Persuasion that happens in good faith is a two-way street. You explain your position, but also truly listen to theirs. If you are prepared to change your own position based on what they say, then you can hope that they might change theirs based on what you say.
If it is truly two way in this sense, including your best efforts to extract from the other party their strongest, potentially unexpected, arguments for their position and give them your due consideration, it shouldn't feel like manipulation.
Even if you’re not going to change your position, such as when the other party doesn’t believe basic facts or incontrovertible evidence, you have to be willing to listen to their position to understand why they hold that position.
When you have a debate with someone who is only waiting for their turn to talk and visibly doesn’t care to parse what you’re saying, you are not motivated to hear them out.
It has to be a discussion, not a lecture combined with light condescension and dismissal.
This is fine when the question is, “What’s for dinner?” However, there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed. This is called having integrity. It’s important to understand where these lines fall within yourself and those you are speaking with. Some arguments aren’t worth having in an effort to persuade, but rather they should be discussions aimed at understanding, being vulnerable and finding ways to respect and live at peace among people we have fundamental differences with. Otherwise we are no different than Crusaders and Jihadists.
> This is fine when the question is, “What’s for dinner?” However, there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed. This is called having integrity.
No, it is not the definition of integrity. If you opt to double-down on positions you held in spite of being presented to evidence that contradicts or refutes your prior beliefs, the behavior you are displaying is opposite of integrity, specially the part about honesty and commitment to do what's right.
having integrity: “murder is bad, even if it’s someone i disagree with (tho isn’t murdering)”
lack of integrity: “EU bad, even if you give me evidence to say that it’s the UK’s own politicians that have screwed us for decades.. not the EU necessarily”
Rape is wrong. It doesn't matter what your evidence or positions or logic are, you will not sway me on that point. I suspect that sort of thing is what GP meant.
> Rape is wrong. It doesn't matter what your evidence or positions or logic are, you will not sway me on that point.
Do you believe that you were already presented with evidence that compelled you to change your personal position on rape, and the only reason you didn't changed your position in spite of that was your stubbornness to stick with them in spite of you feeling your belief was already refuted?
Or does the rationale still holds?
I think you tried very hard to find a moral argument to try to refute the argument on integrity, but you unwittingly just proved the point.
But that clearly falls within the parent comment’s definition. Just because you are prepared to change your opinion on something based on evidence to the contrary, it doesn’t mean such evidence exists or may even be possible! I am of the opinion that the Earth is not flat. And I know that no evidence you can present would ever change that because it’s patently obvious that’s the case given the evidence I already have! But I am still theoretically open to a debate. That’s the scientific method.
Why is rape wrong though? "hurr durr rape bad" is just repeating whatever you've been indoctrinated to believe. There's a more fundamental reason rape is bad (and this same fundamental reason underpins the reason we find a lot of other things bad).
It does fall back to "core values" though - kinda' like with math & axioms. The "why" chain of questions will inevitably lead to something like "because there's inherent value in human life", and this is the point where it breaks down because there's no logical reason to say that. You can probably postulate the contrary and end up with a completely different set of morals that may still be internally coherent but would be very alien to you. Just how you can say "in a plane, through a given point not on a given line, there is no line parallel to the given line" and end up with a weird, non-Euclidean but coherent geometry.
Yes. But what happens in practice, both in actual rape trials and the court of public opinion, is a battery of arguments to say that it wasn't "really" rape. Disbelief at the woman's version of events. (Or, for other cases, the socially subordinate person in the interaction). Arguments that various sorts of actions or forms of dress constitute consent. Introducing the victim's previous sexual history to discredit them. And so on.
Much like saying "murder is wrong", the wrongness is a part of the definition of the word. There's no need for evidence or logic, beyond understanding what a definition is.
Neither rape nor murder are inherently, definitionally wrong. There are situations in extremis where murder and rape are considered justifiable: in war, murder is often praised; and in an "everyone else is dead, humanity will go extinct" situation (e.g. the subjective belief of Lot's daughters, according to some traditions, in Genesis 19:31–36), rape might¹ be considered permissible. And both words are used to refer to things which aren't necessarily wrong (e.g. "I'm going to murder this sandwich", or the "forcefully taking" -> "winning in a competition" senses of 'rape' described on Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary).
Rather, central members of the categories of 'rape' and 'murder' are wrong for reasons, and while those reasons may differ depending on your ethical framework, pretty much all ethical systems agree on this point.
"That's immoral by definition" isn't really how words work. Some philosophers would call that a category error, others would call it meaningless, and yet others would call it equivocation.
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¹: For the record: I think the "don't rape" deontological principle is extremely reliable, and if anyone alive finds themselves in a situation where they think they should break it, they're almost certainly wrong about the facts. The dilemma faced by Lot's daughters was a false dilemma: many other options were available, including "talk about the dilemma and thereby acquire either consent, or a good counterargument", or "double-check with the supernatural being who created the otherwise-unlikely circumstance where you have good reason to believe everyone else died in fire and/or conversion to salt, to confirm whether you are in fact the last remnants of humanity". I can't think of a situation where rape is actually justified. Trolley problems don't occur in real life.
The killing of an enemy combatant, for example, is usually lawful, praised and not considered murder. Generally speaking, the killing of a civilian is sometimes a war crime and considered a murder.
You also have a lot to say on the nuanced ethics of killing and on sexual violence, but these deal with the underlying concepts themselves and the words don't matter; in fact philosophers frequently give common terms a specialized, ad-hoc definition when they want to discuss these concepts themselves.
I have nothing to say on the "nuanced ethics": as far as I'm concerned, rape is bad and murder is bad. Sufficiently-advanced pedantry always circles back to that. There's no nuance to be had.
If you asked any (non-bloodthirsty) soldier, officer or general whether they'd press a button to magically achieve their military objectives without bloodshed, they'd certainly take that option. Killing enemy combatants is praised as good because it is (considered) a necessary evil, but "necessary evil" is awful for morale. If you take people outside that situation, they tend to hold the view that "killing is wrong", or "killing non-wrongdoers is wrong" at worst.
You've (re)defined the word "murder" to exclude "lawful killings of enemy combatants", but whether we use your or my definition, that doesn't change the morality of the actions. You also observed that philosophers do that kind of (re)definition all the time. That's the point I was trying to make.
If the legal system calls certain morally bad killings in peacetime manslaughter that does not rise to the severity of murder, then I think that murder as is commonly used is a specific kind of killing that does not include your example of a wartime killing. Even outside of the courtroom itself, many are also very careful when using the word "murder" when discussing actual killings, because of its severity, and responsible people will defer to what suspects/convicts are charged/convicted with. Rather, it is you that have chosen a redefinition of the word.
I am not responding to your discussion on the morality of killings, because your argument was primarily about the definition of the word "murder", and I wanted to point that you were not accurate either.
Murder is when you kill someone on purpose, when you had the option of not. Voluntary manslaughter is when you do a violence on purpose, and the target dies, but your intent was not to kill. Constructive involuntary manslaughter is when you take an action that's against the rules, and someone dies as a result, but you didn't realise you were doing violence. Negligence involuntary manslaughter is when you take an action that's not against the rules, and someone dies as a result, but you could've averted it.
Wartime killing of the enemy could be any of these (except probably not the last one), but it's probably going to meet the requirements for murder. The main reason it's not considered murder is that in war, we use a different classification system for violent acts, because the social context of violence in wartime is very different to the social context of violence in peacetime.
If you're taking the perspective that the social context is bundled up in the definition of the word (Later Wittgenstein's "use" theory of language), then killing an enemy soldier in war is not murder. If you're taking the perspective that a word refers to a meaningful proposition, i.e. a family of states of affairs (Early Wittgenstein's "picture" theory of language), then killing an enemy soldier in war is a non-central member of the 'murder' category, and just nobody calls it that. Personally, I'm a "use" theory proponent, so, uh… hm. Guess I was inaccurate.
> Murder is when you kill someone on purpose, when you had the option of not.
Indeed, I think that your original reply would have been more useful and less apparently combative if you had
1. replied with this definition,
2. showed why this commonsense definition that does not definitionally involve morality is useful, and gave examples of it,
3. finally showed marginal cases where murder is not a moral bad according to certain ethical frameworks,
4. acknowledge that it's OK to redefine the word so that it is definitionally morally bad, but since it differs from a commonsense notion, it needs to be signposted,
I'll have to study my original comment to see why it appears combative: thanks for pointing that out.
RE 2: I just looked through a few country's English-language laws and cribbed (what I saw as) the consensus definition of "murder". I'm not sure the other definitions I gave actually correspond to any real-world legal system, but many of them have something similar.
RE 4: Defining the word as "definitionally morally bad" means you have to make a moral assessment before using the word – but that takes most people way longer than the language processing of two syllables, so it leaves you open to equivocating rhetoric. Appeals to "common sense" (which, in my experience, is far from common) aren't why I object to that definition (except as signposted technical jargon, narrowly-scoped to a particular context).
The post I originally replied to was equivocating in this way (probably unintentionally), hence the strong objection. Though in my experience, explanations are better than intensifiers: that's something I should look out for in my editing passes in future.
> Neither rape nor murder are inherently, definitionally wrong.
This is easily refuted: look up “murder” in any English dictionary and you’ll find a definition like this: “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” The inclusion of “unlawful” makes it definitionally wrong. You might want to quibble about legality vs. morality but in this case at least, the one entails the other. Perhaps you’re thinking of words like “killing”.
The difference between legality and morality is extremely relevant and it's absurd to just gloss over it. Many things we now consider immoral were perfectly legal, like slavery or the holocaust. Law should be based on morality, morality does not and should not defer to the law.
> For me, integrity means I will change my mind when presented with convincing data.
It's not as binary as that.
Each new convincing data point may cause me to re-evaluate my position, but simply re-evaluation may not cause me to change my mind, but may cause me to slightly shift in the direction of the new position.
At some point, I would have ingested and/or seen so many convincing data points that my position is effectively neutral. And some point after that, my position may have actually shifted and not be neutral anymore.
IOW, it's a spectrum, and journeys across this spectrum are:
a) Slow - position moves in tiny amounts, and
b) Not guaranteed to end up on the opposite end - you might get to neutral and remain there for the rest of your life, or you might shift back towards your original position.
> Does the alcoholic dad who wont stop drinking have integrity? His core principles say he shouldn't back down; he's not a quitter after all.
Then yes, he does have integrity. He has his principles and stands by them (however misguided it may seem to others). But all this illustrates is that integrity alone doesn't define a good person.
The problem there though is that data completely breaks down for anything historical, philosophical, cultural, religious, miraculous, or otherwise requiring “faith.”
Anything that is not a repeatable event under a microscope has no “data” and never will.
I am not a "data or it didn't happen" person. I am sure I have magical beliefs that don't play out in reality.
I'm not convinced by the argument that this falls apart for your categories. Logic and reasoning still exists. Philosophy can be argued and principals agreed upon. Historical things leave traces. And I am appalled by blind faith.
At some point, our society and ways of doing things boils down to trust or faith. I trust that people thinking about things, trying to validate those things, and who employ a way to change their minds will move towards "more correct" understandings. People knew not to hang around people with the plague before germ theory.
I used to look at things this way too, but I now see this picture as incomplete, missing a crucial detail. There exist another dimension to our reality, beyond the inanimate, objective one we normally study through physics and life sciences. That dimension is the social dimension. It has its own rules, and for everyone at almost all times, it's more directly relevant to survival and happiness than actual physics.
An example I also posted in another comment: you can be objectively right about the color of the sky, but that won't save you from becoming dinner to wild animals after your people cast you out for believing differently.
We've evolved to navigate this social dimension as much as physical one, because we're social creatures and other people have forever been a part of our environment. Recognizing that, and recognizing that this social reality is more relevant than physical one, is IMO the key to understanding why people behave they do - why they believe obvious bullshit, and refuse to align their beliefs with the truth of physical reality, despite ample and indisputable evidence. It's the key to understand why seemingly smart people say and believe dumb things, especially after they start a career in sales or politics. It's all because, for almost everyone and in almost every case, being seen as in good standing in one's social circles is much more directly relevant to everyday experience and long and happy life, than getting some facts right.
Having that understanding, it becomes more apparent than just about the only way to convince people to change their mind, is to make things relevant to them personally in either dimension, and at a larger scale, to bring those two dimension more in alignment.
In a world where there is no way of knowing whether my blue is the same as your blue, can there be a way to be objectively right about the colour of the sky?
Irrelevant. You cannot communicate what you actually see, you only communicate labels you assign to incommunicable, inaccessible between humans feelings.
Ergo, there is no “objectively right” about the colour of the sky (or anything). There is only “using the same labels” or “using different labels” compared to everybody.
Sounds about right, until the reality check. How often do you raise the problem of the incommunicability of qualia outside hacker news? With what purpose? How often does that conversation accomplish its purpose?
You know, I've always figured, if our culture was based on an epistemic fundament that acknowledged and properly accounted for the fundamental incommunicability of percepts, it probably would've been a better world. (One where it's much easier for everyone to communicate accurately and effectively; as people would not expect of themselves and of each other to be "objective", just verbalize their current understandings as best as they could, without stressing too much over how understanding can only ever be subjective and incomplete.)
Some of us do envision such a world, but instead find ourselves living in a planetary culture based on the very rejection of the exact distinction that you're trying to point out. Turns out Cartesian dualism offers a lot of leeway along the "is-ought" axis, huh. (Qui bono, et sapienti sat.)
Enough to make the generally accepted standard for "objectively right" to be "the house is always right". (Supposedly, a supermajority of objects does not a subject make - or vice versa. And yet post-Enlightenment history is rife with efforts to scientifically desubjectify subjects in the service of some objectively rational philosopher king.)
And yet it seems to work well enough for most prosocials, you don't see them complaining, now do they? (What's a little mass neurosis between civilized folk?) I think it's safe to say that a member of the general public is cognizant of the labels they've been accultured to, at least to the same extent as they're aware of the physical reality which surrounds them. (If not vastly more so, physical reality being the more predictable of the two.)
This would mean that they have not actually experienced the quale of "incommunicable, inaccessible between humans [qualia]" and therefore the distinction you're trying to point out here is not in fact something they are able to think about; only perhaps to construct sentences about it by example, much like a LLM or a(n M)BA does.
As I'm sure you already know your own subjective version of most of the above, but I'm guessing you maybe view it more like a problematic to be struggled with, rather than a natural paradox and absurdity deserving of a more playful approach, I'd totally leave the celestial color coordination (along with all the worrying about whether people get it) to you - you, personally, and certainly none of the other folks. Not in the least because agreeing with people on how colors are called does not seem to be inherently conducive to being able to fly.
I don’t really understand the point you’re trying to make.
> Sounds about right, until the reality check. How often do you raise the problem of the incommunicability of qualia outside hacker news?
This is HN, and I was replying to a specific thought experiment posted in a comment:
> you can be objectively right about the color of the sky, but that won't save you from becoming dinner to wild animals after your people cast you out for believing differently.
That’s it.
You trying to bring into this people not complaining about it is, again, irrelevant. Most people, unless they are into philosophy, don’t tend complain about the inability to read someone else’s mind or feel what someone else’s feel. People also don’t tend to complain about the inevitability of death, the inability to go back in time, and in fact pretty much any fact of life that they cannot change. Yet, indeed, people absolutely do bring these up on regular basis in relevant philosophy-adjacent discussions and thought experiments, such as when correcting a claim that verbal labels assigned to feelings can be “objectively correct”.
>People also don’t tend to complain about the inevitability of death, the inability to go back in time, and in fact pretty much any fact of life that they cannot change.
your perception of blue might be different than mine, but as a society we have agreed that specific wavelengths of light are blue. those wavelengths are absolutely measurable.
Most likely neither, as you are presumably not voting for a politician who has committed rape or pedophilia because it is a legitimate, logical argument for not supporting them. Likewise I am rather firmly opposed to being thrown into a woodchipper, not because of some inflexible commitment to an ideology or ethical principle but because I have two braincells to rub together.
If your principles don't stand up to scrutiny, you shouldn't hold them. Some of the greatest evils ever committed were done by people certain they were acting according to upstanding principles. There is a middle ground between forcing all people to adopt your viewpoints and accepting all viewpoints as equally valid. Oftentimes you can agree to disagree, but there are certainly times you can't.
