The dark arts: Examples from the Harris-Adams conversation

(1a) Adams never claims that Trump is a good person, and consequently this wasn't a point of disagreement between him and Harris and thus not relevant to their conversation.

(1b) Yes, that's my opinion as well. What's relevant is what we should do about climate change, and as Adams pointed out even if all the climate change stuff is true, the economics doesn't necessarily support taking immediate action.

(2) This is more two conditions have to be true than Motte and Bailey. It's like a legal argument that my client didn't do X, but even if he did do X it wouldn't have been a crime.

(3) Yes, but Adams was honest about this. I think Adams takes a consequentialist view of morality and so, for example, thinks it would be OK for Trump to lie if it helped our economy or harm ISIS. Adams wants his audience to understand the worldview of a master persuader, and from this worldview facts are often not relevant. Also, it's too simple to say that Trump lies when Trump says something that Trump knows is false, but which Trump also knows that his audience knows is false. This is more emotional signaling.

(4) Disagree. I love Sam Harris's podcasts but I think Harris has a case of Trump derange syndrome, and it was fantastic of Adams to point this out. Getting Harris to make Hitler / exorcist comparisons was very telling. Rationalist should point out when they think others are suffering from confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.

(5a) Yes Adams makes an unfalseafiable claim, but a claim that seems theoretical reasonable.

(5b) Since Trump has made no apparent effort to lock Hillary up, this seems right. But I admit Trump's pre-election call to lock Hillary up greatly troubled me.

(5c) Trump has sacrificed a lot of time, and knowingly accepted a lot of insults to become president and at age in which he seems unlikely to be able to personally benefit much from having been president. Lots of Americans really do think that Trump is saving American civilization, and it seems reasonable that Trump is one of those people.

(6a) It's know known that the 17 agency figure was an error. I think even the NYT has admitted this.

(6b) Yes, and this seems relevant.

"He is an ethical and epistemological relativist: he does not seem to believe in truth or in morality."

Adams doesn't think that true and morality play much of a role in political persuasion. Adams thinks that most people greatly overestimate how much their own personal opinions are influenced by truth and morality. Adams is trying to correct this massive flaw in human nature by giving his readers/viewers/listeners some of the secrets of master persuaders.

This is an example of Adams using the dark arts.

It might have worked.

I haven't listened to the debate (I'd read it if it was transcribed), but I want to object to a part of your post on a meta level, namely the part where you say:

To me, he is very far from a model for a rationalist

Being able to effectively convince people, to reliably influence their behavior, is perhaps the biggest general-purpose power a human can have. Don't dismiss an effective arguer as "not rationalist". On the contrary, acknowledge them as a scary rationalist more powerful than you are.

The word "rationalist" means something fairly narrow. We shouldn't make it into an applause light, a near synonym of "people we like and admire and are allied with". Being reliably effective, on the other hand, is a near synonym of being rational(ist).

If Adams employed "dark arts" in his debate, the only thing that necessarily means is that he wasn't engaged in an honest effort to discover the truth. But that's not news - it was a public debate staged in order to convince the audience! So Adams used a time-honored technique of achieving this goal - how very rational of him. At least, it's rational if he succeeded, and I assume you think he did succeed in convincing some of the audience, otherwise you wouldn't bother to post a denunciation.

Similarly, the name "Dark Arts" is misleading. They are (if I may channel Professor Quirrell for a moment) extremely powerful Arts everyone should cultivate if they can, and use where appropriate: not when honestly conversing with a fellow rationalist to discover the truth, but when aiming to convince people who are not themselves trained in rationality, and who (in your estimation) will not come by their beliefs rationally, whether or not they end up believing the truth.

This is a near cousin of politics (in the social sense, not the government sense). Politics is a mind-killer and it's important to keep politics-free spaces for various purposes including the pursuit of truth. But we should not say "rationalists should not engage in politics", any more than "rationalists should never try to convince non-rationalists of anything".

ETA: I'm not claiming Adam is a rationalist or is good at being a rationalist; I'm not familiar enough with him to tell. I'm only claiming that the fact he is or tries to be a good persuader in a debate and uses Dark Arts isn't evidence that he isn't.

I dunno man. I feel like 'practitioner of Dark Arts' is a sneaky way to describe 'rationalist who disagrees with me'.

Surely, as a rationalist, you are also a relativist, yeah? Like, you get that there is no giant stone block with the One True Morality on it somewhere? Like, when you say that Adams doesn't believe in morality...you agree with him, right?

