It's come to my attention that people on Lesswrong are really really really bad at defending themselves against even semi competent deceptions.
How has this come to your attention, and how are you determining whether your sequence is useful to the segment of the audience that needs to hear it?
I think LW readers and participants are somewhat LESS easily deceived than comparable groups (say, Bay Area professionals who don't read LW), and the majority of LW readers aren't even that particularly-intense demographic.
Ideally, you'd include very specific examples here - actual cultish-leaders having success with the deceptive arts, and how those that escape did so. I don't think general advice about deceptive practices will do much good, especially if you haven't read a number of accounts of such things and analyzed why they remain effective even with fairly-common knowledge of them.
Where is the rest of the post? Is it a draft which you accidentally released? UPD: this was a teaser for a sequence, Kabir published the first post.
It's come to my attention that people on Lesswrong are really really really bad at defending themselves against even semi competent deceptions.
To whom are you comparing them?
People on Lesswrong significantly outperform the Nuh Uh rock at important tasks like making friends, getting jobs, and buying groceries. If the rock had any biological processes to sustain it would die in a matter of days after Just Saying No to hydration.
This is a bizarre comparison and it's not clear to me what you think it demonstrates.
We are extremely persuadable in a way that is not needed for making friends, getting jobs, and buying groceries and in a way that a rock isn't. People who can't have their mind changed for shit have many difficulties, but not with those three tasks.
From the recent Leverage research post:
https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-leverage-research
> During James’s recruitment, he received a demo from a guest lecturer who specialized in bodywork, a form of alternative medicine. That demo, James says, was “completely shocking.” The lecturer “had me lay down and just put his hands very lightly on me. And I had a massive qualitative change in experience… I felt as if I had been asleep for a month, and just woken up fresh. And I had no caffeine tolerance anymore.” This was both notable and surprising, because James was previously reliant on caffeine. Normally, he needed two or three cups per day, but: “That biochemistry had just gotten reset, apparently. I tried to drink a little bit of caffeine and I was jittery.”
The skill that the rock has is to experience this and then not update at all because it says Nuh Uh, and things go bad in spicy ways when a community lacks that skill
Also, where the rock is very legibly unpersuadable (in analogy to how the rock painted "don't swerve" is good at chicken) we are very legibly persuadable, which predators seem to notice.
For the record, the rock is bad at lots of other important things outside the scope of doing boring, societally endorsed life tasks. A painted stone is not a general purpose genius. It's just worth noticing when we underperform it, since that's always a hint that something about our strategy is suboptimal.
It’s just worth noticing when we underperform it, since that’s always a hint that something about our strategy is suboptimal.
The "never talk to anyone" rock avoids all the actions you listed above. The "Move to France and live there forever" rock does surprisingly well, as does the "Never trust a gay man" rock. If you are going to cherry-pick individual decisions then every person on Earth is constantly underperforming an infinite number of rocks with things painted on them and it is not helpful to point out a random rock that someone underperformed.
I think the rock is worth looking at because my estimate is that the average man on the street is closer to the nuh-uh rock than to rationalist norms of persuadability- that not being the rock is the weird thing we're doing. However, I'm open to arguments that most people are more persuadable than I am giving them credit for, or that rationalists are less. (badum-tss)
Notably, the shut in and move to france rocks are rare in the wild. (the homophobic rock less so, but that looks like coincidence)
I think the rock is worth looking at because my estimate is that the average man on the street is closer to the nuh-uh rock than to rationalist norms of persuadability
If a rock with arbitrary text on it is validated by its resemblance to the man on the street, then isn't it more informative to point directly at the man on the street rather than invoking weird rocks?
I am going to look more closely at the rock with "Don't read the comments section" written on it, since I am currently underperforming it.
what led you personally to take an interest in this sort of skill? Did you learn deliberately, by osmosis, or as defense mechanism?
all of the above. my mother did marketing for a bank, degree in econ, both parents did econ degrees and started businesses, mum took me to business stuff with her growing up, taught me business and marketing since I was 7. I also did a bunch of mental health coaching for people during covid and have a startup that I market and recruit people for.
And in for most of my teenage years and until I was 22, I was a pathological liar.
It's come to my attention that people on Lesswrong are really really really bad at defending themselves against even semi competent deceptions. And worse, they massively overestimate their own defenses.
To help against this, this will be the start of a sequence named Defense Against the Deceptive Arts.
I will discuss tactics used by VCs, Lobbyists, Politicians, Marketers, Recruiters and more.
I will begin with something fundamental, but basic - "How to Answer a Question Without Answering The Question"