"However, there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed"
That's called being dogmatic. Sure, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but, in the face of extraordinary evidence you'd be a fool to stay unswayed and adhere to your proven false core principles.
I would venture to say that not all dogma is misplaced, despite the negative feelings that word tends to ignite. I tend to use that word more in situations where it’s clear someone hasn’t reasoned out why they believe what they believe. When I use the word “principles” I think it different than someone who just follows rules they were told to follow.
> However, there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed. This is called having integrity... ...Otherwise we are no different than Crusaders and Jihadists.
And do you suggest a crusader or jihadist or keep this point of view as well? They too might think they are in the right and should keep their (religious etc) integrity, surely?
Everyone/most people always assume they are always in the right; if this was objectively true, there would never be a single debate or argument in the world.
A saying I like, apparently first made by Quine: "I always think I'm right, but I don't think I'm always right."
In other words, for every belief I have, I think it's right. Clearly, otherwise I would have abandoned it already. But I don't think that the set of all my beliefs is 100% free of errors or inconsistencies.
The point is I don’t have to agree with their views. Why would I want them to keep views I disagree with? This isn’t about what I’d want them to do, but rather accepting that people believe things that sound crazy to me, and it’s still up to me to find a way to live with and love them.
> there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed
Well, yes there is.
In fact, that is the central problem of unresolvable divisions. People implicitly making themselves "the decider" by imagining their principles are so great as to preclude any need for revision. (Faith in the primacy of one's beliefs, is inherently the same as faith in one's own primacy to choose beliefs.)
There is nothing wrong with having strong core principles, because your best understanding supports them strongly. But as soon as you discount the possibility of them being wrong, even partially wrong, not the whole picture, framed within a non-tautological assumption, or not supercedable by other wiser principles, ..., you become the enemy of your own progress.
Nobody's knowledge, wisdom, or principles are complete, or have consistent primacy over all others.
Ultimately, principles, ethics and morality are a kind of economics. Decisions are tradeoffs between options. How does one make choices, so that the result is the outcome with the greatest value, and doesn't create other problems that exceed what is solved. That is a decidability problem, which will never have a complete or completely consistent answer.
The landscape for the question "What is best?" and "What is true?" is chaotic, fractal, non-Euclidean and infinitely complex.
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One of the biggest reasons to strong man the arguments of others, is the better at strong manning you become, the more likely you find something worth changing your own views over. Regardless of how explicit, implicit, or non-existent that was in their original argument.
Leveraging others disagreement, to identify misunderstandings and gaps in one's own knowledge, is the most important reason to talk to someone we disagree with.
Persuading them should be second, but is also more likely if we are clearly pushing ourselves to improve first.
There are very few cases where someone who disagrees with us doesn't see something wrong with our side. Or at a minimum, is not convinced because we are not as clear of a communicator as we think we are. Or not as good a listener as to what their question is, as we think. Even when we are "mostly right" and they are "mostly wrong", others rarely can't teach us something more about what we already know in one of those dimensions.
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Finally, don't try to persuade people in real time. Discuss, then move on. Discuss again if they want to.
People don't decide anything big in the moment.
They need time to understand an argument. Time to consider both its strengths and weaknesses. And time to consider ramifications we haven't even imagined. And the freedom to prioritize what is worth going down a rabbit hole for, in their life.
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I have been preparing to persuade a lot of people of something highly contrarian for a long time. This topic lights all the fires in me!
No, I disagree. Not all differences need resolving. Mature adults should learn to respect those differences. It doesn’t mean you have to change your worldview to get along. This is not about how tight or loose your convictions are, but rather how much empathy and grace you’re willing to grant to others. I can vehemently disagree with you while also seeking to understand and love you. Mischaracterizing strong and, yes, even non-negotiable convictions as “hate” or “division” is what keeps us divided.
I’m not actually so sure that we disagree as much as I originally said. A better way for me to phrase it would have been: there is nothing wrong with certain unswayable convictions. But others can be very problematic.
That said, the point I want to make more is that both of these exist whether we like it or not. So rather than saying there’s no place for those strong convictions I disagree with, it is better to understand and empathize than to debate. That doesn’t mean changing my convictions necessarily. But it does mean I should treat others well regardless of how I think of them. This is the true meaning of “love thy neighbor”. And It is a shame more people who quote such scriptures don’t exercise them.
Strongman argument style here and I agree. If you argue with enough people you will be changed. If you keep arguing you will develop hardened identity around these positions or fold into humility. Only politicians shape their views inside a box. At that point one chose power over progress. They learned power can be leveraged far sooner than wisdom can be applied.
That's all well and good, but when you have to put your trust in someone and person A believes "it's wrong to cheat people" and person B has a whole framework for thinking about the problem on a case by case basis, you just go with A, right?
This reminds me of the Heinz Dilemma [0]. Ideally you want neither person A's rigid social/legal conformity in the face of death, not person B's vague wishy-washy convictions that change each time, but some higher set of ideals. Ones that accept cheating may sometimes be justified but only when the stakes are something really important like a human life, and only when cheating doesn't cause more harm than it prevents.
If person A can't accept or understand that a human life overrides lesser considerations, then no, I don't put my trust in them.
> That's all well and good, but when you have to put your trust in someone and person A believes "it's wrong to cheat people" and person B has a whole framework for thinking about the problem on a case by case basis, you just go with A, right?
Whut?
Surely it would also depend on the situation, and the relevance and reasoning behind B's view.
Are we in preschool with children? Then probably A is right.
But if B is a teacher and explains that the kids love a game in which they all rampantly cheat, and the teacher has given up because they are having an absolute blast breaking the rules and trying to trick each other? I hope you would change your mind too.
Are we talking about an undercover agent in a dangerous country, attempting to get a critical component from a drunk bioweapons scientist, at a card table in a casino?
These are humorous examples, but real world versions are not hard to come by.
Principles that have few or no exceptions tend to be very narrow in scope. Like don't preemptively launch world ending nukes during a stable peacetime.
The sensible approach is have the best principles you can, be willing to improve them, and apply them with care and situational flexibility.
Principles are maps, not the actual moral territory.
I feel like people who make such blanket value statements like "I don't cheat people" or "I don't lie" aren't being honest with themselves, or are putting too much faith in the stability of the society they live in.
The easiest retort is Anne Frank. You're hiding her in your attic and a Nazi asks if you're hiding enemies of the state. There you go, a time when you'll definitely lie and cheat!
Someone might answer, "well, fine. I don't cheat or lie unless I'm in extraordinary circumstances." That's fine, they've let go of dogmatism then, now the interesting conversation starts of where the line is, what constitutes extraordinary circumstances. That's a very interesting conversation I believe.
> There you go, a time when you'll definitely lie and cheat!
I don't think this is the win you think it is. Kantians and se deontologists will absolutely say that no, you cannot lie and cheat even in that scenario. You have a moral duty to not lie but also a moral duty to resist tyranny. You cannot sacrifice one to achieve the other, you must choose only options that fulfill both duties.
> You have a moral duty to not lie but also a moral duty to resist tyranny. You cannot sacrifice one to achieve the other, you must choose only options that fulfill both duties.
The universe doesn't respect that viewpoint. There is no mechanism in reality or life that prevents hard tradeoffs from having to be made.
Are you role playing in a fictional world? Where you can make up whatever ideals you want, and make them happen. Then I am for nobody ever suffering injustice.
That would be good and right, indeed.
Or, making actual choices in reality? Where there are limits to what we can do, but making hard choices well has positive impact.
> Or, making actual choices in reality? Where there are limits to what we can do, but making hard choices well has positive impact.
Impact is irrelevant in Kantian ethics, deontological ethics [1] and virtue ethics [2]. A choice is good and right because it the nature of the choice itself in deontology, or because of how it defines one character in virtue ethics, not because of what effects it may or may not have on the world.
Every novice approaching ethics naively assumes a framework of consequentialism [3], where every choice is judged by its consequences, but this framework is deeply problematic and we have literal proofs that not all ethic theories can be reformulated in terms of consequences [4].
The original post I replied to also naively assumed a consequentialist framing, and I replied that this framing is not universal and so his conclusion does not follow. You can continue to double down on "it's obvious that consequences matter for ethical choices", but that doesn't make it true, and thus, it does not support the original argument.
From an arm chair perspective, this is a wonderful shortcut isn't it! Roughly, treat everyone how we would want to be treated - or some other limited formulation, with no horizon of thought about downstream impact past that.
Presumably, inflexible pacifism would get a sympathetic response from Kantians.
A kind of intellectual purity, at the relative cost to others' lives.
Interesting as an idea. Not so great for actual humans.
What exactly is the imagined benefit, that outweighs the well being of others and ourselves? A circular form of philosophical purity? A view that is better because it deems itself better?
EDIT: Just saw this:
> Not unless you can present some proof of this. Your implicit assumption that we should care about outcomes over principles has its own set of moral failures, like the repugnant conclusion.
Well, most people start by caring about other people and themselves. Not as an assumption but as a real status.
Doing so has a particularly interesting and meaningful consequence. By prioritizing better results for human beings, positive impact can better produce more positive impact. Creating a positive spiral where benefits of the ethics of prioritizing impact compound, and compound.
So for those that care about our fellow beings, and nontrivial non-limiting implications of choices, there is solid ground for ethics. Nothing arbitrary or foundationally circular.
Need to make up assumptions.
In contrast, what is the assumption or principle that values principles over people. What is the actual point? How is that deemed better than prioritizing a better world. How is that better or richer than ethics that achieve a higher bar, by continually re-incorporating, navigating and producing an ever more complex enabling future?
I gave you all of the links you need to read if you want to know more. Suffice it to say that all you're describing is what you care about, which is about as logically compelling an argument about what is good as telling me what deity you believe in. Your random foray into philosophy is not going to solve 3,000 years of ethical debates in a simple quip.
You seem to be completely at sea here, for all your knowledge.
Caring about oneself and others' welfare is a direct result of being creatures that must make choices to survive. The compounding positive sums of increasing cooperative behavior are not arbitrary. They pay for themselves, many many times over.
Thus, practical virtue appears naturally, and persists, and grows, regardless of what you want to call it, or alternatives that anyone comes up with.
If you are going to argue about/against that practical impact, at least acknowledge practical virtue has a very special status.
Or you are arguing from (real or posed) ignorance.
The burden us on you, if you want to claim this practical progression should be superseded.
Without that, an appeal to impractical principles over practical good, is very much in the vein of "telling me what deity you believe in".
What "good" is "good" that doesn't reciprocally maximize "good" going forward.
So far your comments lack any grounding beyond itself. Perverse "purity". That relegates virtue to an hermetic aesthetic or OCD tick.
Philosophy has spent 3000 years trying to organize humans well and has apparently failed to solve that problem.
Reframing that reality as "actually it doesn't matter what the consequence is as long as we followed our values to the letter!" is convenient, but in modern terminology, a cope.
I read your links and was already aware of deontology anyway but it was a nice refresher. Yup, you're right, we're describing what we care about! And in doing so we represent the majority of human thinking - maybe not the human thinking that gets written down, but nonetheless.
Why should people care to convince dusty academics what is right and wrong using logical systems and proofs when the dusty academic has lost the ethical debate immediately in the eyes of most when he admits that according to his ethical system, lying to prevent Anne Frank is wrong? This is instinctively wrong to most people, so, why should we care? Rigid logic is worthless when people are looking for something else, and rigid logic alone isn't enough to build a society.
I feel like you got to deontology and stopped. I've never actually met someone who studies ethics who got to deontology and didn't later end up with emergency exit modes, such as the Anne frank scenario. Using ethics to live a virtuous life is well and good, but Nazis don't do that, and you won't convince them using deontology to not round people up. You don't have to go all the way the other way and make "ends justify the means" arguments. Just allow yourself the flexibility to say "in an emergency, of course it's ok to lie," which may not seem logically sound, but society isn't logically nor is it possible to make it purely logical enough to be a valid ground for Kantian ethics to result in actual virtuous people - because the man that gives up Anne Frank telling the truth is not virtuous, he is a selfish monster, sacrificing a human life for his own sense of virtue and preservation of ethical purity, a disgusting trade off.
Have you ever met in real life a person who wouldn't lie to the axe murderer, because of their Kantian values?
If a Kantian can be put into a situation where their morals would require them to say the word that gives up Anne Frank, we can safely say it's a bad moral system.
> If a Kantian can be put into a situation where their morals would require them to say the word that gives up Anne Frank, we can safely say it's a bad moral system.
Not unless you can present some proof of this. Your implicit assumption that we should care about outcomes over principles has its own set of moral failures, like the repugnant conclusion.
Yes yes I'm sure smarter people than me have done lots of interesting logical things to philosophy over the last thousand years.
And I maintain my simple point: if your ethical system doesn't allow the flexibility to not give up Anne Frank, it's a bad ethical system. Unless you believe giving up Anne Frank isn't wrong? Then you're a bad person and shouldn't be considered in conversations about ethics!
Design it in a way to have good outcomes if you're worried about repugnant conclusions. Personally I believe putting it on paper is a fool's errand - vibes based ethics seems to work as good as one can get from an ethical system.
To cheat someone implies there is some obligation owed which is reneged upon, even if that's just the minute obligation owed from one member of a society to another.
In your hypothetical situation, I owe no such obligation to the Nazis who as you'll remember were an occupying force. I entered into no social compact with them.
The earth is not flat. This is indisputable fact. Yet, much ink has been spilt on arguments to the contrary. Refuting some of these arguments is quite difficult, honestly, but none of the arguments really matter because they reject all the convincing evidence as conspiracy or magic.
In this way, what you suggest demands significant labor on the part of the person arguing an obvious fact against an ideologue who will proclaim an open desire to change their belief but whose world view is entrenched in magic making it fundamentally impossible to actually change it.
Long story short I don't buy it and think what you said is full of shit.
"The earth is not flat. This is indisputable fact. "
Well, the earth you walk is indisputable flat. That all of earth is round, comes not from direct observation (except for the very few people who have been in space).
So I dare you to actually argue with flat earthers. It is a good way to test your basic scientific knowledge.
If you poke deep, you will find, that most people learned science the way people learned religion before. By memorising it, not by applying the scientific principle of questioning everything and aim for confirmation via experiment. Some flat earthers are actually more "scientific" in the way that they try out (weird) experiments and not just believe things. (But most probably do have a serious mental condition)
Long story short, this could have been the start of a interesting debate, if you would not have finished your argument with that insult.
The thing about this particular topic is that humanity has known this fact for millennia, not because we flew or went to space, but because we sailed. Any human who has watched ships come in to a harbor would be able to trivially tell you: We see the masts before the ship.
Where I grew up you can stand by the shore on a clear day and see the tree tops on the neighboring island, but not the beach. Sailing there, the beach emerges from the horizon.
The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass.
"The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass."
The main cause I could determine was rather a deep trauma of some sort or the other and with the result of them now mistrusting everything mainstream by principle and only now trusting their eyes and "intuition".
And believing the earth is flat is maybe the most anti mainstream position ever.
Edit: and my conclusion sort of was, that the only thing, that would really convince some of them is indeed to let them see it with their own eyes. So maybe I will organize a high altitude baloon trip for some people some day, but personally I also always wanted to get as close to space as possible at least once in my life..
Greeks calculated the circumference of the world based on the shadows of obelisks. Parallax was used to calculate how far the moon was, & from that how large
(people didn't think Columbus would fall off the edge of the world, they thought he wouldn't make it to India, which to be fair, if it was only ocean between the Pacific & Atlantic, him & his crew most definitely would've perished)
> Any human who has watched ships come in to a harbor would be able to trivially tell you: We see the masts before the ship.
Of which, until recently, there were very few. Civilizations developed not just on the coasts, but along the rivers, and until ~industrial revolution, the bulk of people at any given time didn't really have a chance to see the sea.
> The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass.
Yup, that is still true for humanity; what's changed in the last few hundred years is trains, cars, airplanes, and them all becoming broadly accessible to people.
Still, that was then. Today, "flat Earthers" are mostly just peer groups of shitposters or extreme contrarians.
It varies somewhat by continent, but living very far from the ocean is what’s new. Humans have historically had by far the densest population near shores - river deltas, archipelagos, and so on.
