The Purpose of Persuasion | Hacker News Reader

The Purpose of Persuasion

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I think pseudonymity will be important for the future of ideas (expanded beyond HN but into actual journalistic practice). You don't have to put up your real name, aka your full reputation behind interesting ideas that could risk damage to you as a person (being cancelled, character assassination, or otherwise)

I also believe that this kind of work will invite better discussion and critique around different topics since the focus can only be on the merit of the content. Of course, anonymity also has its downsides, but good work usually finds a way into circles while bad work gets nipped at the bud fairly quickly

The Rolodex re-purposed, keeping track of all of our own identities instead of other's

I do think this is interesting as an adaption, though to have any coherence of identity then that identity will need to re-used. That makes an interesting game, where people effectively wager different amounts of reputation, while understanding that some or total loss of that reputation could also occur.

The natural advantage to having reputation is that you are better discovery status, more exposure. Imagine debating if the "top" tier identity or the "low" tier identity should be used to promote a new idea, as it is riskier.

Overall, I think this expansion of pseudonymity as a society would just lead to additional fragmentation of personality. The "coherence" of a person as one, consistent individual is an interesting breakdown of self. We see this already with "online" vs "real-life" personalities can be highly divergent (Insta-self vs actual-self).

> Imagine debating if the "top" tier identity or the "low" tier identity should be used to promote a new idea, as it is riskier.

This sentence reminds me a lot of Ender's Game, in which the characters of Locke and Demosthenes are created to contrast views.

> They used throwaway names with their early efforts, not the identities that Peter planned to make famous and influential... When Peter was satisfied that they knew how to sound adult, he killed the old identities and they began to prepare to attract real attention.

I think xkcd's take on how that would play out is more typical: https://xkcd.com/635/

How would you fix the problem of sock puppets, the absurd cruelty that online anonymity tends to bring out over time, and the potential for doxxing those pseudononmous accounts?

Pseudonymity in my experience tends to lead to less cruelty than anonymity. I think the cruelty problem is solved reasonably well by strict moderation and intentional, reputation-based communities. When people care about the reputation of their pseudonym, and the culture awards respect to those who maintain those standards, they can be maintained reasonably well.

> strict moderation and intentional, reputation-based communities

Those sound expensive, as in time, time and money, or just money.

But I don't have a lot of experience in that space.

What's your experience with that?

They can be, although often community members are willing to do the work for free. An example of this working well is the slatestarcodex community, the blog that recently canceled itself because of the NYT piece that was coming out on it. It has a community over at:

https://reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex

and

https://reddit.com/r/themotte

That, despite often discussing controversial issues, remains mostly civil and low cruelty.

Lovely! I wish there were more of them.

I guess only by adding 'rarity' to my list of costs would make it wholly correct.

Somewhat tangential...

I've been thinking lately that there is a need for a space in which political discussions can be had where people are as committed to the values of civility and good-faith argument as we are at news.yc.com

I have not a clue how such a space could be moderated. It's obvious to me that a person violating guidelines would quickly claim suppression if their posts were moderated, and the space itself would quickly devolve into the things it tries to avoid. Eg, echo-chamberiness, sophists, trolls.

It seems like a paradigm shift is required, or that the medium just isn't appropriate. It also seems widely-accepted by nearly everyone that our current medium is destructive and no longer serves constructive use. Reputation, ranking, and moderation based on the 'wisdom of crowds' is no longer viable in its current form, but I'm utterly unwilling to cede control to an authority...

How does one establish trustless good-faith?

People are committed to civility at HN and good faith arguments mostly because HN is a small community, much smaller than twitter e.g. It is also inhabited by mostly people with intellectual curiosity, and accounts violating the guidelines get banned quickly in their infancy.

I followed quora since when it was a very small website. It was full of very useful and well written content. As the userbase grew, the quality of the content went on continuous downward trajectory. If HN had 100 million users, you would see the same content quality at HN, and the volume would make moderation hard, if not impossible. Not to mention, you might start seeing calls to cancel user XYZ on HN too if it reaches a userbase as large as twitter.

A lot of approaches to moderation seem destined to fail, afaic.

I think first principles should be:

1. There is no such thing as objective moderation. The universe gives us no way to conclusively prove something is good, fair or true.

