Can manipulation ever be a good thing?

I mean, yeah... usually the examples people give point out how and when manipulation is bad, and you ain't wrong....

but I was like thinking about manipulation in terms of helping the person when you have no personal self gain?

I did this to my mum, lol

Says she hates emails and refuses to learn them, she gets everyone else to do anything email related if they need it.

me: on a daily basis, starts sending them random links to YouTube videos I know she'll like.

Long story short, eventually she starts expecting daily interesting videos, starts checking email, gets curious about replying with more interesting videos,

feels comfortable sending it to me because if she makes mistakes it's not a huge issue.
Therefore she is practicing how to send email?

She's done a few email things now on her own, doesn't seem to hate it as much 🤔

technically manipulation?
or am I thinking of something else?

I dunno, random thoughts, lol

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Kwek00 · 41-45, M

Depending on how far you want to go with your view on what "manipulation" is... every interaction where someone absorbs a piece of data (listening, seeing, feeling, smelling, tasting) actively presented by another person, is a form of manipulation and has the possibility of changing their path.

These outcomes can either lead to good or bad things.

If the intent of the person presenting the data, has the objective to lead to a good thing for everyone involved, then manipulation can be considered "good". But you can also have another value system to determine if an action is good or not.

I'm at a point, where I abandon the idea of "free will" almost completely... that means that people (and their actions) are for a large part determined by their imput and their biological make up. People sometimes say that: "you are what you eat" ... but I think it's more correct to say that "you have a high chance to become what data you consume".