A well-written article, especially clearly listing out the differences in the forms of communication helped make the point.
But sadly, the people most prone to bad-faith communication are also probably least likely to take this criticism and improve. I have also resorted to bad-faith communications in conversations where it seems like that is the only way to be heard.
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?
I think some other responders have touched lightly on this but I feel it should be explicitly said that sometimes engaging in conversation is not actually what the other party is doing, even though it might look like it.
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.
It’s more basic too. Bad faith redefines the nature of the situation. It’s no longer a conversation and instead a game. And in game theory you have to play on level ground as your opponent. Ie when they go low you have to go low or exit the conversation turned game. “Going high” in modern rhetoric doesn’t actually net strategic advantage.
So maybe that’s insightful. Point out that conversations (unless they’re debates and everyone’s agreed to debate) are not games.
> 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?
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.
Only a tiny percentage of users take part in online discussions . It is important to communicate with bad faith actors so that the overwhelming majority of users who are simply lurkers are exposed to ideas from "the other side". Refusing to engage with bad faith actors is leaving their ideas unchallenged out in the open.
What you’re describing is simply person B not really listening, and if that’s true then it’s pointless to argue the point anyways. Person A is better off sticking with the compromise because it doesn’t cost him/her anything to do so, and hey maybe there’s a very slight chance person B clues in.
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.
I look for this in interviews. Obviously people are typically on best behavior and nervous so liable to make non-meaningful* errors, but I look for humility and openness, hard as it is to find upon such a high pressure and artificial situation. If it does it’s positive.
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.
> 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?
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.
I think to an extent people do this unconsciously, or offenders don't realize their projection onto others is bad faith. It's habit that is mistakenly believed to be a good heuristic. I expect this triggers as they switch to "argument" mode following contradiction, assuming a posture of attacking/defending, casting nuance aside.
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.
I think there's a degree of market segmentation (as it were) when it comes to arguing. The fastest way someone can discredit themselves in my eyes is to be too certain about something. In your example I'd be much more open to someone who admits that their side could be in the wrong than someone who says that it's impossible. Especially where there's not enough evidence for that kind of claim. But you're right that certainty does appeal in other contexts.
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"
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.
But sadly, the people most prone to bad-faith communication are also probably least likely to take this criticism and improve.
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.
I think the biggest problem is cult of personality. Instead of discussing actual issues we focus on elevating or disparaging people. In your example - what is the chance that 'your' politician X is always right?
Isn't that more about drifting meaning of the language? "You might be right" is a common way of actually meaning to say "I reluctantly agree that you're definitely right".
When this happens I generally pause and say something like I just said X, what did you hear? If that doesn't work then I throw out a hypothesis like it sounds like you heard Y, is that right? Once we agree upon what I said and what they heard then I clarify that I don't believe Y, I sincerely believe X.
You can't control the outcome of a conversation, and cynicism goes hand in hand with bad faith. Communication is still the most awesome thing that humans do, or will ever be able to do!
“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"”
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.
Those most likely to have strong disagreements mostly consist of politically engaged liberals at 6-8% of the population and politically engaged conservatives at 6-8% of the population. Because of this a more accurate representation of what is going on is that persons A and B disagree strongly with persons C and D and persons E through Z really wish that persons A through D would find some middle ground that all can live with even if they harbor objections. In this larger context it may make sense to call out bad faith communication and engage in good faith communication for the benefit of the larger population who get dragged into political conflicts.
Here's an alternative ending: what if good faith communication was superior to bad faith in a systemic way ?
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
It would be great for people who desire good faith communication to call out people who are resorting to bad faith techniques. Especially, and most importantly, when those bad actors are of the same political stripe.
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.
There are, in my opinion, two problems with that. The first is that it is very, very difficult for most people to view their own side objectively. The Russel conjugation comes to mind; "I am a freedom fighter, you are a rebel, he is a terrorist." The other problem is that often, calling out your own side's bad behavior feels like treachery. "When arguments become soldiers, to criticize your own sides' points is to stab your fellows in the back." Anyone who engages in that kind of criticism is likely to be ostracized as a traitor well before their criticisms are taken seriously. See, for example, the Hundred Flowers Campaign. I believe the book Scout Mindset by Julia Galef discusses ways around the first problem (I have not personally read the book), with the main thrust being that this is exceptionally difficult to train oneself to do and a mostly personal endeavor. For the second problem, I have no idea except to aspire to groups that welcome self-criticism.