2. You cannot moderate a forum at internet-scale using exclusively paid employees.

3. A tech company is not the government. There is no shame in a company looking out to protect its own good name.

Some takeaways: (1) and (3) suggest a social network should admit its point of view, and moderate according to its tastes from the top-down. (2) suggests the bulk of moderation should either be AI-based, or delegated down via a hierarchy of its users. Since AI won't be capable of competent moderation for at least a decade, the primary method should be the community. (3) means that the the positioning on moderation should be heavy-handed. Eg: "If we dislike your contributions or feel you make us look bad, we will ban you. We offer no 'court of appeals', because it's an esthetic judgment."

This ideology of my model is rather depressing, but the current state of the internet (compare HN or Tildes with 8chan or Gab) hints that it's better than the status quo.

It needs to follow the rules in place for advertising and completion law. Deliberate deception should be handled with a heavy hand, most other things should be community managed.

> 2. You cannot moderate a forum at internet-scale using exclusively paid employees.

Sure you can. You just may not be able to print money Facebook style while doing so.

I agree that these companies could afford to hire tens of thousands of people, and have them follow a flowchart. I don't see that environment ever delivering competent moderation. Not to mention, it's unethical to subject employees to several hours a day of troll vomit.

I took a stab at this a couple of years ago and ended up in some interesting discussions. Mostly what I found is that a lot of times people are arguing for one policy when they really mean for that policy to be bundled with a second policy. For example, in the USA, shelter-in-place is a good response to COVID if it is paired with a social safety net to handle lost wages. But if you don't trust the government to hold up the safety net, then maybe a masks-only policy would have been better.

I called my discussion method, Humble Americans for Math and Reason (HAMR) and it was sort of tongue in cheek because I knew how annoying it would be if that was an actual group trying to insert itself into conversations all over the place.

The discussion system boiled down to three guidelines. Do the math. Be transparent about values. Be humble about the math.

Here's the longer explanation:

-------

#1. Do The Math

The main goal of HAMR is to promote mathematical reasoning when we evaluate problems and solutions. For example, the media often covers new dangers that are probably overblown. The novelty of the danger far exceeds the actual risk.

The HAMR style response would be to develop a standard of safety that everyone can relate to.

Let’s call it the car standard, or Automobile Fatality Comparison Scale to be precise.

One person dies per 2 million hours driving in a car.

So, when we hear a story that someone died during a Tough Mudder competition, HAMR’s job is to apply the car standard.

The math looks approximately like: 750,000 people have entered a Tough Mudder, the average Tough Mudder takes three hours to finish, and there has been one fatality.

That’s (1 death / (750,000 participants * 3 hours)) = 1 death per 2.25 million hours.

In other words it’s a 0.9 on the Automobile Fatality Comparison Scale, i.e. 10% safer than driving.

Now people can make a mathematically reasoned decision about the dangers of a Tough Mudder.

-------

#2. Value System Transparency and Neutrality

Reason is actually a value system — but let’s ignore that.

What HAMR needs is to be able to be both transparent and neutral about other value systems.

For example, if we were to analyze the Iraq War we could look at several value systems: * Imperial: will the United States come out ahead in terms of opening and protecting new markets. * Respect for Human Life: How many Iraqi’s will die in the conflict? What change can we expect in their quality of life? * Respect for American Life: How many Americans will die in the conflict.

One of those three angles is much more compelling to my value system. But the point of HAMR isn’t to convince you my value system is better than yours. It’s simply to help people be better at mathematical reasoning.

And I picked Iraq as an example, because I’m nearly positive that the Iraq War was a bad decision by almost any value system: * The Iraq war cost the US: $2 Trillion dollars (i.e. $6,289 per US citizen) * Led to the death of 4,486 US soldiers. * Led to the death of 110,000+ Iraqi civilians.

For every calculation, there needs to be transparency about the value system prompting that calculation.

Then, having transparency about the values, there needs to be a huge amount of respect for other people’s values.

It’s an oxymoron, but the HAMR party is non-partisan. Democrats, Communists and Republicans should be able to contribute together.

-------

#3. Embrace Humility

Anyone who spends any time with data knows that data is messy. You need to be open to better data and better math at all times.

For example, I just gave numbers from the Iraq war above. I got those from a Google search. Do you have better numbers or a deeper analysis of how those numbers were calculated?

Undoubtedly, someone does.

