boccaderlupo | LLMs are demonic

It's something I've given some thought to, and honestly, it's mostly in the nature of making me doubt the way I make my living as legitimate and worth pursuing in the long run. Persuasion techniques like Cialdini's "shortcuts" strike me as little different from crass sorcery. Being clear on the goal of your communication and then thinking about how to get your audience on board with it sounds a lot like focusing your will and acting to achieve it, but if the goal is to sell a project or get a company to adopt a consulting proposal, is that worth it?

So, in practice, the way it has shaken out for me is that my esoteric work has led me to inject more skepticism/protection into my teaching - rather than saying "here's how to use Cialdini's shortcuts to get what you want" I more emphasize "here's how others use Cialdini's techniques to try to trick you, do you really want to let them?" I'm pretty savage on advertising in general.

All that said, I do think there's such a thing as legitimate influence/persuasion/advertising/marketing, but I think its borders are much hazier than many proponents insist, and that someone who wants to engage in such activities and remain ethical has to hold himself to a much higher standard than most business majors or MBAs would think. To put it more concretely, if I have a product I think is genuinely useful, it makes sense that I would use an understanding of what folks pay attention to and remember to get them engaged with it, but the moment you start doing so, you have to ask yourself if your product is really as good as you think, and whether making it easier to engage with is actually intruding on anyone's free will or not.

Lately, it's been bothering me quite a bit that I am pretty much literally a sophist - I teach rhetoric and justify it as a "tool that can be turned to different ends" and (mostly) disclaim teaching what ends its right to turn such tools to. I solace myself a bit by including a discussion of ethics, where I don't say "this is right and this wrong" but instead "here's a handful of ways of sorting out how to think of right and wrong, my preference is is this one (virtue ethics), but it's up to you to pick how you decide things in your own life." Maybe weak sauce, but when I discovered there was no required ethics content in the undergraduate business major at my school, I figured I could at least devote a lecture or two to it.

Anyhow, sorry for a long response to what may have been a mostly throwaway line. The short version is that I've noticed much of the overlap of teaching "effective communication" and "magic," and I've been left with the feeling that the default goals, ethics, and so forth of the former have a lot to learn from the latter.

Cheers,
Jeff

Not at all. This is very fascinating. Yes, it seems like if nothing else you have a sense of the ethical dimensions of such work, and that being able to impart that consciousness—even if it's for people to develop a sort of resilience or resistance to such techniques—is itself a valuable weapon, as it were.

Thank you, and that's the hope, at least!

All of which is to say: I don't know word one about these shortcuts you speak of, but if you're looking for something to write about, I would 100 percent be interested in a series on the intersection of "effective communication" and magic.

Edited (typos, of course) 2025-06-03 14:04 (UTC)

Hmm, I hadn't considered that, maybe I will!

The very short version is that Cialdini (a communication researcher) looked at both the communication research and did extensive interviews with people whose job it is to convince others to do what they want (salesmen, police interrogators, etc) and was able to derive six principles that affect whether someone is more likely to go along with what you're trying to convince them of - Similarity/Likability, Consistency, Commitment, Authority, Reciprocity, and Scarcity. These principles can be turned into "shortcuts" by sales guys and the like - you walk into a car dealership and the guy starts asking you personal questions until he hits on something you have in common, and then starts talking about that, and now you like him more because you're similar, which better disposes you to buying a car from him (and makes you less likely to bargain hard on the price, since you don't want to upset your new friend).

All of the principles are normal and natural (of course you're more likely to do something that someone you like asks you to do!), but where it gets gray or worse is when the person trying to influence contrives to use the principles in a calculated way that maximizes their benefit with as little cost to them as possible. Like offering cheap swag to instill a feeling of reciprocity, or leading the conversation to get you to agree with something he then paints as being consistent with what he really wants ("wouldn't you agree that it's bad that some children starve? Ah, so then you're willing to donate to my charity for starving children, of course.")

Anyhow, maybe I'll expand on it and try to make some connections to magic, as you suggested.

Cheers,
Jeff

The will's the thing.

Fascinating. Sounds a bit like the "FORD" principles for relating (family, occupation, recreation, dreams). Sounds easy, but when a person with inherent charisma gets ahold of these tools...watch out.

Exactly. When "descriptive," there's almost nothing to find fault with - folks who are actually more likable, authoritative, drawing on your past genuine commitments, or whatever, are, of course, more compelling. There's little fault to find there.

The trouble is when folks start trying to be likable/authoritative/creators of consistency/scarcity/whatever and making decisions based on that. Then the ethics quickly get very fuzzy, and sometimes outright scary. A more serious example of "consistency" used for influence: the North Korean/Chinese communists, when they captured American troops, would say "hey, make this written/recorded statement about problems with America." They'd start with small, easy to agree-to stuff, like "nobody's perfect, just talk about something that could be better in America." And, of course, if you refused, you didn't eat and/or got beaten. But then, once you've talked about a problem America has, you'd be asked to talk about why America was problematic - "you already admitted one problem, why not others?" And, of course, oh yeah, if you don't escalate you or your buddies starve and/or get beaten, and so on.

So, you see this very powerful (but gross) mix of compulsion and playing on normal human psychology (why would you not want to be seen as consistent with what you've publicly asserted in the past?). I think most businesses don't got all that far, but as I've come to care about the ethics of such things more strongly, I've found "the line" is much harder to identify than we might wish.

Cheers,
Jeff

I suspect that line is indeed fairly hard to identify, the closer one looks.

Have you read "De Magia" by Bruno or his other magic essays? The line between them and modern disciplines like advertising (perhaps even New Thought) seem pretty clear.

I have not yet, though he's on the (very long) list, as is Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, which I understand makes the argument that that line is a direct one.

Eros and Magic... is not one I have read, but it's going on the list. Thank you!

LLMs are demonic

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