The endgames of bad faith communication
consilienceproject.org
consilienceproject.org
Consider this example: Person A, displaying some humility, says : "You might be right, there is a chance politician X is in the wrong". Person A assumes this is interpreted by Person B as: "There is uncertainty about politician X being in the wrong" Person B actually interprets this as: "Person A has admitted, without any doubt, to politician X being completely in the wrong"
If I ever find myself in a conversation where I'm in the shoes of Person A, using good-faith communication means actually risking a complete failure of communication. Why even bother to communicate?
So maybe that’s insightful. Point out that conversations (unless they’re debates and everyone’s agreed to debate) are not games.
In that sense, does it change the game, just through removing those consequences and thus making bad faith a more attractive strategy than it would be otherwise (e.g. face to face reputation based communication)?
Maybe you are right and positing it as a game is itself reductive, and gets people into a zero-sum mindset, rather than viewing conversation as a win-win.
Edit-I’d venture even the ability for the internet to bring together people who would otherwise not have a cohort “breaks at scale” because people just don’t scale like that.
This has been profitable enough that these social media now dominate a large part of public discussions, and other platforms have followed suit either by choice or by selection pressure. Hence a large part of public communication is happening in a context that is (inadvertently or intentionally) built to encourage conflict and outrage. This rewards bad-faith communication, so that is what we get.
I treat my local subreddit like I would treat my local pub, especially since I know a few of its users IRL, and many tie my username to my business. I can't say the same about large subreddits.
Tight moderation also helps a ton. It enforces a certain tone, and after a while the community crystallises around that tone and enforces it itself. You don't pick fights at the country club.
I realise now that I stopped interacting in larger communities. I prefer quieter channels where people have a reputation to uphold.
The new moderation team is more heavy-handed. Of course people still aren't happy.
It's a tough job and the pay sucks.
Consider a verbal fight within a couple. Everyone wants to have the last word and both throw loudly anything they can come up with at each other. In such a situaiton you may be able to break that mental stance of your opponent by "simply" shifting the topic/perspective to something, they did not expect at all. This way, you may be able to force you opponent to give up the trench they dig themself into.
I know its not simple. This is more education than superficial conversation.
I’m saying the space of people communicating is larger than the space of people using words in rhetorical games.
You cannot flip the table and still call it a game. Its not a game move when your intention is progress and not a rhetorical win.
I've seen this state called different things, like "Exiles" in IFS therapy, "below the line", "tilted", "triggering painful spots", I usually call it "defensive".
(Aside... a thing I've learned is not to ask if someone is feeling defensive (if they are, they'll say no). Instead I think the better move is to ask if they feel like I'm not listening, or not understanding their position. This lines up with the internal thoughts of feeling defensive.)
All this to say, rational conversation is possible when two people are in a rational state but there are other states of being.
(Aside.. I find that rational communication techniques like NVC are actually devilishly hard to put into practice all the time because they go out the window when we get tilted.)
(Aside... EFT couples therapy is designed around communication in an emotionally vulnerable state as opposed to rational, and supposedly has pretty good empirical results)
Unfortunately, the latter two don't typically scale all that well, especially as the bad actor hones their ability to put you in a rhetorical box.
There is not a way to beat bad faith communication with good faith communication at scale, because the latter doesn't scale, because the average/median person is not intelligent enough for it. I wish they were.
A lot of people love drama, and bad faith creates drama. Good faith creates solutions, and a lot of people seek solutions. That alone is enough to be skeptical of anything conclusive.
I've resolved to avoid responses, unless it's a subject where I have an especially valuable perspective (e.g. personal expertise, I have a passage from a credible book that could be relevant, or I have a highly relevant anecdote to share).
It's almost always not worth it to get involved in a controversial topic discussion (examples include journalism, Apple products, urban planning and whether the ending of a popular television series was good or not). It can be distracting and draining, especially if people respond negatively or you get downvoted (I tell myself it's just internet points, but it feels punishing despite my rational thoughts), and I'm unlikely to change minds. There's more to life that's more rewarding (e.g. reading a book, physical exercise, even playing a relaxing video game for a few minutes).
I think you intended Person A to be someone with an opposing view. But I read this Person A as a friend that strongly likes Politician X, and in some ways that seemed even more appropriate to what the article is talking about. Especially if "politician X" is something like a controversial issue that is strongly moralized. People often end up outwardly adopting an almost Manichean set of opinions on things, even if our internal beliefs are more nuanced. So we end up saying Politician X is perfect, even if we have more mixed opinions. It's not Bad Faith communication in the same vein as a troll on a forum, we're acting in bad faith to maintain cohesion and membership among our own social group.
The OP articulates this well in a paragraph:
A key feature of escalating extremism is a belief that group membership requires bad faith engagements with out-groups. In these contexts, bad faith behavior is often justified to maintain in-group membership and consensus. The normalization of bad faith communication contributes to the creation of extreme in-group pressures, which can rupture identities and exacerbate mental health crises. Personal instabilities usually lead to a doubling down on the need for group membership, increasing rationalizations and amplifications of bad faith practices.
More importantly the founders set the culture through their own behavior and most new hires adopt and adapt to the local culture. So if you can propagate humility, openness to changing minds, etc your company will become stronger and more fun.
And I use the word “company” deliberately: “corporation” and “business” and technical tools, but a ”company” is a group of people getting together. Often corporation and company are used interchangeably, but effective organizations know the difference.
Basically sticking to good faith even when it’s not reciprocated is usually the best option, or just saving your energy by dropping the topic. The alternative is usually just ego stuff.
Sometimes they are not speaking to you at all, but rather to your listeners. And the larger your pool of listeners the more likely you'll encounter arguments in bad faith because it turns out that if the goal is persuasion then good-faith arguments don't scale.
A tangent here is that on private-public platforms like twitter "your listeners" could be an entirely separate set from the people you actually have contact with. Algorithms that signal-boost opinions out of their actual social circle become essentially propaganda posters for a host of varying in and out groups.
My personal opinion is that this is a misaligned incentive that social platforms should correct structurally, rather than via governance or policies. And pushing the corrective actions back down to the individual is a cop-out.
That phrase helps crystalize the concept very nicely.
The ability to entertain multiple, seemingly contradictory thoughts at once is a good skill I think.
Unfortunately large portions of the populace see this as being phony. You must be a red or blue team person, being “people without a tribe” is itself a heresy because by not conforming to this idiotic false dichotomy denies the simpletons and partisans their fallacious little world views. Socrates died in vein, I suppose.
Anyway, I suspect you mean 'in vain'. Veins are those little tubes in your body that the blood flows through, in generally in the direction of the heart. Since Socrates died by poison one could argue that he literally died "in vein" but this is probably not the interpretation you were going for.
I agree with you on the teams thing, and in my opinion it has a strong relation to two-party systems.
Much of the Christian narrative about Jesus and the nature of divinity is influenced by Neo-Platonist thought, and Plato did kind of frame Socrates' story in those terms. So it's not that Socrates was a Jesus figure, Jesus was a Socrates figure.
That's the academic concept of discussion, which is a very fine and respectable (not to mention important) thing.
Sometimes you do have to persuade, because action is required.
For instance, it is important to persuade non-believers in human-caused global warming; it's not just about improving their intellectual position.
This is true, but only in a very narrow, specific sense. Arguments don't persuade on their own, they scale with the credibility of the speaker. Speakers gain credibility and respect by:
- Giving good advice.
- Showing good judgement and making accurate predictions.
- Demonstrating that they understand various audience. constituencies, with bonus points for demonstrating that they actually care about these constituencies.
Conversely, there are numerous ways for speakers to destroy that credibility, like a history of making deceptive statements.
For most people, this means good-faith argumentation doesn't scale because they don't have the standing to make people take them seriously. But it isn't a rule of good-faith arguments as such: arguments are just constrained by social factors and by people's finely-tuned heuristics for who's worth taking seriously.
I suspect this is the main reason people are frustrated by internet debates, to the point of wanting to give up on them and just start censoring people. I make what I think is a careful, reasoned case, and in response all I hear is crickets, or trolls, or "lol lol lol lmao lol lol lol". This is because, to almost everyone reading Twitter, Hacker News, Substack, or the NYT comments, I'm just a rando.
It takes time to build respect and credibility, so keep at the good faith discussion, give people a reason to read what you're writing, and keep your relative obscurity in perspective on the way up.
I assume it's entertainment. People enjoy watching drama. Social media is their drama hit, and genuine communicators are frankly more boring.
But "building an audience" is a different than building credibility, trust, and respect. If you just aim for the most eyeballs, you find yourself vulnerable to what some people call audience capture, where your audience controls you, rather than the other way around.
For example, Trump has a huge audience, but that didn't stop an audience from booing him when he recommended getting vaccinated. [0]
The best most of us can hope for, if we're careful, is influence on a small group of people.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-booed-al...
Do you mean only at the local level, individually? Because it sure isn't hard to find extremely popular speakers with a great deal of influence that run counter to most of those points. It is hard not to conclude that the only thing that scales well in social media is to correctly deduce what most people want to hear, and then say it. People don't care about deception, good advice, good faith discussion, none of that, so long as you confirm the biases they already hold.
People really want to be told they are right, and were always right.
I agree with the what you're saying, but I'm not talking about things that make people popular, I'm talking about argumentation and what makes someone persuasive. I'm talking about the relatively rare circumstances that can create opportunities to repudiate biases instead of confirm them.
Not sure if this is accurate, and I'm sure misses some nuance, but rings true-ish to me.
There are other ways to persuade: You could lie about the facts of the argument, you could convince others you're in their group or that your opponent is in a group opposed to them, or you could say whatever you think they want to hear and sprinkle your message in among it.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fEX7G2N7CtmZQ3eB5/simulacra-...
The parent commenter wrote that "good-faith arguments don't scale". I don't agree with that, because good-faith arguments do scale with social capital. People often run afoul of several problems that make it seem like they don't:
- Their reach exceeds their grasp: they want to persuade strangers, but don't have enough social capital to pull it off.
- They think they're involved in a good-faith discussion or argument, but the other participants are competing for status or trying to entertain themselves (or others).
In other words, I don't think good-faith arguments are the only way to persuade people, but if that's your preferred technique, you have to develop credibility, respect, and trust - on top of building an audience, which is a whole different matter.
> My personal opinion is that this is a misaligned incentive that social platforms should correct structurally, rather than via governance or policies. And pushing the corrective actions back down to the individual is a cop-out.
hmm... I rather think the opposite is the case. Its all about playing to the crowd. And that there is no incentive for anyone (apart from the good faith individual) to do anything about it - all that noise translates into engagement with the platform.
I hesitate to throw this out there because, in general, I don't agree with all the hot takes such as "the internet has made us dumber" or whatever negative trait is the flavor of the week to blame on technology. But in this case, I'd say a lot of this is the direct result of forums/social media/etc.
People are arguing/debating the same way politicians do on stage with each other. Functionally we are millions of surrogates arguing everywhere for whatever individual/policy/ideal we believe in. The goal isn't to change the mind of your "opponent," it's to convince onlookers that you're right. And whether that victory is the result of the "better argument" is secondary - the point is to win over the most people by whatever means are deemed most effective. This is bad for dialogue, but (usually) great for winning debate competitions.
