LogFAQs > #960697222

agesboy posted...

Do you consider anti-drunk driving campaigns to be worse than presenting "both" sides, though?

There isn't really another side, at least not one that isn't implied by doing a little basic math on drunk driving stats. If you say 30% of car accidents are caused by drunk driving, it's implicit that 70% are not, but presenting the inverse statistic is largely meaningless (though not entirely unlike what the "Covid has a 99% survival rate!" people are trying to do). The fact of the matter is that driving drunk significantly increases your risk of being involved in a crash. The other side of "you might be fine though" doesn't change that point, nor does it in any way affect the conclusion of "you should avoid driving drunk."

Now, if you start exaggerating the risk (such as "If you drive drunk you will crash and die")? That does become a problem, because it means people who look into the matter and find out that you're lying about it will be less inclined to trust your judgement and opinions and may be driven to defiance because they resent you. This is more or less what happened with anti-drug PSA's, as PO mentioned above.

agesboy posted...

It feels fairly reductive to imply manipulation is inherently negative, which is what tying it together with lying and manipulation (which both largely have very negative connotations) accomplishes.

At some level, you can say that any sort of persuasive speech is manipulative, because you're trying to change what the other person thinks, but I think the fundamental difference is whether you change their mind by getting them to think about the situation as a whole and agree with your assessment, or change their mind by manipulating the information they are presented with to lead them to a conclusion they wouldn't reach if they had the whole picture. The former is treating them like an intelligent person and engaging in intellectual discourse to arrive at the desired conclusion. The latter is hoping that they're stupid enough to be tricked into agreeing with you. Propaganda, by and large, falls under the latter umbrella, even if it's trying to lead to conclusions that we might agree with.

As an example, opponents of gay marriage often like to bring up statistics that show that children of gay parents tend to be worse off on average than children of straight parents (based on various metrics that I can't remember off the top of my head, but they aren't needed for this example). Dismissing those statistics outright by saying they're untrue - even for the sake of promoting the generally good idea that is gay marriage and parenthood - is dishonest and manipulative, and generally only galvanizes the opposition. Contextualizing those statistics by looking at how other factors affect child welfare, however, provides a basis for saying that the law should not prohibit gay parenthood any more than it prohibits black, poor, or single parenthood. There's also plenty of basis there to use those statistics to call for improved screening measures for prospective adoptive parents to ensure that they will beat the average, without needing to categorically rule out gay people regardless of how fit they are to adopt. That still might not convince gay marriage's opponents, since they'll cling to their own propaganda, but it does discredit them such that they may eventually relent, and in a public setting, it reduces the risk that they get any fence-sitters on board with them.

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