Defense Against the Dark Arts w/ Duncan Sabien
Manipulation doesn't feel, from the inside, like manipulation. It looks like a reasonable question, a minor slight, an obvious baseline, or a joke, in precisely the same way that a tiger slinking through the foliage just looks like branches waving in the wind. Much of the time, by the time you recognize what has happened, the new frame has landed, the ledger has shifted, and objecting makes you look like the problem.
This is a course on the anatomy of social dark arts—the tactics people use, whether deliberately or instinctively, to corrupt others' maps of reality for their own benefit. Our first session will orient you to the work we'll be doing throughout the remainder of the semester. We will discuss:
Three planes of attack, surfaces upon which dark spells are etched (the epistemic plane, the accounting plane, and the procedural plane)
Fundamental forces at play (such as deferral, equivocation, asymmetry, and thresholding)
The nature of noticing
The (often surprising) irrelevance of intent
...and then take a broad overview of the syllabus, touching briefly on each of the major spells covered in the basics course, including:
Tare Detrimens (setting the zero point)
Tempus Malum (displacing costs in time)
Impugnate (abusing the social power of confidence)
Invocatio (weaponizing concepts and categories)
Equivocus (erasing important distinctions)
Per Lacunam (tactical cherrypicking)
Vulnero (strategic deployment of weakness)
...among others. There will also be chocolate, as per the standard advice that one should not face dementors without it. Welcome to Defense Against the Dark Arts; keep your wits about you and your wands in your hands.