I would think "calling out" is, or often takes the form of, exactly the type of bad faith communication that this article is trying to argue against (possibly categorised under "Undue social pressure" or "Villainization").
Engaging in a good-faith argument, especially with those you often agree with, yes. "Calling out" - I'd be hesitant about that.
I agree that it’s important for your own side to call out bad faith communication as much as possible. Scrutiny of your own sides arguments helps improve your position and intellectual honesty.
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.
I agree with this, but in spaces where bad faith is the predominant form of communication, you'll probably be accused of being a centrist for not falling exactly in line.
I'd say it slightly different: I hope that we can have the courage to tell the people closest to us when their behaviors make us feel angry or disgusted or ashamed.
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.
One of the things about call out culture is that it can be an extremely potent weapon for bad faith actors to silence everyone else. Thus stiffling vital dissent and making organizations stupid. In the recent Atlantic, there is an article by Jonathan Haidt that argues precisely that.
Looking at past results, I would not encourage call out culture further.
This is consistently what Glenn Greenwald has done and the smear campaign against him by the DNC and liberal establishment has taken him from a world famous Oscar and Pulitzer prize winning journalist to a pariah and supposed Russian right wing shill, kicked out of the organization he founded, The Intercept.
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.
To say nothing of communication issues caused by social media users themselves, the platforms can have built-in miscommunication. For example, on reddit your removed comments are shown to you as if they are live, as shown here [1]. You can try it yourself in r/CantSayAnything [2].
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.
This "feature" of Reddit has always really bothered me. Who is Reddit helping when a user's comment is removed but they're tricked into thinking it's still up?
I am a pretty big advocate for good faith communication and think the article is right that it is necessary. The thing that disheartens me though, is the asymmetric nature of the problem: good faith communication is hard. It takes time and patience. Bad faith communication is easy. You can write 20 bad faith drive by comments in the time it takes to post one thoughtful reply. And due to the wide open nature of most of these platforms you're rarely interacting with the same person twice. So it's hard not to feel that that effort is entirely going to waste.
I agree, I think it's also likely that in many scenarios bad faith communication is more successful in the short term. You can appeal to a persons emotions, disparage the person making the argument, exclude nuance to make simple memorable statements, etc. Which is where I struggle with settling on a strategy for dealing with it (and trying to prevent myself from doing it), since so much of our lives are geared towards/optimised for short term results
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.
> What, I'd argue, would be at least a tiny step forward would be thinking in terms of games people play, rewards they seek
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.
I hadn't heard about steelmanning [0], and it was definitely a pleasant thing to learn about.
> 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.
The end game of bad faith communication is that noise begins to dominate the channel.
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).
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.
I have realized when browsing some twitter culture war exchanges that people almost never respond to the opposing party's arguments. They imagine a set of arguments that uses some of the same words and then argue with that. This type of exchange never results in agreement -- or even the exchange of information! It's unhinged from any communicative act. It's merely inflammatory.
I do think this is extremely problematic in the long run.
My main concern in online discussions is that you're effectively arguing against a hydra. Even if you successfully convince a group of people about the validity of a specific point, there will always be someone else who will show up to continue arguing (often, as you say, with a completely different argument). And if someone successfully convinces me that my argument was wrong, there is no way for me to declare the point settled - someone else will show up and keep the discussion going.
It's turtles all the way down, where each turtle is yelling at the one on top.
It goes far beyond twitter culture. Even in daily conversation there are people who only open out port and close in port. One signal is that whenever you bring up a perspective (either in support/disagreement) this person gonna continue his speech and make the conversation expereince like attending a lecture.
Addressing your opponent position lets them pick what the topic is. They are picking a topic their position is strong at. Therefore addressing your opponent position in limited-attention setting (aka publicly) is simply a losing move.
That's just it, neither side goes to Twitter for a good faith argument, they're there to vent and lash out, but they've already dismissed the other party.
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.
The purpose of such exchanges is not to communicate information to the other participant. It is to signal allegiance to one’s own side. This dynamic tends to drive people who already disagree further apart, and those who already agree, closer.
