6 ms·

I wish the author gave examples for why he thinks "manipulation" and "gaslighting" are arbitrary and flexible. I think the definitions are actually very clear:

I wish the author gave examples for why he thinks "manipulation" and "gaslighting" are arbitrary and flexible. I think the definitions are actually very clear: manipulation is intentionally using deception, dishonesty, or withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs. It's essentially persuading in bad faith. It's fair to say that it's extremely difficult to prove manipulation, which makes it seem arbitrary. But, there's plenty of legal standards that require proving intent, not just action. That's a high bar, but it's not unreasonable or arbitrary

kiba 5y ago
OK? Discussion are often highly complex with shifting terrain. At some point 'manipulation' became a judgement call.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
randrews 5y ago
Shifting the definition of manipulation and gaslighting is itself a kind of manipulative gaslighting...
- abecedarius 5y ago
  Their definition of manipulation would forbid any negotiation move other than laying all of your cards on the table. ("Withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs.") So yeah.
  - User23 5y ago
    Tangentially, when negotiating I’ve had pretty good luck with just straight up asking what the other party’s best offer is. Usually I have to iterate a couple rounds of course. Rarely is the first response actually their best offer. Since I really am willing to walk away, it’s worked well for both professional and personal relationships. Obviously the framing and presentation is different between a job interview and a first date, but in the end it’s basically the same principles at work.
    - abecedarius 5y ago
      Yeah, I actually lean towards openness too (though I once had to give up on an exciting job offer because I naively anchored the salary discussion with my previous government-salary-band-for-a-high-school-dropout, instead of just not answering). But it's gotta be a free choice; someone demanding it of you, as a supposed norm, is being pushy.
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    Would their definition forbid it, or would it just label such behavior as "manipulative" and you happen to have a negative association with that word? I do personally view many (but not all) "aggressive" negotiations as manipulative. And yes, withholding pertinent information is deceitful as far as I'm concerned.
    - abecedarius 5y ago
      But I didn't bring up aggressive negotiations at all: I said that withholding any information about my private, personal valuation of a prospective trade constitutes "manipulation" according to the definition given. It's true that withholding of information can be manipulative. Either this definition left out how we are to judge this (and so failed to establish that it's "actually very clear") or you think you have a right to the private contents of my mind and 100% of the gains from trade. > Would their definition forbid it Our context is a discussion of good or bad norms. Technically you could want to live under bad norms.
      - mind-blight 5y ago
        That's a great critique of my definition. I don't think people are manipulative by withholding private or personal information. Withholding relevant information isn't manipulative in certain contexts either: i.e. those where all parties agree that there is no expectation of transparency. So, we could either argue that 1) deception implies that there is a reasonable expectation of disclosure, or 2) update the definition to explicitly say "...withheld information when there is a reasonable expectation of disclosure..." For example, if I invest in a publicly traded company, I expect the company to be honest on their quarterly filings, but I don't expect to have access to all of their financials. If a company withholds pertinent information because they don't want to impact the stock price, that is manipulation. If they withhold the same information honestly believing it isn't significant to the stock price, that's not manipulation (though it may be incompetence). Another example: If I target financially illiterate people with predatory loans, that is often manipulative. I'm deliberately targeting people who I wouldn't expect to be able to analyze repercussions of the loan, and I'm lying when I say it will be positive. If I target financially illiterate people and give them credit cards that I believe are within their means, then I'm not being manipulative - even if some of those folks default or their lives are made worse by the loan.
jessriedel 5y ago
> I think the definitions are actually very clear: manipulation is intentionally using deception, dishonesty, or withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs. It's essentially persuading in bad faith. If that is what charges of "manipulation" actually corresponded to in practice, then one could just punish the actual instances of deception, dishonesty, or withheld information (DD&WI). But, in fact, it's rather rare for people to object to DD&WI when it is used to support a position they agree with, and in these situations they essentially never call it "manipulation". (If your friend Bob withheld information to convince someone of a political position you strongly agreed with, can you imagine yourself saying "Bob manipulated him"? Of course not, because "manipulation" is understood to mean "...for something bad".) In other words, "manipulation" is only used as an additional charge, beyond DD&WI, for things we disagree with. (One could argue that we correctly have laws that punish actions based on the action's impact, like attempted vs. completed murder, and that "manipulation" could be for when DD&WI is deployed effectively. But again, no one ever calls this "manipulation" when it's for something they agree with, and they never claim that effective DD&WI of this type should be punished more harshly than ineffective DD&WI.)
- lazide 5y ago
  That doesn’t stop it from being manipulation - it’s just calling out how most people are hypocrites?
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    Well, it's certainly true that the post is about hypocrisy: > Most laws are defined in relatively objective ways, so that society can truthfully say “no one is above the law”. Those who violate the law can be found guilty and punished, while others remain free....But most societies have also included a few less objective and more “flexible” offenses, flexible enough to let the powerful more arbitrarily punishment disliked parties. If we all agree on the facts of how the word "manipulation" is used in practice, then mind-blight's first paragraph is at most asking that Hanson would be clearer that he is a linguistic descriptivist rather than a linguistic prescriptivist. That would be fair enough, but then mind-blight's second paragraph wouldn't make sense: Hanson's objection isn't that "manipulation" is hard to prove, it's that it's used exclusively in an outcome-dependent (i.e. hypocritical) way.
ajdv 5y ago
At a basic hardware level its not hard to understand. Our chimp brain has 200 billion neurons with about 1 trillion connections. There is nothing static about that network structure or the info flowing through it at any given moment. If there are 6-7 billion of these networks then connected up with each other in various other ever changing networks with different ever changing info flowing through, what the fuck hope is there of keeping all that hardware in sync for very long. The energy requirememts for consistent sync are massive.
- tartoran 5y ago
  We’re constantly updating and synching with peers and community. If these are giving us bad signals it’s sort of downward spiral.
slibhb 5y ago
I think the author is right that those terms are flexible (maybe arbitrary is too strong). They depend on value judgements or the ability to know someone else's mental state. "Bad faith" is a great example. It's easy to label someone "bad faith" just because you disagree with them and I find that's common. Whether this flexibility is a problem or a virtue is another question. When the author calls for us to eliminate these flexible laws/norms, he's trying to formalize something quite vague. Even if that's possible I'm not sure it's desirable. Perhaps when it comes to millions of people living together in harmony, vagueness is a good thing.
wisty 5y ago
What does "persuading in bad faith" mean? Is this bad faith in the techniques of the persuasion, or that the persuasion is being used in a malicious way? For example, if I say something misleading (or omit a few facts) to encourage people to vote for an objectively good candidate, is that bad faith? The persuasion is using a dark pattern, but I've got good intentions. On the other hand, maybe I have some objectively bad belief, and I openly and candidly try to persuade people of it. Is that bad faith? I'd lean towards the former being "bad faith". I believe that free and candid discussion is the best mechanism to move society forward, and I think that more progress would be great. But there are people who would disagree, because it took a lot of work to get our society to its current state, and they want to prioritise conserving what we've already got.
- mistermann 5y ago
  I think people who use the term bad faith (and similar phrases) use it with the best of intentions, but the ambiguous nature of it combined with the imprecise way most people speak and think results in it causing more problems not less.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  Yes, your first example is correct (by definition). Bad faith is misrepresenting your motivations or the relevant facts in some way, including by omission. > But there are people who would disagree, because <reasons> That is an example of mental gymnastics to avoid classifying the thing they want to do as bad in their own view. They want to do something but they don't want to think of themselves as behaving in bad faith because they're a good person doing the right thing.
User23 5y ago
Effective rhetoric can use truth at least as easily as falsehood.

