[HN Gopher] Against Persuasion
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Against Persuasion
Author : Petiver
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-07-28 05:44 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bostonreview.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (bostonreview.net)
| 09bjb wrote:
| The sarcastic question that popped into my head was, OK, then
| what are the preconditions for becoming open to being persuaded?
| How do people develop a higher degree of openness? Then I
| thought...maybe if you're not being bombarded with opinions that
| are aggressively trying to convince you of something, you'll
| explore the world in a more open way, looking constantly for the
| next informational morsel that will evolve your mental schema of
| the world.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I agree with you that the feeling of being bombarded or
| manipulated causes people to close off and deny the opportunity
| to be persuaded. Another factor might be fear - if people feel
| that something they value is threatened by the other side's
| position, they will react to it like a cornered animal. I guess
| that means people can only be persuaded when something doesn't
| matter existentially to them?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| People only have so much mental bandwidth. If you lived
| completely alone, and one day someone walked up and started
| talking to you, and it was the only person you'd seen that
| month, you might take hours to talk to that person. You might
| thoughtfully consider their position, even if you didn't
| agree with it.
|
| We don't live in that world. Even here on HN, there are
| sometimes really strident voices trying very aggressively to
| advocate and defend their viewpoint. But it's worse off of
| HN. It's everywhere. It's social media, and TV, and
| advertising, and spam phone calls, and and and. Nobody has
| time to fairly consider even a small fraction of the attempts
| to persuade us. We just reject without consideration all
| these attempts, because it's the only way to keep any kind of
| space for ourselves in our own heads.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Much of openness is what you are born with. Seriously. You have
| a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over
| your life.
|
| There are ways to "picking the lock" however, as another part.
| That's the basis of marketing and sales. The processes are very
| well defined though the results are stochastic rather than
| deterministic. Hence marketing and sales are "number games".
|
| But such techniques are merely tools without specific morality
| or ethics - never give the human a free pass on morality or
| ethics because only humans can make such decisions.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| > You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom
| changes much over your life
|
| Which studies?
|
| This sounds like one of those new-agey empathic business
| tutorials which are actually hidden racism, classism and
| eugenicism 101s.
| mistermann wrote:
| > You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom
| changes much over your life.
|
| Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about
| a wide variety of things that we now take for
| granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing,
| and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking
| _to a certain degree of competency_ is innate in human
| beings, but exceptionally skillful thinking in things like
| logic and epistemology must be learned...but for people to
| learn them, they must be taught. As it is, numerous errors
| can be easily found even in intellectual spaces online,
| demonstrating that even the cream of the crop is far from
| perfect....and as for the less intellectual places (the
| overwhelming majority), well we 're all familiar with how bad
| those are.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, for my part, I have a couple of things that have helped
| me here (determined by change in outcome post-intervention
| which I, unfortunately, cannot share):
|
| 1. I know Aumann's Agreement Theorem and the appropriate lemmas
| about information transfer and prior modification (i.e. if I
| start failing to modify my priors with repeated conversation, I
| am failing or the other person is failing, either of which
| leads to our conversation failing at converging => we should
| exit)
|
| 2. I try to place myself in situations where the difference in
| outcome is a large multiple of the difference in knowledge of
| reality. This biases me to accept input well, since I want
| positive outcome and biology will ruthlessly optimize me toward
| it. Not every situation is like this. Sometimes, the part of
| reality you want to optimize against is specifically the
| people, ignoring the underlying reality. e.g. Though I had a
| respirator with P100 filters on all exhale and inhale valves I
| took it off and wore my standard N95 mask when on a plane when
| asked to. The truth didn't matter there as much as the part of
| the truth which is "don't piss off flight attendants".
|
| 3. I force skin in the game. For instance, I took all my money
| out of Vanguard and actively managed it in 2019 on a 5x lever.
| My idea was that I could beat the market, and I did. I also
| believed in early Feb that despite having advance warning from
| my friends in Asia about COVID-19 that it was a huge deal, that
| American bureaucracy was likely to be sophisticated and
| evidence-based. Since I knew the correct actions to be taken in
| response, I assumed they knew, and I assumed they had the
| wherewithal to make it happen. It appears that none of these
| things are true. But it was a good lesson. It helps me
| understand how some people I am distantly related to make all
| that money on defence contracts in Virginia - the bureaucracy
| is actually _not_ sophisticated, it is merely large.