Hmm. I no longer log into Twitter, but I do browse it without being logged in[0]. At least with regard to Brexit (about which it seems the argument is still raging), pro and anti do seem to engage with each other, the problem is they reject each other’s evidence.
[0] The annoying popups you get when you scroll too far without being logged in, do at least prevent me from doom-scrolling
> many still assert that it is actually unethical to engage "the other side" in good faith.
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.)
You just don't engage with them, or engage selectively. If someone wants to engage in bad faith, you politely end the discussion, and introduce distance into the relationship. You're not required to provide any explanation or attempt at rehabilitation, but I find that most people aren't operating in bad faith 100% of the time -- they have trigger topics which are emotionally charged and will put them into that mode. So you can first avoid those topics, and if they keep bringing those topics up, eventually you avoid them.
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.)
> What's missing from this article is how to protect yourself from bad faith actors.
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.
When someone posts completely wrong interpretations of events, a world view totally opposite reality and incompatible with the one you experience it’s really hard to think someone can actually be posting in good faith. And it’s not a case of blue dress gold dress sense type perception difference.
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)
I think this is the hard part. How do you engage in good faith when everyone else seems to be engaging in bad faith tactics? How can you be open to changing your mind when no one else is open to changing theirs? Seems like you immediately lose every time.
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 the key thing here is that the question is not about changing a single person who acts in bad faith. Indeed that may be impossible. How you act may not have any affect on the specific person you’re engaging with, but it will have a (likely very small) affect on the community as a whole. Engage in good faith towards all and others may slowly start to act similarly. Engaged in bad faith and you may encourage others in the community to act the same way.
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.
I find myself really inspired by the work The Consilience Project and a few other people are putting out about sensemaking, consensus building, and maybe generally empathy.
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.
I think that most social media is increasing the power of bad faith compared to good faith actors.
Normal perspective versus an extreme perspective then I fear that the more normal perspective people often has a more diverse situation with many other sources and influences.
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.
One of the most important parts of the article is a footnote:
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).
I have sometimes seen rules that don't try to spell out every specific,
because most civil conversations don't require knowing exactly where the line is between good behavior and bad,
so you can get riiight up to it, then say in bad faith,
"but I was obeying the rules!"
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
> 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. To do so would be to fall into a trap, serving only to validate the dangerous views of groups known to be acting in bad faith.
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.
It's interesting that you're making a both-sides argument while complaining about people making both-sides arguments. I mostly hear "both sides, both sides" coming from one side in particular. The other side just blames that one side.
Yes, arguing in good faith is good but how do you deal with people who have no interest in arguing in good faith? I encounter this all the time and I just choose to stop engaging.
i've taken a clue from Jessica Livingston. she responded once to bad faith communicators by saying (not a quote): "i'm not inclined to engage with people who are purposefully trying to misunderstand me."
it both disengages you from the situation while also calling out the bad faith actors.
> how do you deal with people who have no interest in arguing in good faith?
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.
Really good article. Succinctly articulates and categorizes types of online social interactions I've observed over the past decade. I'm guilty of occasionally engaging bad faith communications myself. I'm trying to do better. For a while now I've felt this uneasiness that the escalating social discord we've been seeing over the past ~5 years could have disastrous consequences. I'm starting to think in terms of urgency, this year-over-year escalation of social discord needs to be addressed even before climate change.
This was a great article. A practical question came to mind while reading it: Now that bad-faith communication has become normalized, does it makes sense to keep bringing good-faith communication to a bad-faith communication fight?
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.
The article implies that there are productive ways to engage a bad-faith interlocutor in good faith. It's a shame it doesn't go into any details about what that looks like.
Can someone point me to an example of a society where good faith communication has dominated? This article paints a picture that the issue is something new, but I don't know any human society where bad faith communication was not a norm. Differences are mainly related to power structures and who holds the Power to communicate. Besides, this is really a dualist perspective to communication. What if most communication is neither good faith or bad faith, but something in between?
Examples I would use would be sports teams, construction teams, hunting groups, military units, sailing crews, fraternal organizations, and other environents that apprehend consequences from playing games. These are environments where competence and integrity are moral virtues, and misrepresentation has real consequences.
