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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

...said the Wolf to the Three Little Pigs.

…except in nearly every case there was no Wolf, it was just the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Nice retort. In the modern fear fueled environment the cries of "but what about the bad guys?!?" have gotten very old to me. Letting a minority ruin your ability to trust people is very unhealthy.

...in which case it would be folly to "assume positive intent" on the part of the Boy.

Stipulated: undue suspicion is as much a failure mode as insufficient suspicion. Both hazards might be implicated in any particular situation. That's why it's a mistake to make hard and fast rules. A sense of proportion is valuable.

Assume Good Faith (I'm not going to go with the "positive intent" version, I'm sticking to the known, better formulated Wikipedia principle) doesn't mean you should blindly truly assume it literally, it means that when you interact with people, you should consider how they could be saying what they are saying with good faith and engage in the discourse with that assumption.

AGF is a rule in the sense that if you don't know someone's bad faith, you must act as thought they have good faith as a rule for maintaining healthy discourse. It does not mean you assume good faith to the point of allowing yourself to be vulnerable or agree to anything based on that good-faith assumption.

In short: Assume Good Faith in how you communicate, but verify good faith with certainty if your decisions rely on it.

... or do what I say, not what I do.

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