Is Rhetoric Worth Learning?

Regarding the separation between "being correct" and "being persuasive" and whether the latter is a "Dark Art". I think that there are two different types of "being persuasive". The first type is, being good at communicating your knowledge and ideas to other people. The second type is, being good at getting people to agree with you about something.

To put it differently, the first skill is about playing a game where you win when both you and your rationally combine your evidence and update towards a common position, or at least more similar positions. This might involve either your interlocutor changing eir position, or your changing your position, or both of you changing your positions. The second skill is about playing a game where you win when your interlocutor agrees with your initial position, regardless of its objective merit.

The first is definitely an important skill, because most intellectual projects are collaborative and any intellectual project has to produce comprehensible output in order to be useful for society. The second is very different, since, from its perspective, it doesn't matter why the interlocutor agrees and it doesn't even matter whether it's something you believe yourself or just want other people to believe. In particular, it easily allows for deceit and manipulation as long as you don't expect it to backfire. I think that the second skill (or, the part of the second skill which is not redundant w.r.t. the first skill) is definitely a "Dark Art" in the sense that, although it is still valuable consequentially, it might easily run into ethical problems and/or harm your own ability to think rationally (since you might start lying to yourself in order to improve your ability to lie to others).

Its difficult to discuss this topic on lesswrong for several reasons:

1) The bulk of most people's experience 'trying to convince other people of things' comes from political discussions. This is probably not an optimal state of affairs but its still true for most rationalists. Most of my experience 'learning how to persuade people' comes from discussing things like libertarianism and climate change. I can't go into details about those things on lesswrong.

2) Talking about how persuasive you are makes you sound arrogant and might make you sound manipulative. So its difficult to talk about successes you have had. Even worse, people you convinced of things don't want to hear about your master persuader powers.

3) The 'Dark Arts' taboo is pretty strong. When I was younger I was very bad at persuading people. Looking back I was just spamming arguments that only made sense to people who shared my moral foundations (and they are relatively but not ridiculously rare). At some point I decided to stop trying to make 'good' arguments and just try to convince people of things. I would not actively lie or mislead but I stopped trying to follow especially truth seeking norms (as I understood them). This was actually very educational. The later approach led to me spending much more time trying to really understand and engage with different points of view. I followed this approach for many years until I decided I had learned enough to change mindset. I only practiced this sort of attitude in political discussions with little or no real world ramification. But even talking about this can be socially risky if one is not careful. Among other things I argued for lots of positions I didn't actually hold (with no disclaimers) and made tons of arguments I personally found unpersausive. This rubs alot of people the wrong way.

When I went to college the first time it was for liberal arts. I also participated in Mock Trial, which is a sort of performative pre-law competition where two teams compete as Prosecution/Plaintiff and Defense on in a fictional case. Points are awarded by judges based on individual performance of team members and then the total determines the winner.

Since there is an established set of (fictional) facts, and we use a simplified version of the rules of evidence, it is a kind of boundedly-extemporaneous speaking. I was good at this, and in a good program; I occasionally won tournament awards and we competed at the national championships. This trains the physical skills well, in the main through frequent practice. They were also disproportionately rewarded. The judges were volunteers; clear exposition that did not require them to think too hard routinely shifted the evidence in your favor. It trained cognitive skills reasonably well, because even though the rules were simplified and known to everyone it was adversarial so there was continuous testing of your ability to respond on your feet to what the opponent said.

This format has a better system of feedback than any other speaking competition I know of: a tournament will usually have three or four trials in it, and the case stays the same throughout the season. As a consequence you get to repeatedly test your rhetorical skill with small variations and very fast feedback. This is distinct from oratory or debate competitions, where it is common to only speak once per competition. For anyone who is still an undergraduate, I recommend it.

It departs from the question asked in the post a bit, but I would like to weigh in on the side of rhetoric. Richard Feynman is a good candidate for the most popular physicist of the postwar era, and I think you will agree that the driving force behind his popularity is not the Nobel Prize he won; rather he is called the Great Explainer and the public knows him most through his skill at communicating. This was how I learned about him, and this video is his most memorable moment for me. Consider also the anecdote about Shannon and Von Neumann concerning entropy:

Von Neumann told me, ‘You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place you uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name. In the second place, and more importantly, no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

Can anyone think of any examples where the course of science was directed as much by the debater's skill as by the technical merits?