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'd just like to take a moment to express my appreciation for the discussion on this site. I believe there is a better ratio of good-faith to bad-faith communication here than on any other public forum where everyone is free to participate.
Is it just me, or are all of the listed bad faith communication mannerisms rife in government and the legal profession? I no longer trust the rule of law, because everyone involved acts in bad faith. From police, lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats… my experience has shown that are all untrustworthy in anything they say. The fish rots from the head.
I really wonder how much of it relates to how those professions often prohibit or strongly discourage 1st-person expression and encourage 2nd-person or 3rd-person. For example, police don't often say how they individually are feeling, often they refer to law and to the suspect and other parties. Politicians tend to talk about what their constituents want ("Americans want this! Americans hate that!") more than saying how they themselves feel and what they want.
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.
"Bad Faith Communication: discourse that is intended to achieve behavioral outcomes (including consensus, agreement, "likes") irrespective of achieving true mutual understanding"
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.
Or religions, traditions, cultures, political slogans and reductionisms of apply sorts. Essentially, anything that fits within the realm of the Noble Lie.
This article is great at explaining many differences between good and bad faith communication, but repeatedly asserts that bad communication = wars, violence, etc while providing no proof or argument to support that claim.
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.
It's not foolish. Aldous Huxley explained why in his Ends and Means, more than eighty years ago.
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.
Game theory 101. You want to build a good/better world? Then don't be shit. Don't contribute to shit dynamics. Build a sustainable culture where people listen to each other. I'll never get how this isn't ingrained to reasonable people from the get-go
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.
What an interesting and thoughtful article. However we will not restore good-faith communication in public spaces. It’s a 1-way process. This is why the future will be (I think) smaller and more selective communities where good-faith discourse can occur between a select sub-set of people. Probably the sort of people who do not feel threatened intellectually or otherwise in indulging in such an exchange. You are not going to educate or persuade “the mass” to change their approach now.
If you disagree with me then you are evil and on the wrong side of history and I will summon a mob against you. ;-)
No I think that’s the dangerous part. It used to be hard to hold radical fringe opinions. If you openly identified as a Klansman you would likely get shunned in most communities. Your exchange of social power for your idiotic beliefs was made open and clear.
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.
Is "bad faith communication" always in bad faith (ie, socially undesirable)? Some people are just wrong because they are talking out of their arse, and need to be put in their place.
Depends how they are talking out of their arse, are they open to new ideas? The other side, is the dialog more to put them in their place, or more to illuminate the depths of their arse?
The bad faith is more about how the communication is done and the end goals
Generally a good article, but unfortunately it falls into the political trap.
> 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.
I thoroughly enjoyed this article, it was a bit of a breath of fresh air.
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 is an extremely dangerous (and quite frankly stupid) way of thinking. Discourse is discourse, regardless of how you feel about it. When people feel as though "bad" faith discourse needs to be controlled through curation, censorship, or through some other means, you end up with idiots like Twitters Parag Agrawal saying things like "Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation." https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/18/1012066/emtech-s...
The "endgame" of "bad faith" communication is the endgame of your freedom of speech and expression. I agree that people ought to be more compassionate and open-minded, both on the internet and in real life, but I am in no position to control what another person thinks or says, and I'm certainly not in a position to make the judgement of what "good" or "bad" faith discourse is. No one is.
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".
Yes, all these "bad faiths" and "good faiths" just add confusion. As is using the word "communication" for unidirectional propagation of information.
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.
The problem isn’t the prominence of bad faith communication. That’s a symptom. Bad faith communicating happens because one party becomes cornered when their standpoint is indefensible, and they know it.
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.
There's no way to win an argument anymore because the goalposts don't even exist anymore. All of the groups that exist have decided to remove them so that instead of winning small battles, they win the entire narrative by removing all goalposts (the thing that locks some conversation or argument inside some constraint). Without those constraints there's literally no argument to be had. At that point people just talk past each other so all that's really left in America is if your local radio stations tend to be more left or right. And whether you have Fox or CNN on your TV.
Propaganda and bad faith has always been normalized, it is not new, read Edward Bernays' Propaganda.
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.