Expanding a bit further, all sorts of problems arise when participants bring with them different conversational frames. Take, for instance, the case where one participant frames a back and forth as in the same way they would a dyadic conversation, while the other participants frames the same strip of events as a debate in front of an audience. The former may see the later as being bombastic or evasive, while the later may see the former as being naïve or pestering. There are all sorts of rhetorical registers available or unavailable to each depending on how each frames the exchange and using an "unavailable" rhetorical register in a particular frame can be keyed as a deception. Bad faith arguments, can then be thought of as deliberately fabricating a frame in order to induce a false belief (ex: that the participants share a common frame).
> this is a misaligned incentive that social platforms should correct structurally, rather than via governance or policies. And pushing the corrective actions back down to the individual is a cop-out.
Can platforms do a better job at framing online discussion in such a way that makes it easier to maintain common framing? Which sort of laminations are available or could be invented in order to facilitate common framing and allow readers to identify frame-breaking activity? Platform creators literally create the mediums for these interactions, the choices they make make them structural participants in the ways in which these interactions play out. As such there is an implicit responsibility placed on them because of their agency in this process.
Unfortunately you can't always know ahead of time, even here on HN I have found that sometimes if I give an inch, others will take a mile. But if that happens I think you have two options: Out right correction, just outright say "Hey wait a minute, that's not what I meant." or, step back and accept that you are probably not changing this persons mind today.
The trouble with the internet, or really any public speaking, is that you might accidentally end up on the side of the conversation you are against in the eyes of the public, so just letting it go may not be a good idea.
The article actually addresses this, and in a good way IMHO (in the paragraph starting "Avoiding social catastrophe"). The reason to both to communicate, in such cases, is to attempt to demonstrate your willingness (and ability!) to engage in good faith, and thereby eventually restoring faith in Person B that good-faith communication is possible.
Note that this is explicitly not an attempt to convince the other party of whatever it is you're arguing about. The goal is not to change their view, but to restore a society in which discussion about those views in good faith is at least possible again.
It's not that people prone to this are doing so because of poor communication skills that can be improved upon, bad faith communication is by definition intentional.
Why even bother to communicate?
You probably should disregard anyone communicating in bad faith.
As online spaces are concerned, one thing I liked about forums is that communities, while large, became increasingly familiar and you could reasonably expect some good faith discussion over time. On spaces like reddit, all the tip toeing in the world doesn't prevent it. You could be Mr Rogers speaking to someone's "elephant in the brain" and it wouldn't prevent it.
Reminds me of a discussion with a neighbor. I was talking about things I didn’t like Obama or Biden had done. His response was “see? Should have voted for Trump”. He didn’t understand at all when I told him that Trump is even more wrong in my opinion. People are trained to totally agree or disagree with one side.
Clues:
- at a personal level: have you ever tried to put in practice "highly skilled, non-naive good faith communication" ? If you did, you've probably noted that more often than not, it doesn't make you weaker. It increases your value, your status, even your financial success. So maybe this could also be a contagious/unstoppable strategy simply because it has an edge for personal success ?
- as an organization: good faith leadership, good faith communication... seem to overall be a competitive advantage because it goes hand-in-hand with happy & productive people
- as a society: democracy emerged despite a world of tyrants to take over most a the world. Why ? Maybe because it was stronger in a systemic way ? It unlocks collaboration, decentralization, resilience... Moreover, it doesn't sound unreasonable that democracy would be fittest as poverty diminishes. So maybe authoritarianism, not democracy, is in danger of extinction in the end ?
Result: instead of spiraling bad faith, maybe we will have (though slower) spiraling good faith ? Maybe "good faith" will win simply because it's stronger, in a kind of evolutionary sense.
This has implications in everyday life : practicing "highly skilled, non-naive good faith communication" may be the best way to personal success. And this may also be the best way to incidentally induce a "good faith" society
In company environments I think it’s a factor of size and what core leadership will tolerate. With a good CEO, it’s hard for a bad-faith leader to thrive at a 1000 person company. But at 3000 (anecdotally) it somehow becomes easier for this behavior to thrive.
In certain environments (say, one dominated by good-faith communicators) it may be advantageous to be a bad-faith communicator, while in other environments it may not.
The resulting fluctuations in the mix of strategies deployed in the environment (as agents seek out better performing strategies) may well be unstable (i.e. a particular strategy's performance depends on what's presently dominant).
The good thing is: the strategy for personal success seems to be aligned with the strategy for a global good faith. So I can live with doubts: maybe it scales, maybe it doesn't. That doesn't change my daily behaviour, I'm maximizing for myself. This is not a prisoner dilemna where I lose if I cooperate.
I would even argue that if it wasn't aligned, this would certainly be doomed.
The books "Reinventing Organizations" (Frédéric Laloux) and "The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education" (Edward Deming) (intro: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20161226) gave me good intuitions that this can work at least at a corporate level.
Thanks a lot for the book recommendations. I read the intro you linked and it really piqued my interest.
The best strategy there is to suck up to people in authority and derive benefits from that. Since (as the [Rules for rulers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs) idea states) authoritarian societies have way less keys, you will gain much more respectively if you're successful at sucking up to a power key.
And that's why good faith strategies work great in open democracies - since there are _a lot of_ albeit smaller keys, just sucking up is harder, and its easier just to have a reputation of competence, then you can go from one key to another and keep what you've earned. Merit and proven record both become more profitable for an individual, and since there is high trust between keys, it can also be transferable.
That's also a reason why authoritarian societies are so big on loyalty, since on a personal level, there are so much less keys, its better for you to stick with the one you have, and since there is way less trust in the society, you can't easily transfer your influence with one key to another.
Honestly that video (or more so the book it was based on) should be a required reading in all schools...
However, there were no such "kind" environments a few centuries ago. Yet they managed to be bootstraped against their surroundings. So maybe there is clues that we underestimate the strength of "high-skilled good faith" strategies in adversarial situations? But again, I can't really imagine what it's like to live in authoritarian states so my thoughts must not be very relevant here.
I've seen Rules for rulers previously and remember it pretty well as it was quite instructive. It didn't provide enough guiding answers for me to the question "And so, knowing that, how should I behave to live my best possible life ??"
Opposite experience. It leads to wasting time, especially compared to getting to the same conclusions using more effective, if less 'true', tactics. It just doesn't scale.
At some level good faith is superior on a very large scale, since the reality tends to provide a somewhat consistent feedback, but there remains a local niche of maxxing out persuasion skill tree. Not to beat dead horse, but large organizations with too much resources seem particularly prone - it is an obviously self correcting mechanism, but the tactic remains valid locally.
I've felt that not focusing on the fact that people may have bad faith and we need tactics etc freed a lot of time and energy to invest somewhere more useful
If you're talking to people who, for w/e reason, have large influence on your life, who you are stuck with and who are not very numerous, investing heavily in enforcing communications standards should pay off. Similarly in cooperative setting with aligned incentives you would expect assuming good faith to work out well.
Now, in social media, sales or a large fluid organization...
It starts with not assuming bad faith from the other side.
Trying to adapt your communication strategy depending on the profile of the other side is not really "good faith". The goal is to train _ourselves_ to look at reality in a less biased, personal way. Wanting to max out every opportunities precisely tends to distort reality.
Imagine the war scenario. The honest, good-faith communication would be like: If we capitulate outright, the worst thing that happens is paying taxes to somewhere else, and the set of faces on TV news will change to a different set of faces. Anyway, please go and die to prevent that from happening, while the people who have the most at stake hide in safety
It's not difficult to see why bad-faith war propaganda beats that every time
Perhaps I don’t understand your point, but the experiences of people in the states annexed by the Soviet Union would beg to differ.
And not only that, the bad-faith communication goes back decades, and the equipment the invaders are fighting with is in disrepair because local administrators and subcontractors have been lying to those in charge while pocketing maintenance funds. We're seeing, in a massive way, the havoc that a culture of deceit wreaks on any organization or society's ability to function coherently.
You probably meant WWI, but afaik, historians dispute that one. He was not that good in economy.
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Is that actual truth? It seems to me that in quite a lot of wars, there is a lot more in stake then just where you pay taxes or who is on TV. This is not a good faith communication - this is flat out lie.
And also, civilian casualties in wars outnumber military ones. Soldiers do die a lot ... but causalities and suffering in wars are not limited to them.
"HIGHSUN: Your way to personal success through highly skilled, non-naive good faith communication"
also sounds like a great title for a self-help bestseller ;)
While it won him lots of supporters it ultimately resulted in his downfall as he refused to use underhanded rhetorical attacks of any kind, even when the ends clearly justified the means.
For example, in social media the votes outweigh the replies 10 to 100 fold, and fewer people read the replies than the first post (especially on sites where it's an extra click to see comments).
Yet to your point, if it's iterated, that doesn't work as well. Of course this isn't just a technical problem, but I wonder if there's a way to weight high quality commenters similar to high quality posters, and if that leads to the virtuous cycle you describe.
Bad-faith communicators occupy a lot of powerful positions. Perhaps even the large majority.
It's impossible for those bad actors to hear criticism from "the enemy". Only people who share a position of almost total fundamental agreement, can maybe be heard in any criticism of how to better deal with the opposition.
TLDR: We should be most aggressive and loud in criticism of those we agree with most.
I don't like to use the word "criticism" because I believe it tends to be about trying to objectively label their actions, and much more prefer opening up about we individually feel or even how we imagine others might feel in reaction to those actions.
I agree with you in that this may be more well received by people who feel closest to us and also may be easier for us to open up to them when we fee close to them.
This is, after all, why virtue signalling is such a common tactic. It shores up reputational defense against such accusations. Unfortunately, it also commonly has the effect of further deepening the divide between the group and other parties who might otherwise be interested in the Cause, as the most valuable signalling techniques require costly actions - i.e. ones that are materially or socially damaging to the member doing said signalling. This may affirm loyalty, but often harms proselytization efforts (you cannot advance the Cause to your family if you have cut off contact with them for not already being part of the Cause, for example).
I'm from a bipartisan family in a purple area in a purple/battlefield state. You can't grow up like I did without being exposed to both/all sides of the aisle, so you end up with a pretty decent idea of the follies of your own side as well as a lot of friends/colleagues/etc. that don't agree with you.
10-15 years ago, I was still 'allowed' to deviate from accepted practice/opinion, as long as I respected the hosts, and conditional/partial belonging was allowed. (e.g. I might be a dirty commie liberal, but I'm still a Christian or, on the other end, I might be a gun nut but I'm still queer so I fit in 'enough'). Now, not so much. We also used to have more defined and accepted internal fighting/it used to be accepted that sides were coalitions instead of Borgs.
Now, not so much. We talk a lot about things we can't say/do, and share tips on how not to be pilloried for saying the wrong thing. Interestingly, these discussions are happening with people across all parts of the political spectrum.
People were always somewhat suspicious of you for hanging out with the enemy, but it was accepted if you were of an intellectual or sneaky bent. Now it's not. You're in or you're out.
Whether you want to or not, as things get more polarized, it becomes ever more difficult to maintain any kind of nuanced position.
And that last part is key: at the point where people are arguing that they are moderate, rather then what they actually believe, they're not arguing in good faith to start with - they're trying to argue they're morally superior without engaging with the actual subject matter.
At best, they're in fact arguing for the status quo and trying to pretend that they are not in fact very definitely asserting a position by doing that.
There's a certain amount of irony in dismissing a entire range of political opinion as uniquely susceptible to "trying to argue they're morally superior without engaging with the actual subject matter" under an article about bad faith communication.
