Dark Arts 101: Using presuppositions

There's what I take to be a good introduction to the so-called "Reporters' Privilege" here . The reference to Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972) is a key point.

I'd hesitate to say that there isn't at least an arguable legal precedent for just about any comprehensible assertion at all.

P.S. I would also hesitate to trust reporters to be unbiased in their assertions about the protections of the "Reporter's Privilege."

(continued)

...Half the writing assignments will put into practice persuasive techniques such as these. The other half will analyze course readings (by Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Jane Austen, George Orwell, and others) debating whether persuasion -- in the strong sense of actually changing a reader's mind -- is possible.

On the first day, they teach you how to quote selectively...

I use Evernote for stuff I want to save for later perusal.

As for getting distracted and following hyperlinks, you're at a computer, you're connected to the internet. Enter the role of "self discipline".

If that doesn't work you can look under (with Firefox) "File" and find the "print" entry. This will instantiate a persistent, highly portable copy of the page in such a way as to make it almost impossible to follow the links. You can then carry the copy to a place away from distractions (aka "The smallest room in the house") and spend as much time as you need. If you have the right kind if paper in the printer you can even use it to clean up when you're done.

The articles themselves can be copy-pasted, but I can think of no good way to handle the issue of translating threaded comments. When I try to copy these directly, my word processor tells me to stick a finger up my nose, because producing smart looks evidently ain't in my nature.

The "Save Webpage As" feature will perhaps be a better solution copy and paste, although you will still not save comments that are nested more than half a dozen or so deep (not that this is usually a problem). That allows you to read in offline mode allowing you to disconnect the net connection.

If you explicitly want to not have visible hyperlinks to click on then you have a few options to be rid of them:

• Open the saved webpage in Word, select all and strip hyperlinks. I believe the shortcut key is cntrl-shift-F9.
• Run the saved pages through a regex substitution. In vim that would mean typing :s/\<a /<a style="display: none" /g. On a linux command line that would mean running sed 's/\<a /<a style="display: none" /g' foo.html> foo2.html.
• Download that lesswrong kibotzer script that was posted around here a year or so ago. Add one line in the appropriate place so that it hides other links as well as authors.

(None of the above are tested. I don't happen to have any of those pieces of software installed on this machine and would have to walk all the way to the next room to try it. I'm not sure if there is interest to warrant it but those would be my approaches.)

Thanks for the help. I'll see what works best for me.

I've had some success reading websites on an Amazon Kindle. It doesn't disable links, but it takes several clicks to select and open one and you can only have one page open a a time. (Reading footnotes is a bit of a pain, though.) There may be other ebook readers or tablets that work similarly or better.

You can use a simple bookmarklet to make links on LW non-functional, e.g.:

javascript:(function(){$$('a').each(function(q){q.writeAttribute('href','#');})})();

To use this you would just set up a bookmark with the code as the address and click on it while LW is open.

Edit: A cross-site version of the bookmarklet would look like this:

javascript:(function(){var x=document.getElementsByTagName('a');for(var i=0,n=x.length;i<n;i++)x[i].setAttribute('href','#');})();

A private citizen emailing secret documents to someone without proper clearance can be prosecuted for it; a journalist publishing classified documents that were passed to her cannot be prosecuted.

No, shield laws, both existing and proposed, are only about sources and offer no protection for publishing classified information. They might offer protection from admitting that you have classified information. Also, most classified information is at the federal level and there isn't a federal shield law, so this is all hypothetical.

I didn't know that was the original meaning of that phrase.

Wikipedia has pages on begging the question, and on circular reasoning. Each of them says they are different from each other; but both of them are given nearly the same definition. So what's the difference?

Rights guaranteed by the US Constitution -- with a few exceptions, such as the right to vote -- have generally been held to apply to everyone under American jurisdiction, not just to citizens. Though Assange is not a US citizen and lives outside the United States, First Amendment protections would in theory apply if the US government attempted to prosecute him under its laws, e.g. following an extradition request.

I was adopting the persona of a Dark Arts instructor.

You'd never make it in Slytherin, sorry.

To expand: your blog is what happens when a non-neurotypical person reads about a subtle trick routinely done by smart neurotypicals, then tries to emulate the trick as they consciously understand it. It doesn't come across as natural, and only hurts your cause (it's way too easy to make fun of; what it most reminds me of is the style of Stuff White People Like, and I don't think that's the tone you were aiming for).

