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zackmdavis  8mo ago (lesswrong.com)   1871 thread views

Assume Bad Faith

lesswrong.com

A short essay about why I don't think "bad faith" is the best ontology for thinking about people having hidden motives during arguments, which I think is more ubiquitous than the term implies.

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Most disagreements of note—most disagreements people care about—don't behave like the concert date or physics problem examples: people are very attached to "their own" answers.

There could be other reasons than hidden motives for that. Consider for example that one of the largest debate here recently was about a completely hypothetical situation involving red/blue pills. Or imagine a technical discussion about some software engineering problem, those can get quite heated too.

So, first of all, sufficiently complex problems tend to be like icebergs, with only a small part being easily communicable, and a lot of underwater assumptions, connections, and intuitions that are personal to you.

For example, if the concerts at that place are always on Thursdays which I know because I'm a regular there, and you have never been there before, I'm sure as hell double checking your claim. Or if your answer to the physics problem is not just different from mine but doesn't make any sense given all other stuff I learned about the problem while working on it, I'm likely to start by asking pointed questions about those discrepancies instead of humbly assuming that one of us just made an arithmetic error somewhere and that could as well be me. And of course in case of software engineering, "your approach is going to suck, I feel it in my bones as a result of decades of experience that I can't just spend years relaying to you here"...

Second, that last example doesn't fit into your model even if it does have an underlying conflict of interest. I can 100% honestly believe that my approach is superior for complicated reasons I can't articulate convincingly enough, and I don't want to waste my time implementing your inferior solution, while you honestly believe and feel the exact opposite. So that seems to be a conflict of interest, but we both can easily be 100% open about it because it's actually driven by a factual disagreement.

That's not to disagree with your main thesis, that there's a lot of "bad faith" arguments, so much that it becomes a counterproductive label. But you're both too optimistic and too pessimistic about that, because there's also a lot of hard to reconcile factual disagreements.

Big fan of your writings.

Just leaving a quick note that I don't understand why you are hosting these in LW rather than in your own site & linking to them. It seems that you don't have that much control over what the LW people do, and e.g., having your own rss would be a good preventative measure.

Thanks. I had made a habit of posting my rationality writing as Less Wrong exclusives (when I was still holding out more hope for the site than I am now). You're right; I should upgrade my personal blog (which is still running WordPress) and have that be the canonical version, but it feels thematically appropriate to wait to change the habit until after I finish my memoir sequence.

If an apple is green, and you tell me that it's red, and I believe you, I end up with false beliefs about the apple. It doesn't matter whether you said it was red because you were consciously lying or because you're wearing rose-colored glasses. The input–output function is the same either way: the problem is that the color you report to me doesn't depend on the color of the apple.

This matters quite a lot because the former leads to me being scammed by someone selling me a granny smith but charging me for a honeycrisp. And the "relationship between your reports and the state of the world" is very much dependent on whether you are scamming or just colorblind.

Perhaps as you point out earlier there is an entire tribe of folks living on land that's suitable only for the granny smith and have coalesced around a beneficial lie that they are indeed honeycrisp. But that takes ages and isn't an extremely probable first interpretation.

Good post, I largely agree with your point. This part in particular is relevant:

If I'm doing full-contact psychoanalysis, the problem with "I don't think you're here in good faith" is that it's insufficiently specific. Rather than accusing someone of generic "bad faith", the way to move the discussion forward is by positing that one's interlocutor has some specific motive that hasn't yet been made explicit---and the way to defend oneself against such an accusation is by making the case that one's real agenda isn't the one being proposed, rather than protesting one's "good faith" and implausibly claiming not to have an agenda.

I get accused of bad faith regularly (whether the accusation is earnest and made in "good faith" is another question) and I agree completely that a naked denial doesn't accomplish anything. Like you, I usually can see what the accusation is based on and so what I do is acknowledge that the suspicion is reasonable (it often is!) and then explain why it's wrong. If I can't see what it's based on, then I ask something along "what could convince you otherwise?" Sometimes there's nothing that could dislodge the truck stuck in the mud, and it's good to know that.

I find that this is a useful approach in everyday personal disagreements too because a lot of them are spawned out of suspicions. If someone shirks on a household chore, maybe it's because they genuinely forgot OR MAYBE it's because they are driven by animus and hatred towards their roommates. If the shirking continues as part of a regular pattern, it's perfectly reasonable for the roommates to become drawn to the latter hypothesis.

To your broader point, accusing someone of bad faith doesn't really accomplish much, and your proposed solutions (just stick to the object level or, in the alternative and if the circumstances warrant it, full-contact psychoanalysis) seem perfectly appropriate.