If you want to see some great examples of politicians engaging in good faith communication, check out the series "The Constitution: That Delicate Balance" that Annenberg put out in 1984.
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.
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.
I see a dynamic on Twitter a lot where a person who is probably aligned with the retweeter is thrown under the bus to demonstrate the purity of the retweeter. The retweeted person is usually misrepresented or uncharitable interpreted.
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.
I think the issue is trying to have individualism, and team work at the same time.
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.
In my opinion, the main issues with bad faith versus good faith communication is that the later is only used within what speakers consider their tribe.
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.
I think the issue is that many people are emotionally invested in not understanding things, in other words you assume people want to understand things. In my experience there is a significant portion of the population who doesn't (and that crosses through all social and political spectra).
I suspect engaging in bad faith communication goes along with not being too interested in understanding things. These tactics seems to say "Your perspective is unworthy of consideration. I want to ridicule or destroy it."
> Both ends of the political spectrum (the far left and the far right) express this view.
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.
I thought this was a pretty good book despite the seeming brevity to it. Anyways to really expand for those who haven't read it, Dethmer talks about an internal mindset dial between judgementalness vs curiosity. There are other dials like victim vs agency, emotional acceptance vs denial, etc.
At this stage I just reject communication anyway, I am never going to reach some dumb compromise with conservatives, [homo,trans]-phobes, racists, oligarch supporters, climate change deniers etc. In my view they are morally, ethically, scientifically wrong so there is absolutely nothing constructive to even engage with. I don't think the fundamental problem is:
>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 think the fundamental mistake this article makes is in assuming that bad-faith tactics are non-partisan. It's not as if fake news is coming from equally both sides of the spectrum. It's not as if there can be any equivocacy between Trump's administration and Biden's administration in terms of their willingness to lie. Right-wing media and left-wing media do not manipulate the truth to equivalent degrees. Science does not equally support liberal and conservative ideas about medicine and the environment.
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."
Steelmanning is a bad idea that needs to go away. It’s pretty condescending to say “your argument was bad I fixed it for you”. It’s also confusing when someone tries to improve an argument before responding to it. Lastly, steelmanning done poorly changes an argument into something that’s easier to respond to without necessarily improving it. It might be a good concept for academic debates in ivory towers. In general, it’s confusing and wildly impractical.
There's a risk that steel-manning can veer into condescension, but the real goal is to find a version of an argument that all parties agree represents it accurately and fairly.
(As opposed to wasting time on superficial contradictions, reductio ad absurdum variations, and other hazards of bad faith conflicts.)
Maybe the underlying reason is that there is no more common interest between groups that fight each other? That is, no more "society" as something common, most importantly, right-wing electorate can't benefit from what can benefit left-wing electorate, and vice versa? Indeed, the discourse has become quite ugly, but maybe the reason is not the form, but the substance: that it's no longer about arguing about what's better for society as a whole, but winning over the other side to achieve what's good for "us", by defeating the interest of "them".
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.
Trolling is absolutely a form of bad faith communication. However, you needn't look far on twitter to find that trolls are pretty high hanging fruit compared to ideological flamewars perpetuated by non-trolls fighting to score points for their respective ideological teams.
Trolling often involves bad faith communication, but bad faith communication isn't necessarily trolling. Consider politicians, salespeople, and advertisers who are willing to convince by any means possible.
"Plain old trolling" in the traditional sense (e.g. back with newsgroups) is seeking to provoke an emotional reaction, but without regard to the truth of falsity of the statement, and not necessarily with any grander agenda.
It was only later that it came to be (mis?)applied toward organized disinformation campaigns.
Because "bad faith communication" is about the talking head on the TV sowing doubt in your mind on complex issues. It is oil company shills telling you that climate change is not man made and it is Malthusian environmental activist that it is impossible to get safe and carbonfree energy from nuclear. Neither of these are communicating with you in good faith because they have an agenda.
By strict definition it is bad faith because the troll's goal is agnostic to the position advertised and the only real intention is to provoke people.
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.
We've trained society to believe they are bringing in some form of enlightenment and all who disagree with the orthodoxy portrayed by popular media are quite literally evil and held with contempt. We've banned, censored, demonetized and ostracized people who disagree by finding even the most minuscule lapses of political correctness and excommunicating them from the public sphere or our own personal communities. We are training the youth (children books to graduates) that politics and culture are black and white (sometimes quite literally...), that people are divided into oppressed vs oppressors, privileged vs victims, good vs evil, activists vs status quo, rich vs poor.
