Hacker News Reader

Comment by zazen | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for this comment - that's a really striking way of looking at these things. Makes me wonder just how many human interactions involve being that little bit of a sociopath. E.g., "putting your best foot forward" for a job interview or first date can feel like a kind of dishonesty, although it's expected in those cases. I wonder how you could start drawing a definitive line between "good" empathic manipulation and "bad" sociopathic manipulation, when even just smiling at someone can be manipulation of a sort?

View on HN

> "That is, you have to be willing to use arguments that you think are false, just because the person you're trying to convince will believe them.

It feels weirdly like lying; like you're a politician swaying the populace with empty rhetoric. But you're not saying things that nobody would believe (if given long enough to think about them); you're instead just getting into the head of—empathizing with—the person who holds those axioms, and then saying things that you—as that person—really do believe." -derefr

Response to derefr: If you are willing to use an argument that you think is false then, by definition, you are lying [even in situations where the lie can be mistaken for truth by others].

and

> "E.g., 'putting your best foot forward' for a job interview or first date can feel like a kind of dishonesty, although it's expected in those cases. I wonder how you could start drawing a definitive line between "good" empathic manipulation and "bad" sociopathic manipulation, when even just smiling at someone can be manipulation of a sort?" -zazen

Response to zazen: If it feels like dishonesty then it most definitely is. Consider cases where the interviewee simply lacks confidence but puts on a facade to appear otherwise. As for drawing a line between "good" and "bad" manipulation, reference derefr's note:

> "To use "empathy aikido" on them—to come up with arguments that will convince them of something, not slowly and laboriously from logical first principles, but by building up quickly from what they already assume to be true—you have to be willing to make arguments that are true under their axioms, but not under yours. That is, you have to be willing to use arguments that you think are false, just because the person you're trying to convince will believe them." - derefr

The addition of "but not under yours" constitutes manipulation on grounds which are aside from truth.

I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by "axioms" here—a lot of these fundamental beliefs that inform which arguments you have to use with people to convince them, are "orthogonal to truth"—that is, things that aren't part of a causal graph, like normative or theological beliefs.

It takes a different thought process to convince someone that e.g. climate change is happening, if they're a Young Earth Creationist, than it does if they're a paleontologist. It takes different arguments to convince someone to donate money to charity if they're a deontologist than if they're a consequentialist. None of these axiomatic positions affect what (empirically discoverable) facts are true, per se; they just affect what facts are relevant to changing one's mind about what one should do—that is, these axioms influence how the "is" statements† a person hears will affect their confidence in various "ought" statements.

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem

So, this kind of "empathy aikido" is less about modelling a person who believes different facts are true, as it is about modelling a person who cares about the truth-value of different facts than you do. It's not that you might have to believe [X thing you believe is true] to be false; it's that you will have to pretend that [X thing you believe being true] is not a compelling argument, and might be so unimportant that you've never even thought about it and never will. Whereas the truth-value of [Y thing you don't care about] might be, to the person you're talking to, the most important thing in the world; the "trick" is figuring this out and then using a (true) argument about Y to convince them, despite thinking personally that only X, and not Y, holds any real sway over the truth-value of your conclusion C.

It can still feel bad, but I hope you can see how that intuition is less grounded here in any real injustice you're doing. Telling a virtue-ethicist that it is "noble" to e.g. donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, when you think that "nobility" is complete poppycock and the only thing that matters is that those donations mean people won't die, isn't an example of a lie. It is a manipulation, but not an illegitimate one—because, from the other person's perspective, it's just the honest truth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com