>> Except centrism isn't a real position - by definition.
There is something distinctly and genuinely different about centrism, but it is still a real position (it does in fact exist, and is thus "real").
I think what you're actually getting at is that centrism is a relative position (by definition), whereas non-centrists are absolute positions. Well...at least potentially. Fundamentally, few positions are not mostly relative (especially if one includes premises, axioms, etc), as the mind fundamentally and almost necessarily perceives reality thorough relative lenses (with respect to the individual's prior experiences, or in neural network terms: according to the training of their model). And if one is to discuss things in purely/highly absolute terms, the other person will balk ("That's pedantry/Gish Galloping / JAQing off!", behavior which more than a few HN'ers are not immune to themselves).
I believe a large percentage of the population actually possesses these abilities, and some subset of people even exercise these abilities on a very regular basis, with extreme skill (say, when we are programming software) - but only under specific circumstances. Take someone who has these capabilities and drop them into an object level culture war discussion, and these abilities will vanish. This phenomenon can be seen in large quantities not just on sites like Reddit, but also here - it is our nature, at least for now (perhaps some day someone will notice and try to address the issue).
There are also other hidden fundamental problems that are rarely realized or discussed: as just one example, the very language we use to communicate - take the innocuous looking word word "is"....oh, the problems this one seemingly simple word causes in "reality".
> they're in fact [...] very definitely asserting a position by doing that.
You seem to have talked yourself out of your own argument through the course of making it.
Someone (that is generally thoughtful and level-headed) once implied I was racist because I agreed with a conservative.
The conservative had claimed, and I agreed, that, on average, people of African descent have quantifiably darker skin than those with Northern European ancestry.
Edit: The context was a paper on Vitamin D deficiency arguing that funding for increasing Vitamin D supplementation should be aimed at African American communities, since Vitamin D deficiency is more common in darker-skinned communities.
According to the paper, darker skin means less sunlight gets through, which means less Vitamin D production per unit of sun exposure. This matches common sense, and also their epidemiological data.
In fact that practice is expressly disallowed on this very site, whose guidelines demand we assume good faith on the part of other commenters.
It is completely possible for one person to use bad faith techniques without doing it on purpose. You can assume they did that by mistake, and point that out. If after being presented with the evidence they simply refuse to take it, you can continue from there. But be prepared to be presented by their own counter-argument, though.
His beliefs and ideas are clearly left wing and he has remained consistent, but by doing what you suggest he has been effectively destroyed. It's really sad to see. And I agree with you, I think he did the right thing regardless of the consequences.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwal...
https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/press-...
Are you suggesting that these three letter agencies aren't constantly involved in shady unethical often law-breaking activity? Have you not been reading hacker news at all? They make it to the front page regularly with their poor behavior.
Greenwald had previously worked on the Anthrax story of 2001, where a couple of high profile people got sent a sophisticated Anthrax variant in the mail.
It was supposed to be foreign terrorism at first, later it was found that the strain came from a U.S. research facility.
Biological weapons aren't allowed by treaty. Research how to combat biological weapons however is allowed. So many countries produce strains in biological research facilities under the guise of defense.
That is precisely Greenwald's point, he has never claimed that bioweapons are manufactured in Ukraine. He has claimed that dangerous biological agents might be present, like they were in the U.S. in 2001.
It takes a lot of history and reading to understand Greenwald. The man is a walking encyclopedia, very careful in his statements and touches issues of great complexity. One can rarely refute him in a one liner.
Which is fairly normal thing to have in a developed country. And is much different thing the bioweapons lab.
This muddying things does not make Greenwald's sound better. It makes him exactly what he is - someone building conspiracy theory.
What is being described is beyond that, with thinly veiled suggestions of covert maliciousness sprinkled in.
In Ukraine, matters are exacerbated by the fact that these research facilities, according to the left wing newspaper The Guardian, were U.S. funded:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/11/russia-biologi...
Ukraine does operate biological laboratories that receive US funding. The US undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland affirmed those facts in a Senate foreign relations committee hearing this week, in which the Republican senator Marco Rubio asked directly if Ukraine had biological weapons.
Given the politically unstable situation in February 2022 and earlier, people like Greenwald and Gabbard simply point out that Putin will view this as a provocation, same as the Nuland/Graham involvement in the revolution in 2014.
Most people who are called Putin apologists are simply doing one thing: They know that Putin is a bully with 6,000 nuclear weapons, so they try to understand his thinking and possible reactions. As we see now, they were right in many ways.
This would require reading what Putin wrote and commenting on it. This would require listening to his speeches in Russia. This would require close listening to Russian ideology and mythology disseminated in Russia itself and commenting on it. This would required reading Russian and Easter European politics and history - at least recent one.
It would require watching which of his statements are shifting, which are ignored the moment they are not useful, which are staying and which are supported by his actions. I dont see them ever mentioning Putins historical theories, his theories about Ukraine statehood, about Stalin.
And somehow, that concern exists only when Russia is trying to excuse invasion by bioweapons labs. Somehow, magically, this concern did not existed before, nor in other countries and stopped existing as it turned out not many people are buying it as excuse for invasion. There was no "maybe the war did not started due to that" consideration either.
This was not concern about "provocation" or concern about Putin being good-faith afraid of new covid from Ukraine. This was muddying waters, trying to build up new WMD-like narrative, because libs are at Ukrainien side.
Seriously, like are we supposed to believe Russia has no biological labs? Or that only Russia is allowed to, and not other countries like Ukraine?
It's totally normal and expected for biological research labs to have biological samples with which to do research.
Ukraine, like any other country, has a vested interest in the health of its population, and so Ukraine, like many other countries, performs research on diseases that ail mankind.
Additionally, "receives US funding" is a better way to put it than "US funded", which is calculated to make it seem more like the US was the _only_ country funding them. Though one would expect that one of the largest economies in the world would help its allies research and treat their diseases.
The accusations and suppositions put forward are beyond that, with thinly veiled suggestions of covert maliciousness sprinkled in.
As for Putin, he views the existence of a free Ukraine that isn't part of Russia, as a provocation, thus the invasion, so it's pretty clear that what he viewed as provocation is not necessarily an actual provocation, but rather a pretext for further violence that he already planned anyways.
This could be your bad-faith reading of the stories, though. You are "reading between the lines" and seeing statements that aren't actually there, then claiming bad-faith communication on others.
Finally, saying what you think another is thinking or going to say, as in Putin's actions and motives, is very far from SUPPORTING those actions and motives.
You simply claiming that does not make it so.
>Finally, saying what you think another is thinking or going to say, as in Putin's actions and motives, is very far from SUPPORTING those actions and motives.
Yes, there was no disagreement on this point. The point is that "Putin will view X as a provocation, so we shouldn't do X" is an unconvincing argument, because Putin has already claimed his own actions were provocations against him. There is no world in which Putin will not either find or invent a pretext to do what he wants, and call it a "provocation".
No matter what anyone says or does, as long as Ukraine still exists as an independent country, Putin will say, it is engaged in "provocation" which necessitates eliminating Ukraine as an independent country.
Instead of describing it, why not provide a quote with a citation to its context?
Every journalist has a particular topic and audience that they focus on. His topic and audience is around waking up left wingers to the bad behavior of the "their own side". This topic is almost completely unaddressed amongst the left. To attack the right would be singing to the choir, and also be part of the choir, because 99% of the rest of left wing media already focus all their effort on "the other side". Do you not think it's a waste of time to convince the left that trump and fox are bad?
The fact is that most media are just cheerleaders for team red or team blue. Glenn is not a cheerleader, and thus not an establishment mouthpiece, and so he gets smeared by people like you.
The majority of journalists and opinion writers wont ever be on CNN and MSNBC. Overwhelming majority of them, in fact.
> Every journalist has a particular topic and audience that they focus on. His topic and audience is around waking up left wingers to the bad behavior of the "their own side".
Well, in that case, he is massive failure. Probably because he argues in bad faith and also because hate is dripping out of him.
> This topic is almost completely unaddressed amongst the left.
The left is constantly engaged in in-fighting.
And in-fighting is not the same as calling out the corrupt elite that maintain the Overton window of what most blue journalists and politicians speak about.
I used to like him and respect him, which is why I was following him. It was not other peoples criticism of Greenwald that made me loose respect to him. People I normally follow dont comment on Greenwald. It was him.
Hold on, I did not say he shouldn't be going on Fox news or TC. However going to Fox news and calling NYT biased left wing media of the "rich elite", without any criticism towards Fox news, their ownership and agenda is not engaging in a good faith debate.
> Every journalist has a particular topic and audience that they focus on. His topic and audience is around waking up left wingers to the bad behavior of the "their own side". This topic is almost completely unaddressed amongst the left.
So do you believe that going to Fox news and essentially repeating their talking points is a good way of "waking up the left"? I mean the audience he is trying to address is not really listening there is it? Also why not take the opportunity to also engage critically with Fox?
>To attack the right would be singing to the choir, and also be part of the choir, because 99% of the rest of left wing media already focus all their effort on "the other side". Do you not think it's a waste of time to convince the left that trump and fox are bad?
I find the notion that any media in the US is left completely alien. I mean the NYT would maybe considered centre right in most of Europe.
> The fact is that most media are just cheerleaders for team red or team blue. Glenn is not a cheerleader, and thus not an establishment mouthpiece, and so he gets smeared by people like you.
I find it ironic that in a discussion about bad faith communication, you call my criticising Glenn as smearing? Where did I attack his character? I think what he is doing is not constructive, and I explained why I think that is the case.
Now in 2022, many of the same outlets suddenly acknowledge the authenticity of the story. CNN has James Clapper as its own security analyst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clapper#CNN_national_sec...), why would Greenwald appear there after all that has happened in 2013?
Many of Greenwald's "conspiracy theories" are facts two years later.
> His beliefs and ideas are clearly left wing and he has remained consistent,
Kinda yes and no, not really. He has some lefty opinions, but that is it.
One of your bigger tells however is how you never actually defend your positions. You only attack the others' opinions. You constantly require everyone else to be on the defense while never actually defending your positions yourself.
You're not here to engage in debate, you're here to rant.
I notice you also didn't engage with Cycomanic after he deconstructed your post and called out all of your bad faith tactics. I also pointed out another.
You also like to sneak in hyperbole. You claim I said you were underhanded, when I did no such thing. It's an effort to get me to argue something I never said.
This isn't so much an accusation as just pointing out what you're doing here.
However, I don't think it will have the outcome you think it will.
That being said, what is ideal in theory, breaks down in practice.
Feel free to take this with a grain of salt, my experience has been that when one person calls out another on their side for bad faith communication, a weird popularity contest happens.
As others have said about “feeling like a traitor”, the person who is called out feels metaphorically “stabbed in the back” by someone they now perceive as a “turncoat”. The ensuing popularity battle is used to discredit the position of the person who called out the bad faith communication. I’ve seen it many times, it’s both predictable and bizarre. Watching folks alienate their closest friends and advocates to protect a perceived attack on their ego is wild.
Looking at past results, I would not encourage call out culture further.
Engaging in a good-faith argument, especially with those you often agree with, yes. "Calling out" - I'd be hesitant about that.
This way it doesn't come off an an accusation, it keeps the conversation going, and is generally much more constructive. I found that people who "call out" logical fallacies and the like are generally looking to "win the argument" rather than actually have a conversation.
