Influence = Manipulation

If I can tell you what I'm doing and it still works, it's influence.

If my telling you would make it ineffective, it's manipulation.

I have yet to find anything wrong with this definition:

Manipulation is influence we don't like.

I invite you to find a general principle cleanly dividing the following examples into manipulation and influence

Precise conceptual analysis being impossible doesn't make all words have the same or trivially related meaning (clearly). What is the purpose on this exercise?

I'd probably say none of the examples are manipulation by any definition I know that doesn't have all of influencing as a subset. By those, manipulation is the kind of thing used for brainwashing prisoners, or uFAI escaping from boxes, or Stanford basilisks, or drugging someone without their consent, or the like.

I have sometimes been described as slightly manipulative by others, and never quite understood why, it sounds like it might be related.

It seems to me that once we get away from obviously problematic situations (such as blackmail), the distinction is going to be in intent, which is never uncontroversial.

Economy = greed, valour = fanatism, piety = bigotry, precision = nitpickery ... the examples may not be the best ones, I am not so good at generating synonyms of this kind. But there are lots of words which denote the same thing but are perceived as distinct because of the moral judgement contained in their connotations. "Influence" is neutral, "manipulation" is disapproving. An attempt to locate the boundary between these two either assumes common (or objective) moral position, or doesn't conserve the connotational part of the meaning of the respective words.

Well well... having been involved in the PUA community for quite a long time made me ponder this theme a lot. This is how I see it.

First some definition: regarding personal data, a truth is some fact that is true of us, and a lie is some fact that is false of us. Regarding behaviours, a truth is some behaviour that is sustainable, i.e. can be indefinitely repeated, either because it is a habit or because we have the intention to persevere in doing it. A lie is then defined as some unsustainable behaviour, that is something we do with effort without the explicit, conscious intention to repeat it.

Then, in my book, revealing a truth and omitting a lie is influence, and revealing a lie and omitting a truth is manipulation (that is, morally despicable). In table form

---------- Reveal --------- Omit

Truth ---- Inf. ------------- Man.

Lie ------ Man. ------------ Inf.

This table spurs a number of interesting and, in some cases, counter-intuitive moral tenets. For example, if I have a big car and I tell to a girl that, it's influence. Of course it's manipulation if I don't own a fancy car. On the line below, buying a drink for a girl when I don't normally buy drinks for people I don't know, that's manipulation (revealing a lie). OTOH, if I'm shy around women that I don't know and I'm attracted to, but not shy around women I know and I'm attracted to, then trying to be at ease around women in the first group amount to sustainably omitting a lie, which makes it influence and not manipulation.

Regarding the behaviour indicated by the OP: 1 - influence if she normally does that, manipulation in the other case; 2 - normally influence; 3 - normally influence, depends on the shyness of the flirter; 4 - same as above; 5 - usually manipulation, again it depends; 6 - same as above; 7 - depends on the choice career of the mother: did she choose job security? If so, influence, in the other case, manipulation; 8 - depends on the mother: if she cared about her son, influence, otherwise, twisted manipulation.

I think that most people intuitively draw the line at whether someone is doing something intentionally or unintentionally, then don't reflect on the distinction.

What one person does naturally could be manipulation for another person to try, if they explicitly learned how to do it and then decided to for some purpose.

I can think of a lot of lines I would defend that sort acts of influence into socially-acceptable and not, or moral and not, or pragmatic and not, or various other divisions. But I agree with you that none of those lines are between influence and manipulation (nor between manipulation and coercion, nor between coercion and force).

I wouldn't expect them to be: manipulation, coercion, and force are all sometimes socially acceptable, moral, and pragmatic.

Hm, I should find a good Jedi Kreia quote for this.

Then again, maybe not.

Hm, I'm trying to delete a double post. All I can see is this "retract" button, after which the post is crossed out but still there, even when I've logged out. What am I doing wrong?

The way I use the term, manipulation is influence that is improper either due to the methods used, or the social context in which they are being used. Our society (and I suspect any complex society) will have very complicated norms about what kinds of influence are legitimate in what circumstances. For instance, lying to induce somebody to do something they wouldn't do if you told them the truth is improper manipulation in most circumstances.

A lot of our norms are area-specific. For instance, in law, there's a very well developed set of principles about precisely what constitutes misrepresentation or undue influence -- in which case the contract can be void.

I suspect, in general, there will not be good reasons for putting the demarcation at one point over another: I imagine that social processes will drive norms towards at least a local cost-benefit maximum. And if the cost-benefit landscape is smooth, those local maxima will be places where there landscape is locally flat, implying that there's negligible harm if you move the equilibrium slightly.

One aspect that seems to be relevant is the level of harm / benefit to the people involved, and the degree to which the influenced person is willing to go along with it.

As for PUA - I might think that people are looking at signals of [fitness / how fun you might be to have sex with / whatever], and deliberately manipulating these (instead of the underlying traits) degrades the reliability of the signal, effectively "lying" about the quality under consideration.

Interesting topic. Various kinds of Dark Arts seem to fall in this influence v. manipulation gray area. I think the distinction is going to depend on context, and the projected benefits or drawbacks of said influence to the target and possible third parties. For instance, take the use of Powerpoint slides: They are often used in the classroom for convenience, yet many management experts decry their use in the workplace, because the whole setup connotes the speaker as having a higher status than coworkers, the audience usually falls into a "flow" state or semi-trance (useful in academia, very much not so in business), and the slides' contents are subconciously perceived as factual and objective even when we conciously try to maintain an open mind.

This problem is going to become more and more serious as research in neuroscience improves: the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories are already working on "cognotechnology" (possibly bordering on mind control according to Gerald Yonas) for the US military. Maybe we need a moratorium on neuroscience and ems research, to complement the SIAI-proposed ban on unfriendly AI development.

If you believe that there is a point that actually is pragmatically better than another by a real margin, please state it, and defend your proposition.

I'm highly unusual, but seeing as I've optimized my choice of friends pretty well, for me personally there's a pretty clear point of divergence, and that's the point of divergence that causes some commenters on Less Wrong to get all worked up about PUA. Seeing as it gets those commenters all worked up it presumably would get some non-negligible fraction of less reflective smart people all worked up as well, so perhaps it extends beyond just Less Wrong. In the majority of cases I've heard discussed, if something isn't explicitly-learned-and-consciously-acquired attracting-women-in-optimized-ways then it's probably influence, if it is then it's obviously manipulation. Yawn-inducing but practically useful in a way that a thorough understanding of the social psychology of manipulation wouldn't be. ("Manipulation" just never seems to come up. Is this not true for most folk here?)

(In case it's not blatantly obvious, yes I agree the existence of this Schelling point is unfortunate, no I am not going to waste time complaining about it or dreaming about marginally better ones.)