(a) Harris says Trump is unethical and cites the example of Trump gate-crashing a charity event to falsely get credit for himself. Adams responds by saying that others are equally bad—that all politicians do morally dubious things. When Harris points out that Obama would never do such a thing, Adams says Trump is a very public figure and hence people have lots of dirt on him.

There's nothing wrong with Adams here, because

1) Harris's implicit argument is that Trump is unethical compared to other politicians, even if he doesn't actually say it. Thus, pointing out that other politicians are unethical is a legitimate rebuttal.

2) As far as I can tell from your summary, the argument is not "Trump gets caught at more bad things than other politicians", the argument is "Trump does more bad things than other politicians". If someone brings up an example of another politician who doesn't get caught as much, it's entirely proper to point out that it's harder for that politician to get caught and that not getting caught doesn't mean not doing bad things.

Instead, Adams always says, Trump “doesn’t pass the fact checks”. This move essentially makes it sound as if there’s some organization whose arbitrary and biased standards are what Trump doesn’t pass and so downplays the much more important fact that Trump lies.

This has some of the same problems as #1. Pretty much nobody tells the truth 100% of the time; saying that a politician lies really means he lies more than other politicians. Just because nobody explicitly said "... more than other politicians" doesn't mean the implication is not there. It is entirely correct to rebut this by saying "actually, other politicians lie, they just don't get caught at it by fact checkers".

Furthermore, if you don't think there are organizations that use arbitrary and biased standards for Trump lies, you haven't been paying attention to the controversy over fact-checking sites. Generally those sites are correct when it comes to facts, but selective about which facts to check and whether a literally true or false statement counts as mostly false or mostly true.

The OP is an interesting twist on the usual "Dark Arts" political argument.

It is commonplace as an extended exercise in confirmation bias to poison the well.

I wanted to work on this essay more carefully, and find out all the different ways in which Adams subverts the truth and sound reasoning.

Seek, and ye shall find, o' confirmation bias.

But "the well" is not just Scott himself, but his epistemological method. This is much more powerful than just attacking the person, as it provides a fully general counterargument to dismiss anything Scott Adams has to say as "Dark Arts".

He is a bad person, for engaging in the Dark Arts, and all his arguments are bad, because they are Dark Arts.

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For my part, I found the interview itself as an exercise in Dark Arts by Sam. He wants to pretend that he has given Trump politics a fair hearing. But he doesn't have on someone who actually supports the politics in any conventional sense.

He has on a persuasion analyst who doesn't believe in that there is much utility in us having political opinions because of our lack of knowledge and ability to be objective, and will say that his political opinions are so outside the mainstream that there is no point in discussing them. Similarly, he doesn't argue morality because his he says that his own moral values are so outside the mainstream that he finds everyone immoral.

Not a guy who is going to defend Trump on policy or morality. He finds him an effective persuader, and thinks that an effective persuader will make a good president, and sees a number benefits accrued already.

Sam has him on, and then doesn't even talk policy, but spends the hour attacking Trump personally.

Now watch to see how many times Sam uses this interview as evidence of engaging with the ideas behind Trump's politics and finding them unconvincing.

I just posted a bit called "Beliefs as Body Language."

I explore the idea that most people basically do not have beliefs, and are essentially incapable of thinking in terms of beliefs. You cannot tell them what you want them to hear, because what you want them to hear is a proposition about reality, and they are only capable of hearing signals of tribal affiliation or personality traits.

I definitely see some flaws with Adams' methodology, but a few of the things he says that are identified as epistemologically unsound, I understand in terms of communicating with the average person, who is not a nerd and doesn't deal with propositions about reality much. It's implied that Adams should instead make a sentence the words in which symbolize a model about reality that matches the way reality really is, ie, say true things.

The problem is that he can say that, and we nerds can understand it and applaud him for it, but most people are incapable of receiving the message. At which point, it becomes a question of picking your poison. If you can't communicate accurate proposition about reality to people, what can you do?

This is where Adams' idea about Trump's statements being "emotionally true" comes in. The way that most people think, which can be very difficult for us nerds to understand, means that certain factually inaccurate statements communicate truth in the only or the best way they are able to receive it.

It's a mixed bag; some of this stuff is flat-out deceptive, whether viewed "emotionally" or epistemologically. But there are some parts here that are "accurate" in the emotional sense. I'm more fluent in epistemological thinking, and would prefer people talked that way. But for those who can't, I don't begrudge them trying to be honest in the way that they do think, even if that doesn't mean trading propositional statements about reality.