Sometimes, people don't say what they actually think, not because saying it would be rude or costly, but because they believe saying it now would be counterproductive. They see that the true claim is outside the Overton window. And they conclude that the strategic play is to say something weaker, something adjacent. That will let you normalize the frame without triggering the immune response. You will redesign the house a bit now so that you can slide the window later. Then, when the ground has shifted, you imagine, the real claim becomes sayable.

Strategic discourse chess?

The above is an attempt at high-dimensional discourse chess. In politics and the world of ideas, it seems that people play it constantly. But building on a recent comment by Rob Bensinger, I want to argue that the conceit behind playing, that we can model how public acceptability shifts and cleverly intervene to steer those shifts, is usually wrong - not in the sense that discourse has no structure, or to argue that framing never matters.

Most people vastly overestimate their ability to predict second- and third-order effects of anything, including strategic speech. And this is a more damaging error than you might [...]

---

Outline:

(00:45) Strategic discourse chess?

(02:21) Yes, Overton windows exist, but...

(04:00) ...can they be reliably manipulated?

(05:57) Why would you think this could work?

(07:16) The case of AI Safety

(11:14) Pushing back is also manipulation.

(15:03) Another real-world example: Defund the Police

(17:43) Strategic discourse chess usually underperforms just saying what is true.

(19:58) The obvious conclusion

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.