Edit: people also assign different "comparative value" to different things. Most value judgements involve comparing apples and oranges, but one person might have a preference for oranges and someone else might prefer the apples. Not for any "rational" reason.
It's really a very powerful analysis, because it's Occam's Razor compliant. The theory is simple yet has great explanatory power.
"Some kind" is doing a lot of work there, but I think there's some truth to what you're saying. My father-in-law will pop out with some bizarro story about how global warming was invented to cover up government collaboration with aliens, or Covid-19 was created in a lab using Vince Foster's stem cells, and when my wife asks where he heard it, it'll be from some guy he met last week and talked to for a total of half an hour while he was buying a motorcycle from him. Or maybe he didn't buy the motorcycle because he didn't totally trust the guy, but he believed him about the aliens. If you or me repeated information from a source like that, we'd be doing it in bad faith, but my father-in-law does it with a kind of innocent sincerity.
There are a lot of people like my father-in-law, but there are also a lot of people who are aware that what they're saying isn't literally true, but it's a way of supporting a system that they believe is wholesome for society, or at wholesome to their own interests. So there's a spectrum much like religion, with true believers on one end, and complete unbelievers on the other end who outwardly speak and behave as if they believe, because they think it's a good story for little kids to grow up with and because they think it's an effective shared fiction to structure society around.
In a sense you could say that both my father-in-law and the college-educated conspiracy theorists are willfully ignorant. My father-in-law sincerely believes a lot of sketchy things about politics and the government, but his lack of skepticism is not completely symmetrical. He is nominally in the "they're all crooks" camp, but he is not as quick to believe really crazy stuff about Republicans as about Democrats. Against Republicans, he'll believe that they invent reasons to use military hardware because they have a cozy relationship with defense contractors. Against Democrats, he'll believe that the military invented and perfect flying saucers in the 1950s, and then Barbara Bush and Anton Levay opened a portal to hell by having butt sex in a church and we gave the flying saucers to the demons so if they crash people will just think they're aliens. (Barbara Bush was a secret Demoncrat, of course -- she was pro-abortion!)
There's a lot about my father-in-law's internal mental state that I can't figure out from the outside. When he "believes" something crazy about Democrats, he's aware that he enjoys believing and repeating it, he seems to be aware that there's a certain kind of scrutiny that it won't hold up under, but he also regards it as actionable information in the sense that he votes based on his distaste for the Democrats and he cites crazy conspiracy stuff as supporting his distaste for the Democrats.
tl;dr Most people's conclusions are based on "some kind of logical deduction" in the sense that almost any cognitive process can be described as "some kind of logical deduction."
This doesn’t align very well with my observations. I can’t read minds so I don’t truly know anyone else’s beliefs. However, to the extent that I can infer possible beliefs from behavior, deductive or any other form of dialectic reasoning doesn’t appear to play much of a role. Social proof and other such phenomena appear to dominate belief formation.
I’ve found that an honest and rigorous examination of one’s own beliefs reveals that they are predominantly held for emotional reasons. Often it’s as simple as avoiding the emotional discomfort of being shunned for deviating from whatever your group’s particular dogma is.
First, people put their identities into their beliefs. Everything is a lifestyle choice anymore. What non-mainstream belief defines me as a person? When you make believing in the flat earth part of your identity, you get a fight or flight response when someone attacks the idea of the flat earth, because in a way, they are attacking you.
Second, it's easy to confirm your misinformation with more misinformation! I don't think people hear something once, like "the earth is flat" and just believe it. They hear it, look it up, see multiple sources saying the same things (weren't we taught to confirm stuff like this?), sprinkle in the smallest amount of plausibility - maybe a source that otherwise prints stuff you know to be true (sports scores, natural disasters, whatever) also prints something about the flat earth, and there you have it. You've done your homework. At this point admitting you're wrong means you must admit you are ignorant and were so easily duped, or that your entire education was a waste of time. It takes a very big person to do that.
People have always folded beliefs into their identities and felt embarrassed or defensive when they are challenged. Most high-profile since forever is religion.
Which brings me to another frustration, when it's presumed that there is something wrong with beliefs being involved with identity. I'm not even sure what capital-I Identity is supposed to be if not a system of beliefs about yourself and the world and how they relate.
