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Comment by RangerScience | Hacker News Reader

A few others have summarized via quote, but I think this one is the most effective:

"For it is the intention to degrade another person’s decision-making situation that is both the essence and the essential immorality of manipulation."

A cult leader may not be thinking that they're getting you to make a mistake, because they're only thinking of themselves. But they are trying to degrade your decision-making.

Conversely, persuasion could be considered an attempt to empower your decision making: with new information, new perspectives, lights in blindspots, education on fallacies, etc.

Doesn't feel quite right, but closer.

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Trying to determine which one you are doing is hard problem, because, relying on incomplete information. I believe it's best to be internally positive about your own decision making, and let what is not you take over when it does. Sometimes other people know best, sometimes you do. Not everything is as easy to understand as a computer program, math proof, circuit board - anything logical, mechanical in nature, easy to understand, easy to identify gaps in understanding - because, it's a mechanical object. Those things lack consciousness. Being a rational being means having awareness for the difference (at least to me).

Selectivity in who to listen to, depends on trust, which is a hard problem, life can sometimes really beat up on any of us. I don't think it's a good thing to choose to interact with people you have to constantly decide between two binaries - manipulator or guide. That is the business world though, sometimes, unfortunately. Some people can seem like they are just out to get you, but that doesn't make it true.

Tolerance is important, but, emotions sometimes, seem mechanical in nature. At least how I understand my own, internally. Feels like being computer. Socializing in general always seems to be a hard problem. Even harder when there's a bottom line.

Hmm, I dunno. Seems like this is duck-type'able.

If you are seeking to degrade someone's decision making, you're manipulating.

If you are feeling like your decisions process is being degraded, you're being manipulated.

For the first case, it doesn't mean that you're succeeding. For the second case, that doesn't mean it's their intention.

I'd then also say you can duck-type the opposite (which I wouldn't really call persuasion, but anyway) - if you seek to empower someone's decision making, well, then there's no reason to beat yourself up over which you're doing. (If someone says you're being manipulative tho, take it as a bug report - but again, since your intentions are solid, no reason to beat yourself up over it).

Hmmm I don’t know if I agree. You can feel like someone is trying to degrade your desision making when they’re not. In mental illness this is common. If a person refuses to believe they are mentally ill any attempt to help them seek treatment appears to them as an attempt to gaslight them.

Good point.

Chalk this up to "existence is fractally complex - anything that can exist, does exist, in every variation".

Being labeled mentally ill can feel like it's gas lighting, especially if oneself knows their self to be just as rational and competent as anyone else. Mental illness is often a matter of circumstance. Of course people who are homeless or fear the worst happening to them over and over are going to appear as though their decision making is being degraded by being called mentally ill. It's basically like being called an idiot, which is ironic, because, lots of mental healthcare attempts to reduce stigma, but still must discriminate between types of individuals for diagnosis, even though people really, really can't be labeled that way. It's always an observer bias.

I don't know if this helps or hurts generally, about mental illness, I don't know your specific circumstance or people you have interacted with who have mental illness. But feeling slapped with a label for the rest of your life feels like a huge burden to carry. Just because, you made some big 'mistakes', in front of someone who had the authority to give you that label.

Something I'm personally very stubborn about, and very outspoken about, is mental illness discrimination. You can read through these papers and see if they make sense to you, if you want to. I'm not sure how many of the papers I've read throughout my life about psychology, neuroscience, etc, but I've read a lot. I'm not a psychologist, therapist, or anyone who has been correctly (via an accredited institution) educated in mental health care, and I only study myself, and to a lesser degree, my family, as they study me. Mental illness should be a label you can have removed - because every variation of behavior mental illness describes as negative can also have a positive side, and trying to remove all the things mental illness labels as negative can really be handicapping, eventually. You need 'black and white' thinking for software development. Application of it to social systems, can be useful, but only in chaotic social systems where people identify you as 'the enemy', which is just as much up to them as it is to you.

Trying to identify one big thing as 'the error' in life just, this a burdensome mindset to have. No matter what it gets attached to. Oneself can convince oneself they believe 'that was it, that was the error' at any moment in time. Those things aren't future proof, and it's erroneous to assume they are.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1747091080231971...

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/49/11489?utm_source=Tren...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-29561-w

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6171/675

Yeah I totally get that. But there are cases where people are not as rational and competent as anyone else.

I've a good friend with Bipolar. 99% of the time they are as rational and competent as anyone I know. But there are times when they get manic. During that phase everything is amazing they are amazing and every decision they make is brilliant.

Only you know that in a couple of weeks that the depression is going to hit and if you don't help will have done things that they regret. Things that lead them to getting fired, spending too much money etc. And you're going to feel super guilty trying to comfort that person if you didn't do everything you could to stop them.

If in that manic phase they decide you're only gas lighting them, they wont listen. You just have to sit back and hope it doesn't get too bad. Hope that they don't wipe out everything they spent the last 5 years investing in.

I don't really care what label you use. But there are professionals that can help. Even in a non manic state my friend wont go beyond the GP. They've been on the same medication for decades. There must be more that can be done. More than just going back for a repeat prescription from a GP that has never been told how bad it gets.

Well, hopefully that friend can learn how to see everything they do as amazing internally, when they want to.

Everyone needs that sometimes in life. Comes down to self belief, self expectations, hopes, dreams.

I don't know what your manic friend is like, but I do know that if you really care about them, think of yourself as a guide to find those things out, and help them get there.

As children we are allowed to believe we can do anything. It's vitally important to retain that part of you.

I can't assume that a lot of people understand their cycles. But we all have them. Every person I've met, known, or read from or about. Everyone has insecurities and dreams.

http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html

This is a good quote. One similar way to state it is by using the System 1 / System 2 [1] terminology. Manipulation is when someone pushes the audience to System 1 reasoning, diverting them from using System 2.

It's not a perfect distinction (there probably are cases where appealing to System 2 might look a lot like manipulation), but it's succinct, ends-neutral and not too subjective to be useful in practice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory#Dual-proce...

Good point! I'd adjust it a bit tho - I'd say that that's one way to manipulate, but not all of them. In my [uneducated on this topic] opinion.

This is only true if you assume that System 2 is always better. But if someone has rationalized great cruelty, it is perfectly appropriate to appeal to their emotions if it will get them to stop (this is essentially equivalent to a point the author of the original piece makes).

Rationalizing is very different from actually making a rational decision, and is part of System 1 thinking.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

A rational decision starts with defining the epistemic system in which it is made. Is it bayesian, frequentist, higher order fuzzy logic? How the weighting, if any, works? What is the data/proposition acquisition algorithm? Which heuristics are to be used to simplify decision and why?

Rationalization can mean rationalizing a system 1 decision. It can also just mean justifying a bad decision using explicit reasons, which is the sense in which I mean it.

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