|
| 4. I model us all as message-passing elements that incur a cost
| per message. I make a good effort to pass you information that
| has been effective to me to encourage you to do so to me.
| Multiple elements doing so will lead to easier misinformation
| detection, less variance in information availability, etc. This
| is good for me since I am a very capable execution machine. I
| can only lose in the world in the ways I care about because I
| don't have information, not because I can't execute.
|
| The consequence of the message-passing element idea is that I
| don't try to convince, i.e. if I know that there is a red apple
| at the corner of Bush and Sansome and I tell you this and you
| say "oh yeah? Prove it!" I will not attempt to do so. I have
| given you the information but the cost of ensuring good
| provenance is high in an untrusted information network with few
| repeated interactions. So, what I do is that I attempt to
| repeat interactions as frequently as possible with a limited
| set of elements so that provenance-information is cached and I
| am operating on the trusted subnetwork. For my part, I try to
| make falsifiable claims so that other people can either add or
| remove me from their trust network. For HN, I have an extension
| that removes comment-threads started by low-information low-
| provenance individuals. I know I will fail sometimes at not
| being one of these people and I'll accept that risk and let
| others choose to do the same to me.
| analog31 wrote:
| My rule is that I'm open to changing my mind, but on my own
| timetable and with no obligation to provide any feedback to the
| persuader. For instance, my time constant for updating my views
| is longer than one election or marketing cycle.
|
| Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by
| being the most skilled debater.
| bamboo2 wrote:
| Psychedelics.
| coding123 wrote:
| I think the largest problem of persuasion right now is that no
| one (left or right) is willing to really try to understand what
| it is like in the shoes of the other. Until we get past that,
| we're just going to keep fighting. The only ones that see this
| are those that recently switched sides (aka usually moderates).
| nonomaybeyes wrote:
| I don't think it's that symmetric. Generally it's the faction
| that holds the power that doesn't want to consider anything
| other than its own perspective. The lower factions understand
| the perspectives of the others perfectly well.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| In the current situation in the US, which faction holds the
| power?
|
| I would say neither clearly holds the power. The Senate is
| split 50-50. The conservatives hold the Supreme Court, and
| the liberals hold the House and the Presidency. And those
| have flipped in recent elections. So both sides are fighting
| as hard as they can, because they are _this close_ to winning
| control. But "fighting as hard as you can" is not conducive
| to thoughtfully listening to the other side.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Very true. The amount of energy spent on trying to persuade or
| vilify the "other" side is much higher than the effort that's
| put into really understanding issues and trying to come up with
| solutions.
| jfengel wrote:
| The way I see it, the left tried really, really hard for a long
| time. They probably tried badly, but they did try. The
| intellectual left loves to pump out articles and books trying
| to explain right-wing thought:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind
| https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-d...
| (paywall)
|
| Whereas books by prominent conservatives tend to have titles
| like "Demonic : How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America" and
| "Liberal Fascism : The Secret History of the American Left,
| from Mussolini to the Politics of Change". (Not that the left
| doesn't produce books with similar titles, but they don't get
| wide distribution, while you've heard of Ann Coulter and Jonah
| Goldberg).
|
| Your statement is probably true, but it's as a matter of self-
| fulfilling prophecy. If one side insists long enough that that
| the other side is literally evil, they _won 't_ be understood
| no matter how hard their opponents try.
|
| Every time liberals lose elections, there is hand-wringing
| about understanding the other side. But I've never seen the
| equivalent worry about how conservatives can understand
| liberals. Instead, the response is usually to do the same thing
| even harder -- which works, because it generates enthusiastic
| support from the far right and grudging support from the
| center, while compromise bores everybody.
|
| It eventually resulted in Trump, whose primary skill is in
| being deliberately offensive. And it would have worked again,
| had a literal pandemic not intervened. He remains incredibly
| popular with the right -- not because he tries to understand
| liberals, but because he specifically rejects the notion that
| there's anything there to understand.
|
| This conclusion is repugnant, and I rejected it for a very long
| time. But it seems inescapable. And I have no idea what to
| recommend, because it seems clear that no amount of me trying
| harder to understand is going to help. I do believe, however,
| that additional calls for equivalence are detrimental. They
| deny the reality that the split is asymmetric, and therefore
| shunt us into lines of thought that will continue to prove
| ineffective.
| AS37 wrote:
| > The intellectual left loves to pump out articles and books
| trying to explain right-wing thought: ...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind
|
| > Every time liberals lose elections, there is hand-wringing
| about understanding the other side. But I've never seen the
| equivalent worry about how conservatives can understand
| liberals.