Calling people out on "bad faith" is common; there's an entire string of terms for this ("gaslighting", "sealioning", "concern trolling", what-have-you). I've never seen it end well. If someone is actually engaging in bad faith then it's better to disengage and call it a day, and if someone is engaging in good faith then all you've did is insult them without actually contributing all that much.
I haven't heard the other two terms, and wouldn't be able to guess what they mean.
Sea lions spend all day fighting over [arbitrary thing] to impress potential mates. I'm certain this happens on social media, and that most potential mates are as impressed as they are by an actual sea lion. :-)
Concern trolling seems to be too specific a term.
IMO it's an annoying corruption of what was actually a rather useful term, but there you go.
The predominant viewpoint in modern day journalism is that a true headline that is technically correct and gets page views is a good headline.
This is the first sign of bad faith communication in the article (misleading with facts).
Example (ficticious) controversial headline:
"Scientists extremely concerned that new variant will kill more children."
Two scientists, and only two dead kids globally (so, less than the current variant), and this is a fine thing to say, apparently.
The goal of a good journalist, in their mind, is to be technically correct while selling papers by getting people to assume the headline means:
"The scientific consensus is that a larger percentage of children will die from the next Covid variant".
No minds were changed during the argument, but I think we both learned something.
Effective communication requires nuance, and definitionally nuances are subtle, and therefore are often difficult to convey in a terse way.
Headlines definitionally are restricted in length. So we can say that nuance and headlines are natural enemies.
Therefore, the best thing a headline can do is to direct a reader toward nuance, which hopefully is contained within the article. So an article that gets page views is not just good for the publisher, but it's also good for discourse in general.
But what about technically correct? Well, I think it's safe to say that a headline that gets clicks but is technically wrong is not what we want. Then let's consider technically correct, what does that even mean? To me, I'd really have to hear the argument in full, but in the spirit of steel manning I'd have to think what they meant was "factually correct", as "technically correct" has some negative connotation having to do focusing on facts while ignoring or discounting more salient issues.
Then again, due to the limited nature of a headline, some or even most of the context must be elided. So really I think the difference between something being "factually correct" and "technically correct" is intent to deceive through lies of omission.
Given the above, I would say a good headline is one which drives the reader to nuance and does so in a way which is factually correct, which I could see characterized as "technically correct and gets page views".
You can be having a conversation with someone that suddenly stops because a 3rd party removed the last reply. Often, neither of the speakers is aware this happened, making it appear to each as if the other ghosted the discussion.
Since reality is a bit more complex, I think such things should be decided on a case by case basis. I've seen plenty of both extremes here on HN, and tons of unknowns
I get the practicality of it, but still think it's a pretty nasty thing to do. Even to a troll.
The first time silent removals were discussed on reddit was apparently in 2007,
> "A better idea is a silent ban. Let him post comments" [3] (found via [3.a])
In 2010 reddit's CTO said he supports silent bans [4] after a blogger discovered they had been silently banned. And the CEO in 2017 said it was necessary [5], then in 2018 said,
> If we knew everything everything we know today about spam, enforcement, and transparency, we probably wouldn’t build shadow-banning. It’s use is really limited to spam, and I think the downsides (false positives, lack of transparency) outweigh the benefits.
> That said, it was useful in the early days when spam was more of an arms race, we didn’t have moderators or reporting, and our content policy was limited to spam. [6]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/duwdco/should_mode...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/tk7xl1/meta_c...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20070604141333/http://reddit.com...
[3.a] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20647592#20650370
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/bbc58/silently_...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5q4qmg/out_w...
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/8k5qh3/if_y...
If the solution was providing people with a list of bad faith tactics we would have been done with it at least twice by now: first when Socrates was arguing with Sophists 2500 years ago and another time when Schopenhauer wrote Eristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right. And before you think 'maybe someone doesn't know yet': yes, you are correct. Someone doesn't know. We tried telling everyone before and just trying harder doesn't seem to cut it.
What, I'd argue, would be at least a tiny step forward would be thinking in terms of games people play, rewards they seek and maybe even monetization of systems. Thinking of people who argue in 'bad faith' as being mostly plain wrong is naive and somewhat offensive. Talk to your PR department every now and then, some of them are smart and know what they're doing. Same for Twitter discourse and all else.
Telling people (or yourself) to make better communities ignores costs involved in managing that community. Can you afford onboarding of even telling people that cute list of bad faith tactics? Can you do it faster than a place that doesn't do it? Can you achieve retention higher than love bombarding communities?
No. No, you can't.
Not with current tooling at least. Not to push own products/services (today!), here are some angles that seem achievably hard, yet somewhat underdeveloped: good faith arguments are more time expensive - it can be cut into pieces/redesigned to give them more chance; both wrong and correct ways of thinking about specific problems are actually very limited in numbers - maintaining searchable database of them to reuse should dramatically speed up 'getting through'; false positives in ostracism are unnoticed - layered moderation that provides feedback on initial misjudgment can noticeably improve the space: not so much retention (that numbers would be small), but limit echo chamber by avoiding rituals of cancellation - without increasing costs as much as having 'full conversation' with everyone before banning would.
Definitely. One thing that I think is unappreciated is the extent to which we see "preference falsification". This is a game people play where they pretend to have different preferences to better fit in with their in-group.
It's common for preference falsification to be manufactured intentionally – I think Robin Hanson formalized it with the idea of a "meta-norm", a norm that not says: you must ostracize people who do <bad thing x> AND you must ostracize people who don't follow this rule. I think when people complain about "cancel culture", this is the real thing they're unhappy about, they just lack the vocabulary to articulate it. The sneaky thing about the meta-norm is that it's self-reinforcing. Once enough people follow the meta-norm, following the meta-norm becomes a stable equilibrium where no individual person gains from not following it.
From Scott Alexander:
> Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.
> So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures.
The subtlety of this is that you might genuinely believe that everyone supports the electric shocks, because you'll never hear anyone speaking out against it, even though everyone hates it.
I think this dynamic is so powerful that it's almost innate. I remember once when a friend of a friend cheated on her boyfriend regularly. I obviously thought negatively of the cheater and didn't want to be around her, but I also thought negatively of my friend for continuing to be around the cheater. The instinct is that punishing cheaters by social ostracism is socially useful, so we should also punish people who fail to ostracize cheaters by ostracising them, and so on. This can be good like in the case of punishing cheaters, but the problem is that it could work for any social norm even if 100% of people disagreed with it.
I think this is a real and powerful social dynamic that leads to a huge amount of people having no choice but to act in bad faith. If this is a real social dynamic, how can it be neutralized? One approach I think is promising is to use local opinion polls, only structured as opinion elections. If everyone could vote anonymously, I'm sure they would say "I'm not such a fan of these electric shocks" (and the anonymity protects them from the fear of socially-enforced retaliation). Once it becomes common knowledge that almost nobody around you likes the electric shocks, it's much easier to coordinate "let's stop punishing people for not shocking themselves". Electric shocks are just an example, you could use this for any hot-button political issue. For example, in the US's antebellum South I'm sure there was immense social pressure to be pro-slavery, but opinion elections might have helped pro-abolition people understand if they were even in the minority (and if so, by how much).
This is just one mechanism I think might be workable, but I'm sure if we sat down and thought about it we could come up with many others, like reputation systems for those who make accurate predictions for the future, debates where people have an incentive to call-out their counterparty's selective reporting of the facts, etc.
Say a research article came out, claiming the health benefits of the electric shocks, or even some vague "think of the children" style "children become violent and dangerous when not shocked". It is parroted by all the news organisations you'd expect.
Even if any casual scrutiny debunks the article, I believe a worryingly high percentage of the population would believe it, because they _want_ to believe it, because it means they don't have to worry about the shocks. They've justified the shocks to themselves, so they become less painful. Accepting that they are useless or cruel after this would require them to accept that they were doing something harmful for no reason, and people are generally very resistant to being told they were wrong, especially if they have any stake in the status quo.
So now you have people who _genuinely_ believe in the shocks, even though they got there through being deceived. Then all it takes is a bit of villifying of those who even suggest that there might be another way (They want to hurt our children) and the system becomes self-sustaining.
> A steel man argument (or steelmanning) is the opposite of a straw man argument. The idea is to help one's opponent to construct the strongest form of their argument. This may involve removing flawed assumptions that could be easily refuted, for example, so that one produces the best argument for the "core" of one's opponent's position. It has been advocated as a more productive strategy in political dialog that promotes real understanding and compromise instead of fueling partisanship by discussing only the weakest arguments of the opposition.
That sounds cynical, but what I mean is this:
- Steelmanning the “enemy position” indicates that your argument takes into account all of the nuance of the “enemy position”
- It indicates that you’re arguing in good faith, and not going for an easy win
In other words,
- Steelmanning indicates: “I have looked at the problem space, and this position fits it the best.”
- Strawmanning indicates: “I will present the problem space in a way that fits this position the best.”
Subtle, but important and gives you a lot of credibility as a speaker.
Humans, reacting to this degradation in signal rely less and less on channels that are dominated by noise.
This opens up opportunities for technology to build new channels, which accumulate users, engagement and momentum by supporting good faith communication (truth).
Thus the cycle continues.
You can have good faith communication over something like the Fermi Paradox or SETI, but the truth is unknown. With a lot of complex social and political realities, the truth is also unknown. Some facts are known, but how they fit whatever grand narrative is in dispute. And with technology, often the dispute centers around preference or what's popular, where for example, which programming language is better doesn't really have a truth value in the general sense.
Turning the conversation away from "X language is better" to "X works best than Y to accomplish Z", trying to gauge by how much (e.g.: will it pay of for you to learn X if you only have to do Z once in your lifetime?), etc.. is what I'm understanding "good faith" communication to entail in such situations.
I do think this is extremely problematic in the long run.
My online posting life got a lot less stressful once I realized that the world will be exactly the same if I neglect to rebut some twitter user's bad/uninformed point of view.
Maybe you have a ton more social clout than I do, though :P
The winning move is to seem like the winning side of discourse in their space.
The truly winning move is to own a media conglomerate including social psychology people in communications.
That said, if you are playing, the winning move is not to play their games. Don't engage with their attempted straw man arguments, or end up in endless discussions about semantics. Some of the best debates I've seen / read were people not playing games and not reacting to bad faith arguments / tactics, but instead cleverly pointing out something else.
I get involved in conversations, but not in heated debates. I don't even dignify bad faith responses with an answer.
Participation is optional. If it's pointless and unpleasant, I don't bother anymore.
It's just not what public debate is. You see rookie politicians do it, but it's generally a mistake.
A huge part of what political debate is, is dominating the frame. The frame. The key facts, alternative or otherwise. The key question being debated.
Once those are established, the conclusion tends to be trivial.
There is no flow of information and I could not see this form of acts as "communication" - it seems to be more like a kind of art/show/performance.
So a key part of such debates becomes influencing or provoking others to talk about things that advance your cause and avoiding discussion of things that hurt it. E.g. if someone says "you eat babies" and you respond with extensive evidence that you don't, then that public debate becomes a debate about you being a baby-eater and not whatever you wanted to promote.
What do you think ‘stay on message’ means? It’s as old as rhetoric itself.
Cathago delenda est!
[0] The annoying popups you get when you scroll too far without being logged in, do at least prevent me from doom-scrolling
I feel the same way! When they come up, my reaction is "nice"+cmd-w. Thanks, twitter!
