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

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

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