The notion that “seeing the ocean” was a very special thing to most people in history is unlikely. To a Hungarian peasant or a Mongol shepherd, sure, but there were far more people along the Mediterranean coast, the Pearl River delta, and so on.
Well, the main thing I learned in such debates is, you are free to believe what you want
I don't feel responsible for grounding the facts you somehow believe in.
But in another mood, I might have shared links to certain Telegram groups, or connect you with some people I know personally. They would be eager to enlighten you, if you are in for that.
It means I debated very often with weird people and the proof that I did, is that I don't feel the need to make the poster above believe, that I actually did that.
(Otherwise I would have shared links where you can find me debating the topic at length with various people)
Because indeed, most flat earthers are immune to reason as they are in the realm of irrationality.
So at some point someone needs to accept that and that helped my attitude towards my need to correct wrong information in people in general.
And if you believe now, I am a flat earther, because I said I discovered some flat earthers that act somewhat scientific sometimes and are open for arguments, well, so be it.
Whether or not you believe the earth is flat is a yes or no question, but you responded with a paragraph that wasn't a real answer. This reads as defensive, which leads a reasonable person to believe that you are in fact a flat earther.
I was defensive about the accusation of never having engaged with a real flat earther, despite saying so. And this part of the debate actually reminds me of engaging with them, so I rather stop that.
Have you ever watched a we-have-never-been-on-the-moon conspiracy freak engage a flat earther?
With both trying to top each other who has the most superior knowledge and who is the real sheep?
But yes. All that borderlines on the dangerous mental crazy side, so I cannot really recommend it, unless you have a fascination with the abyss of the human mind.
I mean, I just checked, it seems under ideal conditions one could see the curvature of earth at 10.5 km height, but to me it was not really a convincing curvature last time I did a long flight. Your experience was different?
The standard nonsens reply to this is something with perspective. Like a train track in the distance get closer together, the ship gets closer to the ground and then infinitely small. Doesn't make sense, but abstract enough to make some believe there is another explanation possible.
Standard answer: Ships do not get infinitely small - they visibly "sink" behind the horizont. Starting with the bulbous bow, which you stop being able to see at a distance of, i estimate, 10 kilometers?
Yes and standard reply then is quickly distracting (also themself?) with lots of other "facts" they quickly throw in, or some more vague mystic mumblings about perspective.
Edit: Oh and also there is some "proof" with a certain camera model they present. Where they zoom in closely to ships on the horizont, while not knowing the difference between optical and digital zoom. I am still not sure what they were trying to proof with that, but I did saw a visual glitch of the image processing on high digital zoom. Some vague impression that indeed you can enlarge the ship again fully, despite it being over the horizon. To me it was rather pixel soup, but for them confirmation. So to be on topic a bit again, if you want to influence irrational people of anything, logic only gets you so far and appealing on emotion quite further.
I know some who fucked up their whole life, because they believe that crazy shit for real. (Living now alone in a remote hut and waiting for the day when they come to take him away from there, because he also does not believe in paying taxes)
I can give you the adress, but maybe be a bit careful. To him you might be one of the evil NASA brainwashers.
Yes, I did. I also grew up watching scientific space videos before I could read and frequently making holidays at the sea as a kid.
But other people grew up in flat areas, far from the sea and maybe exposed with too much BS and maybe drugs at some points in their life, so ended up with a very different point of view.
It was interesting for me to find ways to maybe guide them back to reality and sometimes I succeeded a bit, but I don't think that argument would have helped me. On average and to our senses the earth is pretty undisputable flat.
> On average and to our senses the earth is pretty undisputable flat.
That's very easy to dispute
> have you never seen a hill or a hole?
Ok, fine, "other people ... maybe exposed with too much BS", but let's not pretend sticking to some patent nonsense can be traced to simple observations when those don't exist, that's not how you become a true believer
Ok yes, you can totally dispute that the earth we walk around is flat. It was mainly rhetorical reasons, why I used that wording. And I actually believe nothing is indisputable.
(But that does not mean I waste energy seriously trying to negate flat earth theory for good, I am more interested in the psychological reasons that makes people think like that)
That’s a tremendously high bar. Who defines what constitutes “legitimate” evidence? Anyone can disagree on what that means and you’re back to square one.
Look up “The Final Experiment” and its aftermath. Despite convincing the flat earthers who participated, the ones who observed it via livestream dug their heels in further.
I mean to some extent if you doubt the results of your experiments you’re not going to get anywhere, because you can never prove a model. At some point the simpler model is the one that wins out and some very small number of observations that go against it can be accounted by sampling error or hoaxes or whatever. Where you draw that line is up to you of course but generally the scientific community does fairly well on extremely well-supported theories.
> generally the scientific community does fairly well on extremely well-supported theories.
Then you step outside of the scientific community into the flamethrower of public opinion, and suddenly you have to deal with people who think it's a good idea to give their kids measles.
The most significant evidence that the earth is flat is that you can just look out your window and it's obviously flat, but all the round-earth evidence is complicated sciencey stuff.
If someone doesn't believe in complicated sciencey stuff, they just won't believe you, and they'll conclude they have evidence and you don't. At what point do you just walk away from the argument?
This is the core problem of scientific communication. Flat earthers are an extreme example. The process of arguing it etc can be a good exercise.
Edit: my favourite argument is to look at a half moon, and what angle the "shadow line" on the moon is relative to the horizon. Then ask your friends around the globe to report what angle it looks like to them. Because we are all standing on the side of a globe, we see it at different angles relative to our local horizon, which should perfectly correspond to each person's latitude etc. Fun easy experiment for an online community!
Yes, but the round earther can provide a model that matches your observations. Round earth is a better model because it matches reality more often while also accounting for a lot of the obvious flat earth arguments (mostly, that they hold true locally).
Atmospheric refraction. (See? The flat earther knows complicated sciencey stuff too. You won't accept their complicated sciencey stuff, so why should they accept your complicated sciencey stuff?)
We’re not trying to come up with a convincing argument - there’s thousands - but we’re trying to understand how it’s even possible to conceive of such idiocy for a person who is otherwise reasonable.
They mean “flat” in the sense of “straight” (i.e. not curved), the same way a sheet of sandpaper is flat despite being rugged. There are plenty of simple ways to disprove Flat Earth theories, but you’ll never be able to convince anyone by refuting their arguments with something which clearly misunderstands what they’re trying to say.
Instead of refuting their arguments, ask them to prove it to you. Whenever they say something you don't understand, ask them to explain it. Eventually they will get stuck.
Ideally, you explain your position and they explain theirs and it’s an open dialogue. Truthfully, you could be wrong about any number of things you have resolute conviction about- even things you believe are well evidenced.
The cynic in me is aware that actually us as individuals have finite time and mental energy to keep debating things which are base, and our lives are improved by just accepting some base assumptions and engaging our energy at higher levels instead of litigating the basics.
We don't even really have time or energy to debate the higher levels with other people. Maybe if it's a friend or family or someone you're close with. But arguing with strangers, at least imo, is a total waste of time most of the time.
Seems more likely the downvotes are related to the last sentence. Telling someone they are “full of shit” is not the type of curious discourse HN wants to promote.
That being the case, you might be getting downvoted for incorrectly assessing the situation and inaccurately placing blame.
I’m speculating, as it’s impossible to know what went through the heads of those who came before, but seems like a reasonable explanation to me.
No, I think they are being downvoted because they dismiss a thoughtful comment that makes a good attempt at providing an actual answer to the question at hand as "full of shit".
> actually us as individuals have finite time and mental energy to keep debating things which are base, and our lives are improved by just accepting some base assumptions and engaging our energy at higher levels instead of litigating the basics.
Which is precisely why most people considered Earth to be flat until it became more fashionable to consider it spherical, and continue to believe it's spherical because that remains in vogue.
I mean, it's not like people in general suddenly got gained some intrinsic reasons for getting to the true nature of things. Nah, all that changed is what you have to say so others don't think you're stupid.
Call it a more realistic take: humans are social animals. Ever since we started cooperating in groups, the social reality became more important to our survival than actual physical reality. For better or worse, that is a fact of nature. You may argue all you want that the sky is blue, but if the rest of your tribe calls it green, all you'll accomplish is to get yourself shunned and cast out and then eaten by wild animals.
"Is Earth flat or round", from the perspective of a regular person across all history: why are you asking me that question?. The answer has no direct, immediate relevance to anyone's lives - so either you're contrarian, or trying to pick a fight, or have some political angle, or just have too much idle time. Either of that means you're a potential threat. The right answer is always "flat" or "spherical" depending on the time period you live in, followed by "go away and do something useful for a change".
Note: I'm not promoting idiocy or lack of interest into the nature of things - all I'm saying, one needs to cut other people some slack. Most people aren't idiots; if they're holding on to "wrong" beliefs there's probably a damn good reason for it, and with some politically charged questions they may actually be smarter, on a pragmatic/survival level, in giving the "wrong" answer, than someone rocking the boat.
If you want to convince people, don't assume they're idiots - rather, try to connect your arguments to their experience, so getting it right matters to them, and then - that's the pragmatic/cynical part - be ready to accept that, in some cases, having the right answer doesn't matter in practice.
I really don’t like this article. I think this article reflects more our desire to categorize things into neatly numbered lists, and reflects less any thorough understanding of influence. Big lists of aphorisms. Less in the way of concrete detail. Words are used the wrong way. Concepts are broken up into incoherent lists.
“Ratianolising” is the word used in the most wrong way. The word normally describes inventing post-hoc reasons for some decision or behavior.
“Negotiating” is a big list of aphorisms which pull in different directions. Some of the advice sounds like amateurish art-of-the-deal tips which encourage you to extract as many concessions as you can from the other side. Some of the advice pulls in the opposite direction. And then, to mix everything up, the advice to compromise and meet half-way rears its ugly head.
The more I read in this article, the worse my opinion gets. I’m stopping.
You make a good point and I agree mostly to the point being made i.e. it is more fluid than categorical. However, I think it is not being made in good faith. I found the article highly insightful because it provides a solid starting point to those that have not started or don't know much about negotiations and how they happen. It should be safe to assume that there are plenty that have not started yet. It is also true that the more frameworks one reads and learns about, the more they realize that there are gaps in each one of them, and it is indeed fluid, not categorical, and hence reaching the same conclusion.
I can see that some of the categories are a stretch semantically; however, I didn't see the specific categories and their names as central to the point of the article. I think the goal is to demonstrate that 1) everyone engages in persuasion in some form; 2) there are various different styles of persuasion with different strengths and weaknesses, and it's useful to be self-aware about what style(s) you tend to use and whether there are other styles you might want to try out in certain situations. I think breaking it down into 5 somewhat artificial categories is a good framework for making this topic approachable and providing good examples to think about.
I think if you already have well-developed thoughts about persuasion and social interaction, it might not add much, but it was useful for me.
As an attorney, I've found that the best persuasion is the removal of impediments and friction standing between the person you hope to influence and what they want to do in the first place.
Most other tactics amount to force or deceit ("manipulation").
Are you talking about the judge, opposing attorney, your client, coworker, business partner, or who? Surely that context matters much more than you're suggesting, viz what you individually perceive the impediments and friction to be, and how you both think they can be removed?
(Not OP) How so? Behind every "no", there is a good reason. If you are honestly curious to understand the objection or hesitation, you may find ways to address them, and find others opening up to your suggestions when their points have been heard. Fundamental principle behind NVC.
Lawyers vs. lawyers may not be the cleanest example since a defence lawyers job is to make it harder for th prosecution to win, but then might want to get that advantage then mediate a deal.
For most of us ideally a colleague is more aligned than that.
This connects with me. More about helping people do what they already have in mind. Connecting with people and finding overlapping interests rather than a manipulation mindset.
Feels to me like that is addressed by the very first sentence in the article:
> We influence others every day, whether we intend to or not.
And then it’s expanded as it continues.
> Every effective communication is manipulation to a degree.
Yes, to a degree. Seems to me the author is attempting to be pragmatic and not let excessive pedantry cloud the larger point. A friend trying to convince you to stop smoking because they want you to live healthier for longer may be technically manipulating you, but that’s not a useful definition and realistically no one would colloquially consider it to be the case. Whenever you find yourself dismissing an argument because a word can be applied universally, instead steelman the author’s argument by trying to understand the definition they are working with.
When people say or hear "manipulation", it usually implies deception: someone is tricking someone else into a position that's against the former's goals and interests.
It's possible to communicate without manipulating if all you aspire to do is describe reality as you see it, and make an effort to separate your own aesthetic judgements from mere observations of what exists.
People may change their actions without changing their goals when their model of reality becomes more accurate.
To manipulate is to control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously. It implies that you're getting someone to do something they wouldn't if they were aware of what was going on.
The way I read manipulation is that someone is handling (manus: latin for 'hands') someone merely as a tool, bending and pushing and whatnot, just as a mere means to an end, without big regard for the tool, in an egotistical way. Objectifying the other, to some extent.
Advice a sales coach gave me was “sales is sorting, not convincing.”
I always found that put me in the right headspace to focus on listening first, then being clear. Whether they sort themselves into a yes or no is on them.
I had a manager once who argued that there was no difference between influence and manipulation. He was one of the most manipulative people I've ever worked with, and working with him was very obnoxious and stressful. I suspect most people who argue that there is no difference are either very manipulative people trying to justify their own behavior, or are people who have been taken in by such people.
IMO people get too caught up in the words "influence" and "manipulate", and effectively start arguing over definitions (whether they realize that's what they're doing or not). I don't think any of that matters.
What matters is whether you're behaving like a decent human being who respects and cares about others. The negative things that people associate with the word "manipulate" are things like trickery, dishonesty, etc. As long as you are approaching others with respect, authenticity, honesty, and a reasonable amount of humility, then I don't think you need to worry about whether your influence counts as "manipulation" or not: you'll be avoiding the aspects of "manipulation" that make it a bad thing.
People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies.
I see a lot of whitewashing of Charlie Kirk on social media at the moment that this quote reminds me of. The guy made a killing from speaking hate and then he got killed by hate himself. Like the guy that's always in the jurassic park movies, that doesn't think letting the t-rex out will be much of a problem, and then he get's killed by the t-rex and everyone else needs to deal with the t-rex of hate and far wingism walking the streets.
Did you watch all the videos where he says all the hateful things? Why wouldn't you link to all those videos? Cause for being such a supposedly kind man he sure did say a lot of hateful stuff. We have 10 years of backlog to go though.
Like how he dehumanized women by saying they should submit to their husbands. Or when he said Joe Biden should be killed. Or all the times he used slurs for lgbt. Or the time he joked that it would be funny if the Pelosi attacker would be let loose. Or all the many times he called women and black people dumb. He can't help himself, he goes on and on with his explicit hate and racism. I've had they misfortune of watching the full length videos of these clips, and they just make it clear that he really means these things. He just keeps speaking his hateful heart.
He wished death on his political opponents. That alone should make him someone you wouldn't want to associate with for fear of how it reflects on you.
I've always found that it's about defining win/win situations. Also, you should make real human connection in the process. If you don't like the person, that's a real issue. It may not be that the person is unlikeable, it may be that you aren't finding a perspective that aligns right.
But yeah, aligning incentives and making friends. Even if they don't go the way you want, you both still had a positive experience and can potentially find a way to work together in the future.
I'm sure you can think of a personally meaningful example if you try; have you turned on the news lately? There's a big story that people seem to be having a hard time finding a win/win and people are starving and being killed.
Sadly, that description doesn't even narrow it down to one "no-win" situation I can think of, so your comment is slightly concerning on its face.
I asked as a chance (a challenge even) to reframe an arbitrary situation.
Even the one you mention, at this exact moment, a win/win could be framed around the benefits of stopping the war. While it's entirely reasonable to pick a perspective that focuses on the awfulness that has occurred, looking ahead, a peace deal would benefit all sides. Certainly it's closer to win/win than continuing down the current path.
My point is that the perspective we take is a choice.
This is a very HN sort of sentiment. How can I be persuasive without being gross?
I had a bit of a moment when I first became a PM. (I've done a bunch of things, engineering / sales / founding, but PM only sort of recently.) I realized that my job was to wake up in the morning and pick fights. Or more diplomatically: to tell people they were doing the wrong thing, and they should be doing a different thing, in a way that made them want to listen to me more in the future, not less.
