Intro to Rhetoric?

post by rule_and_line · 2014-03-04T04:19:56.970Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 1 comments

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Is there an explicit summary somewhere of the the LW community's views on rhetoric?

There clearly exist people around this community who can persuasively carry a rational point.  I also strongly expect that there exist specific instructions for training rhetorical skills, and these skills apply pretty generally.

But I also quasi-expect that rhetorical techniques LW community members appreciate might differ in specific ways from rhetorical techniques taught in popular books.  All that being said, I can't find any page where somebody explains why he or she explicitly practices something picked up via LW (e.g. Eliezer's "concrete-abstract" writing pattern) to the exclusion of something else in a standard text on rhetoric.

So a brief search didn't find the evidence I weakly expected.  What am I missing?  Do we have a few pages somewhere?  Do we normally point curious individuals to some standard text?  Or do you have a favorite intro not mentioned on LW yet?

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comment by DaFranker · 2014-03-04T12:38:38.679Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

From my understanding, the LW community doesn't have any cohesive view, appreciation or even level of understanding in rhetoric (or so many other skillsets and fields), beyond the general idea that it's a useful social skills but that some areas contain a lot of Dark Arts and must be approached with caution by those with moral reservations towards manipulation and anti-epistemics.