Unless you've had substantial practice with marketing or politics, you're better off telling it straight than consciously intending to manipulate people's biases (again, aside from the ethical issues involved).

Use Google, and you'll see many people asking whether Julian Assange is a reporter, and therefore protected under the first amendment. Such as "Why Julian Assange is a journalist - And why WikiLeaks is entitled to the same First Amendment protections as the New York Times ". And you will also find people responding to the implied argument, like Reason magazine.

No one has explicitly said the First Amendment should apply only to journalists. But posing the question "Is X a journalist, and therefore protected by the First Amendment?" has that implication.

whether assange qualifies as a journalist is/could be relevant because the first amendment specifically protects the freedom of the press. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"

ergo, if assange is a member of the press, it's constitutionally harder to go after him than if not.

no one is saying that if he's not a journalist, the separately-mentioned freedom of speech doesn't apply to everyone else.

My girlfriend and her roommate were having trouble deciding between apartments to move to. I visited the girlfriend's favorite with the group and asked the roommate "Which bedroom do you want?"

The more she thought about that question, the more she imagined herself choosing that apartment.

It's really just the pattern "unspoken premise", which happens all the time, usually accidentally. Rarely can you know whether the person did it intentionally, except when a salesman asks someone contemplating a purchase, "Would you like to take it home today, or have it shipped?"

Sales and marketing are the Dark Arts.

One common example is that whenever there's a real or perceived national problem, the question that gets asked is what are we going to do about it.

Where "we" implicitly means the government and the "do about it" means creating a new law and probably a new bureaucracy whose job will be to "do something about it".

When did you stop beating your wife?

No - a circular argument tries to prove its presupposition. This method assumes its presupposition, then draws attention away from it.

In a classic circular argument, the circularity is explicit-- God exists because it says so in the bible, the bible is true because it's the word of God.

Identifying presuppositions takes more work.

"Human" is a word with many meanings, interpretations, and implications, not all of which are satisfied by the condition of possessing human DNA. "Person" is likewise disputable.

And I hate to sound like a style guide, but the phrase "everyone will agree that [x]" is false almost without exception and should probably be avoided.

Spies are journalists? I think you can at most say there is a non-empty intersection of the activities of journalists and spies.

That's nonsense.

1) There is quite a bit of journalism that has nothing to do with exposing other peoples secrets. This would include reporting on natural events (storms, snow, earthquakes, politicians lying or accepting bribes), human activities (that a murder happened, who the police claim to be interested in etc., business information (stock prices, sales, etc.)) all of which and more require no subterfuge, burglary, or other morally or legally questionable activities to learn about and create a report of.

2) Almost no espionage (as a percentage of the total amount created) is intended for eventual exposure via "the press", be that a real press, the internets, or various video outlets. I've been (tangentially) in the espionage industry (providing non-espionage (and non-interesting) support to people doing electronic intelligence gathering) and I have some feel for the amount of data gathered this way. I've also been (at a different time) in the Media Industry (providing similar non-interesting support to a much more interesting set of artists) and there really is NO similarity between the two, other than some journalists also providing some humint to military and civilian intelligence sources. (Note, I've never been on the humint side and know nothing of this that isn't already out there. It could be disinformation, it could be real.)

Very few journalists are aware and disciplined enough to be intelligence assets. Most who are are egotistical f'wits (like the aforementioned Assange) who just want more money and fame and don't care who they kill to get it.

What Assange did was neither espionage, nor journalism. He simply accepted material someone else had stolen (Manning was the one committing espionage with the Iraq documents.) and then published it (as far as I know) unedited.

The big fallacy being committed here is that Assange is not, or at least shouldn't be subject to US law, and as such is not covered by the Constitution. I believe our constitution to be the least-bad construction of a government yet implemented in a pluralistic society, and that in general our government is at least as transparent (given it's size and scope) as there is.

But we do not (yet) own the world and trying to try an Australian citizen for something that isn't clearly a crime in America (vis the pentagon papers case) and didn't actually happen in America (unless I missed something Assange isn't here in the states and didn't receive the materiel here) is really a fucking stretch folks.

A US citizen cannot be tried and convicted in an Australian court for the crime of owning a handgun IN THE US, even though it would be a crime in Australia (handwaving some legal details here, the point is jurisdiction). Now, if there is a statute in Australia that makes what Assange did illegal, then THEY need to try him, and I can tell you for certain that there ain't no constitutional protections there.