I get accused of bad faith regularly (whether the accusation is earnest and made in "good faith" is another question) and I agree completely that a naked denial doesn't accomplish anything. Like you, I usually can see what the accusation is based on and so what I do is acknowledge that the suspicion is reasonable (it often is!) and then explain why it's wrong. If I can't see what it's based on, then I ask something along "what could convince you otherwise?" Sometimes there's nothing that could dislodge the truck stuck in the mud, and it's good to know that.

This hits for me, in that I like your reasoning and most of your positions, but every once in a while, and predictably, I'm all like "that motherfucker!", and it's not because I'm frustrated by your argumental wizardry but more that it feels like you are being deliberately obtuse and/or using Dark Arts or just being somehow hypocritical or applying double standards. But really, I think it's just a value difference. We all are hypocritical and apply double standards according to our values.

I love your approach in the latter half of the quoted paragraph. I am also a fan of Rogerian Argument where the objective is to find the largest areas of agreement, push those boundaries as far as possible, and just understand the areas of disagreement and map them out. Accusations and denials are discouraged.

Let's see if we can put what I said into action! I have to sort of read between the lines in your reply but that's part of the exercise.

I sometimes do engage in conduct that can be plausibly described as deceptive, at least temporarily so, so maybe that's what you had in mind? This example from a few months ago matches, where I ran what I called an "experiment" to test if another user was being consistent. I see this as similar to the grievance studies affair hoax, and even defended Matt Walsh securing interviews under false/misleading pretenses. I think the distinction here is that the charade lasts only as long as necessary to make the point, and there's no reason for me to extend it beyond that.

Regarding being deliberately obtuse, I'm not totally sure what would fit but I do frequently ask questions I (likely) already know the answer to. I do this because it would be unfair for me to assume someone holds a position they don't, and also because it's helpful to hear the position articulated by my interlocutor. Without those two aims, I don't see what would be advanced by me just feigning ignorance but if you think I'm doing that, call me out.

I've heard the Dark Arts a few times and it's amusing to me. I don't have any special powers! Especially in writing. I admit that my personality could give me an unfair advantage in a real-time conversation, and I further admit that I have exploited that ability at work to more-or-less verbally browbeat a witness into stumbling over words in court. I wouldn't do that in something like the Bailey, and so far no one I've recorded with has ever accused me of that. My goal in a courtroom isn't truth-seeking, so I have no concerns about deploying the Arts there.

I feel desperately allergic to being hypocritical or applying any double standards, so I would urge you to call me out whenever you see it happening.

Thanks for letting me know about Rogerian Argument :)

Belated appreciation from me. I did not intend my criticism so literally, but this level of honesty is becoming.

Also, I just learned about Dennett's version of Rapoport's rules:

In a summary of Dennett's version of Rapoport's rules, Peter Boghossian and James A. Lindsay pointed out that an important part of how Rapoport's rules work is by modeling prosocial behavior: one party demonstrates respect and intellectual openness so that the other party can emulate those characteristics, which would be less likely to occur in intensely adversarial conditions.

Boghossian and Lindsay (Jimmy Concepts) are practitioners of Rogerian Argument. The aggressive form, but nonetheless an update towards.

If you are in a conversation with an anon here on TheMotte or in a blog comment thread, you should assume good faith, because otherwise, why are you even talking to them? Mutual recriminations of the other person acting in bad faith just make the debate unreadable for everyone else.

On the other hand, if you are trying to figure out why some public intellectual or institution or political figure or political party platform or prominent activist says what they say, you should not assume good faith by default. You should distrust by default, and only believe they are honest if they have proved it over a long time.

I don’t care (much) about the epistemic state of the other posters here. I care about my epistemic state. If I think something is true, often I will post it here to see if there are any good objections. Knowing the faith-status of potential objectors is relevant information — to perform a proper Bayesian update you have to reason about the process that generated the evidence — but a good argument does not become automatically invalid just because the person who posted it is deceitful about their motivation.

It’s a similar situation to steelmanning. Contrary to popular belief, the point of steelmanninng is not to be nice to your opponent. The point is to be epistemically fair to yourself. The only way to do that is to consider the best possible objections to your position. Otherwise you violate conservation of expected evidence.

If you are in a conversation with an anon here on TheMotte or in a blog comment thread, you should assume good faith, because otherwise, why are you even talking to them?

I think there are plenty of potential reasons. A big part of why I participate here is to hone arguments, so in some ways someone arguing against me in bad faith is better for me. I get to test out argumentative tactics against people maximally motivated to find flaws in them.

There is also the audience to consider. If this site is anything like the broader internet, there are at least dozens of lurkers for every commenter. If someone is arguing in bad faith your job (to advance your views/values) becomes a lot easier.

That said I agree it's best to assume good faith, or at least not maximally bad faith.

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