To your response: I mean, there are some curious people on twitter. Curious people don't engage in the problematic dynamics outlied in the article, so some exchange of information happens there. That's clearly not representative of the bigger picture though, simply because the most people can't afford curiosity, courtesy of their cognitive functions (if you subscribe to Jungs model) and/or their position in maslows pyramid.
This extends to a lot of politics these days. There are well-financed parties out there whose goal is to destabilize, mainly targeting the US and Europe but I'm sure it happens everywhere. These are the ones behind Trump getting elected, Brexit proceeding even though only 28% of eligible voters voted in favor of it, the referendum being bad for only having two options, and the referendum only being advisory, and countries like Hungary and Poland shifting hard to authoritarian right, breaking with the separation of state and justice.
These forces have the destabilization of post-ww2 unions in mind on the one hand, and people focusing on each other internally instead of internationally on the other. Think things like JK Rowling's trolling, Trump coming out with something that all of twitter and the media pounce on, Reddit brigades.
It's turtles all the way down, where each turtle is yelling at the one on top.
And I kinda get it, I was there for it as well and to this day will make shitposts on the internet with no intent to actually engage with any replies <_<
'twas ever thus - some people just like arguing. Give them an amplifier and they'll never stop. Usenet was the same, back in the day, so its nothing new.
It's a small community, but it's an interesting experiment at what online communication could be.
I mean not always, but I do wonder if the posts that LOOK like they're in good faith are also misleading as such.
Best thing to do is to not spend the energy. Don't engage with anyone if they don't have an open mind or are acting in bad faith. If it's more neutral, you can always ask "What will it take you to change your mind?"; the answer of that will determine if it's worth spending energy on. And the answer to that could be done in bad faith as well - for example, if the other says "I will change my mind if I see a scientific paper disproving me", but then proceeds to not actually read any scientific paper sent to them, they were acting in bad faith all along.
Not everybody on "the other side" is communicating in bad faith, but some are. (Same with "your own side".) When someone is communicating in bad faith, I don't think it's "unethical" to engage them in good faith, I think it's foolhardy.
Don't feed the trolls. For dog's sake don't assume you can change the trolls.
One of the HN guidelines is "assume good faith". But many arguments presented here are made in bad faith. There are certain topics which in my view, cannot be intelligently discussed on HN because you are not allowed to assume bad faith.
What's missing from this article is how to protect yourself from bad faith actors.
(I've deliberately written this so that it could apply to "either side". Take that as an attempt to engage in good faith.)
I believe strongly in these good faith tactics, and I use them to engage with people I vehemently disagree with. Because of this I have a deeper understanding of them than many of my peers on the other side. But understanding doesn’t help the situation. The overall conversation continues to deteriorate year after year.
I think this page is a great definition of what is happening, but a poor prescription of what to do about it.
> I think this page is a great definition of what is happening, but a poor prescription of what to do about it.
I strongly strongly agree. Notice how even in this, I'm not saying "you are 100% right", I'm still open to changing my perspective, and yes maybe partially it's because I find that even comments like this land better with the recipient when I express my perspective rather than assert a global truth, but mostly I feel much better saying it this way.
Anyway, I could talk about this stuff for days, it's what I do for work, teaching myself and others how to communicate to better resolve such conflict. Doesn't meant I'm "right" just means I spend a lotttt of time thinking about this stuff.
How do you approach conflict resulting from bad faith interaction? How do you deescalate such conflict?
I practice three main steps: 1) tell the truth about how I'm actually feeling 2) tell them how I imagine they might be feeling, and 3) say one thing to connect with love. If I do the first two steps well, then the third comes more easily.
There are other tactics, such as separating behavior from person: "I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at what you said, and I'm telling you because I care about you." Or really expressing uncertainty: "I don't know what to do anymore" (as long as I genuinely don't know what to do)
I'd say overall the goal is for me to feel closer to them, for me to resolve my conflict with them, and then maybe they'll resolve their side as well, but not required.
Does that make sense?
In looking more at the definition, I don't even know if it makes sense in that sentence even if I did spell it right lol.
Yet there’s a good chunk of people posting incompatible realities, do you ever think that maybe it’s not them living in a mistaken reality but yours that are wrong. How does one test ones own views to be certain?
Do they ever wonder the same thing? If they aren’t posting in bad faith then surely they must wonder the same about you or I. How does one verify and test ones reality.
( you, I and they are all used in the general sense)
The short answer is, you can't. At least not about anything that you can't test for yourself by personal experience.
The longer answer is to ask why you care about whatever particular aspect of "reality" you are thinking about testing. What difference would it make to what you choose to do, if reality were one way rather than another? If the answer is that it would make no difference, then the correct thing to do is to not care how reality is in that respect. Have no opinion at all. (There's an old engineer's joke about running tests. Before you run a test, ask yourself two questions: What will I do if the test passes? What will I do if the test fails? If both answers are the same, don't bother doing the test.)
The problem is that our minds did not evolve to be comfortable with having no opinion about something. Our minds evolved to seek answers, not to leave questions hanging. That probably made sense in the hunter-gatherer environment in which we originally evolved, but it doesn't make sense in our world now. There are simply too many questions, too much information, and too little time for anyone to check it all, and there are no "trusted" sources of information we can turn to to just tell us the answers. But it's very difficult to accept having unanswered questions; our minds keep sending us alarm signals even though we might have convinced ourselves intellectually that we should leave those questions unanswered. So many people end up accepting some answer even if it's wrong, and even if the answer makes no difference to anything they actually do.
I assume that it's the same for "the other side".
There are others who are truly at odds with reality (in fact that's more common), but they don't have the same vibe.
For about two weeks I was convinced my new roommate was a hallucination and I'd finally snapped. There were a number of uncanny cases where he knew the same incredibly obscure trivia and references that I knew. Things like "trap remixes of musicians that sold their soul". That's too specific to write off as just similar interests by men in a similar demographic. There were also a number of uncanny instances of not knowing the same exact things I didn't know. I had never seen him outside of the apartment. We had no mutual friends. We were both in the same unusual living arrangement, permanent temporaries at an Airbnb partially bartering code / home automation work as barter for rent. At some point the topic of eye color came up, and someone pointed out how all of us in the room have green eyes, and how that is the least common eye color and 3 of us is very statistically unlikely. Eventually I had to ask myself which is more probable, there really are two people with all these characteristics in common that ended up at the same place by coincidence, or I'm having a schizophrenic break and this is my delusion? My possibly imaginary friend had mentioned that he lived in Russia through the first grade and speaks Russian at a first grade level. I do not speak Russian. So I ask him to teach me some Russian grammar. He agrees but then changes the topic. I ask him to teach me some Russian. He says sure but avoids the question again. I ask him to teach me a bit of Russian. He agrees and evades again. At this point I am having some very serious doubts about my grip on reality.
Eventually we do meet other people from each other's circles. After a while there's been enough mutual third parties acknowledging both of us, that either a very large cast of characters are my delusion or this man is real. I can never actually prove one way or the other, but the scales are now tipped towards real by all the people standing on them.
And so we get to the answer to your question. "Reality is shared consensus." There's a shared consensus that my roommate was real, and that consensus may as well be reality because I can't distinguish it from the case where everyone has the same delusion.
Of course reality isn't the shared consensus per se. Reality is not subject to a referendum. However, shared consensus is the multimeter we use to read reality. Where is the difference between a 9 volt battery and "if I touch the proved to the terminal it reads 9 volts"? There isn't one.
In your example, my definition of "reality is shared consensus" becomes a big problem. If there are two groups with their own consensus then those are two realities. You are free to believe anything and everything is true right up to the point of fatally erroneous belief. For things where the consequences of being wrong are not so sure, there is nothing forcing a consensus around "objective reality".
Niels Bohr allegedly had a horse shoe in his office. When asked he said it was for good luck. One audacious visitor asked "do you really believe that?" He replies "no, but they say it works even if you don't believe in it." This was cheeky of Bohr. Plenty of people don't believe in quantum mechanics, but they say it works anyway. If someone truly insists on believing magic horse shoe theory and rejecting quantum mechanics, there is nothing that will force them to acquiesce to our objectively correct answer.
I think that's because, at the level of society at large, nobody knows how to do that. That's the unsolved problem the article is describing.
At an individual level, you protect yourself from bad faith actors by refusing to interact with them once you become convinced that they're bad faith actors. But at the level of society, many of the bad faith actors are in positions where their actions have large scale consequences that will affect you whether you like it or not. So the individual solution doesn't work for that case.
Another important thing: you may identify 98% of bad faith actors correctly, but that’s still 2% of people acting in good faith that you’ll polarize against your cause.
The assumption that trolls are only motivated by a desire for attention and that, if ignored, they will simply go away like frustrated children in massively naive. Trolls are networked and sponsored by states now. They're weaponized. They'll find your address and harass your family. They'll complain about you to your employer. They'll send SWAT teams to your door. And they know that the internet is designed in such a way that as long as they keep spreading their nonsense they'll win by default. A lie can travel around the world twice before the truth laces up its boots, as whomever said.
That rule was fine when the internet was nothing but nerds LARPing on USENET and there were no stakes to anything but personal ego, but it isn't enough anymore. The internet is real life now.
None of this is a silver bullet fix for the overall problem threatening society, but I doubt there is one, the only solution is for enough people to figure this out and start insisting on a better form of discourse in their own sphere of influence.
The pollution of the public square in recent years has prompted me to put more energy into actively managing my personal network, where I can maintain standards. Participating in social media is like fishing in a polluted river. You might find a good fish, reel them in, and transfer them to your pond. But usually you won't, and overall the ROI of this stuff is pretty low. (In places where it has declined the most, like Facebook, the platform's user engagement is declining too.)
I've started to feel that it might be my answer to "The Hamming Question." [0]
I'm a burnt out software engineer. Do you have any advice on careers to explore to work on the above societal issue?
[0]: > Mathematician Richard Hamming used to ask scientists in other fields "What are the most important problems in your field?" partly so he could troll them by asking "Why aren't you working on them?" and partly because getting asked this question is really useful for focusing people's attention on what matters.
A less extreme person arguing in good faith probably has many other things in his/her life to worry about, like children/parents/work/neighbours etc.
While bad faith actors often have much less distractions, and can more easily afford to just keep the point going. I think a bad faith actor will relative easy force out more moderate/normal people out of the forum or conversation thread. Why keep going, if you got a family and work and .. to take cary about, and arguing in good faith will be hard to get anywhere good ?
I think this give a much bigger loudspeaker to people with more extrem views, and help shut up people with more moderate positions. I suspect the the setup of social media and the tools they use, and the tools within forums influence this.
Engagement is probably increased if such extreme versus moderate is argued, and I think the more extreme position win is likely increasing income for social media.
NOTE: All signs of good faith communication can be "faked" in bad faith.
Basically, in modern online mob communication, the winning side defines what "good faith" and "bad faith" are. The winning side defines a vague code of conduct, cloaks themselves in "goodness" and then openly uses the "bad faith" slander against anyone who disagrees on any issue (even purely technical ones).
Rather, I consider vaguer rules like "don't be a jerk" to be a feature, and one can use context clues to see what the community considers jerkiness
This is what I'm most tired of. Anytime you try to point this out one of these two groups will respond with, "both sides, both sides" like some edgy teenager sitting at the lunch table looking for a confirmatory laugh from their friends. People love this world that's developed to some degree; that's what the real uphill battle is.
