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

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

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

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