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zackmdavis  1yr ago (lesswrong.com)   2064 thread views

Assume Bad Faith

lesswrong.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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