I put it to all of you that we are dealing with challenging subjects, often removed from people's everyday experience, but which are of critical importance to them nevertheless. Expository work in math and science is effectively technical rhetoric; we should seriously consider what the motivation is for arbitrarily stopping efforts at clear communication when we come to the spoken word.

Also, two points of interest:

Point of interest 1: while it was a standard part of liberal arts educations for centuries, it is not a standard part of them now in the United States. For some intuition as to why, I offer an article from Harvard Magazine called How Harvard Destroyed Rhetoric.

Point of interest 2: it may not be standard, but it is on the rise. In the engineering program where I went to school, Public Speaking was a curriculum requirement. The reason is that engineers will be expected to give presentations throughout their career, the majority of which will not be to technical peers - the ability to speak clearly and in a manner that inspires confidence in technical conclusions is expected to be key to success.

P.S. I had in mind using a transcript of a talk given by an older mathematician, wherein he described lessons from his career, including not spending enough time on exposition and killing his field as a result. He ends with some comment on learning to enjoy being a mathematical institution. I initially thought it might be Richard Hamming's 'You and Your Research', but that is not correct and it is maddening to me that I cannot find it. Can anyone help?

For what it's worth, I have three years' experience with university-level competitive debating, specifically with the debate format known as British Parliamentary (which is the style used by the World Universities Debating Championship or WUDC). Since many people are unfamiliar with it, I'll briefly explain the rules: one BP debate comprises four teams of two members each. All four teams are ranked against each other, but two of them must argue for the affirmative ("government") side of the issue and the other two for the negative ("opposition") side. The objective is basically to persuade the adjudicators why your team should win. In this format you do not get to research the topic beforehand, and you don't even know what you are going to debate until 15 minutes before the debate starts -- which means that it requires a lot of quick brainstorming and improvisation. And since each individual speaker gets only 7 minutes to make their case, you have to prioritize the most important content and structure it coherently.

In our training sessions we actually do not study classical rhetoric. So I'm not familiar with terms like elocutio, dispositio or pronuntiatio -- although I can definitely recognize clear delivery, organized structure, and appeals to logic as important principles of varsity debating. I think there are skills one can learn from this kind of public speaking:

• The target of persuasion in BP is the judge, who we regard as a layman, or "average informed voter". This means that he or she has a high-school education and reads a newspaper once a while, but is not an expert on any particular subject. Furthermore, the judge is not supposed to have a bias in favor of left-wing or right-wing arguments (but is moderate by the standards of a Western liberal democracy). This rule encourages speakers to use arguments that will appeal to a broad segment of people.
• The persuasiveness of a speech is evaluated not based on how impressive your style is, but on how compelling your arguments are. A good argument is one that is (a) believable, i.e. the premises are acceptable and the conclusion follows logically; and (b) relevant to the concerns of the debate, i.e. something that counts in favor of your side and against the other side. It is up to you as a speaker to explain why a claim you make is likely to be true and why it implies that your team should win. This encourages speakers to be clear about what it is that they actually stand for, and why the rest of us should care.
• Due to the short preparation time and the fact that judges do not fact-check the participants' speeches using Google, it doesn't make much sense to cite academic papers or statistics in one's speech. Additionally, to base an argument on a single example makes it vulnerable to refutation by counterexample. So if you can neither say "Studies show that in 73% of cases, X happens..." nor say "Last year, there was a case where X happened..." and get away with it, then what can you say? Well, a useful trick here is to remember that debating entails a comparison between two worlds: you can claim that "X is more likely (or less likely) to happen if we enact this policy than if we don't". Then you need argumentation to explain why that is the case, starting from premises that most people would accept as common knowledge or some kind of first principle about how the world works. You also need to explain why, assuming your argument is correct, this justifies/warrants the kind of action or conclusion you are proposing. This aspect of BP debating encourages speakers to think in terms of general rules rather than specific data points.
• The interactive nature of the game requires you to respond to the arguments presented by the other teams. A rebuttal works the same way as an argument, but with the opposite intention: you explain why the claims made by the other side are either (a) unrealistic; or (b) unimportant, perhaps because they are not mutually exclusive with your claims, or because they are of such little consequence that they are outweighed by other factors. Thus, speakers have to simultaneously see both sides of the dispute in order to isolate the core tensions and advocate successfully for their side.
• One quirk of this kind of format is that you don't get to choose beforehand which side of the topic you will be arguing for. This means that you will occasionally be required to defend positions that you personally disagree with, and poke holes in the ones you cherish. This is great for challenging confirmation bias and inviting speakers to consider different points of view. Even if you don't radically change your worldview, you will at least develop a greater understanding of the other side.