|
| One of the big theories in The Righteous Mind can be used to
| explain this. The Moral Foundations Theory lists 5 drivers of
| moral judgments, 5 reasons why people may feel things are
| 'right'. Then it gives data showing that liberals feel 2 of
| these strongly and 3 weakly, while conservatives feel all 5
| about as equally strongly.
|
| By that theory, the reason that conservatives need not work
| as hard to understand liberals is that they feel all the same
| moral impulses liberals do, and more, while liberals only
| feel 2/5ths of the conservatives' impulses.
|
| The same theory suggests that conservative persuasion will be
| more effective on liberals than liberal persuasion on
| conservatives. This then leads to election losses, which
| leads to hand wringing about how liberals don't understand
| conservatives, so they can't convince them to vote liberal.
| chokolad wrote:
| > Whereas books by prominent conservatives tend to have
| titles like "Demonic : How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering
| America" and "Liberal Fascism : The Secret History of the
| American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change".
| (Not that the left doesn't produce books with similar titles,
| but they don't get wide distribution, while you've heard of
| Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg).
|
| Interestingly enough Jonah Goldberg is pretty much never-
| Trumper.
| snegu wrote:
| There is something to this.
|
| I am a big fan of the organization Braver Angels, which is
| working to reduce polarization and facilitate conversations
| between people with different viewpoints.
|
| One of their biggest struggles is that they get significant
| participation from the "blue" tribe, but have trouble
| recruiting "red" tribe members. Some of this may be
| skepticism from the red tribe that they will be treated
| fairly, but I wonder how much is simply lack of interest in
| understanding others.
| a_conservative wrote:
| > but I wonder how much is simply lack of interest in
| understanding others.
|
| Talk about assuming the worst about people! Let me present
| an alternate theory: The "blue tribe" is surprised by a
| "red tribe" reaction more than the "red tribe" is surprised
| by the "blue tribe".
|
| I read about a study in the lead up to the 2016 election.
| Conservatives were asked to voice liberal opinions and vice
| versa. The conservatives were able to voice opposing
| viewpoints significantly better than those who leaned left
| wing.
|
| This blog came up while searching for a source on that
| research and has some other information you might find
| useful. I can relate to the author's feeling of frustration
| very well! [0]
|
| [0] https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-
| understand...
| ZoharAtkins wrote:
| I wrote a full length response to this article here. Basically, I
| think it raises two questions: 1) what does the socratic mode
| miss? 2) is it better to have a conversation between two socratic
| types, or does does socratic dialogue require one dupe?
| https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/should-we-aspire...
| JadeNB wrote:
| I know it's a cheap way of thinking about it, but I just can't
| get over writing a whole article (on further reading: a whole
| book) trying to convince your audience that they shouldn't be
| trying to persuade people. (Of course, that's not the whole of
| the point--it's that discovery should be a collaborative process,
| not a one-sided process of the 'right' imposing their worldview
| on the 'wrong'--but writing a _Boston Review_ article, or,
| rather, a book from which a _Boston Review_ article is excerpted,
| is a pretty one-sided process.)
| smoldesu wrote:
| This article, for all of it's words, doesn't really justify it's
| thesis at all. In one hand, it declares that we all must put
| aside our differences to pursue lives of ethical piety, and in
| the other hand it demands that we cannot ask questions to get
| there. At no point along the essay does it seem that the author
| entertains a middle ground between the two, which frankly
| confuses me even more. And for all the Socrates-bashing they
| indulge in, they seemingly forget that the purpose of a Socratic
| Seminar is not to walk away feeling personally dejected, but
| mentally enlightened. If all you can take away from it is
| offense, then why bother learning anything in the first place?
|
| Persuasion is a two-way street. Rhetoric is not. If you dislike
| the _way_ someone says something, then don 't conflate that with
| the actual thing they're saying.
| fluentmundo wrote:
| _No idea_ where you got the notion that the author is Socrates-
| bashing or that the author "demands that we cannot ask
| questions." The piece is so obviously a love letter to and
| defense of Socrates! You seem to have completely misread it.
|
| The author _obviously_ thinks persuasion is "a two-way street,"
| that asking questions is good, and that Socratic dialogue
| leaves people more enlightened: it helps make their ignorance
| more precise.
