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The Dying Art of Persuasion
- quirkot 6y agoThis presents a fairly narrow view of persuasion, a romanticized version. Broadly defined persuasion is alive and well. Consider the massive political demonstrations that have occurred in the last year, who persuaded these people to leave their homes and congregate during the middle of a pandemic? Consider the rapid decriminalization of marijuana and even other drugs. Who persuaded these voters to change the law? Consider all the new start-ups and other business that rely on a sales force to persuade customers of their value and to sign up? Persuasion is very much still alive
- coding123 6y agoI think what he's trying to say is that instead of doing this: L > > > C < < < R Media outlets are focusing more on this: L < < < C > > > R But you're right, it's still persuasion. It was all explained during the superbowl man.
- prionassembly 6y agoSuperbowl? Reference?
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoYeah this should be developed more
- coding123 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPOPLrUfyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPOPLrUfyw An ad played during the superbowl.
- Digory 6y ago"Choice" is very much alive in your examples. We seem to be in an open fight against negative reinforcement. To say "policing is the consequence of bad behavior," or "You should go to jail for dealing weed" or even "We shouldn't cancel services or people too hastily" is to pick a fight.
- quirkot 6y agoIf arguing online has taught me anything, it's that you don't need to win a fight to persuade bystanders of your righteousness
- Jochim 6y agoI don't think those points really link together. 1) This argument is about negative reinforcement argument. Specifically how increasing levels of it haven't fixed the problems that lead to high crime in those neighbourhoods in the first place and in some cases has made those neighbourhoods more dangerous. We already know tough on crime policies don't work. It's why we don't chop off the hands of thieves. It's why states with the death penalty still have plenty of murders. 2) The argument isn't against negative reinforcement it's that marijuana shouldn't be illegal in the first place. 3) Implies the people you're arguing against are in favour of at least some negative reinforcement.
- kop316 6y agoI've noted an increasing trend in US papers that the headline or the first few paragraphs sort of level where the author expects your beliefs will be, and much of the article is precicated on such beliefs. For me personally, it makes trying to read the rest of the article, whether I agree with the headline/first few paragraphs or not, much more difficult.
- sandworm101 6y agoLol. The art is not dead. It has simply moved on from ancient forms. Nobody's mind is being changed by editorials in some paper-and-ink newspaper. Minds are changed through social media. The skill now isn't about formulated argument. It is about subtle pushes delivered through a variety of means. Want grandma to change her mind about politics? Don't send her a well-reasoned letter. Manipulate her social media feeds. Hit her with targeted adds/messages from apparently like-minded people. Manufacture something that she fears that will draw her to where you want her to move. The art of persuasion isn't dead. It is just now operating on a wider playing field and softer rulebook.
- spaetzleesser 6y agoIt seems what you are describing is manipulation, not persuasion. The outcome is the same but at least in my mind persuasion means to have a good faith argument.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago> Minds are changed through social media. Respectfully disagree. I think minds are being changed by news sources and real-life experiences, and social media is reinforcing the views of each tribe.
- shuntress 6y agoMinds are changed by all inputs but some are more effective than others. I don't think it is a stretch to assume "community consensus" is the most effective way to change minds. That (in both cases, perceived) consensus can be accessed through either "traditional" or "social" media but either way people decide based mostly on "What does everyone else think about this?"
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TwitBar 6y ago> minds are being changed by news sources Optimistic of you. For everyone else, social media supplants traditional news. > and real-life experiences For many, social media is reality. Enough to end lives, livelihoods, and each other's patience at least.
- bentona 6y agoI agree with the comments positing that persuasion is clearly alive and well, given the enthusiasm of today's e.g. demonstrations. I believe the author's point, however, is that persuasion can (should?) engage the conscious, rational mind, rather than just fear-based, tribal instincts leveraged today.
- shuntress 6y agoMaybe it can or should but when the ends justify the means and the goal is to scale your persuasion as far and wide as possible it seems to be tough to beat "us vs them" fear-based persuasion.
- quirkot 6y agoI'll take the counterpoint. Tribal instincts exist because it is impossible to have rational/conscious debate about most things. It's basically over engineering the problem. How would you convince an entire lakeside community to site a water treatment plant somewhere else? How many man-years of training would be required for them to have enough fundamental understanding to even enter a rational/informed debate? And what other topics are competing for that time? vs. "Chris is the expert and I trust Chris, so we'll do what Chris says"
- sleepysysadmin 6y agoPersuasion is dying but it's not dead. It has morphed in this age of echo chambers. How do you persuade someone who is stuck in a situation not hearing opposing viewpoints?
- anarchop 6y agoBy downvoting their comments obviously. That will surely convince them.
- Igelau 6y agoIt was a little uncomfortable that the author found it necessary to keep referring to Rationalists as "nerds and weirdos". Presumably he left these irons in the fire in case someone tries to associate him with the Rationalists. Not sure I want to read his book if the conclusion is "I only feel like I can talk about them safely if I call them derisive names".
- mcguire 6y agoI suspect the author regards "nerds and weirdos" as positive things.