Of course one could also criticize this type of debating. Firstly, it inculcates a competitive spirit rather than a spirit of collaborative truth-seeking. Secondly, as a game it is in some ways detached from the nuances and practicalities of persuasion in the "real world", where things like statistical figures and budgetary limits and constitutionality do matter. Finally, one might become too adept at constructing plausible-seeming justifications for any conclusion one likes regardless of the actual evidence -- and this Eliezer warned us about [LW · GW]:

And that problem—too much ready ammunition—is one of the primary ways that people with high mental agility end up stupid, in Stanovich's "dysrationalia" sense of stupidity.

You can think of people who fit this description, right?  People with high g-factor who end up being less effective because they are too sophisticated as arguers?

When you start with a given position on a topic (let's say you have to argue against legalizing recreational drugs) and construct arguments in its favor, you are essentially engaging in rationalization [LW · GW]instead of rationality.

So do the benefits outweigh these risks? I don't know.

I think rhetorics can be "friendly" and "adversarial", and the two things require different skills (and of course there is "art".)

**About friendly rhetorics:**

at the meetings of our team for bioconservation, being the "scribe" meant you have fewer chances to put in your own five cents, and kind of more desire for others' clarity of thought:) so in practice it meant mutual training:

• asking people to clarify;
• tracking who said what (we sent out write-ups afterwards and naturally people got upset if their position was misrepresented);
• sometimes reminding everybody we need A Conclusion;
• preparing tea (it is better for the voice than speaking "drily", it's *not* beer (which not everybody likes or can afford), it means you can stuck the kettle into someone's cold hands and so make them welcome without a hitch in the discussion, & the making of it can be used for a break from That One Topic which nobody agrees upon);
• speaking shortly. I still remember the time when we couldn't decide how best to chart a pigsty (being built somewhere on protected land), and I said "there's a GPS", and there was blessed silence :)

**For adversarial rhetorics,** the one thing that helps most is letting 'em know you come prepared - it means they will waste resources on weighing their own arguments against your possible answers; so:

• decide what you want to say beforehand and have all references either learnt or written down;
• if possible, BYOS - bring [copies of] your original sources (law print-outs, etc), earmarked and highlighted;
• if you can help it, don't enter arguments you expect to lose, if this means setting a dangerous precedent or a hit to your image;
• do not get off topic, do not be less than polite (which is harder when you have limited time and need shortcuts - informality can hurt, and it will be easily used against you);
• citing precise figures is good - there's a "but the numbers speak for themselves" feel about them, and if you are wrong about them, you will have maid "a noble mistake", unless, well, it was obviously not noble;
• study the other side's sources closely;
• if you work with journalists, demand reading the piece before publication and check, at least, all names in it (srsly).

I notice that I'm thinking about "friendly rhetorics" as having two sides, and "adversarial rhetorics" as having three - you, your opponent. and the observers; I am merely used to this setting, but it doesn't mean it can't be the other way round.

A good way to practice pronuntiatio is simply to watch yourself speak. Even without external feedback, you yourself will notice many bad habits in the way you speak and correct them.

I did this as part of a class: each week we would give a short talk on some subject, then watch the video of ourselves talking. For the next talk, it's best to focus on improving just a single thing that went wrong, starting from the mouth and moving outward. For example, on a particular week I would focus on fixing on of the following:

• Too quiet (usually) or too loud.
• Too fast (usually) or too slow.
• Filler words: "umm" and "ahh".
• Monotone, or tone changes that don't match the context.
• Eye contact with audience - you want to make brief eye contact that moves around the room, rather than staring at the floor or at a single person.
• Shoulder posture, arm movement.
• Body posture, some people tend to sway in the wind.
• Moving around the room.