That's the job. In fact, in almost every job, that's the job.
Impact happens when you reach people and they behave differently because of you. That's nothing to be ashamed of. If you do it authentically and with good intent, it's one of the best things you can do with your time.
Think of what you are doing as revealing information as to why you think your new approach is more aligned with business and business goals. Give them room to do the same.
There might be systemic issues getting in the way. You and them having competing OKRs for example. Good to surface that and deal with it too.
Right -- the stereotypes of "selling" or "telling" or "persuading" are unhelpful in a lot of contexts.
Even in direct selling, many people don't want to feel they're being sold to! At a minimum, they don't want to feel out of control on decision they care about. But they're frequently open to learning, even if the constraints of how much time / credit they'll give you are extremely different.
What would communication without manipulation even mean? The whole point of making mouth-noises or eye-shapes is to cause the neural activations in people perceiving these shapes to change in some way. If they don't, you haven't communicated.
What most people mean when they ask questions like yours isn't "How do I avoid manipulation?" but "How do I live with integrity?". Answering this question is a field in its own right and isn't coupled to communication per se.
This is discussed at length in ancient philosophy. Reason is showing people why they should come to your position. Rhetoric, persuasion, manipulation are all ways of convincing people to take your side based on a story, rather than dispassionate good faith.
> Yet logic alone is not enough. Overused, it can become cold and detached.
I see this sentiment from time to time in the HN crowd, and I’m really interested in understanding more about it.
My first reaction to this? I think that you’re using “manipulate” to describe a process where somebody doesn’t want to do something, and make them do it anyway, but without using force. It feels like this has to be rooted in some kind of denial of other people’s free will—that they are somehow incapable of choosing to help you or agree with you, and can only be tricked. It seems like you would need to believe that other people don’t genuinely like you or value you.
Those are some bounding leaps you made without much context. Are you in sales?
Kidding aside, my first reaction was: perhaps the occasions they were aware of their own influence were ones in which they didn't much care for the outcome. Or maybe a conflict of interest, like trying to win over a hiring manager for a position you know you'll hate.
I don't think cajoling or persuading others inherently manipulative, but I can think of a lot of examples where doing so feels grimy.
> I don't think cajoling or persuading others inherently manipulative, but I can think of a lot of examples where doing so feels grimy.
What I am trying to do is understand why sema4hacker, and some others, feel that influencing people is manipulative. So if you pop into the conversation and say that you don’t feel the same way that sema4hacker does, that doesn’t really help me understand sema4hacker’s perspective.
That’s the bounding leap here and I want to pull it apart, dissect it. The bounding leap from “I influenced somebody” to “I manipulated them”. I think there’s not just raw, random feelings here, but some kind of rational thought that I want to understand.
I'm one of those people-For clarity I'm referring to influence in the active 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' sense. To me "influence" and "manipulation" seem like forms of persuasion but with positive and negative connotations, like "public relations" versus "propaganda".
None of them are necessarily bad on their own, but the choice of words seems like it depends on the perspective who is perceiving or describing the influencer/manipulator and their motives. Influence can be seen as manipulation and manipulation seen as influence.
For example someone who dislikes an "ifluencer" is probably more likely to think of them as manipulating their audience into buying products. Convincing someone to join a religious group could be seen as positive influence by current members, and manipulation by an outsider.
Clarity of purpose from the person doing the persuading is not necessarily clear as well. There is likely there's likely a mixture of factors motivating them to persuade, including some to their own benefit. People, especially those who think they are doing good, will also generally grade themselves on a bit of a curve and rationalize their actions towards being positive, especially in moral and emotional contexts.
In one of many possible definitions, manipulation requires deceit; a hidden agenda or goal.
In an "original" definition, manipulation literally means "to move". In that sense, we all manipulate. We move.
The two combined together: You're allowed to "move". You are broadly "allowed" to "manipulate" in that sense. If you add lies, deceit, etc, you're in territory others might not find acceptable, and will in turn reject you or remove you from their lives.
If you feel bad about your "success" but can't see why on a rational level, you may want to remember how your parents or other people growing up treated you. Can you find some childhood memories related to this? Potentially "adverse" experiences related to "manipulation" around you?
Not really, there are honest ways as well to influence as well. I also find it annoying when people try to manipulate at the sake of influencing just to sell something. Infact, wrote a small piece on this https://aishwaryagoel.com/what-engineers-taught-me-about-sel..... would love to know what you think?
The form of the question has assumptions that are broken.
The action of manipulating people is fairly obvious. It means you have a predetermined outcome that you want other people to accept The same assumption is implicit in the "How can I influence others..." Again there is the same predetermined outcome.
The answer then is obvious. You cannot. Perhaps what you are looking for is instead a way to join with other people in a participatory/collaborative fashion. You can ask what other people think, you can talk about what you think.
But as long as you have a predetermined outcome in mind, I suspect your only choices is manipulation.
You might also want to reassess what the question is. We talk about so much, but we do so little. Imagine that my car won't start and I want to fix it. The idea of influencing people here is silliness. We care very little about who thinks what, as long as the car starts. The thinking is in service of an action that produces a result.
I think "manipulation" implies sneakiness, not just influencing somebody. If I tell you that I disagree with your comment, and me saying that is enough to change your mind, then I have influenced you but not manipulated you because I've done nothing but tell you my honest opinion with no unannounced motives.
What I was trying to get at was the concept of mutual benefit in thinking. For example, my thinking is better because of your comment. If we want to think together - create some good thought then the focus is on understanding, not influencing or manipulating.
But yes, you can and did influence me. Or perhaps more accurately, your thinking about this helped me think about it better and more clearly. Thanks!
What they mean is "influence" (positive connotation) without "manipulate" (negative connotation). But this is simply a nuance on "intent" i.e. whether it is good or bad from the pov of the instigator. But the recipient also has an important role to play in this interaction since they are the one perceiving the intent which might be different from what was intended. So the instigator has to sometimes "manipulate" to gain "influence". The End-Goal often (but not always) justifies the means.
This is the realm of Worldly Wisdom/Propaganda/Politics covered in the classic works of Baltasar Gracian/Machiavelli/Francesco Guicciardini/Kautilya/Kamandaki/Vishnu Sharma/Edward Bernays/Jacques Ellul etc.
On the Psychological realm, see the works of B.F.Skinner on Operant Conditioning/Behaviourism and Verbal Behaviour.
Someone once told me the only way to influence is to let yourself be influenced. You have to open up to the other person / other side or nothing will move
And you never control how the influence works exactly :). You influence others in ways you won't be able to control or predict.
The key question is whether we use our moral compass when we influence or manipulate. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with moral manipulation.
The real inquiry is about the moral values we prioritize. Are we only focused on our own gain? Do we genuinely aim to help others? Or are we somewhere in the middle?
When we seek to benefit others, is it truly for them, or is it more about our own satisfaction from doing something “good”? Do those “good” actions genuinely help everyone, or merely specific groups at the cost of others? Perhaps someone has lost out because of our so-called “good” deeds.
By pondering and answering these questions, you'll be able to influence others without resorting to non-moral manipulation.
The solution is not to deny yourself the tools of persuasion or "manipulation" but to be authentic and transparent. It's deceptiveness that makes influence or persuasion manipulative, not the tools and techniques.
I think it's about helping them map out the options. So, listening to what they want and truthfully sharing your opinion on how the different options will solve their problem. If the best option for them is what you sell, it's a win-win. If it's not, all good. They will thank you if you truly helped them and gave them the best option for their problem. Obviously, this isn't possible if what you sell is never the best option. In that case, the problem exists before the conversation even happens. Either make a better product or change company
Public debates are necessary to get new ideas out there, but individuals and groups would rather be horrible than change their minds after an argument.
Attempting to argue with people, in good faith or otherwise, to change their mind is a philosophical trap.
Persuasion is just getting people to come around to your way of thinking without direct argumentation. It gets manipulative, psyopy and evil when fear, envy, lust, guilt, etc nudges are applied.
By setting a "good" example during a time they are in an unfavorable or weaker position. Which could mean remaining firm on the outside while providing space for their ego to transform their loss into a learning experience and improve their performance. It's written this way because the methods are different for the enabler and/or the receiver. I hope you understand obi one!
I would say for me that the difference between Influencing and Manipulating is that when you manipulate someone you could a) advance arguments you know to be untrue or that you don't intend to fulfil (negotiating in bad faith) and/or b) trying to get someone to do something that you know with a high degree of certainty is against their best interests.
Only give positive feedback when they are doing the thing you want them too. Absence of positive feedback is as effective as negative feedback, with the positive effect of extracting the change you want instead of placing the change upon the person.
Let's go back in history of influencing. How did the Egyptian workers were influenced to build pyramids? How did the leaders influence populations to be part of revolutions? How did the kings influence armies to engage in battles? Slavery apart, but there is something else.
You need to realize that people are not inherently individual beings. In some cultures, individuals hardly have any identity of their own. The identify themselves with a larger creature and they become part of that creature. They play a role assigned to them.
So, influencing involves making an individual to lose their individuality to some extent and become a part of the larger interest group. From that point, it is a matter of telling them what to do for the larger community.
This was easier in the old times when social bonds were stronger in families, tribes, villages etc. Individuals hardly had any privacy. Everyone in the village knows what's going on in every home in that village.
Getting these bonds back is the first step. When you try to influence someone, your need to make them understand who you are, to them. And why it is beneficial to have that bond. Once you have that "we" between you two, there is no explicit influencing required.
Find the place where their interests and yours intersect, and frame them existing there as an inevitability. If there is no intersection, don't try to force it.
This is an interesting read and reminded me of this. In the 2000s I was at a company that had a consultant come in and give each group a talk a that was essentially “how win friends and influence people” for business.
I had a relationship with this book. I had read it years before and put it into practice as part of my life. It worked, but I became jaded, yeah I could be a great friend to people but it was almost never reciprocated, and I came to believe that using the techniques in the book were manipulative and deceitful at worst, and just not genuine at best.
So the consultant got to the end and asked for questions, and I asked “isn’t this all just manipulating people and dishonest?” Be sputtered and stammered and didn’t have much of a response. My boss was not thrilled that I had called it out, I was being difficult. That started a real problem for me at that company and I eventually left.
well, manipulation is more about intent, rather than technique... I think it doesn't matter if you chose the correct "door" if you're trying to get someone to operate against their own interests.
If you have Christ, you can pray for them. God controls all random events and us. He also knows what's best for us. By praying, and if God says yes, He might provide what they need in the right way at the right time. He also sometimes gives people the better thing they didn't think to pray for. If He says no, that's also what's best due to His perfect knowledge. Finally, it builds our own inner compassion for other people.
When doing evangelism, Jesus told us to scatter seed, water, and harvest. God provides the growth. So, we can share the Gospel or truths in God's Word... His work, not our schemes... while letting them make their own decisions. Instead of manipulation, we are simply offering a gift out of love for them that they can do what they want with (or ignore). We do it while praying their choices have maximum glory to God and benefit to them, not us.
We're also commanded to display Christ-like character in our interactions with people. Paul reminds his critics "we were blameless among you" and cared like a mother nursing her child. James said to show our faith by our works, like taming the tongue or feeding a starving brother. Paul says imitate me as I imitate Christ. Our character can have a profound impact on people around us. Personally, I've been able to improve a lot just by seeing how my brothers and sisters speak and act in many situations. They've also sometimes learned from how the Holy Spirit showed me to handle specific situations.
So, these are examples of how to influence people without selfishly manipulating them. In two cases, without any manipulation of your own since one is asking the sovereign God to make the right calls and the other is just demonstrating godly behavior in a way that positively impacts them.
c-suite person here...my job is "influence to empower" my team and others - to unlock opportunity for the company I represent.
My advice would be: Stay honest with yourself. To influence IS to manipulate.
Playing squeamish is a slippery slope into avoiding accountability for your actions.
In other words - don't judge the tools - judge your motives and the outcome.
Accept there is always a trade and balance.
If you can be honest about your motives and actions with yourself your friends and colleagues - chances are that you can achieve your goals with ethics and empathy intact.
If you can't, then it's time to take a look at yourself - not the tools.
It's all influence. When it's convenient and good we call it charisma, leadership, crisis navigation. When it's bad we call it manipulative, control freak, sociopathic.
Persuasion that happens in good faith is a two-way street. You explain your position, but also truly listen to theirs. If you are prepared to change your own position based on what they say, then you can hope that they might change theirs based on what you say.
If it is truly two way in this sense, including your best efforts to extract from the other party their strongest, potentially unexpected, arguments for their position and give them your due consideration, it shouldn't feel like manipulation.
Even if you’re not going to change your position, such as when the other party doesn’t believe basic facts or incontrovertible evidence, you have to be willing to listen to their position to understand why they hold that position.
When you have a debate with someone who is only waiting for their turn to talk and visibly doesn’t care to parse what you’re saying, you are not motivated to hear them out.
It has to be a discussion, not a lecture combined with light condescension and dismissal.
This is fine when the question is, “What’s for dinner?” However, there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed. This is called having integrity. It’s important to understand where these lines fall within yourself and those you are speaking with. Some arguments aren’t worth having in an effort to persuade, but rather they should be discussions aimed at understanding, being vulnerable and finding ways to respect and live at peace among people we have fundamental differences with. Otherwise we are no different than Crusaders and Jihadists.
> This is fine when the question is, “What’s for dinner?” However, there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed. This is called having integrity.
No, it is not the definition of integrity. If you opt to double-down on positions you held in spite of being presented to evidence that contradicts or refutes your prior beliefs, the behavior you are displaying is opposite of integrity, specially the part about honesty and commitment to do what's right.
having integrity: “murder is bad, even if it’s someone i disagree with (tho isn’t murdering)”
lack of integrity: “EU bad, even if you give me evidence to say that it’s the UK’s own politicians that have screwed us for decades.. not the EU necessarily”
Rape is wrong. It doesn't matter what your evidence or positions or logic are, you will not sway me on that point. I suspect that sort of thing is what GP meant.
> Rape is wrong. It doesn't matter what your evidence or positions or logic are, you will not sway me on that point.
Do you believe that you were already presented with evidence that compelled you to change your personal position on rape, and the only reason you didn't changed your position in spite of that was your stubbornness to stick with them in spite of you feeling your belief was already refuted?
Or does the rationale still holds?
I think you tried very hard to find a moral argument to try to refute the argument on integrity, but you unwittingly just proved the point.
But that clearly falls within the parent comment’s definition. Just because you are prepared to change your opinion on something based on evidence to the contrary, it doesn’t mean such evidence exists or may even be possible! I am of the opinion that the Earth is not flat. And I know that no evidence you can present would ever change that because it’s patently obvious that’s the case given the evidence I already have! But I am still theoretically open to a debate. That’s the scientific method.
Why is rape wrong though? "hurr durr rape bad" is just repeating whatever you've been indoctrinated to believe. There's a more fundamental reason rape is bad (and this same fundamental reason underpins the reason we find a lot of other things bad).
It does fall back to "core values" though - kinda' like with math & axioms. The "why" chain of questions will inevitably lead to something like "because there's inherent value in human life", and this is the point where it breaks down because there's no logical reason to say that. You can probably postulate the contrary and end up with a completely different set of morals that may still be internally coherent but would be very alien to you. Just how you can say "in a plane, through a given point not on a given line, there is no line parallel to the given line" and end up with a weird, non-Euclidean but coherent geometry.
Yes. But what happens in practice, both in actual rape trials and the court of public opinion, is a battery of arguments to say that it wasn't "really" rape. Disbelief at the woman's version of events. (Or, for other cases, the socially subordinate person in the interaction). Arguments that various sorts of actions or forms of dress constitute consent. Introducing the victim's previous sexual history to discredit them. And so on.
This is why "#metoo" was so controversial.
> This is why "#metoo" was so controversial.
I always though it was controversial because it did away with the 'innocent until proven guilty' argument...
Much like saying "murder is wrong", the wrongness is a part of the definition of the word. There's no need for evidence or logic, beyond understanding what a definition is.
