Marketing rationalism

Most people (even those who aren't rationalists) consider rationality to be usually a good thing. Most people who aren't Christians don't consider following the Bible to be particularly useful or meritorious. So I find your analogy unconvincing. But:

You should convince them by appealing to whatever they understand, in a way you can do with integrity. If there is no such way, then you're probably both wasting your time. I'd have thought that saying more than this would require consideration of the special characteristics of particular situations.

I would muster all their biases in my favor. I would try every trick in the book to influence the unconscious part of their mind because that's where it all happens.

For the conscious part, I'd tell them useful stuff and try to demonstrate it on the spot.

For new age people, I'd try to get them to try to attract rationality.

Some examples of what I think you're looking for:

1. Vassar's proposed shift from saying "this is the best thing you can do" to "this is a cool thing you can do" because people's psychologies respond better to this
2. Operant conditioning in general
3. Generally, create a model of the other person, then use standard rationality to explore how to most efficiently change them. Obviously, the less wrong and overcoming bias knowledge base is very relevant for this.

I think WW Bartley was striving to achieve just this goal in "The Retreat to Commitment". His approach (after much discussion of the Protestants' approach to philosophy as background) is to ask what the goal of thinking about thinking should be. He concludes that anyone who thinks the question is interesting must be looking for techniques to help find out what is true about the world we live in. If you and your interlocutor can agree on that, then you're well on your way to being able to establishing correspondence with reality as the metric for better and worse choices of how to think.

Bartley's success in the book is in arguing well that you don't have to taken any particular theory, approach, or metric as primary in the struggle to decide what works best. At any particular moment you have to have a place to stand, but if there are reasons to doubt the foundations you are using, you can stand somewhere else for a while and inspect those foundations.

At the end you want to come back to contemplation of the question as to which approaches seem to lead to the best understanding of the truth of the world.

This comment is in reply to some ideas in the comments below.

In my opinion, my rationality is as faith-based as is a religious person's religious belief.

Among my highest values is "being right" in the sense of being able to instrumentally effect or predict the world. I want to be able to communicate across long distances, to turn combustible fuel into safe transportation, to correctly predict what an interstellar probe will find and to be able to build an interstellar probe that will work. Looking at the world, I see much more success in endeavors like these from science and rationality than from religiosity or appeals to god. And so I adopt rationality as it supports my values.

I also want to raise healthy, happy, "good" children. My one child who dabbles in alcohol, drugs, and petty theft, I am pretty sure I could "help" him by going to church with him. I've known many people who are effective at doing things I see as good because, it seems, of their religious beliefs and participation in churches and religious communities. I liked being a Lutheran for a few years. One night I told our pastor that I just didn't believe in god. He told me he thought half the church had that happening. Even so I couldn't stay engaged.

I feel the loss of religious faith as a sorrow, or a pain, or a burr under my saddle, or something. But I can't justify it, or more importantly, I can only pretend to believe, actual belief does not seem to me to be a real option anymore.

And it turns out I have enough "faith" in scientific rationalism that I won't even pretend I believe in god. I choose to believe that staying consistent with rational principles will payoff more for me and those I care about than will falling back to the more accessible morality of religious faith. It is a leap of faith, especially in light of "rationalists win." If my son were to become an heroin addict and devote his life to petty theft, jail, and shooting up, AND I could have prevented that by bringing him to church, I will have paid a price for my faith, as much as any Christian Martyr who was harmed or whos family was harmed because he did not deny his Christian belief.

People who think their rationality does not come from a faith they possess remind me of religious people who think their belief in god is just right, that it does not come from a faith that they possess or have chosen.

It took me a long time to respond to this because I found the question resistant to analysis. My immediate impulse is to shout, "But, dammit, my rational argument is really truly actually valid and your bible quotation isn't!" This is obviously irrelevant since, by hypothesis, my goal is to be convincing rather than correct.

After thinking about it, I've decided that the reason the question was hard to analyze is because that hypothesis is so false for me. You haven't placed any constraints at all; in particular, you haven't said that my goal is

• to convince others to be more rational via a correct argument, or
• to convince others to be more rational, provided that this is true, or
• to convince others to be more rational, as long as I don't have to harm anyone to do it, or
• to convince others to be more rational, as long as I can maintain my integrity in the process.

If I take "convince others to be more rational" as a supergoal, then of course I should lie and brain-hack and do whatever is in my power to turn others into rationalists. But in reality, many of my highest values have less to do with the brain-states of others, than with what comes out of my own mouth. Turning others into rationalists at the price of becoming a charlatan myself would not be such a great tradeoff.