I really rather like this approach. I have 2 comments which are that some people are so fixed on one view that they really cannot change. Give them the maths, watch them ignore it.

Example: in a drugs discussion I posted some info showing nicotine to be minimally addictive, complete with reference in the form of a link, extract from the link so people didn't even have to click on it, and added my own experience that I did not find nicotine alone addictive you need a 2nd type of chemical called an MAOI which makes nicotine very addictive wgen taken together). That got downvoted because nicotine = bad. All the facts you like but some react by instinct.(Note, I use nicotine/drugs that just as an example).

The 2nd point is unconscious bias, which you have yourself. You've even included 'Anmericans' in the name, more or less implicitly discoubnting others - plaese don't! We exist in other parts of the globe.

Anyway, I really do like the principle.

The acronym didn't work as well if I extended it to Earthlings. HAMR > HEMR.

Agree not everyone values changing their minds. But since you do, I think you'll enjoy this article about falsification. The idea is to think in terms of "I believe X, but if A, B or C were true then my belief would be false."

https://medium.com/better-humans/the-falsification-mindset-h...

I'm already aware of popper and his falsification, but I'll spend a bit more time on the article, thanks.

My problem is I can easily and happily change my mind if the evidence is concrete but where it is more a matter of common sense I tend to fail; "This is interesting and fun and may be useful - is it worth investing the time in?" And because it is all these, I seduce myself into spending the time on it whereas I suspect it may not be the best use of my time. Deffo not my strong point, that...

Going back to the original issue of evidence swaying (or not) people, I really feel lost looking at how to some people, reality is just a hindrance to what they know to be true.

I love these guidelines.

The 2nd one feels like the starting assumptions for a mathematical proof. Everything in the argument has to start with your values.

In most debates, people talk over each other because they haven't agreed to disagree on their value systems. They don't focus on the flow of reasoning that follows.

> "people talk over each other because they haven't agreed to disagree on their value systems"

Love this summary.

I like the idea of moderating through providing feedback on the arguments people make. So it isn’t enough to moderate for civility, it’s moderation of the discussion. Like flagging things for logical fallacies. And also promoting those who make sound arguments. Like literally a debate moderator. I think if enough things are flagged people’s pattern matching begins to pick up on those fallacies everywhere and they would become better debators

If you’re trying to start another venue with a stated specific bias, there is every reason to believe that it will (eventually, if not immediately) become exactly as limiting and echo-chambery like the rest of them.

However, if you’re trying to not do that, and create a truly open environment, you run into the problem which was perhaps best described like this:

“If you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.” (Emphasis in original.)

— https://web.archive.org/web/20200618093842/https://slatestar...

> echo-chambery

What is the distinction you draw between an echo chamber and a community which mostly shares certain baseline assumptions and values?

An echo chamber is violently hostile to different opinions and the individuals that defend them.

A community with shared values tends to voice their disagreement (sometimes vehemently) without ejecting or deplatforming alien elements

This usually excludes acts of moderation that enacts policies, guidelines, etc.

Since you ask:

A community which just happens to mostly share common values is merely that and nothing more. An “echo chamber”, on the other hand, is when such a community does not get any significant input from any outside sources, and as a result keep reinforcing their own internal beliefs, even though those beliefs may be erroneous. This extreme homogeneity, thus created, in turn gives rise to a culture in which any persistent dissenters are viewed as anomalous and therefore dangerous. And this is limiting for those who sometimes wishes they could express dissent. It is also restricting the community itself from ever developing any further.

To contrast, a normal community with mostly shared values would occasionally be affected by outside influences. This would create a constant level of turbulence in the system; there would always be some base level of variation between individuals, and over time, the median belief would slowly change this way and that, somewhat like fashions, and this would be normal.

The article says the goal of Persuasion is to serve as a platform for the group the author terms "philosophical liberals" to argue their case. A "fighting magazine", he calls it. It doesn't seem to be meant as an unlimited space or a pure response to witch-hunts.

The magazines the OP cites, Reason, The National Review and Jacobin, are all good, principled magazines from their respective points of view (National Review has written scathingly of Trump notably not as a concession to liberalism as well as I know). As someone well the left, I'd still take articles from either Reason or National Review seriously, for example. And Jacobin doesn't take a single, fixed leftist position either.

Aspiring to produce a magazine of that quality seems reasonable and quite possible in the abstract.