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.
It has been quite instructive to watch what Russia has said and done about the war. Various tactics in their media, that once you think about them, are more common in every day use.
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 like the part where the author mentions having heard “you can’t argue with Nazis!” and then just sort of wanders off into theoreticals about being polite or whatever.
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
There is no room for a truce. To oversimplify it, liberal democracy was basically a 200 year armistice between liberals and conservatives. Now, both sides see the imminent prospect of either final defeat or final victory. The only thing that matters is winning. On this, both sides are right.
The liberal-conservative dichotomy is a modern invention that only came about sometime during the 60's. There have been various parties and coalitions within parties throughout American history.
What does winning mean for either side? The other side doesn't just cease to exist. Nor do the people in the middle our outside the dichotomy. Does it mean autocracy? And how will the prevent revolution? How does it prevent an ongoing, unwinnable civil war which fizzes out to another armistice after everyone is sick of not winning?
I don't agree with certain important points of this article. It is rooted in what seems to be the following unwritten tenets:
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.*
With the caveat that I very much believe in civil, good faith discourse, I find that in being a formal critique of the discourse, it can nevertheless introduce the author's own ideological preferences (fine) in a way that appears neutral (not fine) or purely formal (very not fine). Here are two examples:
> 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.
I agree that this article perhaps veers a little too far into the kind of 'objective' territory that you mention, it's something I see and dislike often in similar pieces, though to be fair I think it's probably quite hard to avoid while remaining personally relatable to many people.
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.
>Decades of culture war have degraded civic discourse,
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.
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.
Edit: for those downvoting, I'm ok with you disagreeing or even feeling annoyed or angry with what I said. I sincerely also wish you would comment below so that I better understand what led to you downvoting. Currently I'm not sure what I did to lead to that and I'd like to know so that I might prevent it in the future.
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.
> how does one actually know whether another or oneself is using good faith communication?
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.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
booboofixer|3 years ago
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?
usernomdeguerre|3 years ago
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.
ianai|3 years ago
So maybe that’s insightful. Point out that conversations (unless they’re debates and everyone’s agreed to debate) are not games.
Vinnl|3 years ago
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.
stackbutterflow|3 years ago
rapind|3 years ago
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.
gumby|3 years ago
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.
ehnto|3 years ago
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.
slothtrop|3 years ago
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.
DharmaPolice|3 years ago
Manuel_D|3 years ago
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.
dfxm12|3 years ago
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.
antattack|3 years ago
sacrosancty|3 years ago
dsugarman|3 years ago
rad88|3 years ago
spaetzleesser|3 years ago
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.
m0llusk|3 years ago
anon23anon|3 years ago
gameswithgo|3 years ago
[deleted]
senguidev|3 years ago
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
banannaise|3 years ago
Bad-faith communicators occupy a lot of powerful positions. Perhaps even the large majority.
Nowado|3 years ago
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.
mindvirus|3 years ago
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.
fxtentacle|3 years ago
"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 ;)
pydry|3 years ago
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.
q-base|3 years ago
thow-58d4e8b|3 years ago
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
tux1968|3 years ago
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.
endominus|3 years ago
Vinnl|3 years ago
Engaging in a good-faith argument, especially with those you often agree with, yes. "Calling out" - I'd be hesitant about that.
softfalcon|3 years ago
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.
vlunkr|3 years ago
jimkleiber|3 years ago
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.
inglor_cz|3 years ago
Looking at past results, I would not encourage call out culture further.
ajross|3 years ago
In fact that practice is expressly disallowed on this very site, whose guidelines demand we assume good faith on the part of other commenters.
hedora|3 years ago
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.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
colordrops|3 years ago
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.
rhaksw|3 years ago
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.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/E3bFvKh.png
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything
RyanShook|3 years ago
alwaysdoit|3 years ago
mojzu|3 years ago
Nowado|3 years ago
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.