I'm not complaining about people making both sides arguments.
it both disengages you from the situation while also calling out the bad faith actors.
The choices critically depend upon context:
1. Is the dispute one-to-one, or is there an audience? With skill, you may be able to turn the opinion of a reasonable audience against your bad-faith interlocutor.
2. Is disengaging a practical option, or are you compelled to continue the discussion under threat of yet more unpleasant consequences?
So, I'd say that's 2*2=4 "game" scenarios, each fundamentally distinct.
Obviously it would be ideal to model the behavior that we'd like to see in the world, but what if this toothpaste can't be put back into the tube? Brandolini's Law suggests that this might be a cultural "innovation" akin to the invention of gunpowder.
Good faith communication is not the norm in bureaucracies, institutions, large cities, and other environments where there are no significant or collective consequences to being misleading.
I believe that good faith communication dominates in ingroup discussion. Trust matters when you discuss with peers whose approval matters to you. Bad faith communication dominates in outgroup discussion. Trust is not important as you really don't care about the "others".
So I wonder how much of the appearance of bad faith is because the people won't or aren't sometimes allowed to even share their personal perspective and experience.
I would argue that nearly all advertisements fit this description. The field of advertising has achieved a massive technological leap over the past few decades.
In reality, we are in a world where there is absolutely 0 reason to be arguing in good faith for anything you truly care about. The most effective way you convince people of something is using all of the bad faith tactics listed here - you get no bonus points from the audience for avoiding these, since a very small amount of people are willing to say something about it, and by avoiding these tactics you are just letting your opponents use them to gain an upper hand.
If there is something you truly care about, something that you think swaying general opinion could make a real difference in your life, arguing in "good faith" is foolish.
Tragedy of the commons right here.
Yes, in times of war the truth and with it good faith communication is one of the first things to go. This is a symptom, not a cause of war.
The view that every conflict can be solved by good faith communication in a for both sides acceptable manner is insane.
If one side wants to murder all people with a certain intrinsic attribute be it race, sexual orientation or whatever and the other side does not want to be murdered, there is no compromise to be made. The people of the first group will never engage in good faith with the later group that they view as subhuman. Any attempt to establish good faith communication will only HURT the later group.
Facebook is suffering a slow death from burning up all it's good will on bad faith money grabs. The news feed could still be the place where people discuss their lives, but close to zero people trust facebook anymore.
Mental note: alexb_ will lie to my face.
>"You mean like the possible tactic of not posting an open exhortation to lie and be cruel, so as to maintain beneficial optics?"
"..."
You played yourself.
You have said you don't care what I think, but I have little certitude to believe you really mean that, so I will say it; I think you are totally lost until you back up and reconsider this line of reasoning.
Also, humans are not 100% rational agents.
Ends don't justify means. On the contrary, if the only way to achieve some end are nefarious means, it's a very strong signal that the end itself is not as desirable as it seems.
Most times, people sell their souls only to find later that they can't get what they paid for.
If you disagree with me then you are evil and on the wrong side of history and I will summon a mob against you. ;-)
Now it’s very easy to find a large safe space to discuss these beliefs and organize without social ridicule. And by doing so, it becomes easier for others to join in.
We have lost the power of the shun. Cancelling is the awkward and unwieldy big brother version. It’s not nearly as effective.
The bad faith is more about how the communication is done and the end goals
> Both ends of the political spectrum (the far left and the far right) express this view. Both sides believe that “the other side” simply can’t be trusted and therefore cannot be engaged in good faith.
I find it unfortunate that they blame this behaviour only on the extremes, because it is prevalent amongst moderates who often even state "you can't discuss/negotiate with extremists" and engage in bad faith communications towards the extremes.
Some quotes that resonated:
> There should be no illusion: today’s culture war cannot be won by any side.
> Good faith communication is both a complex skill and a value commitment that shapes personal identity. In other words: doing it is sufficiently difficult that getting good at it will change the kind of person that you are.
> Delicately transforming a situation of escalating bad faith requires the slow establishment of previously unrecognized shared interests, often on issues as basic as self-preservation. The goal in most cases is not agreement—that would be naive—the goal is simply to preserve the possibility of communication itself.
Also learned the term "steelmanning," which seems to be pretty much identical to the hacker news guideline:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
This essay also does a good job of explaining the concept: https://mypeculiarblog.com/2021/11/07/what-is-steelmanning/
This entire article is buzzword trash, using terminology such as "post-truth" and statements such as "Seeking to understand others and communicate honestly is an essential democratic virtue".
The article should go deeper with that MAD line of thought. A step forward is a strategic arms limitation treaty, where all the sides agree to ban the most effective forms of propagation.
The goal would be to put back the steer of our ship into the water, bit by bit.
Once one side renounces good faith communication, the other sees no point in maintaining communication in good faith, so they throw it away too. So the problem isn’t communicating in bad faith. By the time you’ve gotten there, the battle for good faith communication was already lost.
The problem is pride, plain and simple. If people could detach themselves from their views and not make being wrong anything more than that, then we could once again open the door to good faith communication.
Human nature is that of a predator. Powerful get advantage of the weak, and always has been.
Take for example the USA, it was created by the "expansion" to the West, "expansion" meaning taking ownership of the land others inhabited, and killing them. That needed a propaganda machine to justify it, Manifest destiny.
There were two parties, one won, the other lost. We are not mentioning slavery.
When the US could take advantage of the remains of the Spanish Empire, they did, there was a man called Pulitzer that became rich and famous inventing lies like "remember the Maine"(probably a false flag attack) in order to take control of their colonies and colonize it themselves.
Germans and French tried to do the same. England, Russia, Turkey and Spain did that before, because it is human nature.
Pulitzer never wrote about the US extermination of Spanish teachers in Philippines for example, like modern Media did not inform about the abuses in US created wars like Libya, Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan.
Media owners today have lots of business to do, they need the masses to support them.
Most democrats were ok calling Trump Putin's puppy with no proof(because they hated the guy and benefited from removing a President using lies if necessary) and then Trump did the same thing with them(accusing them without proof of stealing the elections).
The first thing you have to do in order to be free is to read, and not see the world divided in good and bad guys, because if you do you always will consider yourself in the good guys, even when you are the bad side. Then there will be no difference between you and the rest.
I wish they'd repeat it with new participants. I'm not sure which politicians I can imagine taking part though. It does seem like we've declined from the level of discourse shown there.
https://www.learner.org/series/the-constitution-that-delicat...
Like it or not, believe it or not, this is true of all actors. (In the USA) it's not just Team Red, or Team Blue. Both have become masters of the slight of information hand (i.e., propaganda).
If you choose to go binary and take sides then at least try to avoid hyprocricy and hold your side to the same standards you hold the other.
At the moment, bad faith comms and hyprocricy go hand in hand.
Why so much friendly fire? It is hard to imagine we can truly heal discourse across a political divide when we cannot even do nice to our neighbors on the spectrum.
Good performance is team effort, bad performance is 100% individual. Seems to create incentives similar to an ultimatum game. If you work together you get nothing, the only strategy that will serve your own interest, is to step on other people.
Tribalism (and thus trust) is the deeper issue, and is unfortunately deeply rooted in human nature.
I think that the problems arising with tribalism can be seen as a drawback to diversity.
And to a degree and in some contexts (particularly work/in a company), c.) under too much time pressure to take the time to understand. (I.e., too little time is available to them; the dysfunction is higher up the ladder…)
I'd strike this phrase, because it's far from clear what the "far left" is. Is it wealthy Silicon Valley liberals with radical ideas about gender? Or is it for instance the trotskyist World Socialist Web Site, which buy Russian false flag conspiracy claims but are free speech absolutists? And "far right", are we talking about Ayn Rand fans, neo-traditionalist catholic populists like JD Vance etc, or neonazi militias?
Last of all, is the political center necessarily more honest or devoted to good faith public debate? Not that I can see. Their strategies can be different, since they can get away with just never acknowledging disagreement, which makes little sense for small fringes, but there's nothing inherently honest or good-willed about centrism.
Below the line: Closed, Defensive, Committed to being right.
Credit: Jim Dethmer, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
>wow if only you just were good faith and were able to engage with these people!
They are fundamentally opposed to everything I stand for. I don't think communication is possible. Maybe there are unaligned or uniformed people that are still to pick, but the only solution is actually building a better society, and one side winning.
I'm not saying that no elements of the left operate in bad faith, or that elements of the right do not operate in good faith. I'm saying that (as the saying goes) reality has a liberal bias, and the question is not "how do we fix the discourse," but rather "how do we fix what conservatives have deliberately done to the discourse."
1: this has been explicitly admitted: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)
(As opposed to wasting time on superficial contradictions, reductio ad absurdum variations, and other hazards of bad faith conflicts.)
I believe this is the case, and core reason is that we are increasingly in the slow-growth world. Most people will not benefit greatly from overall progress of economy in their lifetime, just because it is now too slow. It's more and more about taking over something for "us" from "them" as opposed to "making the pie bigger".
Same is the reason for rise of dictatorship. In a slow-growth world, there is no way a democratic government or leader can achieve any tangible goals in one electoral cycle. So they have to resort to bullshit of one sort or the other - nothing which is not a deliberate lie, can be attractive enough to their voters. Only a lifelong dictatorship can hope to get things done.
One hope is that once the renewable energy takes over from the fossil fuels and we start seeing our worldwide energy base grow exponentially again the way it did through mid-1970s, quicker growth will return and things will gradually fix themselves.
It was only later that it came to be (mis?)applied toward organized disinformation campaigns.
However I think that like art, trolls can use a lie to tell the truth. My preferred example is James Randi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi, see also the documentary An Honest Liar). You might say that his goal was not to provoke a reaction, but given the repeated humiliations of the conman he exposed I beg to differ.
Personally I like to tell the exact opposite of the truth that nobody knows or most people ignore but would make them change their mind. For instance, it is known vaccines are used to only prevent hospitalizations.
The root problem is: the 90% of people who are not inherently driven by curiosity want to contribute/validate their viewpoint/seek peer confirmation.
This, left alone, leads to nothing good, which is why we came up with this funny concept of "culture".
But culture is dead, courtesy of
* the social-laissez-faire-boogaloo of the US' concept of "total freedom"
* the decay of stability-providing social structures
* existential dread/people trapped in the lower levels of Maslows pyramid
Imagine how smart the smartest people out of one million are. Pretty smart, huh? We have 7000 of them, and they have lots of things to say, but nobody gives a fuck, because people don't actually seek to understand. They seek validation, righteousness and stability. And you don't have to be the smartest out of a million to be worth listening to, but the simple fact that our "culture" (which is decayed to complete archaic groupthink) sets up the wrong reward incentives should paint a clear picture and be accessible to understand for everyone. Its not that stupid people get famous, its that people who are not curious get famous. That is where we fail.
The answer to this must be culture, again. But this time one that matches the world we've built since the last one collapsed, namely one that provides the stability people seek across the board. When the framework for that stability was religion, critically relevant people could not find social stability when they questioned god. That's why religion as a framework sucks, it doesn't capture the entire group.
The solution is easy: curiosity. Curious people are worth listening to, everyone else is not. This is something we have to cement in every piece of art and work we create. Literally: show the people who's minds are trapped in a simpler place their limits, very gently, and offer salvation: man, there are lots of intelligent people out there who try to make the world a better place. You don't have to understand it all, and you wont anyway, so don't stress yourself. We can do this, together. This, roughly, is the rhetoric picture we'll have to paint over the last decades. That, and only that, fixes the problem at its root.
