3 ms·
Omitting information from your arguments has more to do with letting the audience fill it in in their own way, than precluding attack. The master of this techn
by mjburgess 3y ago
Omitting information from your arguments has more to do with letting the audience fill it in in their own way, than precluding attack.
The master of this technique today has to be Trump -- who speaks in the tiniest droplets of information possible to make out a position.
This is a genius (sales, etc.) technique -- it means that moderates who hear him fill-in a moderate background, and radicals likewise.
It enables this meta motte-and-bailey defence of him too: "take trump seriously, but not literally" -- oh, except in this case, where it is literal.
In this way, the art of (mass) persuasion is saying as little as possible to be effective; quite the opposite of the dark arts outlined in OP.
- aebtebeten 3y agoWhen different auditors can fill in wildly different claims, that's not staking a position, it's gesturing in the general direction of a wavefunction. I consider that exactly the same underlying mechanism as the dark arts from OP, because they both rely on maliciously using their speaking time to make evaluation of the underlying argument (if any) more difficult, rather than simpler. (I am hoping that AI, by making waffling cheap and ubiquitous, will mean that people will start to demand crisper public statements. But this is probably much too optimistic?) Tangent: I love the way the two other major Dutch right-wing parties have (thus far) told Geert Wilders that if he really wants to be PM, he'll state which of his too-far-right-even-for-them campaign planks he is renouncing. They've called.