Some thoughts that come to mind (epistemic state: 1 a.m.):
In common-language terms, if we rate people’s goodness from 0 to 100, where 50 is neutral, then “good” might mean “≥60“, and “bad” mean “≤40” (heh, those happen to be the exact numbers KOTOR uses for dark side / light side alignment). Then “not bad” means “>40″, which is in fact a weaker condition than “good”. I think something similar could be said for many conditions that aren’t a rigid binary. So it is often legitimate that “not anti-X” is easier to defend than “X”.
Some have observed that some people use sarcasm or humor to “hide” or “deflect” when the first group are trying to discuss something serious. Generally, saying “Oh yeah, I totally X” is sarcasm-speak for “not X”, which doesn’t rule much out, and especially if X is outlandish, it communicates very little new info.
Orwell’s Politics and the English Language mentions, among other things, the “not un-” formation (e.g. “a not unjustifiable assumption”) as one of the bad language habits he sees; a major complaint is that these habits make communication more vague—less meaningful. 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. Excerpting:
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.
[...] simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself [bold added]. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
[...] In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
On the scenarios described and stuff:
The green/purple example could also be described as the green advocate privileging a certain hypothesis, or arrogating the right to choose the null hypothesis.
In the absence of your post, I would describe people who do that kind of stuff and win arguments as a result (while leaving their interlocutors unsatisfied, and possibly thinking of counterarguments after the meeting is over) as “being really good at arguing”. I had a secondhand account of a striking case of this from someone at work, and have observed less-striking cases of him doing it elsewhere. I note the guy climbed the corporate ladder reasonably quickly; he is also quite smart and driven.
The general “being really good at arguing” thing, and possibly “being good at maneuvering” (including such measures as, say, organizing a meeting to discuss a decision, then taking up most of the time with a presentation you’ve prepared, and giving the other person 5 minutes toward the end to state their side), probably involves lots of skills; the “double negation framing” tactic is one among many.
Setting the Zero Point seems related (haven’t read the whole thing), also links to others. Probably various other essays have mentioned at least similar things in the past. Not sure about the best way(s) to name and think about the stuff.
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.
Some thoughts that come to mind (epistemic state: 1 a.m.):
In common-language terms, if we rate people’s goodness from 0 to 100, where 50 is neutral, then “good” might mean “≥60“, and “bad” mean “≤40” (heh, those happen to be the exact numbers KOTOR uses for dark side / light side alignment). Then “not bad” means “>40″, which is in fact a weaker condition than “good”. I think something similar could be said for many conditions that aren’t a rigid binary. So it is often legitimate that “not anti-X” is easier to defend than “X”.
Some have observed that some people use sarcasm or humor to “hide” or “deflect” when the first group are trying to discuss something serious. Generally, saying “Oh yeah, I totally X” is sarcasm-speak for “not X”, which doesn’t rule much out, and especially if X is outlandish, it communicates very little new info.
Orwell’s Politics and the English Language mentions, among other things, the “not un-” formation (e.g. “a not unjustifiable assumption”) as one of the bad language habits he sees; a major complaint is that these habits make communication more vague—less meaningful. 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. Excerpting:
On the scenarios described and stuff:
The green/purple example could also be described as the green advocate privileging a certain hypothesis, or arrogating the right to choose the null hypothesis.
In the absence of your post, I would describe people who do that kind of stuff and win arguments as a result (while leaving their interlocutors unsatisfied, and possibly thinking of counterarguments after the meeting is over) as “being really good at arguing”. I had a secondhand account of a striking case of this from someone at work, and have observed less-striking cases of him doing it elsewhere. I note the guy climbed the corporate ladder reasonably quickly; he is also quite smart and driven.
The general “being really good at arguing” thing, and possibly “being good at maneuvering” (including such measures as, say, organizing a meeting to discuss a decision, then taking up most of the time with a presentation you’ve prepared, and giving the other person 5 minutes toward the end to state their side), probably involves lots of skills; the “double negation framing” tactic is one among many.
Setting the Zero Point seems related (haven’t read the whole thing), also links to others. Probably various other essays have mentioned at least similar things in the past. Not sure about the best way(s) to name and think about the stuff.
You’re not wrong, and I don’t disagree!
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.