At the very end, which came out to our 6th or 7th talk, we went back to the subject of our first lightning speech and tried to deliver the exact same text and compared the videos. The difference was astounding.

As someone who is here mostly to improve my personal life (and perhaps since that tends to generate a surplus, get some EA done along the way) it's definitely worth it for me. A few points on the things in your list

• Think of your practice:theory ratio for a thing you're good at. Think of how often you deliberately practice conversational skills like connecting with other people. Realize you should be doing less reading more doing. Feel scared to start. Go somewhere nobody will know you and practice anyways.
• Side note: I feel like there must be a better feedback loop since this just gives a fail/pass/ace result and little feedback as to why. Close friends are poor feedback loops for this due to their bias and selection bias in general.
• Tone and posture > attractiveness. Marilyn Monroe could turn her charisma on and off with body language. Read the whole book for more specifics. Controlling my lisp and lordosis causes a visible change in the reaction of people I approach. Losing 20 lbs of muscle in a long period of sloth changed things a little but not proportional to the amount of time it took to gain 20lbs of muscle.
• Making a habit of simulating other people with your system 1 side before including your system 2 side makes conversation more fun and makes people feel more cared about by you. But that's something I got from this site so you may have already read about this.

In my experience, those are the only things specific to rhetoric I've had to learn to get to the level I could have fulfilling and productive interactions with other humans. I'm aware I'm still behind a lot of other people so I would be happy if someone pointed out things they feel are important. Discovering a new deficiency always comes with some great effort:reward areas of focus.

Currently, Difficult Conversations is the only book I recommend to literally all people, because it establishes the principles and practices of effective collaborative truth-seeking. If you want a good chance of persuading someone of something they are already opposed to, you have demonstrate that you understand their point of view and value their well-being. (On a similar note, I read Ender's Game in middle school and took to heart the idea of understanding your adversaries so well that you love them.)

Can the art of influencing emotions be used for destructive purposes? Yes. It's certainly possible to play off of many humans' biases to get them to adopt positions that are arbitrarily chosen by an outside source, by presenting different perspectives of situations and associating different emotions with them. However, it is also possible to explore as many relevant aspects of a situation as possible, validate people's concerns, and have your concerns listened to in turn. Like any other tool it can be used to constructively get people to feel better about seeking the truth. Rhetoric allows you to reframe a situation and get people to go along with it. Some try to reframe a situation for selfish purposes, but you can still frame a situation as accurately as possible, and persuade people to accept and contribute to this reframing.

Here's a twist, though: rhetoric would still be important even if people were rational truth-seekers by default. You can't accurately and efficiently convey the relevant aspects of a situation or idea without rhetoric. The people listening to you will have to spend more energy than necessary to understand your meaning, because you don't know how to arrange your message in a logical order, with clear language.

You'd also be missing a quick method for getting people to start appreciating others' emotions different cultural frames of reference. Even putting them through a simulation wouldn't work as well; their own frame of reference (the Curse of Knowledge) would likely prevent or delay them from having an epiphany about the other person's paradigm. Sometimes you just need to spell things out, and for that, you need rhetoric and other communication skills.

Just because rhetoric isn't sufficient to seek truth doesn't mean it's not necessary. If we tossed out everything that can be used for destruction as well as for construction, we'd be facing the world naked.

Marvelous post.

It's worth reading Aristotle's Rhetoric at some point —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric_(Aristotle)

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.html

The famous points like arguing from ethos (roughly, character/credibility), logos (logic), and pathos (emotional appeals, especially around harm and suffering) — these are well-known enough, but Aristotle went into a lot of specific and counterintuitive examples.

I feel like I got a lot from reading it that I haven't seen elsewhere, but it does oscillate a bit between a dry and slogging type read and some real gems of insight. Probably worth checking out if you're interested in the topic — I don't think summaries do it justice; there's some particularly good and non-obvious examples.