I think the rise of a well headed, free speech space is extremely important. The US has reached a point where certain topics are not even up for debate, as ruled by the court of twitter mob.

I don't know really.

On the one hand, I don't care much about rich and/or prominent people getting served online, when they promote toxic behavior.

On the other hand, I don't like this fake ally culture either. I believe most allys are in for social signaling and to improve their status, and not because they really care about the issues at hand.

And I'm torn.

If I tear down a fascist because it was also my competitor, how good or bad am I?

Few people correctly remember that "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was a comment directed at anti-war socialists who were distributing 'propaganda' against World War I. It's a rallying cry for suppressing war protesters.

I can't wait for VR-style chat[1] to become a dominant mode of online discourse. It is much more likely to emulate the civility of in-person discussions.

[1] Chatting with avatars that can navigate in a 3D digital environment, with or without an actual VR headset. That's just like the eponymous VRChat which allows 2D users to interact with 3D users and vice-versa. I highly recommend trying it. It's free and the worlds are beautiful. https://vrchat.com/

It can, but mostly due to the fact that the amplification of voices would be less, since people won't be talk to thousands of people, unlike twitter.

I doubt VR will become the dominant mode of anything for the simple reason that it's synchronous. Asynchronous communication in text form has become the dominant mode for good reason: it demands way less time and attention from users. People find synchronous voice/video communication exhausting (it's called "Zoom Fatigue" [1]).

[1] https://hbr.org/2020/04/how-to-combat-zoom-fatigue

Asynchronous communication is possible in VR/AR. However, if a material amount of deep conversation moves from asynchronous to synchronous format, that can have a big impact. There's also no reason that synchronous and asynchronous discussion can't be combined. A phrase like "Let's take this IRT" (in real time) can become the new "let's take this offline."

Think about the really controversial tweets that garner thousands of responses. What if there was a link next to the tweet that launched you into a virtual lounge where you can interact with other people looking to discuss the tweet? If someone who joins one of those groups wants to summarize their thoughts and conclusions from the discussion afterwards, in an async format, their response would indicate which discussion group that they were in. It would also be bundled with posts from other users in the same discussion group. It would be like "Twitter meets Reddit meets VRChat."

It's a nice thought, for sure. I think people would generally use it only to hang out and relax with their friends though. People, for the most part, don't want to sit down and get into an intense discussion/debate over controversial topics with someone from "the other side". They'd much rather be around people with whom they agree.

I could see it being useful as something of an intermediate between traditional online video games and offline gatherings involving food & boardgames. I don't see it being used as a primary mode of communication though, for the simple reason that it demands too much time and attention. Text messages and email occupy that space because it's so convenient to pick up and drop them at any time, even with a half-read message or a half-written reply. With VR that means putting on your gear every time, and resuming the "VR video" or whatever.

Heck, tons of people complain when video talks are posted without slides/transcripts. They want the information. They don't care about any other aspects of the presentation. VR in that case just seems to be more distracting stuff that gets in the way of the information.

Members of the cultural vanguard have a disproportionate impact on our zeitgeist. They don’t deserve their status in the vanguard unless they’re willing to engage in synchronous discussion at near-zero marginal cost using the most human digital communication medium in history. They don’t even need to dawn VR headsets. They can log on in 2D or, in the future, use lightweight AR glasses (hence "VR-style" chat).

There was no mythical time in the US when all topics were up for public debate, or without severe consequences for those holding the wrong opinions.

The only real difference that I can see (other than the speed of communication) is that advocating some positions that were supported by an overwhelming majority of public voices 70 years ago will now make a vocal proportion of people see you as a bad person, and if you work for a company who wishes to appeal to those people, maybe get you fired.

It's not even possible to create a "free speech space" where attributed comments will not result in judgment, other than by creating new protected classes for people who say racist, sexist, or homophobic things. Of course, if the state takes a position that those things are worth special protection, while expressing a negative opinion on (for example) the K-pop boy band BTS wouldn't be and could still get you fired or denounced, that's pretty terrifying.

edit: I guess the main difference is that everybody is publishing, now. Once, you couldn't publish unless you agreed with the people who owned the presses, and nothing you said would be reacted to except by other people who owned presses. It gave the impression that the ideas that were held by the most privileged were more secure than they actually were. I think that through internet centralization, we'll be back there soon, and since the presses are still owned by the same people, the world will start to look familiar again.