ChadNauseam|3 years ago
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.
rolandog|3 years ago
> 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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning
dlivingston|3 years ago
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.
thedudeabides5|3 years ago
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.
goatlover|3 years ago
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.
throwaway15908|3 years ago
lucidbee|3 years ago
I do think this is extremely problematic in the long run.
probably_wrong|3 years ago
It's turtles all the way down, where each turtle is yelling at the one on top.
LambdaTrain|3 years ago
Nowado|3 years ago
dalbasal|3 years ago
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.
Cthulhu_|3 years ago
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.
wskinner|3 years ago
ben_w|3 years ago
[0] The annoying popups you get when you scroll too far without being logged in, do at least prevent me from doom-scrolling
mr_toad|3 years ago
What do you think ‘stay on message’ means? It’s as old as rhetoric itself.
Cathago delenda est!
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
rectang|3 years ago
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.)
apatters|3 years ago
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.)
pdonis|3 years ago
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.
mint2|3 years ago
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)
bricemo|3 years ago
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.
vlunkr|3 years ago
johnfn|3 years ago
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.
unknown|3 years ago
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ohwellhere|3 years ago
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.
sagonar|3 years ago
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.
trtqy|3 years ago
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).
ImPostingOnHN|3 years ago
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
kodah|3 years ago
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.
outsidetheparty|3 years ago
jccalhoun|3 years ago
bkirkby|3 years ago
it both disengages you from the situation while also calling out the bad faith actors.
everybodyknows|3 years ago
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.
airforce1|3 years ago
pohl|3 years ago
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.
AlexCoventry|3 years ago
adamisom|3 years ago
tappio|3 years ago
motohagiography|3 years ago
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.
bittercynic|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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voakbasda|3 years ago
jimkleiber|3 years ago
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.
jon37|3 years ago
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.
Dracophoenix|3 years ago
alexb_|3 years ago
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.
narag|3 years ago
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.
hans1729|3 years ago
barrysteve|3 years ago
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.
Zerverus|3 years ago
Tragedy of the commons right here.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
nickdothutton|3 years ago
If you disagree with me then you are evil and on the wrong side of history and I will summon a mob against you. ;-)
oneoff786|3 years ago
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.
AussieWog93|3 years ago
seadan83|3 years ago
The bad faith is more about how the communication is done and the end goals
cycomanic|3 years ago
> 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.
asxd|3 years ago
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/
Slighted|3 years ago
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".
kubanczyk|3 years ago
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.
dclowd9901|3 years ago
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.
coding123|3 years ago
cracrecry|3 years ago
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.
bjt|3 years ago
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...
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
chiefalchemist|3 years ago
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.
projektfu|3 years ago
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.
rogerallen|3 years ago
jseban|3 years ago
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.
stephc_int13|3 years ago
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.
WhitneyLand|3 years ago
cycomanic|3 years ago
bittercynic|3 years ago
vintermann|3 years ago
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.
for_i_in_range|3 years ago
Below the line: Closed, Defensive, Committed to being right.
Credit: Jim Dethmer, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
chillacy|3 years ago
fullshark|3 years ago
foxes|3 years ago
>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.
bccdee|3 years ago
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."
TimPC|3 years ago
deadpannini|3 years ago
(As opposed to wasting time on superficial contradictions, reductio ad absurdum variations, and other hazards of bad faith conflicts.)
anovikov|3 years ago
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.
pmoriarty|3 years ago
airforce1|3 years ago
l0b0|3 years ago
Terr_|3 years ago
It was only later that it came to be (mis?)applied toward organized disinformation campaigns.
JanneVee|3 years ago
TeeMassive|3 years ago
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.
hans1729|3 years ago
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.
JetAlone|3 years ago
>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.
SergeAx|3 years ago
yeetsfromhellL2|3 years ago
boredumb|3 years ago
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.
slackfan|3 years ago
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.
127|3 years ago
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.
braingenious|3 years ago
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
legalcorrection|3 years ago
Dracophoenix|3 years ago
goatlover|3 years ago
kazinator|3 years ago
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.*
overthemoon|3 years ago
> 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.
LichenStone|3 years ago
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.
incomingpain|3 years ago
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.
aaron695|3 years ago
[deleted]
bongoman37|3 years ago
[deleted]
jimkleiber|3 years ago
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.
pdonis|3 years ago
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.