Hacker News Reader

Highly skilled, non-naive good faith communication is successful because it allows you to curate a community of good-faith communicators. Attempting to apply that when talking to bad-faith communicators leads to disaster.

Bad-faith communicators occupy a lot of powerful positions. Perhaps even the large majority.

That sounds right, I can relate to the curation effect. Whether it's another factor promoting success or against it remains to be explored

> 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.

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.

That's funny, my main drive for choosing this strategy is taking account of opportunity costs ie. not wasting time.

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

I'd guess it's, somewhat obviously, strongly context dependent.

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...

I would think that it scales, but that effectively practicing "highly skilled, non-naive good faith communication" is very difficult, and requires a lot of practice and honesty.

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.

Your comment makes me think, I wonder if some of the problem is power imbalances and one off communication leads to bad faith communication being a better strategy.

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.

No matter if you're correct or not, we (society) should really push that narrative.

"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 ;)

Good faith communication was a cornerstone of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. It wasnt just a strategy it was who he was.

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.

I hope your analysis is correct. On a personal level I have found it to work just as you describe, but on a more systemic higher level I am not yet convinced - I hope - but I am sadly not convinced.

For some systems it seems as though a prisoners dilemma develops where communicating in bad faith can give one actor an edge over another.

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.

This general concept is described in the "evolutionarily stable strategies" aspect of game theory.

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).

Yeah, this is understandable. TBH I'm still trying to strengthen the intuition and looking for more clues that it scales.

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.

No I agree again on a personal level. But on a "global" level I can still be worried about the implications of bad faith communication.

Thanks a lot for the book recommendations. I read the intro you linked and it really piqued my interest.

BTW, not sure how much you've lived in or are in contact with people in authoritarian states, but that strategy (being in good fatih in general) most certainly does not lead to more success, on a personal level.

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...

I'm immensely lucky to live a comfortable life in a democratic country. So you're right, there is probably a blindspot here. Good faith sounds definitely more fit for a kinder and more open environment.

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 ??"

Good faith communication is maladaptive on large scale

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

> The honest, good-faith communication would be like…

Perhaps I don’t understand your point, but the experiences of people in the states annexed by the Soviet Union would beg to differ.

We're seeing the opposite play out in real time in Ukraine though. One side tells its soldiers that they are fighting a desperate battle to repel an invading dictator. The other side tells its soldiers that they are going on a training exercise in Belarus, then shoves them across the border telling them they will be welcomed as liberators, then finally switches to some handwavy explanation about nazis. The latter has massively worse morale and battlefield performance than the former.

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.

Ukraine was morally indefensible from the start, as was the Nazi invasion of Europe; with the latter though, they had captured the "hearts and minds" of their own people thanks to over a decade of increasing propaganda. Hitler pulled Germany from an economic downturn post-WW2, and the showy militaristic theming really got people excited. And it still does, but for a much smaller demographic - current-day nazis like the combat boots and flags too.

> Hitler pulled Germany from an economic downturn post-WW2 and the showy militaristic theming really got people excited

You probably meant WWI, but afaik, historians dispute that one. He was not that good in economy.

I t

There are two periods of economic problems in Germany in the 1920's. The first involved economic collapse and hyper inflation in the early 20's immediately after WWI. The second started in 1929 and was a deflationary event. Argument I've seen is the sooner a country got off the gold standard the sooner things improved. Everyone but the French did that. Which is to say the solution wasn't rocket science.

> 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

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.