>Curious people are worth listening to, everyone else is not
Exhibit B:
>The answer to this must be culture
>The solution is easy: curiosity.
It's an interesting model, but there's a serious contradiction here. You're claiming curiosity to be the 1-to-1 justification for being given an audience, yet making dogmatic assertions and setting out a viewpoint-driven agenda - you are not curious about curiosity, you dive right into how to . Therefore there must be a value that makes a non-curious person with a viewpoint-driven agenda (in this case, you) worth listening to.
For brevity, the "90% of people who... want to contribute/validate their viewpoint/seek peer confirmation" can be more or less labelled "vainglorious".
I think you're right about vainglory leading to nothing good. But, the hope of enacting that "something good" that there should be instead is the real reason to listen to non-curious people. And most everyone hopes to enact "something good", so now we're back where we started, listening to ideologues, be they curious or not.
My suggestion is to modify the model by instead seeking to listen to people who are not vainglorious. I think finding people who aren't vainglorious to listen to, and finding out how to not be vainglorious myself is the right direction to point my curiosity.
There is nothing you can do at this point on an individual level in 90% or more of interactions where you are in a political or social disagreement with someone using good faith communication without it being used to crucify you and be seen as naive, uninformed or apathetic. People have not arrived to their own opinions based on good faith communication or information, they have found themselves there through over socialization, indoctrination, bullying, media bombardment, and fear of not being part of the in-group that they are told are on the right side of history - and so they can only operate on that level of thought and "reasoning". Entitled "activists" and cultural busy bodies aren't going to suddenly find a viewpoint that has been deemed to them by authoritative figures (professors, celebrities, peer group majorities) as the views of an "SJW", "Nazis", "Fascists", "Rednecks", or "Libtards" as a suddenly viable option without suffering massive cognitive dissonance and you showing humility for/steelmanning their opinions will not change that, it will only further cement things for them if they are even listening and not just waiting for you to finish in order to pop the cork off their next manufactured talking point.
Its almost like communication is a complex subject and boiling it down to a binary good/bad state is an utterly reductionist way of thinking.
1. Euphenisms: "Tactical military operation" invent all kinds of word games that hide the true nature of actions committed.
2. Mirroring: Blaming the victim for doing the same thing you are already guilty of.
3. Hate speech: Saying you are a Nazi (or otherwise a bad person, insert any emotionally effective, hard to defend against bad word here) and therefore deserve to be murdered/silenced.
Which also makes me question which comes first: authoritarianism and oppression, or the collapse of speech to these kinds of low levels.
I was really confused about what the author’s actual experience was like until I realized that this was published by some sort of think tank. This whole article is basically a big bongrippy, chin stroking hand-wave about the importance of Decorum.
Props to whoever got paid money to write this silly piece. Whoever is funding this stuff clearly has too much money to interface with reality and it’s a good thing that they’re (hopefully) being fleeced to the max by writers that are happy to churn out drivel
For example, liberals are generally agitating for greater democratic freedoms, or in non-democratic societies, at least freedom from oppression. Conservatives are, as the name suggests, generally dissatisfied with the pace of change, and in favor of maintaining current power structures. Also, revolutions are generally presaged by exactly the kind of breakdowns in communication described here. Increased polarization, unwillingness to give the 'other side' any kind of a political win, even if it's beneficial for everyone, etc.
So yeah, while I could see that digital communication might have been a catalyst for our current situation, for the most part this all looks very familiar. And as the article describes, the likely result doesn't look good.
Consider that in 2008, a majority of the country opposed gay marriage, but in 2022, a majority support and it is considered completely unacceptable to advocate for a return to the old order. That's what victory looks like. Consider too that in 1990, a majority of the country was still against interracial marriage. Today, those same people would probably deny they ever felt that way, maybe even convincing themselves of that lie. That's what winning looks like.
Today, a biological male can win women's sports competitions and a five year old can be recognized as transsexual. A robust majority of the country opposes it, but everyone outside of Republican electoral politics[1] is scared to put their face to any opposition to it. This is starting to look like final victory.
[1] And even then, many Republican governors have vetoed bills that would ban this.
There is also research that shows suicide rates for transgender people are far higher than the general population—except for those who receive acceptance for their gender identity from childhood, in which case the difference is drastically reduced. And that's not hard for me to believe. Try imagining yourself in that position. You're a young boy, but for some reason you're in a girl's body. You know that's not right, but no one believes you, and instead they pressure you to act the part of someone you're not, and imply (or outright state) that there's something wrong with you for feeling otherwise. That's got to be a tough life. Contrast that with the same initial condition: you're a boy in a girl's body. But instead your parents and other people you trust understand and tell you that's OK and there are lots of other people experiencing the same thing, and if you're confident you want to live as a boy (or vice-versa the whole thing, obviously) then of course you can do that and they'll help. Sounds a hell of a lot better to me.
I realize the gender transition thing was beside your main point; you just seemed like a reasonable person with a differing view who might be open to my perspective there. I wouldn't expect you to change your mind based on an anecdote from a random stranger, but I hope you'll keep it in mind. FWIW I'm more sympathetic to your other example: trans athletes are a difficult issue IMO. In general I wouldn't want transgender people to be deprived of any of the rights anyone else of the same gender would have. I think bathroom bans are ridiculous and cruel for instance. But in the context of sport, there is also a legitimate concern regarding fairness for other athletes. I honestly don't know what the best outcome is there, but I do think it's something reasonable people should be able to discuss without being vilified.
Did you? I don’t recall “knowing” my truer gender from age 4. That’s something that I took years to grow into, and didn’t become a question at the fore of my mind until teenage years.
And I guess that's what I don't understand about those who find transgender kids implausible. From what I can tell, the vast majority of transgender people will tell you they became aware of it in early childhood. Why would they lie? I can't come up with a speculation that doesn't sound like an absurd straw man.
* "We" had a weak sense of our true gender at age 4
* "We" have a strong sense of our true gender now
* Transgender people had a strong sense of their true gender at age 4
> From what I can tell, the vast majority of transgender people will tell you they became aware of it in early childhood. Why would they lie? I can't come up with a speculation that doesn't sound like an absurd straw man.
I think it would strengthen your argument if everyone who had a strong sense of being transgender at age 4 maintained that sense into adulthood. I don't know how one would find that out though.
Per the original comment here though, I hope it doesn't happen by one 'side' winning and beating the other into submission, but rather through that process of understanding.
1. There is no truth; everything is relative. Therefore anyone who becomes convinced of anything (even if rationally so!) and remains in a debate is a bad actor.
2. People who disagree can continue to debate forever, forever doubting their own positions and maintaining a willingness to change to the other side. The debate is just a game; there are no consequences as to who is right or wrong, therefore anyone who believes they have "skin in the game" is like a child who gets carried away with a game.
3. Because the truth is relative, and debates are just a game with no consequences, whenever some claim of truth is used to establish guidelines regarding behavior claimed to be harmful to the world, that is just an unproven suggestion: those who are not convinced of the debate should be free to carry on as they wish. The slightest coercion in this constitutes totalitarianism more befitting of North Korea than a constitutional democracy.
Note how many of the examples of the "Common Strategies of Bad Faith Communication", those that are not about general poor debating tactics anyone uses, are drawn from the behavior of some of those whose belief is based on rational information, e.g. from science. The list is not balanced by mentioning the specific strategies of other side: such as
- the willingness to reject a mountain of evidence (e.g. as "fake") against one's view in order to cling to a teaspoon supporting one's view.
- making up statements and believing in them
- referring to irrelevant authorities.
- general disdain for learning and intellect.
This article is a manifesto for those who want to be forever doubting facts, and forever to be treated with silk gloves, forever to be implored to think, forever to require extraordinary effort on the part of others to find ways to convince. And most importantly: forever to be excused from following any inconvenient rules for avoiding harm, out of the utmost respect for one's non-acceptance of an argument.
"Rules are based in truth. Truth is relative, therefore, the rules have no validity; I will conform to them if you find a way to convince me you're right (which is unlikely to ever happen) but please always behave toward me without a hint of contempt while you choose to engage me. An acceptable 'end game' of a debate is that we 'agree to disagree' with the utmost debating respect, and go our separate ways without changing any behavior that is contingent on the content of the debate."
Also, I would add the following as a genuine bad-faith strategy in online debating:
Posting key arguments not as plain text, but images of text from which excerpts cannot be easily quoted without retyping or OCR tools.*
> Calls for good faith communication are understood at best as naive requests to calm the outrage and conflict that now runs rife in political discourse. Both ends of the political spectrum (the far left and the far right) express this view. Both sides believe that “the other side” simply can’t be trusted and therefore cannot be engaged in good faith.
This phenomenon exists, it permeates the spectrum. However, the use of the word "far" here sticks in my craw. It implies, without outright suggesting, that the center is the reasonable referee, rather than existing on a spectrum that has a history. What is center today may very well have been "far left" or "far right" 40 years ago, and its relative distance from other ideologies is irrelevant when it comes to objectivity. You have a home base. It's not just "Liberalism". No one is a contentless unit of democratic formalism.
> Given well-documented advances in the field of information warfare, there should be no illusion: today’s culture war cannot be won by any side. Mutually assured destruction is now the name of the wargame.[6] The saturation of bad faith communication throughout culture is steadily increasing, like a kind of dangerous background radiation emitted from scientifically engineered memetic weaponry. Public political discourse is quickly becoming a toxic warzone, leaching externalities into families, friendships, and identity structures.
"Culture war" is a slur for a particular kind of vitriolic discourse, but it is in fact a war over what we consider the common good. In other words--politics. This is the meat and potatoes of democracy. Liberalism says the state shouldn't have an opinion on it. The "common good" is what we all agree it is. People will disagree. So then it stands to reason that whoever has the most influence (defined as broadly as you'd like) gets to decide what the common good is. This war has high stakes.
This also smuggles in the notion that so-called information warfare has in fact warped political outcomes, which is far from being well-documented. The cause->effect sequence is not established. But let's say it is--who are the actors, and why are they doing it? Those motivations have political causes. What are they? Or is misinformation just metastasized communication, chaotic irruptions that happens over a long enough time scale?
Overall, this presents a primarily formal and cultural diagnosis of political chaos and fracture as the root cause, couched in objective language, when that is itself an ideological position. There are other analyses. One might argue that the fractured discourse is an effect, not a cause, but it's taken for granted that _formal_ misbehavior is the cause of the fractious political atmosphere, rather than... well, anything else, I guess. Substitute your favorite diagnosis here.
It's fine to have this analysis. It's not fine to pretend it's anything but an ideological, non-objective analysis. I get the impulse to try to rise above the fray. Politics is ugly, but it's ugly because the stakes are so high. Getting lost in the weeds of formal objections isn't going to fix anything. There's more going on than just procedural fuck ups.
Just my take. I might be imbuing this article with the sins of similar pieces it doesn't commit (although I don't think so), but I think this tendency is common enough that it's worth bringing up. It happens fairly often on HN. Nerds love rules. I'm no exception.
My strategy in general for taking in ideas is to simply pick and choose the bits that seem interesting and productive, and internally reinterpret those parts to remove the author's biases and excessions that don't seem relevant.