Elocution is something of a lost art. My first encounter with it as a concept was reading about the life of Alexander Graham Bell. While Bell is today remembered for the telephone, he was also an elocution instructor that took a keen interest in both the human voice and teaching the deaf to speak like someone who can hear. He could deliver a speech from a phonetic representation in such a way that it was persuasive to foreign speakers, without understanding the language he was using. This interest in the human voice is part of what eventually led him to create the telephone. Naturally then, we should expect Bell's voice to represent a strong example of what the art of elocution can do for you. As fortune would have it, we do in fact have a recording of Bell's voice to examine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALUgxsnCOk

It's distorted, but the inflection, tone, and general cadence can be made out. I'll allow listeners to judge its qualities for themselves.

In a best case scenario, a fellow traveler will already have studied rhetoric and will be able to provide the highlights relevant to LWers. In the spirit of offering the "obvious advice" I've heard the "Very Short Introduction" series of books can give you an introduction to the main ideas of a field and maybe that will be helpful for guiding your research beyond the things that are easily googleable.

Promoted to frontpage.

Just over three years after this post was published, I returned to it and switch to a strong upvote from a regular upvote.  The post is well written and engaging, and it recently appears to me that it continues to be highly relevant.  The proximate cause was the post over at the EA forum about an EA debate competition [EA · GW]; there was a lot of well-articulated and popular concerns about debate as an activity, the most excellent of which [EA(p) · GW(p)] had, if I understand it correctly, the following true concern:

Methods of communicating that are not truth-seeking compete with methods that are for our mastery. Which is to say, by spending time on symmetric weapons like rhetoric, we are forsaking time spent on advancing the truth.

I think this is a mistake, and that the value of rhetoric spoken-or-written to pursuit of the truth is being neglected. I publicly register my intent to write a post on this.

Classical rhetoric is old hat these days. The really persuasive Art is making PowerPoint slides!

My current job involves a lot of writing and talking about emerging technology in order to help companies make strategic decisions in a variety of contexts. I have had lots of practice (and live editing sessions as you describe) with pieces of many different lengths for different audiences (specific individuals, conferences, my coworkers, and the press). I don't know any good substitute for the experience of having people try to follow your arguments and fail, or just refuse to listen to or believe the first however many ways you try to explain something until you succeed.

That said, if someone had asked me before reading this where I learned the most about persuasion, my answer would be... here. All the articles about cognitive biases, how to actually change your mind, and so on, also double as lessons in how to help other people do the same.

As far as persuading those who actively don't care about arguments or don't want to be right instead of just being misinformed or not knowing something... rhetoric as a tool to figure out what psychological levers to pull may be the only way to get that result. Spending time just talking to people used to having a lot more power and status than you can be very helpful there, if you approach it right. Or watching others do the same, since trying it yourself is a higher risk approach.

they restructured the rhythm and pacing and added vivid turns of phrase, while keeping all the important content in place. I still haven't worked out exactly how they did it, or what principles lie behind the changes, but suddenly it sounded like a more graceful, alive voice was making my argument.

I'll just put this great quote here (which is a great explanation for at least one thing they might have done, depends on whether you did that already)

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”

― Gary Provost

Also, remember *Captain Brassbound's Conversion*? Lady Cicely was my Rhetorics Ideal for a while...

• How to be aware of other people’s points of view without merging with them

...

• How to restrain yourself from anger or upset

• How to take unflattering comments or disagreement in stride

...

• How to resist impulses to evade the issue or make misleading points

...

• How to understand another person’s perspective

It wasn't the reason I got into it in the first place, but I have found mindfulness practice helpful for these things. I think that's because mindfulness involves a lot of introspection and metacognition, and those skills transfer pretty well to modeling other people, and are useful for restraining unhelpful emotional impulses. In particular, knowing how to recognize and restrain anger in oneself, I strongly suspect, makes one better at anticipating how one's words might set off other people's anger, and coming up with strategies to avert or de-escalate such confrontations. It's analogous to a phenomenon that I expect will sound familiar to LW readers, which is that getting better at noticing mistakes and biases in one's own thinking also makes one better at noticing them in other people's thinking.