By “via rationality” I assume you mean “via logical argument or sound science”, which is an absurd substitution. Rationalists should win. The Dark Arts therefore are a type of instrumental rationality. That said, I still disagree, at least for some irrational people (let’s roughly say anyone I could convince to eating a food that gives them a stomachache).
They can be convinced they should study [instrumental] rationality, it just requires you present unreasonably large amounts of evidence and don’t use logical inference or experiments. (And when I say unreasonably large, that’s for people in college studying science. For merely average twenty-somethings, you may need to beat them over the head with solid bricks of evidence.) Caveat: I do not often interact with allegedly common people who don’t meet the minimum bar of adjusting expectations based on (sufficient) observation, so this comment does not apply to such persons. It is still a useful comment.
I.e. look, I used this thingy called rationality and I made/saved thousands of dollars, got a boyfriend, and fixed significant mental problems. Seemed to work for me okay. You need to go REALLY overkill on the evidence for non-science folks though. Again, beat them over the head with it. Make it something that will help them personally, too. I’ve found it useful to get people to agree (not verbally and aloud, though that’s an interesting experiment) that whatever mysterious method I used to I do that, it would be a good thing to learn, BEFORE I revealed that the answer is something weird or “educational” sounding. This second half is only slightly dark-artsy (consistency bias).
I’ve studied game theory and rationality, and I don’t use game theory even when applying rationality to game design! I’ve used some of the nontechnical results (threats, from Shelling’s book) to negotiate and precommit but that’s about it. Has someone else used game theory in real life?
Unless someone else responds to this comment, my guess is that this topic is of greater interest to readers than it is of any use.