Neither rape nor murder are inherently, definitionally wrong. There are situations in extremis where murder and rape are considered justifiable: in war, murder is often praised; and in an "everyone else is dead, humanity will go extinct" situation (e.g. the subjective belief of Lot's daughters, according to some traditions, in Genesis 19:31–36), rape might¹ be considered permissible. And both words are used to refer to things which aren't necessarily wrong (e.g. "I'm going to murder this sandwich", or the "forcefully taking" -> "winning in a competition" senses of 'rape' described on Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary).
Rather, central members of the categories of 'rape' and 'murder' are wrong for reasons, and while those reasons may differ depending on your ethical framework, pretty much all ethical systems agree on this point.
"That's immoral by definition" isn't really how words work. Some philosophers would call that a category error, others would call it meaningless, and yet others would call it equivocation.
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¹: For the record: I think the "don't rape" deontological principle is extremely reliable, and if anyone alive finds themselves in a situation where they think they should break it, they're almost certainly wrong about the facts. The dilemma faced by Lot's daughters was a false dilemma: many other options were available, including "talk about the dilemma and thereby acquire either consent, or a good counterargument", or "double-check with the supernatural being who created the otherwise-unlikely circumstance where you have good reason to believe everyone else died in fire and/or conversion to salt, to confirm whether you are in fact the last remnants of humanity". I can't think of a situation where rape is actually justified. Trolley problems don't occur in real life.
You are mistaken.
> in war, murder is often praised;
The killing of an enemy combatant, for example, is usually lawful, praised and not considered murder. Generally speaking, the killing of a civilian is sometimes a war crime and considered a murder.
You also have a lot to say on the nuanced ethics of killing and on sexual violence, but these deal with the underlying concepts themselves and the words don't matter; in fact philosophers frequently give common terms a specialized, ad-hoc definition when they want to discuss these concepts themselves.
I have nothing to say on the "nuanced ethics": as far as I'm concerned, rape is bad and murder is bad. Sufficiently-advanced pedantry always circles back to that. There's no nuance to be had.
If you asked any (non-bloodthirsty) soldier, officer or general whether they'd press a button to magically achieve their military objectives without bloodshed, they'd certainly take that option. Killing enemy combatants is praised as good because it is (considered) a necessary evil, but "necessary evil" is awful for morale. If you take people outside that situation, they tend to hold the view that "killing is wrong", or "killing non-wrongdoers is wrong" at worst.
You've (re)defined the word "murder" to exclude "lawful killings of enemy combatants", but whether we use your or my definition, that doesn't change the morality of the actions. You also observed that philosophers do that kind of (re)definition all the time. That's the point I was trying to make.
If the legal system calls certain morally bad killings in peacetime manslaughter that does not rise to the severity of murder, then I think that murder as is commonly used is a specific kind of killing that does not include your example of a wartime killing. Even outside of the courtroom itself, many are also very careful when using the word "murder" when discussing actual killings, because of its severity, and responsible people will defer to what suspects/convicts are charged/convicted with. Rather, it is you that have chosen a redefinition of the word.
I am not responding to your discussion on the morality of killings, because your argument was primarily about the definition of the word "murder", and I wanted to point that you were not accurate either.
Murder is when you kill someone on purpose, when you had the option of not. Voluntary manslaughter is when you do a violence on purpose, and the target dies, but your intent was not to kill. Constructive involuntary manslaughter is when you take an action that's against the rules, and someone dies as a result, but you didn't realise you were doing violence. Negligence involuntary manslaughter is when you take an action that's not against the rules, and someone dies as a result, but you could've averted it.
Wartime killing of the enemy could be any of these (except probably not the last one), but it's probably going to meet the requirements for murder. The main reason it's not considered murder is that in war, we use a different classification system for violent acts, because the social context of violence in wartime is very different to the social context of violence in peacetime.
If you're taking the perspective that the social context is bundled up in the definition of the word (Later Wittgenstein's "use" theory of language), then killing an enemy soldier in war is not murder. If you're taking the perspective that a word refers to a meaningful proposition, i.e. a family of states of affairs (Early Wittgenstein's "picture" theory of language), then killing an enemy soldier in war is a non-central member of the 'murder' category, and just nobody calls it that. Personally, I'm a "use" theory proponent, so, uh… hm. Guess I was inaccurate.
> Murder is when you kill someone on purpose, when you had the option of not.
Indeed, I think that your original reply would have been more useful and less apparently combative if you had
1. replied with this definition, 2. showed why this commonsense definition that does not definitionally involve morality is useful, and gave examples of it, 3. finally showed marginal cases where murder is not a moral bad according to certain ethical frameworks, 4. acknowledge that it's OK to redefine the word so that it is definitionally morally bad, but since it differs from a commonsense notion, it needs to be signposted,
but I think you had a bit to figure out yourself.
I'll have to study my original comment to see why it appears combative: thanks for pointing that out.
RE 2: I just looked through a few country's English-language laws and cribbed (what I saw as) the consensus definition of "murder". I'm not sure the other definitions I gave actually correspond to any real-world legal system, but many of them have something similar.
RE 4: Defining the word as "definitionally morally bad" means you have to make a moral assessment before using the word – but that takes most people way longer than the language processing of two syllables, so it leaves you open to equivocating rhetoric. Appeals to "common sense" (which, in my experience, is far from common) aren't why I object to that definition (except as signposted technical jargon, narrowly-scoped to a particular context).
The post I originally replied to was equivocating in this way (probably unintentionally), hence the strong objection. Though in my experience, explanations are better than intensifiers: that's something I should look out for in my editing passes in future.
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> Neither rape nor murder are inherently, definitionally wrong.
This is easily refuted: look up “murder” in any English dictionary and you’ll find a definition like this: “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” The inclusion of “unlawful” makes it definitionally wrong. You might want to quibble about legality vs. morality but in this case at least, the one entails the other. Perhaps you’re thinking of words like “killing”.
The difference between legality and morality is extremely relevant and it's absurd to just gloss over it. Many things we now consider immoral were perfectly legal, like slavery or the holocaust. Law should be based on morality, morality does not and should not defer to the law.
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What if you're a duck
Still bad. They should require consent like rats do. Its much more ethical
based duckposting
When the shitpost so bad it needs its own throwaway
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Does the alcoholic dad who wont stop drinking have integrity? His core principles say he shouldn't back down; he's not a quitter after all.
Silly example, but I find arguments fall apart most at the edges.
I challenge you to develop a better definition of integrity. For me, integrity means I will change my mind when presented with convincing data.
> For me, integrity means I will change my mind when presented with convincing data.
It's not as binary as that.
Each new convincing data point may cause me to re-evaluate my position, but simply re-evaluation may not cause me to change my mind, but may cause me to slightly shift in the direction of the new position.
At some point, I would have ingested and/or seen so many convincing data points that my position is effectively neutral. And some point after that, my position may have actually shifted and not be neutral anymore.
IOW, it's a spectrum, and journeys across this spectrum are:
a) Slow - position moves in tiny amounts, and
b) Not guaranteed to end up on the opposite end - you might get to neutral and remain there for the rest of your life, or you might shift back towards your original position.
> Does the alcoholic dad who wont stop drinking have integrity? His core principles say he shouldn't back down; he's not a quitter after all.
Then yes, he does have integrity. He has his principles and stands by them (however misguided it may seem to others). But all this illustrates is that integrity alone doesn't define a good person.
The problem there though is that data completely breaks down for anything historical, philosophical, cultural, religious, miraculous, or otherwise requiring “faith.”
Anything that is not a repeatable event under a microscope has no “data” and never will.
I am not a "data or it didn't happen" person. I am sure I have magical beliefs that don't play out in reality.
I'm not convinced by the argument that this falls apart for your categories. Logic and reasoning still exists. Philosophy can be argued and principals agreed upon. Historical things leave traces. And I am appalled by blind faith.
At some point, our society and ways of doing things boils down to trust or faith. I trust that people thinking about things, trying to validate those things, and who employ a way to change their minds will move towards "more correct" understandings. People knew not to hang around people with the plague before germ theory.
I used to look at things this way too, but I now see this picture as incomplete, missing a crucial detail. There exist another dimension to our reality, beyond the inanimate, objective one we normally study through physics and life sciences. That dimension is the social dimension. It has its own rules, and for everyone at almost all times, it's more directly relevant to survival and happiness than actual physics.
An example I also posted in another comment: you can be objectively right about the color of the sky, but that won't save you from becoming dinner to wild animals after your people cast you out for believing differently.
We've evolved to navigate this social dimension as much as physical one, because we're social creatures and other people have forever been a part of our environment. Recognizing that, and recognizing that this social reality is more relevant than physical one, is IMO the key to understanding why people behave they do - why they believe obvious bullshit, and refuse to align their beliefs with the truth of physical reality, despite ample and indisputable evidence. It's the key to understand why seemingly smart people say and believe dumb things, especially after they start a career in sales or politics. It's all because, for almost everyone and in almost every case, being seen as in good standing in one's social circles is much more directly relevant to everyday experience and long and happy life, than getting some facts right.
Having that understanding, it becomes more apparent than just about the only way to convince people to change their mind, is to make things relevant to them personally in either dimension, and at a larger scale, to bring those two dimension more in alignment.
In a world where there is no way of knowing whether my blue is the same as your blue, can there be a way to be objectively right about the colour of the sky?
Yes. The color is exactly as you see it.
Irrelevant. You cannot communicate what you actually see, you only communicate labels you assign to incommunicable, inaccessible between humans feelings.
Ergo, there is no “objectively right” about the colour of the sky (or anything). There is only “using the same labels” or “using different labels” compared to everybody.
Sounds about right, until the reality check. How often do you raise the problem of the incommunicability of qualia outside hacker news? With what purpose? How often does that conversation accomplish its purpose?
You know, I've always figured, if our culture was based on an epistemic fundament that acknowledged and properly accounted for the fundamental incommunicability of percepts, it probably would've been a better world. (One where it's much easier for everyone to communicate accurately and effectively; as people would not expect of themselves and of each other to be "objective", just verbalize their current understandings as best as they could, without stressing too much over how understanding can only ever be subjective and incomplete.)
Some of us do envision such a world, but instead find ourselves living in a planetary culture based on the very rejection of the exact distinction that you're trying to point out. Turns out Cartesian dualism offers a lot of leeway along the "is-ought" axis, huh. (Qui bono, et sapienti sat.)
Enough to make the generally accepted standard for "objectively right" to be "the house is always right". (Supposedly, a supermajority of objects does not a subject make - or vice versa. And yet post-Enlightenment history is rife with efforts to scientifically desubjectify subjects in the service of some objectively rational philosopher king.)
And yet it seems to work well enough for most prosocials, you don't see them complaining, now do they? (What's a little mass neurosis between civilized folk?) I think it's safe to say that a member of the general public is cognizant of the labels they've been accultured to, at least to the same extent as they're aware of the physical reality which surrounds them. (If not vastly more so, physical reality being the more predictable of the two.)
This would mean that they have not actually experienced the quale of "incommunicable, inaccessible between humans [qualia]" and therefore the distinction you're trying to point out here is not in fact something they are able to think about; only perhaps to construct sentences about it by example, much like a LLM or a(n M)BA does.
As I'm sure you already know your own subjective version of most of the above, but I'm guessing you maybe view it more like a problematic to be struggled with, rather than a natural paradox and absurdity deserving of a more playful approach, I'd totally leave the celestial color coordination (along with all the worrying about whether people get it) to you - you, personally, and certainly none of the other folks. Not in the least because agreeing with people on how colors are called does not seem to be inherently conducive to being able to fly.
I don’t really understand the point you’re trying to make.
> Sounds about right, until the reality check. How often do you raise the problem of the incommunicability of qualia outside hacker news?
This is HN, and I was replying to a specific thought experiment posted in a comment:
> you can be objectively right about the color of the sky, but that won't save you from becoming dinner to wild animals after your people cast you out for believing differently.
That’s it.
You trying to bring into this people not complaining about it is, again, irrelevant. Most people, unless they are into philosophy, don’t tend complain about the inability to read someone else’s mind or feel what someone else’s feel. People also don’t tend to complain about the inevitability of death, the inability to go back in time, and in fact pretty much any fact of life that they cannot change. Yet, indeed, people absolutely do bring these up on regular basis in relevant philosophy-adjacent discussions and thought experiments, such as when correcting a claim that verbal labels assigned to feelings can be “objectively correct”.
>People also don’t tend to complain about the inevitability of death, the inability to go back in time, and in fact pretty much any fact of life that they cannot change.
News to me. The rest is irrelevant.
your perception of blue might be different than mine, but as a society we have agreed that specific wavelengths of light are blue. those wavelengths are absolutely measurable.
Indeed, so if that particular society has apparently agreed to call “blue” a different wavelength then you are the one objectively in the wrong.
To explain why your comment was received poorly: they're talking about integrity & you somewhat randomly brought in faith
Changing your mind given data isn't going to apply when there's no data to go by, so this concept of integrity isn't related to faith
My feeling is that we should simply not believe in stuff where we will never have data.
> However, there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed. This is called having integrity.
I see what you're saying but I think this is called obstinance...
_I will never vote for a politician that committed an act of rape or pedophilia._
Is that part of my character Integrity or Obstinance?
Most likely neither, as you are presumably not voting for a politician who has committed rape or pedophilia because it is a legitimate, logical argument for not supporting them. Likewise I am rather firmly opposed to being thrown into a woodchipper, not because of some inflexible commitment to an ideology or ethical principle but because I have two braincells to rub together.
Have you ever felt a strong desire to vote for a politician who has committed sex crimes?
If your principles don't stand up to scrutiny, you shouldn't hold them. Some of the greatest evils ever committed were done by people certain they were acting according to upstanding principles. There is a middle ground between forcing all people to adopt your viewpoints and accepting all viewpoints as equally valid. Oftentimes you can agree to disagree, but there are certainly times you can't.
Yeah, I think we agree here.
"However, there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed"
That's called being dogmatic. Sure, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but, in the face of extraordinary evidence you'd be a fool to stay unswayed and adhere to your proven false core principles.
I would venture to say that not all dogma is misplaced, despite the negative feelings that word tends to ignite. I tend to use that word more in situations where it’s clear someone hasn’t reasoned out why they believe what they believe. When I use the word “principles” I think it different than someone who just follows rules they were told to follow.
> However, there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed. This is called having integrity... ...Otherwise we are no different than Crusaders and Jihadists.
And do you suggest a crusader or jihadist or keep this point of view as well? They too might think they are in the right and should keep their (religious etc) integrity, surely?
Everyone/most people always assume they are always in the right; if this was objectively true, there would never be a single debate or argument in the world.
A saying I like, apparently first made by Quine: "I always think I'm right, but I don't think I'm always right."
In other words, for every belief I have, I think it's right. Clearly, otherwise I would have abandoned it already. But I don't think that the set of all my beliefs is 100% free of errors or inconsistencies.
The point is I don’t have to agree with their views. Why would I want them to keep views I disagree with? This isn’t about what I’d want them to do, but rather accepting that people believe things that sound crazy to me, and it’s still up to me to find a way to live with and love them.
> there is nothing wrong with having core principles that aren’t able to be swayed
Well, yes there is.
In fact, that is the central problem of unresolvable divisions. People implicitly making themselves "the decider" by imagining their principles are so great as to preclude any need for revision. (Faith in the primacy of one's beliefs, is inherently the same as faith in one's own primacy to choose beliefs.)
There is nothing wrong with having strong core principles, because your best understanding supports them strongly. But as soon as you discount the possibility of them being wrong, even partially wrong, not the whole picture, framed within a non-tautological assumption, or not supercedable by other wiser principles, ..., you become the enemy of your own progress.
Nobody's knowledge, wisdom, or principles are complete, or have consistent primacy over all others.
Ultimately, principles, ethics and morality are a kind of economics. Decisions are tradeoffs between options. How does one make choices, so that the result is the outcome with the greatest value, and doesn't create other problems that exceed what is solved. That is a decidability problem, which will never have a complete or completely consistent answer.
The landscape for the question "What is best?" and "What is true?" is chaotic, fractal, non-Euclidean and infinitely complex.
---
One of the biggest reasons to strong man the arguments of others, is the better at strong manning you become, the more likely you find something worth changing your own views over. Regardless of how explicit, implicit, or non-existent that was in their original argument.
