Dark arts
The term Dark Arts refers to rhetorical techniques crafted to exploit human cognitive biases in order to persuade, deceive, or otherwise manipulate a person into irrationally accepting beliefs perpetuated by the practitioner of the Arts. Use of the dark arts is especially common in sales and similar situations (known as hard sell in the sales business) and promotion of political and religious views.
Art vs. tech
Sometimes these arts are further augmented by the use of persuasion technology, such as broadcast advertising or PowerPoint slides. Persuasion technology may prevent the person who is being targeted from carefully deliberating on the intended message, or thinking up an effective response to it in real time.
Such effects can be caused by something as benign as the use of a specialist vocabulary which the target is unfamiliar with, or an institutional vocabulary with high-status connotations: this is one reason why many specialist professions employ ethical codes to regulate their unbalanced power relationship with customers.
The use of such techniques as whiteboards or PowerPoint slides brings additional concerns, since these tend to connote a single party as the one "in charge" of the presentation: this makes it even more difficult for the intended audience to raise any effective objection, and encourages them to focus their attention on the content of the whiteboard or slides. Said content is often presented as a list of abrupt "bullet points", further connoting it as factual, objective and neutral. One outspoken critic of PowerPoint, management professor David R. Beatty, states: "It is like a disease. It's the AIDS of management." Beatty further states that Powerpoint "removes subtlety and thinking".
Many futurists expect that a technological singularity of even a very mild character will lead to an explosion in the use of radically effective persuasive technology, or "cognotechnology"--a term coined by American military researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. The collection and distribution of information about people may spiral out beyond any feasible control, perhaps even comprising their inner thought processes; cognitive monitoring may range from non-intrusive body monitoring as seen in a polygraph to outright brain emulation. In this scenario, persuasion technology may easily blend over into outright mind control. This is clearly a rather paranoiac and dystopian scenario; nevertheless, the fact that it is being seriously discussed has persuasive potential in itself, such as for directing funding for research into guaranteed Friendly AI, as opposed to naïvely pursuing expanded funding for neuroscience or artificial intelligence.
Blog posts
- Against Propaganda by Robin Hanson
- Lying With Style by Robin Hanson
- Defense Against The Dark Arts: Case Study #1 by Yvain
- Informers and Persuaders by Eliezer_Yudkowsky
- The Dark Arts - Preamble by Aurini
- The Dark Arts: A Beginner's Guide by faul_sname