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Comment by bluebarbet | Hacker News Reader

Trite, yes, but personally I'd argue that accusing people of intellectual dishonesty (i.e. bad faith) is by definition unfalsifiable and therefore unproductive. Always.

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I don't agree that it is either unfalsifiable or unproductive. And even if it is unfalsifiable, it's not "by definition"--so often that phrase is misused to add an aura of authority, but there's no tautology here. I find your claims to be self-reflectively unproductive and erroneous.

(I would note that, strictly speaking, my statement is provably false (therefore falsifiable) since by definition nothing can be at setting 11 on an implied scale of 1-10.)

I also take issue with "I'd argue" ... so often that phrase is misused to characterize an assertion with no accompanying argumentation.

Further discussion is unlikely to be productive so I won't comment further.

Comments noted but I always choose my words carefully. The accusation of bad faith is definitionally unfalsifiable. It makes a claim about intention, which - by definition - nobody but the speaker can know.

You seriously don't know what a definition is ... care isn't adequate in the presence of incompetence. Intentions can be inferred ... it's done all the time (and bad faith is not strictly a matter of intention--people can argue in bad faith without a conscious intention of doing so). I've seen this pedantic epistemologically absurd to the point of bad faith argument so many times--"knowing" is not the standard that anyone actually uses for justification of claims--even the common but quite flawed philosophical definition of knowledge as "true justified belief" recognizes that one only needs justified belief, not knowledge--only via god's eye can it be certified that such beliefs are true. And of course Popper's falsifiability does not depend on "knowing" at the epistemic extreme ... again, this is incompetence.

Enough ... now I'm really going silent no matter how much you goad me.

Arguing with someone who is intellectually dishonest is also usually unproductive (unless you know what you're doing and want to convince bystanders). So it's more of a tie.

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