The reason I’m saying that it isn’t manipulation to counter biases or provide facts even when the facts clearly favor a decision is that these don’t feel like manipulation.
I grow more uncertain, rather than less, as I read your explanation. It sounds like you’re simply working backwards from your intuitions about what feels like manipulation: if I direct your attention in ways that feel manipulative, for example, you class it as “massive misdirection,” otherwise you don’t.
Human definitions aren’t nice, simple, logical, syntactically correct meanings for words—often they’re defined more as “I’ll know it when I see it”. When I want to figure out my own definition for a word, I have to carefully analyze different scenarios where the word applies and doesn’t apply, and try to figure out a definition that fits. Even this is incomplete as it doesn’t account for connotations and subtext. (Once I saw a TV show where they made a reference to sex using the words “play parcheesi”. The meaning was entirely clear despite that I’ve never heard of such a connotation before. Similarly, in the sentence “It’s cold outside, let me go grab my goat”, the word “goat” usually means “a misspelling of ‘coat’” even if that is not what the dictionary says.)
So, my intuition tells me that it is not manipulation to bias someone’s decision-making process towards their normal state if their current state is highly unbalanced due to drugs or emotion. The connotation of manipulation as being negative tells me that helping people make an obviously good decision shouldn’t have a negative connotation, and so shouldn’t be categorized as manipulation.
Ah, I see. So, sure, you’re welcome to your lexical intuitions, and you’re welcome to talk about “manipulation” while referring to the fuzzy concept your lexical intuitions point to. That’s what most people do in casual conversation. And when talking to someone whose intuitions differ from ours we either get derailed into discussing what “manipulation” really means, or we find some other way to talk about the concepts in question, or we fail to communicate at all, and that works more or less OK for our purposes much of the time.
Your original comment made it sound like you were trying to be more rigorous than that… sorry to confuse the issue.
The connotation of manipulation as being negative tells me that helping people make an obviously good decision shouldn’t have a negative connotation, and so shouldn’t be categorized as manipulation.
Oh,boy.
Let me suggest that the set of “obviously good decisions” is much narrower than you seem to think. And that is even ignoring the elephant of an observation that other people’s ideas of “good decisions” are likely to be significantly different from yours.
I grow more uncertain, rather than less, as I read your explanation. It sounds like you’re simply working backwards from your intuitions about what feels like manipulation: if I direct your attention in ways that feel manipulative, for example, you class it as “massive misdirection,” otherwise you don’t.
Human definitions aren’t nice, simple, logical, syntactically correct meanings for words—often they’re defined more as “I’ll know it when I see it”. When I want to figure out my own definition for a word, I have to carefully analyze different scenarios where the word applies and doesn’t apply, and try to figure out a definition that fits. Even this is incomplete as it doesn’t account for connotations and subtext. (Once I saw a TV show where they made a reference to sex using the words “play parcheesi”. The meaning was entirely clear despite that I’ve never heard of such a connotation before. Similarly, in the sentence “It’s cold outside, let me go grab my goat”, the word “goat” usually means “a misspelling of ‘coat’” even if that is not what the dictionary says.)
So, my intuition tells me that it is not manipulation to bias someone’s decision-making process towards their normal state if their current state is highly unbalanced due to drugs or emotion. The connotation of manipulation as being negative tells me that helping people make an obviously good decision shouldn’t have a negative connotation, and so shouldn’t be categorized as manipulation.
Ah, I see. So, sure, you’re welcome to your lexical intuitions, and you’re welcome to talk about “manipulation” while referring to the fuzzy concept your lexical intuitions point to. That’s what most people do in casual conversation. And when talking to someone whose intuitions differ from ours we either get derailed into discussing what “manipulation” really means, or we find some other way to talk about the concepts in question, or we fail to communicate at all, and that works more or less OK for our purposes much of the time.
Your original comment made it sound like you were trying to be more rigorous than that… sorry to confuse the issue.
Oh,boy.
Let me suggest that the set of “obviously good decisions” is much narrower than you seem to think. And that is even ignoring the elephant of an observation that other people’s ideas of “good decisions” are likely to be significantly different from yours.