Note also that most groups treat their intuitions about whether or not someone is acting in bad faith as evidence worth taking seriously
Of course our intuitions of someone acting in bad faith are evidence that they are; that much is obvious. The relevant question is how strong the correlation is between the intuition vs. actual bad faith. Since you admit quite openly that people vary widely in how sensitive their intuitive ‘bad-faith detectors’ are (this, after all, it what it means to have a ‘strong sense’ of such!), shouldn’t this be of concern for those who would claim that this correlation is very high—quite high enough to be useful on its own?
It’s also important to realize that both Type I (false hit) and Type II (miss) errors are harmful here, hence, as usual in any binary detection setting, specificity is as relevant as sensitivity—and there’s no reason why additional evidence should be discounted; particularly if such evidence is of a factual sort—and as such is likely to be otherwise broadly independent from the output of our intuitive detectors!
Of course our intuitions of someone acting in bad faith are evidence that they are; that much is obvious. The relevant question is how strong the correlation is between the intuition vs. actual bad faith. Since you admit quite openly that people vary widely in how sensitive their intuitive ‘bad-faith detectors’ are (this, after all, it what it means to have a ‘strong sense’ of such!), shouldn’t this be of concern for those who would claim that this correlation is very high—quite high enough to be useful on its own?
It’s also important to realize that both Type I (false hit) and Type II (miss) errors are harmful here, hence, as usual in any binary detection setting, specificity is as relevant as sensitivity—and there’s no reason why additional evidence should be discounted; particularly if such evidence is of a factual sort—and as such is likely to be otherwise broadly independent from the output of our intuitive detectors!