I don't think any of this is as new as it is often assumed to be. There appears to have been a rise in "identity politics" but even this is wrong; politics has always been about identity, it's just that nationalism or socialism or other principles can be part of someone's identity. Or in other words, they are beliefs.
So maybe we are more individualistic in our politics, and maybe that is bad. Or maybe it isn't... It's probably a mixed bag!
Edit: that's not quite right, as throwaway894345 and xyzzyz and Sohcahtoa82 have pointed out below. It's also not quite what I meant (I was being hasty). The point is that 'disingenuous', like 'lie', implies intent to deceive.
But of course someone who is set on causing offense can probably manage with any word.
In my observation, that word has the opposite effect of 'finding common ground', so I'm surprised to hear you say that. If finding common ground is what you want to do (which is great), there are other words that should give you even better results.
I don't think that's required. If I call an idea "disingenuous" (or "misleading" for that matter), it doesn't imply that the arguer intended to mislead, but only that the idea lends itself to misinterpretation ("it seems disingenuous to suggest that the protest was violent on the basis of the actions of one or two out of tens of thousands" <- this seems about as polite as anything IMHO). But any way of suggesting that an idea is incorrect or inaccurate risks causing offense--it's a perilous enterprise and no matter which word you use, ultimately you have to lay a lot of groundwork to demonstrate good faith, common ground, etc.
That's my $0.02, anyway.
The etmyology is interesting: ingenuous originally meant noble, which is also only something that would be said about a person (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=ingenuous).
> The move has no political chance in a Democratic House, but sends a clear, though disingenuous, message about punishing supposed “extremism.”
> He would rather endorse someone with genuine doubts than someone with disingenuous beliefs.
And there are many examples in which "disingenous" refers to things other than people.
> The etmyology is interesting: ingenuous originally meant noble, which is also only something that would be said about a person
I wouldn't be surprised at all if "(dis)ingenuous" originally referred only to people but came to take on a broader meaning. This happens all the time--words are fluid on even very short timespans. Consider the verb form of impact:
> Sense of "strike forcefully against something" first recorded 1916. Figurative sense of "have a forceful effect on" is from 1935.
In only 18 years the word acquired a figurative sense (and I strongly suspect linguistic velocity--the rate of change of language--has much increased in the Internet era--although not uniformly across the lexicon). Considering your Etymonline link dates "disingenuous" to the 1650s, it would be surprising if this figurative sense hadn't developed in the intervening ~370 years.
Anyway, while I do enjoy discussing and learning about language, I have to get back to work. Thanks for the conversation, and enjoy your day! :)
Words are sort of statistical meaning clouds—people have different associations and use them differently. Regional variations play a large role. I'm pretty sure the word disingenuous does imply intent to deceive, though, and it's a significant moderation issue because it's extremely popular in internet arguments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/02/01/deshaun-wat...
Just like 'shut your lying mouth' is, in fact, calling someone a liar and not merely an observation about some independent attribute of their piehole.
Since internet commenters basically can't ever know that about each other, they're not allowed to direct those words at each other here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I would label a statement that is technically true but highly misleading as disingenuous. For example, the statement "Vaccines won't prevent you from getting COVID" is technically true, because you can still get COVID despite being vaccinated. However, it's misleading because the statement carries a strong implication that the vaccine is worthless, when the truth is that is the vaccine greatly reduces your chances of getting it, while also significantly reducing likelihood of hospitalization and death. The statement isn't a lie, but it's certainly disingenuous.
This is part of where vaccine hesitancy comes from, it seems like you’re injecting something that’s almost useless (I won’t say it is yet) as it seems those who are healthy (read no underlying conditions, known or not) don’t have issues.
I think they are less confident in their own ideas (politicians aren't even required to state what policies they stand for anymore!) than they are confident that the other side (or at least the cartoonish version of it presented to them via allied media) is wrong/evil.
Actual ignorance is never willful, by definition of ignorance.
Until ~2 years ago, I was one of the uninformed masses. It took the recently-intensifying insanity of American politics and ascendant leftwing ideology in the past few years to wake me up.
"Red pilling" isn't waking up, it's just becoming a nativist right winger. Although the left wing calls itself "progressive" so I guess the words games are everywhere.