That's why a metaphor can remove inferential steps and be an excellent way of bringing us to our senses and making us reconsider a vast network of cached knowledge.
Unfortunately, metaphor can just as easily convince us of false thinks as of true ones.
I think the idea is to use all the bias-avoiding techniques you can, while trying to find the truth; but to use metaphor and other rhetorical tricks, when trying to persuade others of the the truth.
I find the last paragraph (of the quoted post, not yours) very confusing. Yes, it sounds poetic, but it's not really generating any coherent imagery for me.
The other paragraphs are okay, but still seem a bit pretentiously purple for the kinds of points they're making. Not as deep and well-written as it thinks it is, and possibly just applause lights for people who think they like truth.
[...] you could prove that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and (D => F) Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A => F irrevocably, Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom.
I think Justice really, really should let emself be told when F stands for freedom. It seems to me Assange is more or less saying that he will follow logic steps only as far as they lead to a conclusion he likes. Am I the only one reading him this way?
Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and finding the dream a pleasurable one sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber.
This sounds like searching for arguments to a foregone conclusion.
Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors.
This reminds me of a guy, having lost an argument to me fatally, who resorted to saying, "consistency is overrated". He'd rather have two mutually exclusive ideas and acknowledge this as fact than change his mind.
I think Justice really, really should let emself be told when F stands for freedom. It seems to me Assange is more or less saying that he will follow logic steps only as far as they lead to a conclusion he likes. Am I the only one reading him this way?
It took me a while to figure this out, but Assange isn't talking about improving his own model of reality; by my reading he's more or less given up on that. He's talking about ways of convincing people that he's right, and accepts logic only in the service of that goal.
Specifically, he's saying that reductionist arguments are unconvincing when trying to change minds, and that it works better to raise such a pedestal under the ultimate aim of your argument that your audience will do the hard work of building an inductive chain for you.
From this I suspect that Assange hasn't recently spent much time trying to prove things to people that don't already think he's a rockstar. He describes a rather effective way of exploiting halo effects, but that only works when there's a halo to exploit: either Assange's personal halo (probably more likely), or one around a shared ideology or goal. Try that trick with someone that accepts neither, and they're more likely to laugh you off as a deluded hippie than to blithely construct an argument for you.
The entire post leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Try that trick with someone that accepts neither, and they're more likely to laugh you off as a deluded hippie than to blithely construct an argument for you.
But is logical reasoning any more likely to work in this case (when arguing with a person who isn't exceptionally rational)?
Usually. There are other exploits that would work better, though; the point I was trying to make is that Assange's recommendation relies entirely on having a large pool of positive affect that you can entangle with whatever statement you're trying to prove. There's still a term for that kind of entanglement in the effectiveness function for reductionist arguments, but it's considerably less important.
you could prove that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and (D => F) Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A => F irrevocably, Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom.
I think Justice really, really should let emself be told when F stands for freedom.
Since we overestimate the strength of conjunctions, transitive chains may be weaker than they appear. So unless the issue is entirely clear-cut, it's reasonable for people to fail to accept A => F. (Of course, it is true that ideally a rational person would at least consider A => F and adjust probabilities accordingly.)
Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and finding the dream a pleasurable one sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber.
This sounds like searching for arguments to a foregone conclusion.
True. But it also sounds like the gathering of evidence using emotional tags. Direct evidence, in some areas, overwhelmingly beats a transitive chain. So although the evidence is not being gathered evenhandedly by Justice, there is a justification for this manner of thinking. I do think the "gathering [of] cushions to prop up a slumber" is adaptive and a fair representation of how people think.
What I found interesting about this blog post is that a successful person, who has tried to persuade others of his political ideas, has identified models/strategies for persuasion which strongly mirror the LW posts I have read.
I suppose there are far superior guides to persuasion with actual empirical evidence. Admittedly, those are more appropriate for Less Wrong. You people probably already find LW resonances in much of what you read anyway.
everywhere before the direction of self interest is known, people yearn to see where its compass points and then they hunger for truth
In the end, everything seems to come back to economics: you just have to get the incentives right, and everything else follows.
Here's a poetic blog post by Julian Assange (source). I found the first paragraph relevant:
27 Aug 2007 - Irrationality in Argument
The truth is not found on the page, but is a wayward sprite that bursts forth from the readers mind for reasons of its own. I once thought that the Truth was a set comprised of all the things that were true, and the big truth could be obtained by taking all its component propositions and evaluating them until nothing remained. I would approach my rhetorical battles as a logical reductionist, tearing down, atomizing, proving, disproving, discarding falsehoods and reassembling truths until the Truth was pure, golden and unarguable. But then, when truth matters most, when truth is the agent of freedom, I stood before Justice and with truth, lost freedom. Here was something fantastical, unbelievable and impossible, you could prove that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and (D => F) Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A => F irrevocably, Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom. Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and finding the dream a pleasurable one sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber. Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors. So first, always pick your poetic metaphor, to make the reader want to believe, then the facts, and -- miracle! -- transitivity will descend from heaven, invoked as justification for prejudice.
Often we suffer to read, "But if we believe X then we'll have to...", or "If we believe X it will lead to...". This has no reflection on the veracity of X and so we see that outcomes are treated with more reverence than the Truth. It stings us, but natural selection has spun its ancestral yarns from physically realized outcomes, robustly eschewing the vapor thread of platonism as an abomination against the natural order, fit only for the gossip of monks and the page.
Yet just as we feel all hope is lost and we sink back into the miasma, back to the shadow world of ghosts and gods, a miracle arises; everywhere before the direction of self interest is known, people yearn to see where its compass points and then they hunger for truth with passion and beauty and insight. He loves me. He loves me not. Here then is the truth to set them free. Free from the manipulations and constraints of the mendacious. Free to choose their path, free to remove the ring from their noses, free to look up into the infinite voids and choose wonder over whatever gets them though. And before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, on the liberators and martyrs of truth, on the Voltaires, Galileos, and Principias of truth, on the Gutenburgs, Marconis and Internets of truth, on those serial killers of delusion, those brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new.
I've only read a few Less Wrong articles so far, but the first paragraph easily follows from my current models. Since explicit reasoning easily fails, people quite understandably refuse to accept arguments based on transitivity. So in order to be understood, one should carefully craft arguments one inferential step away from the audience's current mental state. A metaphor, because of all the ideas it simultaneously evokes, powerfully takes advantage of a brain's multiprocessing ability. That's why a metaphor can remove inferential steps and be an excellent way of bringing us to our senses and making us reconsider a vast network of cached knowledge.