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.
Well, replacing “X” with “not anti-X” makes it a weaker statement, and it’s quicker, easier, and less risky to make a weaker statement when you’re writing in a political or corporate environment.
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.
Going off localdeity’s comment, I think “arrogating the right to choose the null hypothesis” or as you said, “assuming the burden of proof” are more critical than whether the frame involves negations. If you want to win an argument, don’t argue, make the other person do the arguing by asking lots of questions, even questions phrased as statements, and then just say whatever claim they make isn’t convincing enough. Why should purple be better than green? An eminently reasonable question! But one whose answer will never have satisfactory support, unless you want it to. “I’m just asking questions.”
It’s good for you to point out that the true statement localdeity offered and your conclusion seem in contention. It is a weaker statement, so if you are being asked for your opinion, you may want to hedge with that negation. If you are actually trying to convince someone of something though (and this is why I think you rightly believe these are about subtly different things), that is not the way to do it. You could make the stronger claim, or alternately, you could phrase it as a question—“why shouldn’t we do anti-X?” (but notice it would also work without the negation: “why should we do X?”) and get them to do the arguing for you.
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.
It was a good post! To the extent that whatever I said was value-added or convincing to you, it was only because your quality post prompted me to lay it out.
And like you said, perhaps there is more here. Does a negative (vs. positive) frame make it harder to notice (or easier to forget) that there is a null hypothesis? Preliminary evidence in favor is that people who “own” the null will cede it in a negative frame, whereas they tend to retain it in a positive frame. More thinking/research may be needed though to feel confident about that (I say that as a scientist starting with the null effect of no difference, not as someone proponing the hypothesis of no difference).
“It’s not sufficient to be right in many contexts, you must also be rhetorically persuasive.” Spittin’ facts.
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.
Going off localdeity’s comment, I think “arrogating the right to choose the null hypothesis” or as you said, “assuming the burden of proof” are more critical than whether the frame involves negations. If you want to win an argument, don’t argue, make the other person do the arguing by asking lots of questions, even questions phrased as statements, and then just say whatever claim they make isn’t convincing enough. Why should purple be better than green? An eminently reasonable question! But one whose answer will never have satisfactory support, unless you want it to. “I’m just asking questions.”
It’s good for you to point out that the true statement localdeity offered and your conclusion seem in contention. It is a weaker statement, so if you are being asked for your opinion, you may want to hedge with that negation. If you are actually trying to convince someone of something though (and this is why I think you rightly believe these are about subtly different things), that is not the way to do it. You could make the stronger claim, or alternately, you could phrase it as a question—“why shouldn’t we do anti-X?” (but notice it would also work without the negation: “why should we do X?”) and get them to do the arguing for you.
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.
It was a good post! To the extent that whatever I said was value-added or convincing to you, it was only because your quality post prompted me to lay it out.
And like you said, perhaps there is more here. Does a negative (vs. positive) frame make it harder to notice (or easier to forget) that there is a null hypothesis? Preliminary evidence in favor is that people who “own” the null will cede it in a negative frame, whereas they tend to retain it in a positive frame. More thinking/research may be needed though to feel confident about that (I say that as a scientist starting with the null effect of no difference, not as someone proponing the hypothesis of no difference).
“It’s not sufficient to be right in many contexts, you must also be rhetorically persuasive.” Spittin’ facts.