Leveraging others disagreement, to identify misunderstandings and gaps in one's own knowledge, is the most important reason to talk to someone we disagree with.
Persuading them should be second, but is also more likely if we are clearly pushing ourselves to improve first.
There are very few cases where someone who disagrees with us doesn't see something wrong with our side. Or at a minimum, is not convinced because we are not as clear of a communicator as we think we are. Or not as good a listener as to what their question is, as we think. Even when we are "mostly right" and they are "mostly wrong", others rarely can't teach us something more about what we already know in one of those dimensions.
---
Finally, don't try to persuade people in real time. Discuss, then move on. Discuss again if they want to.
People don't decide anything big in the moment.
They need time to understand an argument. Time to consider both its strengths and weaknesses. And time to consider ramifications we haven't even imagined. And the freedom to prioritize what is worth going down a rabbit hole for, in their life.
---
I have been preparing to persuade a lot of people of something highly contrarian for a long time. This topic lights all the fires in me!
No, I disagree. Not all differences need resolving. Mature adults should learn to respect those differences. It doesn’t mean you have to change your worldview to get along. This is not about how tight or loose your convictions are, but rather how much empathy and grace you’re willing to grant to others. I can vehemently disagree with you while also seeking to understand and love you. Mischaracterizing strong and, yes, even non-negotiable convictions as “hate” or “division” is what keeps us divided.
> And the freedom to prioritize what is worth going down a rabbit hole for, in their life.
I’m not actually so sure that we disagree as much as I originally said. A better way for me to phrase it would have been: there is nothing wrong with certain unswayable convictions. But others can be very problematic.
That said, the point I want to make more is that both of these exist whether we like it or not. So rather than saying there’s no place for those strong convictions I disagree with, it is better to understand and empathize than to debate. That doesn’t mean changing my convictions necessarily. But it does mean I should treat others well regardless of how I think of them. This is the true meaning of “love thy neighbor”. And It is a shame more people who quote such scriptures don’t exercise them.
Even if everyone was flexible, there would be unresolved differences.
So I 100% agree with general (reciprocated) respect.
Strongman argument style here and I agree. If you argue with enough people you will be changed. If you keep arguing you will develop hardened identity around these positions or fold into humility. Only politicians shape their views inside a box. At that point one chose power over progress. They learned power can be leveraged far sooner than wisdom can be applied.
That's all well and good, but when you have to put your trust in someone and person A believes "it's wrong to cheat people" and person B has a whole framework for thinking about the problem on a case by case basis, you just go with A, right?
This reminds me of the Heinz Dilemma [0]. Ideally you want neither person A's rigid social/legal conformity in the face of death, not person B's vague wishy-washy convictions that change each time, but some higher set of ideals. Ones that accept cheating may sometimes be justified but only when the stakes are something really important like a human life, and only when cheating doesn't cause more harm than it prevents.
If person A can't accept or understand that a human life overrides lesser considerations, then no, I don't put my trust in them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_dilemma
The older I get the more I hear the exact opposite of what people say when they claim anything absolute about themselves. It's working out well.
"I'm an empath." "I don't like drama." "I never cheat people." "I value honesty."
So, what you are saying is that you found the fountain of youth and are getting younger?
> That's all well and good, but when you have to put your trust in someone and person A believes "it's wrong to cheat people" and person B has a whole framework for thinking about the problem on a case by case basis, you just go with A, right?
Whut?
Surely it would also depend on the situation, and the relevance and reasoning behind B's view.
Are we in preschool with children? Then probably A is right.
But if B is a teacher and explains that the kids love a game in which they all rampantly cheat, and the teacher has given up because they are having an absolute blast breaking the rules and trying to trick each other? I hope you would change your mind too.
Are we talking about an undercover agent in a dangerous country, attempting to get a critical component from a drunk bioweapons scientist, at a card table in a casino?
These are humorous examples, but real world versions are not hard to come by.
Principles that have few or no exceptions tend to be very narrow in scope. Like don't preemptively launch world ending nukes during a stable peacetime.
The sensible approach is have the best principles you can, be willing to improve them, and apply them with care and situational flexibility.
Principles are maps, not the actual moral territory.
Principles are wisdom, not an algorithm.
I feel like people who make such blanket value statements like "I don't cheat people" or "I don't lie" aren't being honest with themselves, or are putting too much faith in the stability of the society they live in.
The easiest retort is Anne Frank. You're hiding her in your attic and a Nazi asks if you're hiding enemies of the state. There you go, a time when you'll definitely lie and cheat!
Someone might answer, "well, fine. I don't cheat or lie unless I'm in extraordinary circumstances." That's fine, they've let go of dogmatism then, now the interesting conversation starts of where the line is, what constitutes extraordinary circumstances. That's a very interesting conversation I believe.
> There you go, a time when you'll definitely lie and cheat!
I don't think this is the win you think it is. Kantians and se deontologists will absolutely say that no, you cannot lie and cheat even in that scenario. You have a moral duty to not lie but also a moral duty to resist tyranny. You cannot sacrifice one to achieve the other, you must choose only options that fulfill both duties.
> You have a moral duty to not lie but also a moral duty to resist tyranny. You cannot sacrifice one to achieve the other, you must choose only options that fulfill both duties.
The universe doesn't respect that viewpoint. There is no mechanism in reality or life that prevents hard tradeoffs from having to be made.
> The universe doesn't respect that viewpoint. There is no mechanism in reality or life that prevents hard tradeoffs from having to be made.
What the universe does or doesn't respect has no bearing on what is or is not right / good.
Are you role playing in a fictional world? Where you can make up whatever ideals you want, and make them happen. Then I am for nobody ever suffering injustice.
That would be good and right, indeed.
Or, making actual choices in reality? Where there are limits to what we can do, but making hard choices well has positive impact.
I am speaking to the latter.
> Or, making actual choices in reality? Where there are limits to what we can do, but making hard choices well has positive impact.
Impact is irrelevant in Kantian ethics, deontological ethics [1] and virtue ethics [2]. A choice is good and right because it the nature of the choice itself in deontology, or because of how it defines one character in virtue ethics, not because of what effects it may or may not have on the world.
Every novice approaching ethics naively assumes a framework of consequentialism [3], where every choice is judged by its consequences, but this framework is deeply problematic and we have literal proofs that not all ethic theories can be reformulated in terms of consequences [4].
The original post I replied to also naively assumed a consequentialist framing, and I replied that this framing is not universal and so his conclusion does not follow. You can continue to double down on "it's obvious that consequences matter for ethical choices", but that doesn't make it true, and thus, it does not support the original argument.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/
[3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/
[4] https://philarchive.org/rec/BROCT
> Impact is irrelevant in Kantian ethics
From an arm chair perspective, this is a wonderful shortcut isn't it! Roughly, treat everyone how we would want to be treated - or some other limited formulation, with no horizon of thought about downstream impact past that.
Presumably, inflexible pacifism would get a sympathetic response from Kantians.
A kind of intellectual purity, at the relative cost to others' lives.
Interesting as an idea. Not so great for actual humans.
What exactly is the imagined benefit, that outweighs the well being of others and ourselves? A circular form of philosophical purity? A view that is better because it deems itself better?
EDIT: Just saw this:
> Not unless you can present some proof of this. Your implicit assumption that we should care about outcomes over principles has its own set of moral failures, like the repugnant conclusion.
Well, most people start by caring about other people and themselves. Not as an assumption but as a real status.
Doing so has a particularly interesting and meaningful consequence. By prioritizing better results for human beings, positive impact can better produce more positive impact. Creating a positive spiral where benefits of the ethics of prioritizing impact compound, and compound.
So for those that care about our fellow beings, and nontrivial non-limiting implications of choices, there is solid ground for ethics. Nothing arbitrary or foundationally circular.
Need to make up assumptions.
In contrast, what is the assumption or principle that values principles over people. What is the actual point? How is that deemed better than prioritizing a better world. How is that better or richer than ethics that achieve a higher bar, by continually re-incorporating, navigating and producing an ever more complex enabling future?
I gave you all of the links you need to read if you want to know more. Suffice it to say that all you're describing is what you care about, which is about as logically compelling an argument about what is good as telling me what deity you believe in. Your random foray into philosophy is not going to solve 3,000 years of ethical debates in a simple quip.
You seem to be completely at sea here, for all your knowledge.
Caring about oneself and others' welfare is a direct result of being creatures that must make choices to survive. The compounding positive sums of increasing cooperative behavior are not arbitrary. They pay for themselves, many many times over.
Thus, practical virtue appears naturally, and persists, and grows, regardless of what you want to call it, or alternatives that anyone comes up with.
If you are going to argue about/against that practical impact, at least acknowledge practical virtue has a very special status.
Or you are arguing from (real or posed) ignorance.
The burden us on you, if you want to claim this practical progression should be superseded.
Without that, an appeal to impractical principles over practical good, is very much in the vein of "telling me what deity you believe in".
What "good" is "good" that doesn't reciprocally maximize "good" going forward.
So far your comments lack any grounding beyond itself. Perverse "purity". That relegates virtue to an hermetic aesthetic or OCD tick.
Philosophy has spent 3000 years trying to organize humans well and has apparently failed to solve that problem.
Reframing that reality as "actually it doesn't matter what the consequence is as long as we followed our values to the letter!" is convenient, but in modern terminology, a cope.
I read your links and was already aware of deontology anyway but it was a nice refresher. Yup, you're right, we're describing what we care about! And in doing so we represent the majority of human thinking - maybe not the human thinking that gets written down, but nonetheless.
Why should people care to convince dusty academics what is right and wrong using logical systems and proofs when the dusty academic has lost the ethical debate immediately in the eyes of most when he admits that according to his ethical system, lying to prevent Anne Frank is wrong? This is instinctively wrong to most people, so, why should we care? Rigid logic is worthless when people are looking for something else, and rigid logic alone isn't enough to build a society.
I feel like you got to deontology and stopped. I've never actually met someone who studies ethics who got to deontology and didn't later end up with emergency exit modes, such as the Anne frank scenario. Using ethics to live a virtuous life is well and good, but Nazis don't do that, and you won't convince them using deontology to not round people up. You don't have to go all the way the other way and make "ends justify the means" arguments. Just allow yourself the flexibility to say "in an emergency, of course it's ok to lie," which may not seem logically sound, but society isn't logically nor is it possible to make it purely logical enough to be a valid ground for Kantian ethics to result in actual virtuous people - because the man that gives up Anne Frank telling the truth is not virtuous, he is a selfish monster, sacrificing a human life for his own sense of virtue and preservation of ethical purity, a disgusting trade off.
Have you ever met in real life a person who wouldn't lie to the axe murderer, because of their Kantian values?
If a Kantian can be put into a situation where their morals would require them to say the word that gives up Anne Frank, we can safely say it's a bad moral system.
> If a Kantian can be put into a situation where their morals would require them to say the word that gives up Anne Frank, we can safely say it's a bad moral system.
Not unless you can present some proof of this. Your implicit assumption that we should care about outcomes over principles has its own set of moral failures, like the repugnant conclusion.
Yes yes I'm sure smarter people than me have done lots of interesting logical things to philosophy over the last thousand years.
And I maintain my simple point: if your ethical system doesn't allow the flexibility to not give up Anne Frank, it's a bad ethical system. Unless you believe giving up Anne Frank isn't wrong? Then you're a bad person and shouldn't be considered in conversations about ethics!
Design it in a way to have good outcomes if you're worried about repugnant conclusions. Personally I believe putting it on paper is a fool's errand - vibes based ethics seems to work as good as one can get from an ethical system.
To cheat someone implies there is some obligation owed which is reneged upon, even if that's just the minute obligation owed from one member of a society to another.
In your hypothetical situation, I owe no such obligation to the Nazis who as you'll remember were an occupying force. I entered into no social compact with them.
I put my trust in someone on a case by case basis, unless they're going to cheat someone. Then I don't trust them.
[dead]
The earth is not flat. This is indisputable fact. Yet, much ink has been spilt on arguments to the contrary. Refuting some of these arguments is quite difficult, honestly, but none of the arguments really matter because they reject all the convincing evidence as conspiracy or magic.
In this way, what you suggest demands significant labor on the part of the person arguing an obvious fact against an ideologue who will proclaim an open desire to change their belief but whose world view is entrenched in magic making it fundamentally impossible to actually change it.
Long story short I don't buy it and think what you said is full of shit.
"The earth is not flat. This is indisputable fact. "
Well, the earth you walk is indisputable flat. That all of earth is round, comes not from direct observation (except for the very few people who have been in space).
So I dare you to actually argue with flat earthers. It is a good way to test your basic scientific knowledge. If you poke deep, you will find, that most people learned science the way people learned religion before. By memorising it, not by applying the scientific principle of questioning everything and aim for confirmation via experiment. Some flat earthers are actually more "scientific" in the way that they try out (weird) experiments and not just believe things. (But most probably do have a serious mental condition)
Long story short, this could have been the start of a interesting debate, if you would not have finished your argument with that insult.
The thing about this particular topic is that humanity has known this fact for millennia, not because we flew or went to space, but because we sailed. Any human who has watched ships come in to a harbor would be able to trivially tell you: We see the masts before the ship.
Where I grew up you can stand by the shore on a clear day and see the tree tops on the neighboring island, but not the beach. Sailing there, the beach emerges from the horizon.
The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass.
"The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass."
The main cause I could determine was rather a deep trauma of some sort or the other and with the result of them now mistrusting everything mainstream by principle and only now trusting their eyes and "intuition".
And believing the earth is flat is maybe the most anti mainstream position ever.
Edit: and my conclusion sort of was, that the only thing, that would really convince some of them is indeed to let them see it with their own eyes. So maybe I will organize a high altitude baloon trip for some people some day, but personally I also always wanted to get as close to space as possible at least once in my life..
Greeks calculated the circumference of the world based on the shadows of obelisks. Parallax was used to calculate how far the moon was, & from that how large
(people didn't think Columbus would fall off the edge of the world, they thought he wouldn't make it to India, which to be fair, if it was only ocean between the Pacific & Atlantic, him & his crew most definitely would've perished)
> Any human who has watched ships come in to a harbor would be able to trivially tell you: We see the masts before the ship.
Of which, until recently, there were very few. Civilizations developed not just on the coasts, but along the rivers, and until ~industrial revolution, the bulk of people at any given time didn't really have a chance to see the sea.
> The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass.
Yup, that is still true for humanity; what's changed in the last few hundred years is trains, cars, airplanes, and them all becoming broadly accessible to people.
Still, that was then. Today, "flat Earthers" are mostly just peer groups of shitposters or extreme contrarians.
It varies somewhat by continent, but living very far from the ocean is what’s new. Humans have historically had by far the densest population near shores - river deltas, archipelagos, and so on.
The notion that “seeing the ocean” was a very special thing to most people in history is unlikely. To a Hungarian peasant or a Mongol shepherd, sure, but there were far more people along the Mediterranean coast, the Pearl River delta, and so on.
The reason is very simple: Ocean = free food.
How funny, this comments screams to me that you have not argued with a genuine flat earther.
Debates with them are not remotely interesting; they're constantly reaching to religion, magic, and Jewish control.
Find someone grounded who also enjoys debating and it's a fun topic to cover, however.
Well, the main thing I learned in such debates is, you are free to believe what you want
I don't feel responsible for grounding the facts you somehow believe in.
But in another mood, I might have shared links to certain Telegram groups, or connect you with some people I know personally. They would be eager to enlighten you, if you are in for that.
What does this even mean?
Do you think the earth is flat? Who the fuck cares about Telegram groups in this context?
It means I debated very often with weird people and the proof that I did, is that I don't feel the need to make the poster above believe, that I actually did that.
(Otherwise I would have shared links where you can find me debating the topic at length with various people)
Because indeed, most flat earthers are immune to reason as they are in the realm of irrationality. So at some point someone needs to accept that and that helped my attitude towards my need to correct wrong information in people in general.
And if you believe now, I am a flat earther, because I said I discovered some flat earthers that act somewhat scientific sometimes and are open for arguments, well, so be it.
Whether or not you believe the earth is flat is a yes or no question, but you responded with a paragraph that wasn't a real answer. This reads as defensive, which leads a reasonable person to believe that you are in fact a flat earther.