kiba 5y ago

OK? Discussion are often highly complex with shifting terrain. At some point 'manipulation' became a judgement call.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

randrews 5y ago

Shifting the definition of manipulation and gaslighting is itself a kind of manipulative gaslighting...

abecedarius 5y ago
Their definition of manipulation would forbid any negotiation move other than laying all of your cards on the table. ("Withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs.") So yeah.
- User23 5y ago
  Tangentially, when negotiating I’ve had pretty good luck with just straight up asking what the other party’s best offer is. Usually I have to iterate a couple rounds of course. Rarely is the first response actually their best offer. Since I really am willing to walk away, it’s worked well for both professional and personal relationships. Obviously the framing and presentation is different between a job interview and a first date, but in the end it’s basically the same principles at work.
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    Yeah, I actually lean towards openness too (though I once had to give up on an exciting job offer because I naively anchored the salary discussion with my previous government-salary-band-for-a-high-school-dropout, instead of just not answering). But it's gotta be a free choice; someone demanding it of you, as a supposed norm, is being pushy.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  Would their definition forbid it, or would it just label such behavior as "manipulative" and you happen to have a negative association with that word? I do personally view many (but not all) "aggressive" negotiations as manipulative. And yes, withholding pertinent information is deceitful as far as I'm concerned.
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    But I didn't bring up aggressive negotiations at all: I said that withholding any information about my private, personal valuation of a prospective trade constitutes "manipulation" according to the definition given. It's true that withholding of information can be manipulative. Either this definition left out how we are to judge this (and so failed to establish that it's "actually very clear") or you think you have a right to the private contents of my mind and 100% of the gains from trade. > Would their definition forbid it Our context is a discussion of good or bad norms. Technically you could want to live under bad norms.
    - mind-blight 5y ago
      That's a great critique of my definition. I don't think people are manipulative by withholding private or personal information. Withholding relevant information isn't manipulative in certain contexts either: i.e. those where all parties agree that there is no expectation of transparency. So, we could either argue that 1) deception implies that there is a reasonable expectation of disclosure, or 2) update the definition to explicitly say "...withheld information when there is a reasonable expectation of disclosure..." For example, if I invest in a publicly traded company, I expect the company to be honest on their quarterly filings, but I don't expect to have access to all of their financials. If a company withholds pertinent information because they don't want to impact the stock price, that is manipulation. If they withhold the same information honestly believing it isn't significant to the stock price, that's not manipulation (though it may be incompetence). Another example: If I target financially illiterate people with predatory loans, that is often manipulative. I'm deliberately targeting people who I wouldn't expect to be able to analyze repercussions of the loan, and I'm lying when I say it will be positive. If I target financially illiterate people and give them credit cards that I believe are within their means, then I'm not being manipulative - even if some of those folks default or their lives are made worse by the loan.

