Hacker News Reader

"But again, no one ever calls this "manipulation" when it's for something they agree with"

I might be an alien, but I do call this manipulation and I do so openly and loud enough to in fact did receive a lot of "counter attacks", just for insisting on truth and facts, which is indeed not normally welcome by any side in tribal wars.

Did you actually use the word "manipulation", or did you just criticize deception/dishonesty? (Would be interested in a link if you have one.) I think the valence behind the word "manipulation" is so clear in real-world usage that it would be incorrect, from a linguistic descriptivist perspective, to use it this way. It would be like using the word "miserly" for thrifty behavior that you endorsed.

I am not a native english speaker, but I do not really see a big difference between manipulation and deception and dishonesty.

And I rarely call this behavior out in those words in those situations.

Example? Vaccination. I am in the "political" camp of people, who think as much people as possible should get vaccinated against covid.

Still, when I see posts written that go: "there is no reason to not get vaccinated, they are totally safe" (meant especially to covid, but also in a general sense) and I respond, that "no, they are not total safe, there have been incidents of contaminated production batches for example and it is not 100% clear, that for young people there is individually more benefit than potential harm and no doctor ever advised of taking just any vaccination (there are many vaccinations with actual higher risks, only benefiting, when visiting certain areas)" than I have to word it very, very careful or face a shitstorm even here. As in their perception I fight then against their political cause - overcoming the pandemic with more vaccinations. While in my perception they try to reach their goals with lies, which I do not agree with, despite agreeing to the goal.

There's a difference between reasonable and pedantic. To say "going through that neighborhood is perfectly safe", doesn't mean you're not aware of there ever being crimes there.

So yeah, if you would try something like that within the context of a very contested issue, I would definitely assume you're clandestinely trying to sabotage the discussion.

Yeah, I know.

People mean different things, when they say they want to have a discussion guided by facts.

I mean it literal.

"there is no reason to not get vaccinated, they are totally safe"

And since this is factual wrong, I think it is very weird to assume that I would want to sabotage a discussion, when relativating absolutistic statements, that bring no benefit to any discussion. They only enforce groupthink. But this this rather the cultural default, which I am quite aware of.

That doesn’t stop it from being manipulation - it’s just calling out how most people are hypocrites?

Well, it's certainly true that the post is about hypocrisy:

> Most laws are defined in relatively objective ways, so that society can truthfully say “no one is above the law”. Those who violate the law can be found guilty and punished, while others remain free....But most societies have also included a few less objective and more “flexible” offenses, flexible enough to let the powerful more arbitrarily punishment disliked parties.

If we all agree on the facts of how the word "manipulation" is used in practice, then mind-blight's first paragraph is at most asking that Hanson would be clearer that he is a linguistic descriptivist rather than a linguistic prescriptivist. That would be fair enough, but then mind-blight's second paragraph wouldn't make sense: Hanson's objection isn't that "manipulation" is hard to prove, it's that it's used exclusively in an outcome-dependent (i.e. hypocritical) way.

Yep, I disagree with Hanson's assertion that "manipulation" is outcome dependent. I think he's conflating the way that it's used in popular discourse (which is often outcome dependent), with what I think is a fairly clear definition.

He's then calling for a measure that can be used objectively without ascertaining a person's intent. I actually think that's counter-productive and leaves you vulnerable to (for want of a better word) manipulation.

A person's intent matters and effects how you should interpret and respond to information they deliver. If I'm debating with someone, I want to know whether their intent is to 1) figure out the truth or try to reach consensus, 2) prove themselves right, or 3) just prove me wrong. 1 is fun, 2 is normal, and 3 is a troll. Whether they agree with me or not isn't relevant - their intentions very much are.

> I think he's conflating the way that it's used in popular discourse (which is often outcome dependent), with what I think is a fairly clear definition.

He's not conflating, he's just taking a different stance than you to linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism.

> He's then calling for a measure that can be used objectively without ascertaining a person's intent. I actually think that's counter-productive and leaves you vulnerable to (for want of a better word) manipulation.

No, he's not. He never mentions intent in the post. He is calling for a measure that can be used objectively without ascertaining the actions outcome.

> If your friend Bob used withheld information to convince someone of a political position you strongly agreed with, can you imagine yourself saying "Bob manipulated him"? Of course not, because "manipulation" is understood to mean "...for something bad".

I think this depends on both the position and the actual arguments that were used (or withheld).

To give a hypothetical example for Democrats in the U.S.:

- If Bernie Sanders were to information about the negative budgetary repercussions of his Medicare-for-all plan (I'm not claiming he has or hasn't; I'm just giving an example), many Democrats probably wouldn't consider that "manipulation" of the public.

- But if he were to withhold information about how Medicare-for-all would actually somehow benefit corporate interests/profits at the cost of taxpayers (again, I'm not claiming this; I'm just giving a hypothetical example), a lot of the same Democrats probably would consider that "manipulation" of the public.

Of course there are people who would behave the same way in both situations too, but my point is that there are lots that would behave differently.

And obviously this isn't to claim people have zero bias here, but I don't think that's particularly specific to "manipulation". People just have a bias against criticizing people whose conclusions they agree with in general, whether the accusation is one of manipulation, corruption, or something else.

> But if he were to withhold information about how Medicare-for-all would actually somehow benefit corporate interests/profits at the cost of taxpayers..., a lot of the same Democrats probably would consider that "manipulation" of the public.

I assert that Democrats who supported his plan would not use the word "manipulation" for this. Instead, the Democrats who criticized Sanders for this would only say he was deceptive or withheld info.

Maybe? To be honest I'm having a hard time analyzing whether the reluctance to call it manipulation (i.e. actually using that word in speech/writing) would be mostly attributable to him being Democrat, or mostly to the word "manipulation" not being all that common in daily speech in general. I feel like people are just far less willing to use that word in a public interview with a journalist than on, say, an English exam.