I regularly "lose" debates because I'm not willing to use rhetoric I personally find unconvincing. (Though I'm probably flattering myself to suppose that I would "win" otherwise.) To give a specific example, I am deeply opposed to drug prohibition, while openly predicting that more people will be addicted to drugs if they are legally available. This is a very difficult position to quickly relay to someone who doesn't already agree with me, but any simplification would be basically dishonest. I could invent instrumental reasons why I shouldn't use a basically dishonest argument in this case, but the truth is that I just hate lying to people, even more than I hate letting them walk around with false, deadly ideas.

I imagine Eliezer and Robin run into this themselves, when they say that a certain unusual medical procedure only has a small probability of success, but should be undergone anyway because the payoff is so high. Many people will hear "low probability of success" and stop listening, and many of those people will therefore die unnecessarily. Does this mean Eliezer and Robin should start saying that there is a high probability of success after all, in order to better save lives?

Now maybe your point here is that yes, we all should be lying for the sake of our goals---that we should throw out our rules of engagement and wage a total war on epistemic wrongness. I have considered this myself, and honestly I don't have a good rebuttal. I can only say that I'm not ready to be that kind of warrior.

I think coming to agreement on terms through a dialectic is something most everyone can agree to engage in, and I don't think it's offensive to or beyond the scope of rationality. Socrates' way is the sort of meta-winning way, the way that, if fully pursued, will arrive at the conclusion of rationality.

For instance, In any one of those cases, I could start with a dialectic about problem-solving in everyday life, or at least general cases, and proceed to the principle that rationality is the best way. I'd try to come to agreement about the methods we use to diagnose a car problem, calculate how much they owe in taxes, or decide to enter an intersection, and extrapolate to epistemology from there. The philosopher, the Christian, and the hedonist all use reason, not will-to-power, faith, or desire to fix and drive their cars and pay their taxes, and this gives the evangelist of reason a method of proving the epistemological assertion that there is such a thing as truth, which we encounter in passing, and that rationality is the optimal way to approach it.

People are irrational largely because they're stupid. I have yet to be convinced that "rationality" is something entirely distinct from intelligence itself, such that you can appeal to someone to become significantly more "rational" without simultaneously effecting the seemingly tougher feat of boosting IQ a standard deviation or so.

The approach Jaynes takes in the opening chapters Probability: The Logic of Science based on Cox's theorem was very persuasive to me and the few others I've mentioned it to. The basic idea is to start with a few criteria that just seem like common sense that everyone should agree are desirable in a reasoning system. Then Jaynes shows that probability theory is the only possible system that fulfills these criteria.

Is there a similar approach that can be used to argue to rationality in general? I like to appeal to universiality. Different subjects should be governed by the same rules. And science and rationality have been enormously successful, so why shouldn't it be applied universally. Unfortunately, this approach can easily be abused. Can we formulate a good approach of this sort that isn't just leading people to say what we want?

I acknowledge the symmetry and appreciate the conceptual novelty of your argument to my idea set. It's a very powerful interpretation of some behaviour I have observed.

Has it been experimentally tested?

ADDED: People are missing the point that the situation is symmetrical for religious evangelists. For them to step outside of their worldview, and use reason to gain converts, is as epistemically dangerous for them, as it is for us to gain converts using something other than reason.

Disagree. Most people know very little of logic and reason, and will not bother to do their homework upon being approached with Christian arguments based on reason.

Some examples of what I think you're looking for:

1. Vassar's proposed shift from saying "this is the best thing you can do" to "this is a cool thing you can do" because people's psychologies respond better to this
2. Operant conditioning in general
3. Most generally, create a model of the other person, then use standard rationality to explore how to most efficiently change them. Obviously, the less wrong and overcoming bias knowledge base is very relevant for this.

Some examples of what I think you're looking for:

1. Vassar's proposed shift from saying "this is the best thing you can do" to "this is a cool thing you can do" because people's psychologies respond better to this
2. Operant conditioning in general
3. Most generally, create a model of the other person, then use standard rationality to explore how to most efficiently change them. Obviously, the less wrong and overcoming bias knowledge base is very relevant for this.

Some examples of what I think you're looking for:

1. Vassar's proposed shift from saying "this is the best thing you can do" to "this is a cool thing you can do" because people's psychologies respond better to this
2. Operant conditioning in general
3. Most generally, create a model of the other person, then use standard rationality to explore how to most efficiently change them. Obviously, the less wrong and overcoming bias knowledge base is very relevant for this.

Some examples of what I think you're looking for:

1. Vassar's proposed shift from saying "this is the best thing you can do" to "this is a cool thing you can do" because people's psychologies respond better to this
2. Operant conditioning in general
3. Most generally, create a model of the other person, then use standard rationality to explore how to most efficiently change them. Obviously, the less wrong and overcoming bias knowledge base is very relevant for this.

A moral argument is often a good start.