Once, you couldn't publish unless you agreed with the people who owned the presses

Presses weren't all that uncommon -- every town could have its own paper, maybe more than one. In the 20th century there were also typewriters, carbon paper, photocopiers, physical bulletin boards, open town squares, letters to the editor, subscription hand-mailed newsletters, ...

There's hardly a shortage of liberal media outlets, does the world really need another one?

Liberal here means classical liberalism, not just "left-wing":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

Yes, an ideology which is already vastly overrepresented in the media. I'm sure we'll soon find out exactly how necessary this particular venture is.

am i reading that we need to get militantly centrist?

A bit of a self-important way to start what appears to be a blog, imho.

Rhetoric may well find its place as an esteemed study once again.

This guy is apparently "alt-right", though I don't know exactly what that means these days, but someone mentioned him here on HN the other day which led me down the rabbit hole.

I thought this video [1] was interesting and it introduced me to the difference between rhetoric and dialectic. Rhetoric is using emotion to convince people. Dialectic is using reason. He points out that you need to know how to read your audience to choose the correct angle of argument. Some people get hung up on, for example, always persuading through facts (dialectic), when what they really need to do is reach for emotion (rhetoric).

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting intro to the topic.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHpalC3WaXY

Alt-right is technically a white supremacy neo-nazi movement. However, most of the time this label is used by woke people to discredit anyone who doesn’t share their views. Would you be able to share what led you to think why Yascha Mounk is alt-right?

> This guy is apparently "alt-right"...

Yeah, no. I mean, I don't know this guy from Bob, but the above has neither citation nor argument, and everything I've seen disagrees with that assessment.

Skim the list of the board of advisors...

https://www.persuasion.community/p/our-board

Several names pop out - and not because they're alt-right / reactionaries / populist right-wingers. Some bios:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Applebaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Kasparov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheri_Berman

Again, I don't have any personal knowledge here, but it's interesting to consider, eg, this bit from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yascha_Mounk#Political_positio...

> Mounk stated that he had changed his position on nationalism. He initially considered it a relic of the past that must be overcome, but he now advocates an "inclusive nationalism" to head off the threat of aggressive nationalism. On the German television newscast Tagesthemen, he stated that Germany is on a "historically unique experiment, namely to transform a mono-ethnic and monocultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one."

I suppose words like "nationalism" and "mono-ethnic" might appear in an alt-right missive, but IMHO the above doesn't sound anything like an alt-right perspective.

Sorry bad wording on my part. The guy from the linked video. Reading it again I really butchered the message.

Oooh, I see how I misinterpreted! Thank you for clarifying. Cheers.

> It is difficult to convey just how many amazing writers, journalists, and think-tankers—some young and some old, some relatively obscure and others very famous—have privately told me that they can no longer write in their own voices; that they are counting the days until they get fired; and that they don't know where to turn if they do.

Why? Name a number.

Humans are bad at counting. It'd be the proportion of writers, journalists and think-tankers that this person knows that should be communicated, and even then you have to take into account selection bias effects… It's hard to communicate a felt-sense of the magnitude of a quantity like that.

It was interesting to read the description of ‘fighting institutions’ that focus on arguments about certain topics that are mostly based on fallacies.

The sad situation in the U.S. is also a result of it being the target of so much psychological warfare from Russia. The internet is an excellent medium to cause confusion. Fix that, and you might heal democracy.

I've got an idea you might like. Protect Americans from being exposed to dissenting ideas by blocking non-approved foreign content from their internet. You could call it the Great Freedom Wall. /s

If you really blame Russia for the current US situation, I have bad news for you. Blaming an external power is a political manipulation 101. Focusing public attention on them is almost always used to hide real structural domestic problems. Soviet Union also loved to shift blame onto the US and modern Russia does it as well. Did that help them to built a better society?

External powers can only do so much. Usually most that they can do is to give a little push to processes already existing in society (and the US is a world leading expert at giving such pushes). So my advice would be: look at domestic roots of a problem first, not at foreign powers which try to exploit them.

> So my advice would be: look at domestic roots of a problem first, not at foreign powers which try to exploit them.

External powers have done a lot to manipulate US elections… via Facebook, a US company.

This is good advice.

Do you seriously believe that the main reason that Trump got elected is a bunch of Facebook ads?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com