“You’re acting in bad faith” is pretty non-specific and much less useful.
The spectrum between “object level” and “full-contact psychoanalysis” is a useful frame for considering how to deal with problems of bias/deception/motivated-cognition/etc. (I don’t know that it’s the only frame, but seems like a nice default if you haven’t thought of a better one).
I think the “generally stick to object level, bring out the psychoanalysis when it seems particularly important” is a pretty good BATNA.
Thing I agree with although I’m not sure it has quite the same implication you argue:
“Most people are doing some flavor/degree of bias/duplicitousness/motivation/deception most of the time.”
It seems true, although it feels Fallacy of Gray-ish? The question is how often this comes up to a degree that really gets in the way. It seems right that one should at least consider “hmm, this is a spectrum that is almost never on the “zero” degree, so maybe I should hypothesize that its ‘significant’ more often.” But it feels like this post is implying a higher degree of “assume things are at a ‘significant’ end of the spectrum.”
I’m not sure how much of a direct response this post is to Assuming Positive Intent, but I want to revisit So8res’ stated definition there:
First, a few words on what I mean by “good faith”. Imagine you’re having a conversation with someone.
Sometimes, your conversation partner is acting with virtuous conversational motives: maybe they’re curious, maybe they’re trying really hard to understand your arguments, maybe they think you’re wrong about something important and they’re struggling to get you to understand what they’re saying.
Other times, your conversation partner may be acting with malicious conversational motives: they might be explicitly focused on embarrassing you in front of people whose favor they are trying to win, or they might be trying explicitly to cause other listeners to associate you with something distasteful (a la the worst argument in the world), or they might be explicitly attempting to manipulate your actions. We can characterize your conversation partner along this axis, which ranges roughly from “well-intentioned” to “ill-intentioned”.
This feels somewhat different from what you’re talking about here. Whether you intended this post as part-of-that-conversation or not, I think tendency to conflate the thing-you’re-talking-about-AFAICT and This Thing feels important to notice.
Partial notes so far:
So, things I explicitly agree with:
“You’re acting in bad faith” is pretty non-specific and much less useful.
The spectrum between “object level” and “full-contact psychoanalysis” is a useful frame for considering how to deal with problems of bias/deception/motivated-cognition/etc. (I don’t know that it’s the only frame, but seems like a nice default if you haven’t thought of a better one).
I think the “generally stick to object level, bring out the psychoanalysis when it seems particularly important” is a pretty good BATNA.
Thing I agree with although I’m not sure it has quite the same implication you argue:
“Most people are doing some flavor/degree of bias/duplicitousness/motivation/deception most of the time.”
It seems true, although it feels Fallacy of Gray-ish? The question is how often this comes up to a degree that really gets in the way. It seems right that one should at least consider “hmm, this is a spectrum that is almost never on the “zero” degree, so maybe I should hypothesize that its ‘significant’ more often.” But it feels like this post is implying a higher degree of “assume things are at a ‘significant’ end of the spectrum.”
I’m not sure how much of a direct response this post is to Assuming Positive Intent, but I want to revisit So8res’ stated definition there:
This feels somewhat different from what you’re talking about here. Whether you intended this post as part-of-that-conversation or not, I think tendency to conflate the thing-you’re-talking-about-AFAICT and This Thing feels important to notice.