Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

In my experience they will do both, or however many ways they think work.

Re: can persuasive technology methods create tools/processes of radical neutrality.

I'm actively contributing to a tool called Pol.is[3]. It's designed to be consensus-building tech. It's part of some pretty rad democratic processes in Taiwan[1]. It basically just puts a more approachable visualization over some overwise intimidating (but basic) statistical methods of "dimensional reduction", like PCA or UMAP. This visualization lets any participant explore all the statements that each statistical group agrees and disagrees on together.

These "opinion groups" are just neutral statistical clusters. That feels important. It's just an integration of gut-feel statements that people perform a hot-take of: agree/disagree/pass. But it turns into this machine for everyone to independantly uncover the deep stories of each group. Once groups form, for complex but focussed issues, there are often 3-4 groups, even if you maybe thought it was just "us and them".

Light-hearted example: https://pol.is/3ntrtcehas

This tool does lots of interesting things psychologically.

One of my working theories of what makes it unique (I admit to having a few) is that it incentivizes the most passionate participants in a discussion to do the hard work of finding ever-more-nuanced "majority opinions" that everyone agree on under the differences. (These are elevated in the UI.) The nature of this incentive is up to the people who are designing the process in which the tool is embedded. For e.g., they might say that every "majority opinion" uncovered will shape an agenda item topic in a future livestreamed meeting of powerful people. So now you have the most passionate participants (who might otherwise shake apart concensus if their energy were directed otherwise), trying to craft clever statements to "manipulate" people in other groups to agree. But in essence, what this means is that those passionate people are exploring the consensus statements of opinion groups other than their own. They want to understand the group so that they can drop a statement into the opinion space between groups. But even if the intentions are not noble, and someone is just trying to "trick" others into agreeing, that participant is still doing deep work to delve into the theory of mind of the other groups, as evidenced through that groups consensus statements. Basically, the most active, passionate and potentially disruptive participants are encouraged to learn about their opponents in order to sway them, and in doing so, they accidentally indoctrinate themselves into empathic bridge positions. And these bridge positions are perhaps very important to stabilizing consensus and resolving conflict[2].

I'll admit that I wonder what a political or democratic system might look like if we used tools like this to elevate the voices of participants who straddle bridge positions between groups. Like what if we had democratic processes where instead of sending ambassadors from the center of opinion groups, we actually elevated those from the boundary spaces. (Maybe this was always the benefit of systems that use random sortition to elect leaders?) The selection of those people would be relatively politically neutral, as it's not a subjective choice, but a statistical one. Yes, one can probably "fake" being moderate, but to truly embody it, perhaps that changes you. And what effect would it have to send these bridge people (even transiently, for just one topic) into a position of power, to pass judgement?

[1]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi...

[2]: https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_and_dan_ariely_how_...

[3]: https://github.com/pol-is/polis

The tech and the society around it are the problems, not the solutions. The solutions are cultural. If you want to re-establish a private sphere after its complete erosion in the last 25 years, you will have to take on the entire leviathan. IMO, the next wave of disruptive technologies are going to be about providing just that.

I think explicit instruction is quite ineffective either way. What you need is teaching by immersion, through examples. Science should not be taught as a series of facts and formulas but as riddles, arguments, why do we think this or that, what does this or that experiment tell us. How could one misinterpret it? Let's try and present this information to influence the reader's thinking: half of you to one direction, half of you in the opposite. Simiarly in history class, can we weave the narrative to make country X look good in this ancient war? What political slogan could country B come up with to counter that narrative? What facts would you emphasize regarding the Black Plague as a communist or as a Catholic?

In math, would you market a more fuel efficient car by telling the percentage difference in miles per gallon or liters per 100 km?

These are obviously just some examples, but the point is that critical thinking is a cross-cutting concern and cannot be segregated into one class. It should be constantly invoked. Instead of listing fact X, explain how people figured it out. Why did people not see it before and what did they think instead? Was it universally accepted immediately or what were the criticisms?

The thing is, though, this is extremely difficult to teach. You'd need extraordinary teachers with lots of background knowledge, since such debates and brainstorming can quickly go astray of the standard curriculum and quite easily end up in difficult and perhaps unknown territory. Perhaps you could do this with an Internet connected laptop and a projector, diving into Wikipedia rabbit holes in real time. But this would be different each year, and you'd have no way of ensuring a standard curriculum. If you don't make things required for the test, many students just won't listen, no matter how engaging the class may be.

Such teachers would demand higher salaries to be competitive with places that can also make great use of the limited supply of critical thinkers. Maybe it's offensive but teachers as a demographic aren't that smart in most countries,since the requirements are pretty low to graduate and the social reputation of the profession is also quite low.

But even if you find great teachers, it's even more difficult to test, as it's open ended, not objective and not standardizable.

But even with large corporations, how far would you go and what is considered a bias?I buy Apple laptops for the irrational reason that I find them pretty. I am biased towards spending money on items I find aesthetically pleasing. Should Apple be banned from making pretty laptops? Should they be legally restrained from overpricing their products because it creates a possibly unwarrented impression that they are "premium" to people susceptable to that bias.

Just about everything we do has some component of persuasion or an appeal to biases. It's a huge can of worms.