I was defensive about the accusation of never having engaged with a real flat earther, despite saying so. And this part of the debate actually reminds me of engaging with them, so I rather stop that.
If this thread is any indication of what it’s like to debate flat earthers, I absolutely never want to engage with them.
:D
Occasionally it can be fun.
Have you ever watched a we-have-never-been-on-the-moon conspiracy freak engage a flat earther?
With both trying to top each other who has the most superior knowledge and who is the real sheep?
But yes. All that borderlines on the dangerous mental crazy side, so I cannot really recommend it, unless you have a fascination with the abyss of the human mind.
> That all of earth is round, comes not from direct observation (except for the very few people who have been in space).
or anyone who's been in a plane?
Square has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
Wow, that is a weird and interesting plot, thanks for that, I take it as a recommendation.
What kind of planes are you flying?
I mean, I just checked, it seems under ideal conditions one could see the curvature of earth at 10.5 km height, but to me it was not really a convincing curvature last time I did a long flight. Your experience was different?
10.5km (34.4kft) is an ordinary cruising altitude for an ordinary commercial airliner.
The curvature of the earth can be quite apparent on a clear day at that altitude when flying over water. Or the midwestern US.
Well thanks, then this is what I will recommend the next time I engage with flat earthers.
> That all of earth is round, comes not from direct observation
It does! Sit on a beach near a harbour and watch how far you can see the waves and ships. Aristotle did this and came to the same conclusion.
The standard nonsens reply to this is something with perspective. Like a train track in the distance get closer together, the ship gets closer to the ground and then infinitely small. Doesn't make sense, but abstract enough to make some believe there is another explanation possible.
Standard answer: Ships do not get infinitely small - they visibly "sink" behind the horizont. Starting with the bulbous bow, which you stop being able to see at a distance of, i estimate, 10 kilometers?
Yes and standard reply then is quickly distracting (also themself?) with lots of other "facts" they quickly throw in, or some more vague mystic mumblings about perspective.
Edit: Oh and also there is some "proof" with a certain camera model they present. Where they zoom in closely to ships on the horizont, while not knowing the difference between optical and digital zoom. I am still not sure what they were trying to proof with that, but I did saw a visual glitch of the image processing on high digital zoom. Some vague impression that indeed you can enlarge the ship again fully, despite it being over the horizon. To me it was rather pixel soup, but for them confirmation. So to be on topic a bit again, if you want to influence irrational people of anything, logic only gets you so far and appealing on emotion quite further.
Prove to me that flat earthers aren't just trolls who don't believe a word they say.
I know some who fucked up their whole life, because they believe that crazy shit for real. (Living now alone in a remote hut and waiting for the day when they come to take him away from there, because he also does not believe in paying taxes)
I can give you the adress, but maybe be a bit careful. To him you might be one of the evil NASA brainwashers.
> Well, the earth you walk is indisputable flat
have you never seen a hill or a hole?
Yes, I did. I also grew up watching scientific space videos before I could read and frequently making holidays at the sea as a kid.
But other people grew up in flat areas, far from the sea and maybe exposed with too much BS and maybe drugs at some points in their life, so ended up with a very different point of view.
It was interesting for me to find ways to maybe guide them back to reality and sometimes I succeeded a bit, but I don't think that argument would have helped me. On average and to our senses the earth is pretty undisputable flat.
It takes thinking to go further.
> On average and to our senses the earth is pretty undisputable flat.
That's very easy to dispute
> have you never seen a hill or a hole?
Ok, fine, "other people ... maybe exposed with too much BS", but let's not pretend sticking to some patent nonsense can be traced to simple observations when those don't exist, that's not how you become a true believer
Ok yes, you can totally dispute that the earth we walk around is flat. It was mainly rhetorical reasons, why I used that wording. And I actually believe nothing is indisputable.
(But that does not mean I waste energy seriously trying to negate flat earth theory for good, I am more interested in the psychological reasons that makes people think like that)
It’s not? There’s ample evidence to support the earth being round. If you have legitimate evidence to the contrary I’d be happy to listen to you.
> If you have legitimate evidence
That’s a tremendously high bar. Who defines what constitutes “legitimate” evidence? Anyone can disagree on what that means and you’re back to square one.
Look up “The Final Experiment” and its aftermath. Despite convincing the flat earthers who participated, the ones who observed it via livestream dug their heels in further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Experiment_(expediti...
I mean to some extent if you doubt the results of your experiments you’re not going to get anywhere, because you can never prove a model. At some point the simpler model is the one that wins out and some very small number of observations that go against it can be accounted by sampling error or hoaxes or whatever. Where you draw that line is up to you of course but generally the scientific community does fairly well on extremely well-supported theories.
> generally the scientific community does fairly well on extremely well-supported theories.
Then you step outside of the scientific community into the flamethrower of public opinion, and suddenly you have to deal with people who think it's a good idea to give their kids measles.
Yeah, well don't do that. Public opinion is not peer reviewed science.
It does however matter for, say, US vaccine policy.
The most significant evidence that the earth is flat is that you can just look out your window and it's obviously flat, but all the round-earth evidence is complicated sciencey stuff.
If someone doesn't believe in complicated sciencey stuff, they just won't believe you, and they'll conclude they have evidence and you don't. At what point do you just walk away from the argument?
This is the core problem of scientific communication. Flat earthers are an extreme example. The process of arguing it etc can be a good exercise.
Edit: my favourite argument is to look at a half moon, and what angle the "shadow line" on the moon is relative to the horizon. Then ask your friends around the globe to report what angle it looks like to them. Because we are all standing on the side of a globe, we see it at different angles relative to our local horizon, which should perfectly correspond to each person's latitude etc. Fun easy experiment for an online community!
Yes, but the round earther can provide a model that matches your observations. Round earth is a better model because it matches reality more often while also accounting for a lot of the obvious flat earth arguments (mostly, that they hold true locally).
But they don't care. And more importantly, don't want to agree with you.
Then it's not persuasion in good faith.
Of course. Good faith is pretty rare and subject to, shall we say, hostile evolutionary pressure in online and public policy spaces.
Go to the shore. Watch the ships. It's not complicated sciencey stuff.
Atmospheric refraction. (See? The flat earther knows complicated sciencey stuff too. You won't accept their complicated sciencey stuff, so why should they accept your complicated sciencey stuff?)
We’re not trying to come up with a convincing argument - there’s thousands - but we’re trying to understand how it’s even possible to conceive of such idiocy for a person who is otherwise reasonable.
That one is easy because it’s directly refuted by lived experience — eg:
There’s mountains outside my window, so… not flat.
Do you have evidence that it’s flat? — what do you even mean by “flat” when I can see ripples in it?
They mean “flat” in the sense of “straight” (i.e. not curved), the same way a sheet of sandpaper is flat despite being rugged. There are plenty of simple ways to disprove Flat Earth theories, but you’ll never be able to convince anyone by refuting their arguments with something which clearly misunderstands what they’re trying to say.
Take the piece of sandpaper and put a twist into it and now fold it back upon itself. Now it's not flat…nor is it round. It's a secret third thing.
Anyway fun topology aside a lot of flat earth discussion is not really done with the attempt to disprove anything, unfortunately.
Instead of refuting their arguments, ask them to prove it to you. Whenever they say something you don't understand, ask them to explain it. Eventually they will get stuck.
You’re being downvoted by idealists.
I was an idealist, so I understand the position.
Ideally, you explain your position and they explain theirs and it’s an open dialogue. Truthfully, you could be wrong about any number of things you have resolute conviction about- even things you believe are well evidenced.
The cynic in me is aware that actually us as individuals have finite time and mental energy to keep debating things which are base, and our lives are improved by just accepting some base assumptions and engaging our energy at higher levels instead of litigating the basics.
We don't even really have time or energy to debate the higher levels with other people. Maybe if it's a friend or family or someone you're close with. But arguing with strangers, at least imo, is a total waste of time most of the time.
Just nod and smile :)
> You’re being downvoted by idealists.
Seems more likely the downvotes are related to the last sentence. Telling someone they are “full of shit” is not the type of curious discourse HN wants to promote.
That being the case, you might be getting downvoted for incorrectly assessing the situation and inaccurately placing blame.
I’m speculating, as it’s impossible to know what went through the heads of those who came before, but seems like a reasonable explanation to me.
> You’re being downvoted by idealists.
No, I think they are being downvoted because they dismiss a thoughtful comment that makes a good attempt at providing an actual answer to the question at hand as "full of shit".
I'd downvote that comment even if I agreed with it for the last sentence alone.
> actually us as individuals have finite time and mental energy to keep debating things which are base, and our lives are improved by just accepting some base assumptions and engaging our energy at higher levels instead of litigating the basics.
Which is precisely why most people considered Earth to be flat until it became more fashionable to consider it spherical, and continue to believe it's spherical because that remains in vogue.
I mean, it's not like people in general suddenly got gained some intrinsic reasons for getting to the true nature of things. Nah, all that changed is what you have to say so others don't think you're stupid.
Call it a more realistic take: humans are social animals. Ever since we started cooperating in groups, the social reality became more important to our survival than actual physical reality. For better or worse, that is a fact of nature. You may argue all you want that the sky is blue, but if the rest of your tribe calls it green, all you'll accomplish is to get yourself shunned and cast out and then eaten by wild animals.
"Is Earth flat or round", from the perspective of a regular person across all history: why are you asking me that question?. The answer has no direct, immediate relevance to anyone's lives - so either you're contrarian, or trying to pick a fight, or have some political angle, or just have too much idle time. Either of that means you're a potential threat. The right answer is always "flat" or "spherical" depending on the time period you live in, followed by "go away and do something useful for a change".
Note: I'm not promoting idiocy or lack of interest into the nature of things - all I'm saying, one needs to cut other people some slack. Most people aren't idiots; if they're holding on to "wrong" beliefs there's probably a damn good reason for it, and with some politically charged questions they may actually be smarter, on a pragmatic/survival level, in giving the "wrong" answer, than someone rocking the boat.
If you want to convince people, don't assume they're idiots - rather, try to connect your arguments to their experience, so getting it right matters to them, and then - that's the pragmatic/cynical part - be ready to accept that, in some cases, having the right answer doesn't matter in practice.
I really don’t like this article. I think this article reflects more our desire to categorize things into neatly numbered lists, and reflects less any thorough understanding of influence. Big lists of aphorisms. Less in the way of concrete detail. Words are used the wrong way. Concepts are broken up into incoherent lists.
“Ratianolising” is the word used in the most wrong way. The word normally describes inventing post-hoc reasons for some decision or behavior.
“Negotiating” is a big list of aphorisms which pull in different directions. Some of the advice sounds like amateurish art-of-the-deal tips which encourage you to extract as many concessions as you can from the other side. Some of the advice pulls in the opposite direction. And then, to mix everything up, the advice to compromise and meet half-way rears its ugly head.
The more I read in this article, the worse my opinion gets. I’m stopping.
:-(
It's from a "professional coach", not a philosopher. He's selling a product to corporations, not trying to find some truth...
You make a good point and I agree mostly to the point being made i.e. it is more fluid than categorical. However, I think it is not being made in good faith. I found the article highly insightful because it provides a solid starting point to those that have not started or don't know much about negotiations and how they happen. It should be safe to assume that there are plenty that have not started yet. It is also true that the more frameworks one reads and learns about, the more they realize that there are gaps in each one of them, and it is indeed fluid, not categorical, and hence reaching the same conclusion.
I can see that some of the categories are a stretch semantically; however, I didn't see the specific categories and their names as central to the point of the article. I think the goal is to demonstrate that 1) everyone engages in persuasion in some form; 2) there are various different styles of persuasion with different strengths and weaknesses, and it's useful to be self-aware about what style(s) you tend to use and whether there are other styles you might want to try out in certain situations. I think breaking it down into 5 somewhat artificial categories is a good framework for making this topic approachable and providing good examples to think about.
I think if you already have well-developed thoughts about persuasion and social interaction, it might not add much, but it was useful for me.
I'll respond to the title instead of the article.
As an attorney, I've found that the best persuasion is the removal of impediments and friction standing between the person you hope to influence and what they want to do in the first place.
Most other tactics amount to force or deceit ("manipulation").
That sounds a lot like what data scientists have to do at any publicly traded company.
Are you talking about the judge, opposing attorney, your client, coworker, business partner, or who? Surely that context matters much more than you're suggesting, viz what you individually perceive the impediments and friction to be, and how you both think they can be removed?
(Not OP) How so? Behind every "no", there is a good reason. If you are honestly curious to understand the objection or hesitation, you may find ways to address them, and find others opening up to your suggestions when their points have been heard. Fundamental principle behind NVC.
Lawyers vs. lawyers may not be the cleanest example since a defence lawyers job is to make it harder for th prosecution to win, but then might want to get that advantage then mediate a deal.
For most of us ideally a colleague is more aligned than that.
This connects with me. More about helping people do what they already have in mind. Connecting with people and finding overlapping interests rather than a manipulation mindset.
> force or deceit
exactly!
Every effective communication is manipulation to a degree. There is no influence without manipulation.
A baby smiling at you is manipulation.
This is nothing bad in itself.
Feels to me like that is addressed by the very first sentence in the article:
> We influence others every day, whether we intend to or not.
And then it’s expanded as it continues.
> Every effective communication is manipulation to a degree.
Yes, to a degree. Seems to me the author is attempting to be pragmatic and not let excessive pedantry cloud the larger point. A friend trying to convince you to stop smoking because they want you to live healthier for longer may be technically manipulating you, but that’s not a useful definition and realistically no one would colloquially consider it to be the case. Whenever you find yourself dismissing an argument because a word can be applied universally, instead steelman the author’s argument by trying to understand the definition they are working with.
It's not only the more rational (and productive) position to take, it's part of HN's guidelines:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When people say or hear "manipulation", it usually implies deception: someone is tricking someone else into a position that's against the former's goals and interests.
It's possible to communicate without manipulating if all you aspire to do is describe reality as you see it, and make an effort to separate your own aesthetic judgements from mere observations of what exists.
People may change their actions without changing their goals when their model of reality becomes more accurate.
To manipulate is to control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously. It implies that you're getting someone to do something they wouldn't if they were aware of what was going on.
The way I read manipulation is that someone is handling (manus: latin for 'hands') someone merely as a tool, bending and pushing and whatnot, just as a mere means to an end, without big regard for the tool, in an egotistical way. Objectifying the other, to some extent.
I think a distinction based on honest vs dishonest communication can be made
Advice a sales coach gave me was “sales is sorting, not convincing.”
I always found that put me in the right headspace to focus on listening first, then being clear. Whether they sort themselves into a yes or no is on them.
I had a manager once who argued that there was no difference between influence and manipulation. He was one of the most manipulative people I've ever worked with, and working with him was very obnoxious and stressful. I suspect most people who argue that there is no difference are either very manipulative people trying to justify their own behavior, or are people who have been taken in by such people.
IMO people get too caught up in the words "influence" and "manipulate", and effectively start arguing over definitions (whether they realize that's what they're doing or not). I don't think any of that matters.
What matters is whether you're behaving like a decent human being who respects and cares about others. The negative things that people associate with the word "manipulate" are things like trickery, dishonesty, etc. As long as you are approaching others with respect, authenticity, honesty, and a reasonable amount of humility, then I don't think you need to worry about whether your influence counts as "manipulation" or not: you'll be avoiding the aspects of "manipulation" that make it a bad thing.
People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies.
-- Blair Warren
So... parents?
Parents are the worst part of many children's lives. So... probably friends.
I see a lot of whitewashing of Charlie Kirk on social media at the moment that this quote reminds me of. The guy made a killing from speaking hate and then he got killed by hate himself. Like the guy that's always in the jurassic park movies, that doesn't think letting the t-rex out will be much of a problem, and then he get's killed by the t-rex and everyone else needs to deal with the t-rex of hate and far wingism walking the streets.
I didn't know Charlie Krik before. After watching these videos, I don't believe he was such a hateful person: Amir Odom: https://youtu.be/N14ywRyTWVI Bill Maher: https://youtu.be/OblCcO7-Alg Jordan Peterson: https://youtu.be/dP0TagcNvCg
He clearly feels he is superior to everyone else, including the interviewers. He feigns humility but interrupts repeatedly.