| gringoDan wrote:
| This reminds me of a Slate Star Codex post, Epistemic Learned
| Helplessness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-
| epistemic-learn...
|
| Essentially, this essay argues that sometimes it is rational to
| ignore attempts at persuasion altogether - there is always
| someone more adept than you at arguing their point, and since
| they are so convincing you are incapable of distinguishing the
| truth, so you fall back on your Bayesian prior.
| aeneasmackenzie wrote:
| 40K said it best: "An open mind is like a fortress with its
| gates unbarred and unguarded".
| hashkb wrote:
| I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise,
| why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today
| you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
| User23 wrote:
| Socrates is attested not just by Plato, who was a huge fan boy,
| but also by Aristophanes who didn't care for him and Xenophon
| who was fairly neutral.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| Based on my readings of the contradictions in the various
| accounts, I would say he intended to die. He, in effect, I
| think, found a way of enacting the story of Empedocles, where
| Empedocles tries to die by jumping into a volcano so he will
| have just seemingly vanished and be believed to have ascended
| to godhood but was revealed by his bronze sandals. And in some
| ways seems reminiscent of Yukio Mishima.
|
| And it seems to have worked, to a degree. Over 2,000 years
| later, everyone from layman to politician invokes his name and
| death as often as they do Jesus. Not existing is often a really
| good way of _kind of_ existing seemingly forever.
| Leparamour wrote:
| >why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know
| today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're
| wrong.
|
| Maybe he was on the autism spectrum?
| drooby wrote:
| Perhaps Socrates was not in fact wise....But perhaps he would
| have told you that.
| programmarchy wrote:
| He did tell us that, but nobody believed him!
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| He was literally "stoic" which is a wisdom that you can't
| change most things in the world so you survive as best you
| can and if you can't you accept that you can't control when
| your life ends either.
|
| If people still read the Classics, this would be widely known
| as table-stakes.
| kritiko wrote:
| Socrates was not a stoic. Stoicism was founded by Zeno of
| Citium roughly 100 years after Socrates' death.
| playdead wrote:
| > I still think Plato invented Socrates.
|
| No, he was an actual historical person. Plato of course wrote a
| more literary depiction of him, not a direct transcript of his
| conversations.
|
| > If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in
| such a dumb way?
|
| You should probably actually read the dialogues (at least the
| Apology and the Crito) and you'll understand what happened.
| Socrates explicitly chose not to escape prison and to go
| through with the execution, and he gives his reasons in the
| Crito.
| klyrs wrote:
| Speaking truth to power has always had its risks, yes. But,
| wisdom isn't the same as self preservation. Down that road is
| acquiescence, and cowardice. Perhaps he made a choice: to be
| remembered as unprincipled in the face of personal risk, or to
| die in sacrifice to his principles and be a guiding light for
| those who seek the truth for millenia to come.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Is it dumb? Only if you believe self-preservation is more
| important than everything else at all costs.
|
| He chose to remain faithful to speaking truth (or what he
| believed to be true and asking questions to humbly discover it)
| rather than acquiesce to a bunch of manipulative tyrants. Such
| actions not only commit you to stand by the truth in thought,
| word, and deed, but they inspire others to do the same and thus
| disperse the evil of the world. It was a blow to the systemic
| lies of myth and sophistry employed by the powerful of the
| world.
|
| Socrates did not choose death. He chose truth while accepting
| that he would be killed by those in power. Big difference,
| except for a utilitarian.
|
| Now whether he should have chosen exile, I don't know. In some
| sense, what he chose is heroic and more inspiring than skipping
| town. Christian martyrdom is like this. A Christian remains
| steadfast in the truth even to the point of death. This is a
| faithfulness to Truth that cannot be destroyed by evil men who
| would use fear to part us from the truth and toss us back into
| the darkness and slavery of lies. In remaining faithful to the
| truth, the martyr truly lives and is truly happy no matter what
| pain comes his way, whereas some men spend decades rotting in
| the misery of lies. The martyr loves the truth to the point of
| the extinction of self. He also dies in anticipation of the
| Beatific Vision. This is the greatest fulfillment of a rational
| being wherein the doors of the soul are flung open to the
| infinite fullness of truth. In the vanity of the City of Man,
| on the other hand, men love themselves to the point of the
| extinction of truth and thus live in death and misery.
|
| The truth will set you free and so in a sense Socrates died as
| free of a man as you might have reasonably expected a pagan to
| be in his position.
| [deleted]
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