- ouid 6y agoI think that Scott Alexander or whatever his name is, does a much better job than say, Paul Graham, at presenting the best counterargument whenever he presents something that he believes, but it's intrinsically a game of trust. I think what the New York Times intrinsically understands is that the art persuasion is not actually the art of being rational and critical. It is the art of convincing someone else that you have been rational and critical. I am not generally defending the New York Times, I just think that they do understand how good faith persuasive essays can be gateways to bad faith persuasive essays. The existence and effectiveness of bad faith persuasion is nowhere clearer than in court, where you are essentially obligated by the system to act in bad faith (lawyers would not describe it this way, but presenting an argument that you know to be flawed is bad faith), and lawyers are very convincing. However without an adversarial court system, lawyers are about as good a way of getting to the truth of the matter as crystal balls. A reasonable, but not infallible heuristic for evaluating an essay for good faith, is to just imagine how much different the essay would look if counterarguments could be inserted after reaching some threshold of support by the general population. The aggregate problem remains, however. Persuasive essays maintain a shared credit score which is extremely problematic for the process of truth-seeking. Even essays from the same author, can operate on wildly different points on the good/bad faith spectrum. I guess my point is that the solution is not "more rational essayists", but rather provably adversarial comment systems, in which authors are not advantaged.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y agoWhat would a provably adversarial comment system even look like? Maybe my uncreativeness is showing - but I can't even imagine this.
- Dracophoenix 6y agoReddit's CMV should qualify
- HDMI_Cable 6y agoWhat does CMV stand for in this context?
- furrowedbrow 6y agoI think your line "It’s also more fun" sums it up. Social media is about dopamine. As for the art of persuasion, while it might be marginalized in the current online environment, I'm encouraged when I hear people acknowledge that rational arguments have never been the best tool for changing people's minds, especially not in the short run. I think more often they come in handy after the fact, to rationalize people's feelings and memberships. But that's not to say we should throw up our hands and give up on reaching people. There's the alternative of delaying rational debate until a foundation of decency and emotional goodwill has been established--again, pretty tough to do online. There was an episode of Yascha Mounk's podcast from 9/4/20 where these two approaches are discussed. Elizabeth Anderson offers this critique to Mounk's project (called, oddly enough, "Persuasion"): "This is why I think I have some slight reservation against your Persuasion project, because it's all about argument. I don't think Americans in general are ready for argument, what we have to have is testimony. That's where people just sit down and talk about their lives, and open up in ways that other people can actually listen, and hear what the experience of others is like. Where people are speaking from the heart, about their experience. It's not about larger scale, policy arguments about principles; it's just about experience."
- rektide 6y agothe recent "the best story wins"[1][2] is a different angle but kind of suggests a similar thing, that our based instincts win, that whatever fits our current context best is easiest to adopt & will be adopted. [1] https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/story/ https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/story/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26115902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26115902
- rektide 6y agoconsider the reciprocal, how persuadable are people? how much humility do we temper our views & stances with? the internet exposes so many of us to torrents of information. the world seems more firm & certain, now that the cold war is over, now that capitalism's steady gobbling up of all local systems has proceeded space for decades unabated & unchanged. my guess is that people feel more resolute in their own views, & that the world seems less in flux/malleable than ever.
- pnathan 6y agoThe article asserts a strawman, that we had, in the past, cool, rational, reasoned debates that we all stroked our beards and decided what the right choice of action would be. I would suggest several counter examples: * Hearst Newspapers and "Yellow Journalism" * McCarthyism * Revolutionary War era op-eds (e.g., https://thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/The-American-Crisis-by-Thomas-Paine-.pdf https://thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/T... )
- Grustaf 6y agoWhy persuade when you can simply cancel your opponent?
- seph-reed 6y agoPersuasion is a symptom of a broken system in which everyone votes independently. Systems like "liquid democracy" make it so not everyone needs to be an expert on every issue, they just have to choose someone slightly smarter than themselves. In academic spaces, persuasion is still alive and well.
- mcguire 6y ago"But the line in which he “aligns himself” with Murray is on whether there is a genetic component to poverty (which surely there must be), ..." What? Genetic component of poverty?! "Another example. “Free speech” has become a left-right battleground issue, and the instances we read about are always of right-wing speech being limited by left-wing activists. So, inevitably, left-wing people think it’s a partisan attack on them, or a smokescreen for people who just want to say unpleasant things (which, let’s be clear, it often is). But Alexander takes a different tack. In one post, for example, he calls attention to a woman fired for “having a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker on her car” by her George W Bush-supporting boss. The point is, or at least the effect on me was, to drag the issue away from partisan sniping. It wasn’t firing shots in the culture war, it was talking to liberals and left-wingers, trying to persuade." Alexander's post is from 2013, which was before much of the current free speech hoopla. Somehow, I'm not finding this persuasive. Ultimately, in fact, I think this article is exactly what it seems to be complaining about, just in regard to an issue that is orthogonal to the big political discussions it uses as examples: Chivers is writing to a rationalist audience about how rationalists are wonderful.
- Viliam1234 6y ago> Genetic component of poverty?! Could you imagine, hypothetically, that people who suffer from diseases spend more money on medical bills than healthy people, which in case of the same income leaves them with less money at the end of the day? (Actually, the more sick they are, the more difficult it probably is to get the same income as healthy people.) Would you agree that some diseases are hereditary to some degree? If you answered "yes" and "yes", well then you already kinda agree that there is a genetic component of poverty.