If the argument is sound under careful, critical consideration, and you approve of its motivation, then allow the emotional appeal to move you.
My instinctive feeling is that there is often a real dichotomy between emotional and rational argument-based appeals. When constructing your message, if you use one approach heavily enough you do so at the expense of the other.
If that’s true, then dismissing all the emotional parts of an “emotional appeal” will often not leave the strongest “rational”, non-emotional argument behind. Sometimes removing all the emotion won’t leave behind an argument at all! To judge non-emotionally, you’d be better off looking for non-emotional messages the same source has targeted at other audiences which are perceived to shun emotional appeals, such as scientifical publications.
Now, why is there a dichotomy in the first place? I don’t think it’s mainly due to choice between different styles of argument (emotional vs. non-emotional). I suspect it’s due to bias in the listeners.
We Lesswrongers know that rationality (truth) and emotions are orthogonal and complementary, rather than opposite and exclusive. But most people have the Spock mental model of “rationality” or “cold sober facts”. So I conjecture that when such people hear an emotional appeal, and in the middle of it a cold hard fact, the mere presence of that fact and of the appeal to rationality detracts from the power of the main emotional-appeal story—even if the fact is an excellent and convincing one. And conversely, when people are listening to a fact-based “rational” appeal, inserting emotion will lower their confidence and agreement—even when the emotion is a wholly appropriate one.
I submit this as my instinctive appraisal, I don’t have hard data like deliberate studies to back it up.
My instinctive feeling is that there is often a real dichotomy between emotional and rational argument-based appeals. When constructing your message, if you use one approach heavily enough you do so at the expense of the other.
If that’s true, then dismissing all the emotional parts of an “emotional appeal” will often not leave the strongest “rational”, non-emotional argument behind. Sometimes removing all the emotion won’t leave behind an argument at all! To judge non-emotionally, you’d be better off looking for non-emotional messages the same source has targeted at other audiences which are perceived to shun emotional appeals, such as scientifical publications.
Now, why is there a dichotomy in the first place? I don’t think it’s mainly due to choice between different styles of argument (emotional vs. non-emotional). I suspect it’s due to bias in the listeners.
We Lesswrongers know that rationality (truth) and emotions are orthogonal and complementary, rather than opposite and exclusive. But most people have the Spock mental model of “rationality” or “cold sober facts”. So I conjecture that when such people hear an emotional appeal, and in the middle of it a cold hard fact, the mere presence of that fact and of the appeal to rationality detracts from the power of the main emotional-appeal story—even if the fact is an excellent and convincing one. And conversely, when people are listening to a fact-based “rational” appeal, inserting emotion will lower their confidence and agreement—even when the emotion is a wholly appropriate one.
I submit this as my instinctive appraisal, I don’t have hard data like deliberate studies to back it up.