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zackmdavis  8mo ago (lesswrong.com)   1881 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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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.

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