Did you watch all the videos where he says all the hateful things? Why wouldn't you link to all those videos? Cause for being such a supposedly kind man he sure did say a lot of hateful stuff. We have 10 years of backlog to go though.
Like how he dehumanized women by saying they should submit to their husbands. Or when he said Joe Biden should be killed. Or all the times he used slurs for lgbt. Or the time he joked that it would be funny if the Pelosi attacker would be let loose. Or all the many times he called women and black people dumb. He can't help himself, he goes on and on with his explicit hate and racism. I've had they misfortune of watching the full length videos of these clips, and they just make it clear that he really means these things. He just keeps speaking his hateful heart.
He wished death on his political opponents. That alone should make him someone you wouldn't want to associate with for fear of how it reflects on you.
I've always found that it's about defining win/win situations. Also, you should make real human connection in the process. If you don't like the person, that's a real issue. It may not be that the person is unlikeable, it may be that you aren't finding a perspective that aligns right.
But yeah, aligning incentives and making friends. Even if they don't go the way you want, you both still had a positive experience and can potentially find a way to work together in the future.
Sometimes there is no win/win.
Give me an example.
I'm sure you can think of a personally meaningful example if you try; have you turned on the news lately? There's a big story that people seem to be having a hard time finding a win/win and people are starving and being killed.
Sadly, that description doesn't even narrow it down to one "no-win" situation I can think of, so your comment is slightly concerning on its face.
I asked as a chance (a challenge even) to reframe an arbitrary situation.
Even the one you mention, at this exact moment, a win/win could be framed around the benefits of stopping the war. While it's entirely reasonable to pick a perspective that focuses on the awfulness that has occurred, looking ahead, a peace deal would benefit all sides. Certainly it's closer to win/win than continuing down the current path.
My point is that the perspective we take is a choice.
This is a very HN sort of sentiment. How can I be persuasive without being gross?
I had a bit of a moment when I first became a PM. (I've done a bunch of things, engineering / sales / founding, but PM only sort of recently.) I realized that my job was to wake up in the morning and pick fights. Or more diplomatically: to tell people they were doing the wrong thing, and they should be doing a different thing, in a way that made them want to listen to me more in the future, not less.
That's the job. In fact, in almost every job, that's the job.
Impact happens when you reach people and they behave differently because of you. That's nothing to be ashamed of. If you do it authentically and with good intent, it's one of the best things you can do with your time.
Think of what you are doing as revealing information as to why you think your new approach is more aligned with business and business goals. Give them room to do the same.
There might be systemic issues getting in the way. You and them having competing OKRs for example. Good to surface that and deal with it too.
Right -- the stereotypes of "selling" or "telling" or "persuading" are unhelpful in a lot of contexts.
Even in direct selling, many people don't want to feel they're being sold to! At a minimum, they don't want to feel out of control on decision they care about. But they're frequently open to learning, even if the constraints of how much time / credit they'll give you are extremely different.
What would communication without manipulation even mean? The whole point of making mouth-noises or eye-shapes is to cause the neural activations in people perceiving these shapes to change in some way. If they don't, you haven't communicated.
What most people mean when they ask questions like yours isn't "How do I avoid manipulation?" but "How do I live with integrity?". Answering this question is a field in its own right and isn't coupled to communication per se.
This is discussed at length in ancient philosophy. Reason is showing people why they should come to your position. Rhetoric, persuasion, manipulation are all ways of convincing people to take your side based on a story, rather than dispassionate good faith.
> Yet logic alone is not enough. Overused, it can become cold and detached.
The author here shows show their hand.
If I successfully influence someone, I feel I've manipulated them nonetheless.
I see this sentiment from time to time in the HN crowd, and I’m really interested in understanding more about it.
My first reaction to this? I think that you’re using “manipulate” to describe a process where somebody doesn’t want to do something, and make them do it anyway, but without using force. It feels like this has to be rooted in some kind of denial of other people’s free will—that they are somehow incapable of choosing to help you or agree with you, and can only be tricked. It seems like you would need to believe that other people don’t genuinely like you or value you.
Those are some bounding leaps you made without much context. Are you in sales?
Kidding aside, my first reaction was: perhaps the occasions they were aware of their own influence were ones in which they didn't much care for the outcome. Or maybe a conflict of interest, like trying to win over a hiring manager for a position you know you'll hate.
I don't think cajoling or persuading others inherently manipulative, but I can think of a lot of examples where doing so feels grimy.
> I don't think cajoling or persuading others inherently manipulative, but I can think of a lot of examples where doing so feels grimy.
What I am trying to do is understand why sema4hacker, and some others, feel that influencing people is manipulative. So if you pop into the conversation and say that you don’t feel the same way that sema4hacker does, that doesn’t really help me understand sema4hacker’s perspective.
That’s the bounding leap here and I want to pull it apart, dissect it. The bounding leap from “I influenced somebody” to “I manipulated them”. I think there’s not just raw, random feelings here, but some kind of rational thought that I want to understand.
I'm one of those people-For clarity I'm referring to influence in the active 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' sense. To me "influence" and "manipulation" seem like forms of persuasion but with positive and negative connotations, like "public relations" versus "propaganda".
None of them are necessarily bad on their own, but the choice of words seems like it depends on the perspective who is perceiving or describing the influencer/manipulator and their motives. Influence can be seen as manipulation and manipulation seen as influence.
For example someone who dislikes an "ifluencer" is probably more likely to think of them as manipulating their audience into buying products. Convincing someone to join a religious group could be seen as positive influence by current members, and manipulation by an outsider.
Clarity of purpose from the person doing the persuading is not necessarily clear as well. There is likely there's likely a mixture of factors motivating them to persuade, including some to their own benefit. People, especially those who think they are doing good, will also generally grade themselves on a bit of a curve and rationalize their actions towards being positive, especially in moral and emotional contexts.
I think manipulation is just negative influence, and influence doesn’t really have either positive or negative connotations.
In one of many possible definitions, manipulation requires deceit; a hidden agenda or goal.
In an "original" definition, manipulation literally means "to move". In that sense, we all manipulate. We move.
The two combined together: You're allowed to "move". You are broadly "allowed" to "manipulate" in that sense. If you add lies, deceit, etc, you're in territory others might not find acceptable, and will in turn reject you or remove you from their lives.
If you feel bad about your "success" but can't see why on a rational level, you may want to remember how your parents or other people growing up treated you. Can you find some childhood memories related to this? Potentially "adverse" experiences related to "manipulation" around you?
So, let's say you inspire someone just by existing, these things happen.
Not really, there are honest ways as well to influence as well. I also find it annoying when people try to manipulate at the sake of influencing just to sell something. Infact, wrote a small piece on this https://aishwaryagoel.com/what-engineers-taught-me-about-sel..... would love to know what you think?
There is no magic about it
Just give your clear arguments, be detailed, be honest, don't use fallacies, point out fallacies.
It's not about "influence", it's more about communicating your point of view and making it visible and understood by others.
The form of the question has assumptions that are broken.
The action of manipulating people is fairly obvious. It means you have a predetermined outcome that you want other people to accept The same assumption is implicit in the "How can I influence others..." Again there is the same predetermined outcome.
The answer then is obvious. You cannot. Perhaps what you are looking for is instead a way to join with other people in a participatory/collaborative fashion. You can ask what other people think, you can talk about what you think.
But as long as you have a predetermined outcome in mind, I suspect your only choices is manipulation.
You might also want to reassess what the question is. We talk about so much, but we do so little. Imagine that my car won't start and I want to fix it. The idea of influencing people here is silliness. We care very little about who thinks what, as long as the car starts. The thinking is in service of an action that produces a result.
In my opinion! :-)
[edit: fix wording, typos]
I think "manipulation" implies sneakiness, not just influencing somebody. If I tell you that I disagree with your comment, and me saying that is enough to change your mind, then I have influenced you but not manipulated you because I've done nothing but tell you my honest opinion with no unannounced motives.
What I was trying to get at was the concept of mutual benefit in thinking. For example, my thinking is better because of your comment. If we want to think together - create some good thought then the focus is on understanding, not influencing or manipulating.
But yes, you can and did influence me. Or perhaps more accurately, your thinking about this helped me think about it better and more clearly. Thanks!
Not possible.
What they mean is "influence" (positive connotation) without "manipulate" (negative connotation). But this is simply a nuance on "intent" i.e. whether it is good or bad from the pov of the instigator. But the recipient also has an important role to play in this interaction since they are the one perceiving the intent which might be different from what was intended. So the instigator has to sometimes "manipulate" to gain "influence". The End-Goal often (but not always) justifies the means.
This is the realm of Worldly Wisdom/Propaganda/Politics covered in the classic works of Baltasar Gracian/Machiavelli/Francesco Guicciardini/Kautilya/Kamandaki/Vishnu Sharma/Edward Bernays/Jacques Ellul etc.
On the Psychological realm, see the works of B.F.Skinner on Operant Conditioning/Behaviourism and Verbal Behaviour.
Someone once told me the only way to influence is to let yourself be influenced. You have to open up to the other person / other side or nothing will move
And you never control how the influence works exactly :). You influence others in ways you won't be able to control or predict.
Probably why chuggers (charity muggers) never get my money.
Influence is manipulation, plain and simple.
The key question is whether we use our moral compass when we influence or manipulate. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with moral manipulation.
The real inquiry is about the moral values we prioritize. Are we only focused on our own gain? Do we genuinely aim to help others? Or are we somewhere in the middle?
When we seek to benefit others, is it truly for them, or is it more about our own satisfaction from doing something “good”? Do those “good” actions genuinely help everyone, or merely specific groups at the cost of others? Perhaps someone has lost out because of our so-called “good” deeds.
By pondering and answering these questions, you'll be able to influence others without resorting to non-moral manipulation.
The solution is not to deny yourself the tools of persuasion or "manipulation" but to be authentic and transparent. It's deceptiveness that makes influence or persuasion manipulative, not the tools and techniques.
I think it's about helping them map out the options. So, listening to what they want and truthfully sharing your opinion on how the different options will solve their problem. If the best option for them is what you sell, it's a win-win. If it's not, all good. They will thank you if you truly helped them and gave them the best option for their problem. Obviously, this isn't possible if what you sell is never the best option. In that case, the problem exists before the conversation even happens. Either make a better product or change company
Public debates are necessary to get new ideas out there, but individuals and groups would rather be horrible than change their minds after an argument.
Attempting to argue with people, in good faith or otherwise, to change their mind is a philosophical trap.
Persuasion is just getting people to come around to your way of thinking without direct argumentation. It gets manipulative, psyopy and evil when fear, envy, lust, guilt, etc nudges are applied.
By setting a "good" example during a time they are in an unfavorable or weaker position. Which could mean remaining firm on the outside while providing space for their ego to transform their loss into a learning experience and improve their performance. It's written this way because the methods are different for the enabler and/or the receiver. I hope you understand obi one!
I would say for me that the difference between Influencing and Manipulating is that when you manipulate someone you could a) advance arguments you know to be untrue or that you don't intend to fulfil (negotiating in bad faith) and/or b) trying to get someone to do something that you know with a high degree of certainty is against their best interests.
I actually wrote a blog on this a few days ago. which was focussed more on sales practices of manipulation and better ways to do things: https://aishwaryagoel.com/what-engineers-taught-me-about-sel...
You can't? These are connotatively different, but denotatively identical ideas?
Highly recommend this Coursera course from University of Michigan, "Influencing People": https://www.coursera.org/learn/influencing-people
Only give positive feedback when they are doing the thing you want them too. Absence of positive feedback is as effective as negative feedback, with the positive effect of extracting the change you want instead of placing the change upon the person.
That sound a lot like manipulation. Like you train dogs.
Is it though? I would imagine the person wanting to change instead being forced. Where would you draw the line?
Influence, persuasion, manipulation are all identical in every way except moral.
Let's go back in history of influencing. How did the Egyptian workers were influenced to build pyramids? How did the leaders influence populations to be part of revolutions? How did the kings influence armies to engage in battles? Slavery apart, but there is something else.
You need to realize that people are not inherently individual beings. In some cultures, individuals hardly have any identity of their own. The identify themselves with a larger creature and they become part of that creature. They play a role assigned to them.
So, influencing involves making an individual to lose their individuality to some extent and become a part of the larger interest group. From that point, it is a matter of telling them what to do for the larger community.
This was easier in the old times when social bonds were stronger in families, tribes, villages etc. Individuals hardly had any privacy. Everyone in the village knows what's going on in every home in that village.
Getting these bonds back is the first step. When you try to influence someone, your need to make them understand who you are, to them. And why it is beneficial to have that bond. Once you have that "we" between you two, there is no explicit influencing required.
> How can I influence others without manipulating them ?
By listening to them.
Next question.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wJ4ARj67xn8
Find the place where their interests and yours intersect, and frame them existing there as an inevitability. If there is no intersection, don't try to force it.
Putting people into 'doors' could risk stereotyping. Real conversations are messy, and most people shift styles within minutes.
This is an interesting read and reminded me of this. In the 2000s I was at a company that had a consultant come in and give each group a talk a that was essentially “how win friends and influence people” for business.
I had a relationship with this book. I had read it years before and put it into practice as part of my life. It worked, but I became jaded, yeah I could be a great friend to people but it was almost never reciprocated, and I came to believe that using the techniques in the book were manipulative and deceitful at worst, and just not genuine at best.
So the consultant got to the end and asked for questions, and I asked “isn’t this all just manipulating people and dishonest?” Be sputtered and stammered and didn’t have much of a response. My boss was not thrilled that I had called it out, I was being difficult. That started a real problem for me at that company and I eventually left.
Well, the author certainly lost the ability to influence me with that choice of font.
By accepting the fact that sometimes (many times) you won't get the outcome you desire, in the manner of which you desire it.
Describe reality.
Make an effort to separate your aesthetic judgements from your observations.
well, manipulation is more about intent, rather than technique... I think it doesn't matter if you chose the correct "door" if you're trying to get someone to operate against their own interests.
If you have Christ, you can pray for them. God controls all random events and us. He also knows what's best for us. By praying, and if God says yes, He might provide what they need in the right way at the right time. He also sometimes gives people the better thing they didn't think to pray for. If He says no, that's also what's best due to His perfect knowledge. Finally, it builds our own inner compassion for other people.
When doing evangelism, Jesus told us to scatter seed, water, and harvest. God provides the growth. So, we can share the Gospel or truths in God's Word... His work, not our schemes... while letting them make their own decisions. Instead of manipulation, we are simply offering a gift out of love for them that they can do what they want with (or ignore). We do it while praying their choices have maximum glory to God and benefit to them, not us.
We're also commanded to display Christ-like character in our interactions with people. Paul reminds his critics "we were blameless among you" and cared like a mother nursing her child. James said to show our faith by our works, like taming the tongue or feeding a starving brother. Paul says imitate me as I imitate Christ. Our character can have a profound impact on people around us. Personally, I've been able to improve a lot just by seeing how my brothers and sisters speak and act in many situations. They've also sometimes learned from how the Holy Spirit showed me to handle specific situations.
So, these are examples of how to influence people without selfishly manipulating them. In two cases, without any manipulation of your own since one is asking the sovereign God to make the right calls and the other is just demonstrating godly behavior in a way that positively impacts them.
Or, "How can I manipulate others without being perceived to be doing so."
That is simple. By example.
Maybe just try to set an example without any attempt to be persuasive at all.
Effective communication is fundamentally problem solving.
c-suite person here...my job is "influence to empower" my team and others - to unlock opportunity for the company I represent.
My advice would be: Stay honest with yourself. To influence IS to manipulate.
Playing squeamish is a slippery slope into avoiding accountability for your actions.
In other words - don't judge the tools - judge your motives and the outcome.
Accept there is always a trade and balance.
If you can be honest about your motives and actions with yourself your friends and colleagues - chances are that you can achieve your goals with ethics and empathy intact.
If you can't, then it's time to take a look at yourself - not the tools.
Good luck
...by showing them a lot of Comic Sans - that will blur their vision and weaken their defense a lot.
It's all influence. When it's convenient and good we call it charisma, leadership, crisis navigation. When it's bad we call it manipulative, control freak, sociopathic.
[dead]
tldr?
Use a Comic Sans-adjacent font in your essays?
That's a lot of words to make oneself feel better about manipulating others.