Do you treat “the dark arts” as a set of generally forbidden behaviors, or as problematic only in specific contexts?
As a war of good and evil or as the result of trade-offs between epistemic rationality and other values?
Do you shun deception and manipulation, seek to identify contexts where they’re ok or wrong, or embrace them as a key to succeeding in life?
Do you find the dark arts dull, interesting, or key to understanding the world, regardless of whether or not you employ them?
Asymmetric weapons may be the only source of edge for the truth itself. But should the side of the truth therefore eschew symmetric weapons?
What is the value of the label/metaphor “dark arts/dark side?” Why the normative stance right from the outset? Isn’t the use of this phrase, with all its implications of evil intent or moral turpitude, itself an example of the dark arts? An attempt to halt the workings of other minds, or of our own?
There are things like “lying for a good cause”, which is a textbook example of what will go horribly wrong because you almost certainly underestimate the second-order effects. Like the “do not wear face masks, they are useless” expert advice for COVID-19, which was a “clever” dark-arts move aimed to prevent people from buying up necessary medical supplies. A few months later, hundreds of thousands have died (also) thanks to this advice.
(It would probably be useful to compile a list of lying for a good cause gone wrong, just to drive home this point.)
Thinking about historical record of people promoting the use of dark arts within rationalist community, consider Intentional Insights. Turned out, the organization was also using the dark arts against the rationalist community itself. (There is a more general lesson here: whenever a fan of dark arts tries to make you see the wisdom of their ways, you should assume that at this very moment they are probably already using the same techniques on you. Why wouldn’t they, given their expressed belief that this is the right thing to do?)
The general problem with lying is that people are bad at keeping multiple independent models of the world in their brains. The easiest, instinctive way to convince others about something is to start believing it yourself. Today you decide that X is a strategic lie necessary for achieving goal Y, and tomorrow you realize that actually X is more correct than you originally assumed (this is how self-deception feels from inside). This is in conflict with our goal to understand the world better. Also, how would you strategically lie as a group? Post it openly online: “Hey, we are going to spread the lie X for instrumental reasons, don’t tell anyone!” :)
Then there are things like “using techniques-orthogonal-to-truth to promote true things”. Here I am quite guilty myself, because I have long ago advocated turning the Sequences into a book, reasoning, among other things, that for many people, a book is inherently higher-status than a website. Obviously, converting a website to a book doesn’t increase its truth value. This comes with smaller risks, such as getting high on your own supply (convincing ourselves that articles in the book are inherently more valuable than those that didn’t make it for whatever reason, e.g. being written after the book was published), or wasting too many resources on things that are not our goal.
But at least, in this category, one can openly and correctly describe their beliefs and goals.
Metaphorically, reason is traditionally associated with vision/light (e.g. “enlightenment”), ignorance and deception with blindness/darkness. The “dark side” also references Star Wars, which this nerdy audience is familiar with. So, if the use of the term itself is an example of dark arts (which I suppose it is), at least it is the type where I can openly explain how it works and why we do it, without ruining its effect.
But does it make us update too far against the use of deception? Uhm, I don’t know what is the optimal amount of deception. Unlike Kant, I don’t believe it’s literally zero. I also believe that people err on the side of lying more than is optimal, so a nudge in the opposite direction is on average an improvement, but I don’t have a proof for this.
We already had words for lies, exaggerations, incoherence, and advertising. Along with a rich discourse of nuanced critiques and defenses of each one.
The term “dark arts” seems to lump all these together, then uses cherry picked examples of the worst ones to write them all off. It lacks the virtue of precision. We explicitly discourage this way of thinking in other areas. Why do we allow it here?
Do you treat “the dark arts” as a set of generally forbidden behaviors, or as problematic only in specific contexts?
As a war of good and evil or as the result of trade-offs between epistemic rationality and other values?
Do you shun deception and manipulation, seek to identify contexts where they’re ok or wrong, or embrace them as a key to succeeding in life?
Do you find the dark arts dull, interesting, or key to understanding the world, regardless of whether or not you employ them?
Asymmetric weapons may be the only source of edge for the truth itself. But should the side of the truth therefore eschew symmetric weapons?
What is the value of the label/metaphor “dark arts/dark side?” Why the normative stance right from the outset? Isn’t the use of this phrase, with all its implications of evil intent or moral turpitude, itself an example of the dark arts? An attempt to halt the workings of other minds, or of our own?
There are things like “lying for a good cause”, which is a textbook example of what will go horribly wrong because you almost certainly underestimate the second-order effects. Like the “do not wear face masks, they are useless” expert advice for COVID-19, which was a “clever” dark-arts move aimed to prevent people from buying up necessary medical supplies. A few months later, hundreds of thousands have died (also) thanks to this advice.
(It would probably be useful to compile a list of lying for a good cause gone wrong, just to drive home this point.)
Thinking about historical record of people promoting the use of dark arts within rationalist community, consider Intentional Insights. Turned out, the organization was also using the dark arts against the rationalist community itself. (There is a more general lesson here: whenever a fan of dark arts tries to make you see the wisdom of their ways, you should assume that at this very moment they are probably already using the same techniques on you. Why wouldn’t they, given their expressed belief that this is the right thing to do?)
The general problem with lying is that people are bad at keeping multiple independent models of the world in their brains. The easiest, instinctive way to convince others about something is to start believing it yourself. Today you decide that X is a strategic lie necessary for achieving goal Y, and tomorrow you realize that actually X is more correct than you originally assumed (this is how self-deception feels from inside). This is in conflict with our goal to understand the world better. Also, how would you strategically lie as a group? Post it openly online: “Hey, we are going to spread the lie X for instrumental reasons, don’t tell anyone!” :)
Then there are things like “using techniques-orthogonal-to-truth to promote true things”. Here I am quite guilty myself, because I have long ago advocated turning the Sequences into a book, reasoning, among other things, that for many people, a book is inherently higher-status than a website. Obviously, converting a website to a book doesn’t increase its truth value. This comes with smaller risks, such as getting high on your own supply (convincing ourselves that articles in the book are inherently more valuable than those that didn’t make it for whatever reason, e.g. being written after the book was published), or wasting too many resources on things that are not our goal.
But at least, in this category, one can openly and correctly describe their beliefs and goals.
Metaphorically, reason is traditionally associated with vision/light (e.g. “enlightenment”), ignorance and deception with blindness/darkness. The “dark side” also references Star Wars, which this nerdy audience is familiar with. So, if the use of the term itself is an example of dark arts (which I suppose it is), at least it is the type where I can openly explain how it works and why we do it, without ruining its effect.
But does it make us update too far against the use of deception? Uhm, I don’t know what is the optimal amount of deception. Unlike Kant, I don’t believe it’s literally zero. I also believe that people err on the side of lying more than is optimal, so a nudge in the opposite direction is on average an improvement, but I don’t have a proof for this.
We already had words for lies, exaggerations, incoherence, and advertising. Along with a rich discourse of nuanced critiques and defenses of each one.
The term “dark arts” seems to lump all these together, then uses cherry picked examples of the worst ones to write them all off. It lacks the virtue of precision. We explicitly discourage this way of thinking in other areas. Why do we allow it here?