jessriedel 5y ago

> I think the definitions are actually very clear: manipulation is intentionally using deception, dishonesty, or withheld information to alter someone's behavior or beliefs. It's essentially persuading in bad faith. If that is what charges of "manipulation" actually corresponded to in practice, then one could just punish the actual instances of deception, dishonesty, or withheld information (DD&WI). But, in fact, it's rather rare for people to object to DD&WI when it is used to support a position they agree with, and in these situations they essentially never call it "manipulation". (If your friend Bob withheld information to convince someone of a political position you strongly agreed with, can you imagine yourself saying "Bob manipulated him"? Of course not, because "manipulation" is understood to mean "...for something bad".) In other words, "manipulation" is only used as an additional charge, beyond DD&WI, for things we disagree with. (One could argue that we correctly have laws that punish actions based on the action's impact, like attempted vs. completed murder, and that "manipulation" could be for when DD&WI is deployed effectively. But again, no one ever calls this "manipulation" when it's for something they agree with, and they never claim that effective DD&WI of this type should be punished more harshly than ineffective DD&WI.)

lazide 5y ago
That doesn’t stop it from being manipulation - it’s just calling out how most people are hypocrites?
- jessriedel 5y ago
  Well, it's certainly true that the post is about hypocrisy: > Most laws are defined in relatively objective ways, so that society can truthfully say “no one is above the law”. Those who violate the law can be found guilty and punished, while others remain free....But most societies have also included a few less objective and more “flexible” offenses, flexible enough to let the powerful more arbitrarily punishment disliked parties. If we all agree on the facts of how the word "manipulation" is used in practice, then mind-blight's first paragraph is at most asking that Hanson would be clearer that he is a linguistic descriptivist rather than a linguistic prescriptivist. That would be fair enough, but then mind-blight's second paragraph wouldn't make sense: Hanson's objection isn't that "manipulation" is hard to prove, it's that it's used exclusively in an outcome-dependent (i.e. hypocritical) way.

ajdv 5y ago

At a basic hardware level its not hard to understand. Our chimp brain has 200 billion neurons with about 1 trillion connections. There is nothing static about that network structure or the info flowing through it at any given moment. If there are 6-7 billion of these networks then connected up with each other in various other ever changing networks with different ever changing info flowing through, what the fuck hope is there of keeping all that hardware in sync for very long. The energy requirememts for consistent sync are massive.

tartoran 5y ago
We’re constantly updating and synching with peers and community. If these are giving us bad signals it’s sort of downward spiral.

slibhb 5y ago

I think the author is right that those terms are flexible (maybe arbitrary is too strong). They depend on value judgements or the ability to know someone else's mental state. "Bad faith" is a great example. It's easy to label someone "bad faith" just because you disagree with them and I find that's common. Whether this flexibility is a problem or a virtue is another question. When the author calls for us to eliminate these flexible laws/norms, he's trying to formalize something quite vague. Even if that's possible I'm not sure it's desirable. Perhaps when it comes to millions of people living together in harmony, vagueness is a good thing.

wisty 5y ago

What does "persuading in bad faith" mean? Is this bad faith in the techniques of the persuasion, or that the persuasion is being used in a malicious way? For example, if I say something misleading (or omit a few facts) to encourage people to vote for an objectively good candidate, is that bad faith? The persuasion is using a dark pattern, but I've got good intentions. On the other hand, maybe I have some objectively bad belief, and I openly and candidly try to persuade people of it. Is that bad faith? I'd lean towards the former being "bad faith". I believe that free and candid discussion is the best mechanism to move society forward, and I think that more progress would be great. But there are people who would disagree, because it took a lot of work to get our society to its current state, and they want to prioritise conserving what we've already got.

mistermann 5y ago
I think people who use the term bad faith (and similar phrases) use it with the best of intentions, but the ambiguous nature of it combined with the imprecise way most people speak and think results in it causing more problems not less.
d110af5ccf 5y ago
Yes, your first example is correct (by definition). Bad faith is misrepresenting your motivations or the relevant facts in some way, including by omission. > But there are people who would disagree, because <reasons> That is an example of mental gymnastics to avoid classifying the thing they want to do as bad in their own view. They want to do something but they don't want to think of themselves as behaving in bad faith because they're a good person doing the right thing.

User23 5y ago

Effective rhetoric can use truth at least as easily as falsehood.