This tends to cause issues when I share things like this article though, people often seem to prefer to interpret the tone of the piece as a whole, and that overall or initial reading colours their view of the individual ideas that were espoused, making it harder for me and them to have a productive discussion about it.
The culture wars or the neoliberalism stuff is over. It's surprising how many still believe this is happening. Culture wars ended 2009-2014 or so.
>Bad faith communication has become normalized.
Before social media we had newspapers and when tv news came along they were extremely regulated. Bad faith was the standard. The newspapers publish lie after lie and they got away with it for decades if not centuries.
>When open communication cannot be used to resolve conflict and coordinate behavior, societies are driven towards chaos, war, oppression, and authoritarianism.
Everyone knows this, it is diplomacy/talking that ends wars. The entities like Twitter who are censoring communication under false pretense knows they are breaking this rule. They also understand their objective and how this is their intention.
>There should be no illusion: today’s culture war cannot be won by any side.
The author needs the realization is that the culture war is over. They need to analyze and discover who was the victor.
Let me show the battles:
Climate Change: would you say we are doing much of anything for climate change? Even fake efforts like carbon taxes that dont do anything?
Gamergate: would you say mandolorian boob armor was a problem?
BLM: Fundamentally police brutality and racism is a problem but did BLM achieve anything? Are there any defunding police? Did the democrats pass anything?
Comicsgate: Did red skull jordan peterson really work out?
LGBT: Dave Chapelle put an end to that one single handed. LGBT can rejoice.
UBI/MMT: Just tried it in limited fashion. Nobody seriously bringing this up anymore.
White fragility: Yep, white people are all racists. We totally need to teach that to our children.
There's 1 side who won basically all of those in the end. When you lose battle after battle during the culture war. You eventually lose.
What happened is in their failure they became a religion. There are now heresies and the heretics must burn. You must pay penance for your sinning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_church_burnings
None of those church fires ever got investigated by police.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/horrible-attack-catholi...
I have never seen the government arrest so many religious leaders in my life. Our law in canada explicitly makes it illegal for police to arrest clergyman.
"arrest of officiating clergyman" is a crime that police are subject to, yet you can watch video on youtube of police breaking this law.
None of this is surprising. It's a new religion, new religions normally look to destroy their competitor religion.
Ooo, I feel really frustrated by the labeling of them as good or bad faith communication. In their box explaining good faith communication, they say that all those behaviors can be faked if someone is engaging in bad faith communication, so it leaves me wondering how does one actually know whether another or oneself is using good faith communication? I think this harkens back to the discussion on here the other day about always assume good intentions. After reading this article, I almost left it feeling more hopeless, as if it were saying most people communicate with bad intention (bad faith) and by using good and bad as labels, further ingrains the concept of binary good/evil, falling somewhat into a "bad faith" aspect of black/white polarizing categorization.
However, I feel grateful that they started this conversation and overall address the challenge that we have in communicating to resolve conflict. I personally believe they could simplify their good/bad faith classification by focusing more on how open people are communicating about what they're feeling and thinking and how open people are to hearing/imagining how others are feeling and thinking. I think underlying much of their distinction between good/bad faith is an element of more open or more closed, and that such language, especially with the more qualifier included, may not carry such connotations of good/bad.
I feel very confident that one of the largest challenges we face as a society is how to communicate more openly with each other—to say how we feel and think—when anything we say can be shared around the world, recorded, aggregated, etc.
Even after writing this, the idea of "good faith" vs "bad faith" communication really irks me lol. I believe most of us communicate out of how we are feeling based on the things that have happened and are happening in our lives and we are trying our best. In that way, I assume even the people acting in "bad faith" are acting out of "good faith" and perhaps that's the main issue I have with this. I have found assuming people to have good faith even if they and others assume they have bad faith, can drastically improve how I feel in conversations, relationships, and resolving conflict.
By what goal is to be achieved. That's how the article defines the two categories. In a nutshell, good faith communication has the goal of mutual understanding, whether it leads to "agreement" or to the other person doing what you want or not. Bad faith communication has the goal of getting the other person to do what you want, by hook or by crook.
> After reading this article, I almost left it feeling more hopeless, as if it were saying most people communicate with bad intention (bad faith)
I don't think that's true, nor do I think it was the intent of the article. I think most people try to communicate with good faith. But in the world now, with instant mass communication, the small minority of people who do communicate in bad faith can often dominate the communication process. I think one way of looking at the question the article is asking is how that can be fixed.
> I assume even the people acting in "bad faith" are acting out of "good faith"
As above, it's a matter of the goal the person is trying to achieve, not whether or not the person is sincere in their goal. I think most people who communicate in bad faith are perfectly sincere. They may even believe that they are doing something good by getting other people to do things those other people would not choose to do if they were communicated with in good faith.
I do think, though, that the choice of "good faith" and "bad faith" labels does have a reasonable basis: communicating with people to get them to do what you want by hook or by crook, not by convincing them through reasoned argument but just by manipulating them in whatever way works, is not a good thing to do. Even if you think you're doing it to achieve a good goal, human history shows that we humans don't work that way: we can't be trusted to use bad means to achieve good ends.
But who defines what the goal is? I guess I'm confused as if this is more about a self-reflection question: "Am I trying to come to mutual understanding with this person or trick them into doing what I want?" Or is it about asking this of others: "Are they trying to come to a mutual understanding or trick me into getting what they want?" I think in conflict, very very often we can assume we have good intentions and the other has bad intentions. I'd argue that's one of the most commom things I see in conflict: "I'm trying my best and they don't care about me, they only care about themselves," said by both sides.
> I don't think that's true, nor do I think it was the intent of the article. I think most people try to communicate with good faith.
I hear you and appreciate that. I may have got wrapped up in the frustration I was feeling towards the categorization and exaggerated how much they were assuming that, so thank you for providing your perspective.
> But in the world now, with instant mass communication, the small minority of people who do communicate in bad faith can often dominate the communication process. I think one way of looking at the question the article is asking is how that can be fixed.
Ah, I guess what I took from the article was less that they were asking a question and more they were giving an answer. Maybe I misread the amount of certainty they had in presenting of the solution or maybe I disagreed with the certainty they had in describing what was the specific problem.
As for how to resolve such things, I've often wondered if the solution is for many of us to communicate more openly and loudly. I remember watching a news report on a pharmaceutical sales guy who I think sold painkillers and it seemed to me that he was so focused on making a ton of money because he was quite emotionally numb or lonely. I think so many of us don't open up emotionally to others and start thinking others are out to get us and don't care about us so we preemptively try to get them and not care about them, further distancing and closing ourselves off from them and even ourselves.
The person doing the communication. So if that's you, you ask yourself the self-reflection question. If it's the other person, you have to try to figure out what their goal is in communicating with you: are they trying to achieve mutual understanding, or are they trying to get you to do what they want by hook or by crook?
Of course any actual conversation is two-way, so you need to ask both questions.
I guess I just think it's a really hard problem to definitively know whether I or someone else has such intentions and goals, so I often default to assuming that even if their or my behavior appears to be trying to manipulate, that underneath there may be something wanting mutual understanding, or actually, connection. I have seen so many conflicts resolve in my life when I have the courage to go deep enough to foster that connection. I got covid a few weeks ago and this woman called me weak and a baby and other things...then I found out a week later that she was struggling very hard with her relationship and broke up with her long-term boyfriend. So the name calling, which hurt and angered me in the moment, later revealed itself as stemming from deep pain she was feeling and maybe even the same language she was using towards herself as she struggled to make the decision.
So I just don't know how easy it is to figure out these intentions.
In the case of the woman you describe, I don't think she falls into either category we've been discussing. She was just expressing her own pain. I don't think every single human interaction has to fall within one of the two categories we've been discussing ("good faith communication" or "bad faith communication".)
> So in the case of your ex, I would say she was engaging in bad faith communication (though possibly without consciously being aware she was doing so).
I think it's mostly the label of "bad faith" that frustrates me. I don't like the communication techniques that she used, but I still question how it could be "bad faith" if she doesn't believe she's acting in bad faith. It's almost as if she believed I was communicating in bad faith. So bad faith communication is assuming the other is communicating in bad faith? I don't mean to run in circles, I really just don't think labeling communication as bad faith will help me resolve most conflicts.
You can re-label it if you don't like the label. To me, if a person is trying to manipulate you, the label "bad faith" is not unjustified. But if that label doesn't work for you, pick another one.
> I still question how it could be "bad faith" if she doesn't believe she's acting in bad faith.
Because people's intentions and beliefs are not the same as their actions and the actual impact of those actions on others. It should be the case that if we have good intentions, we take good actions and our actions have good impact on others. But unfortunately it isn't always the case.
(Note also that I only said your ex "possibly" didn't realize that she was being manipulative. It's also quite possible that she did.)
Yes, I agree if the person is trying to manipulate you then it'd make sense to label their intentions as bad faith. I guess I choose to believe that people have good intentions even underneath their bad intentions because I feel more at ease and less afraid that way.
> Because people's intentions and beliefs are not the same as their actions and the actual impact of those actions on others. It should be the case that if we have good intentions, we take good actions and our actions have good impact on others. But unfortunately it isn't always the case.
I agree with you that good intentions, or as I'd say, intending to help someone, doesn't always equate to good results, or doesn't mean the person won't feel harmed. I think I get stuck on "bad faith" because from how I understand the phrase, and how the American Heritage Dictionary defines it[0], is "the malicious intention to be dishonest or to violate the law, as in negotiations over a contract." In other words, having bad intentions.
However, as I see the long article on Wikipedia, I'm just realizing that many fields seem to define it differently, from insurance law to Zen Buddhism, to feminism and negotiation theory[1].
EDIT: This has me reflecting on why I'm engaging in this thread. Am I trying to convince you and others that labeling "bad faith" will likely be more harmful and less effective in resolving conflict? If so, am I engaging in "bad faith" communication because I'm trying to convince you of my perspective and not fully understand your perspective? I think I feel very confident in resolving conflict and yet often slip back into such a mindset of trying to "teach" people things, instead of just letting them do what they want to do. In a way, this can be what trips me up the most: I believe I have found ways to communicate that can really help people in conflict, but instead of using those skills with people, I can default into teaching them those skills, even when they don't necessarily want to be taught. With that in mind, I find that some of these conversations on conflict resolution technique frustrate me because it seems that we, the ones who talk about them, often feel very confident in our approaches and may try to convince the others to do it the way that seems to work for us, even if the others don't want to learn.
This thread has helped me realize how I want to get much more intentional about explicitly asking people if they want to learn how I approach conversations and conflict, and creating environments where that consent is more clear to everyone, and in the other spaces doing the skills rather than talking about them.
Was this "bad faith" communication on my part? I think my intention is good in wanting to help people feel more confident in communicating in conflict and resolving it. But perhaps the effect matters more and I still feel lost on the approach they take in their article and maybe that's OK. I keep trying to remind myself: more loving, less saving. I think I have a tendency to jump in and "save" people when they don't necessarily want to be saved.
Anyways, I'm grateful that you went back and forth with me on this and I feel excited to much more express how I'm feeling and how I approach things and explicitly say how it's OK if other people want to do it different ways.
Possibly, but trying to convince other people by making reasoned arguments is good faith communication, not bad faith communication.
> If so, am I engaging in "bad faith" communication because I'm trying to convince you of my perspective and not fully understand your perspective?
Good faith communication doesn't require you to "fully understand" the other person's perspective. Nor does it preclude trying to convince the other person of your perspective. See above.