux of your argument, or distract from it), “tone and posture” are probably bad (because the effect is symmetrical).
So a good test is “would this have an equal effect on the persuasiveness of my speech if I was making an invalid point?”. If the answer is no, then do it; otherwise maybe not.
If I put on my cynical hat, it looks like there’s going to be lots of (regressional) goodharting on persuasiveness here. If you look at those who are the *most* believed when they say things on important matters, or the people whose ideas *most* dominate the conversation, its probably significantly because they maxed out other variables that go into ‘speaking/writing well’ which aren’t just ‘good communication of true and useful things’.
To point to a concrete example of the former, it seems like Peter Singer makes a number of plain factual errors in his writings that reverse the conclusions of his arguments (1, 2). A friend recently suggested to me that Singer likes to take on the frame of ‘reasonable person against the incoherent, screaming masses’, regardless of the truth of his arguments. I’m not confident in that read of him, but it doesn’t seem obviously implausible to me as a tactic a person of the first type would use in current society.
(Homework is to apply such analysis to other public intellectuals like Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, etc.)
To point to concrete examples of the latter… well, the space of ‘things that successfully grab our attention’ feels super vague to me right now, so instead let me point to examples of fairly good things that nonetheless have had to compete very strongly in that domain. LastWeekTonight feels like the obvious one (while I don’t trust it a great deal, it is better than much of its natural competition in that it learns toward discussing apartisan matters, and often in lots of detail). What’s more, WaitButWhy has found that order to get people to take seriously the destruction of all value forever, you have to be funny and do cutesy drawings, and it seems like Eliezer and Scott have had to be incredibly fun writers in order to be read quite so much.
(And yup, because of regressional goodharting and conservation of expected evidence, this is also Bayesian evidence that their ideas are not as true/novel as you previously thought.)
...I notice my comment doesn’t obviously read as a reply to yours. It was inspired by asking the cynical question “What if there’s an arms race / race to the bottom in persuasiveness, and you have to pick up all the symmetrical weapons others use and then use asymmetrical weapons on top of those?”
Added: Unrelated questions: Why do LastWeekTonight, WaitButWhy, and SlateStarCodex all have three words in their titles? What’s more, why do Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson all have an ‘S’ or a ‘P’ in their initials?!
Now I’m imagining the unparalleled amount of readers I will get once I start my new blog, SuperPersuasiveSoliloquies.
I realise we should have called our project, not LessWrong 2, but MoreLessWrong.
LessWrongExtra
MoreOrLessWrong
ProbablyLessWrong
StatisticallyLessWrong
MakeLessWrongAgain
ExtraLessWrong
SuperLessWrong
Doesn’t this question apply to other cases of symmetric/asymmetric weapons just as much?
I think the argument is that you want to try and avoid the arms race by getting everyone to agree to stick to symmetrical weapons because they believe it’ll benefit them (because they’re right). This may not work if they don’t actually believe they’re right and are just using persuasion as a tool, but I think it’s something we could establish as a community norm in restricted circles at least.