+4. I most like the dichotomoy of “stick to object level” vs “full contact psychoanalysis.” And I think the paragraphs towards the end are important:
The reason I don’t think it’s useful to talk about “bad faith” is because the ontology of good vs. bad faith isn’t a great fit to either discourse strategy.
If I’m sticking to the object level, it’s irrelevant: I reply to what’s in the text; my suspicions about the process generating the text are out of scope.
If I’m doing full-contact psychoanalysis, the problem with “I don’t think you’re here in good faith” is that it’s insufficiently specific. Rather than accusing someone of generic “bad faith”, the way to move the discussion forward is by positing that one’s interlocutor has some specific motive that hasn’t yet been made explicit—and the way to defend oneself against such an accusation is by making the case that one’s real agenda isn’t the one being proposed, rather than protesting one’s “good faith” and implausibly claiming not to have an agenda.
I think maybe the title of this post is misleading, and sort of clickbaity/embroiled in a particular conflict that is, ironically, a distraction.
The whole post (admittedly from the very first sentence) is actually about avoiding the frame of bad faith (even if the post argues that basically everyone is in bad faith most of the time). I think it’s useful if post titles convey more of a pointer to the core idea of the post, which gives it a shorthand that’s more likely to be remembered/used when the time is right. (“Taboo bad faith”? “The object level, vs full-contact psychanalysis”? Dunno. Both of those feel like they lose some nuance I think Zack cares about. But, I think there’s some kind of improvement here)
...
That said: I think the post is missing something that lc’s comment sort of hints at (although I don’t think lc meant to imply my takeaway)
Some people in the comments reply to it that other people self-deceive, yes, but you should assume good faith. I say—why not assume the truth, and then do what’s prosocial anyways?
I think the post does give a couple concrete strategies for how to navigate the, er, conflict between conflict and truthseeking, which are one flavor of “prosocial.” I think it’s missing something about what “assume good faith” is for, which isn’t really covered in the post.
The problem “assume good faith” is trying to solve is “there are a bunch of human tendencies to get into escalation spirals of distrust, and make a bigger deal about the mistakes of people you’re in conflict with.” You don’t have to fix this with false beliefs, you can fix this by shifting your relational stance towards the person and the discussion, and holding the possibility more alive that you’ve misinterpreted them or are rounding them off to and incorrect guess as to what their agenda is.
I think the suggestions this post makes on how to deal with that are reasonable, but incomplete, and I think people benefit from also having some tools that more directly engage with “your impulse to naively assume bad faith is part of a spirally-pattern that you may want to step out of somehow.”
The “Taboo bad faith” title doesn’t fit this post. I had hoped from the opening section that it was going in that direction, but it did not.
Most obviously, the post kept relying heavily on the terms “bad faith” and “good faith” and that conceptual distinction, rather than tabooing them.
But also, it doesn’t do the core intellectual work of replacing a pointer with its substance. In the opening scenario where someone accuses their conversation partner of bad faith, conveying something along the lines of ‘I disapprove of how you’re approaching this conversation so I’m leaving’, tabooing “bad faith” would mean articulating what pattern of behavior (they thought that) they saw and why disapproval & departure is an appropriate response. Zack doesn’t try to do this, he just abandons this scenario to talk about other things involving his definition of “bad faith”. (And similarly with “assume good faith”.) I briefly hoped that the post would go in the “taboo your words” direction, describing what was happening in that sort of scenario with a clarity and precision that would make the label “bad faith” seem crude by comparison, but it did not.
This post also doesn’t manage to avoid the main pitfall that tabooing a word is meant to prevent, where people talk past each other because they’re using the same word with different definitions. Even though he says at the start of the post that other people are using the term “bad/good faith” wrong according his understanding of the term, when he talks about the advice “assume good faith” he just plugs in his definition of “good faith” (and “assume”) without noting that he’s making an interpretation of what other people mean when they use the phrase and that they might mean something else. And similarly in other places like “being touchy about bad faith accusations seems counterproductive” and “the belief that persistent good faith disagreements are common would seem to be in bad faith”. When someone says “you’re acting in bad faith” are they claiming that you’re showing the thing that Zack means by “bad faith”? Keeping that sort of thing straight is rationality 101 stuff that tabooing words helps with, and which this post repeatedly stumbles over.
I am sort of confused at what you got from this post. You say “But also, it doesn’t do the core intellectual work of replacing a pointer with its substance.”, but, I think he explicitly does that here?
What does “bad faith” mean, though? It doesn’t mean “with ill intent.” Following Wikipedia, bad faith is “a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another.” The great encyclopedia goes on to provide examples: the solider who waves a flag of surrender but then fires when the enemy comes out of their trenches, the attorney who prosecutes a case she knows to be false, the representative of a company facing a labor dispute who comes to the negotiating table with no intent of compromising.
That is, bad faith is when someone’s apparent reasons for doing something aren’t the same as the real reasons. This is distinct from malign intent. The uniformed solider who shoots you without pretending to surrender is acting in good faith, because what you see is what you get: the man whose clothes indicate that his job is to try to kill you is, in fact, trying to kill you.
It feels like you wanted some entirely different post, about how to navigate when someone accuses someone of bad faith, for a variety of possible definitions of bad faith? (As opposed to this post, which is mostly saying “Avoid accusing people of bad faith. Instead, do some kind of more specific and useful thing.” Which honestly seems like good advice to me even for most people who are using the phrase to mean something else. “I disapprove of what you’re doing here and am leaving now” seems totally fine)
I’ve been trying to avoid the terms “good faith” and “bad faith”. I’m suspicious that most people who have picked up the phrase “bad faith” from hearing it used, don’t actually know what it means—and maybe, that the thing it does mean doesn’t carve reality at the joints.
People get very touchy about bad faith accusations: they think that you should assume good faith, but that if you’ve determined someone is in bad faith, you shouldn’t even be talking to them, that you need to exile them.
The second paragraph uses the term “bad faith” or “good faith” three times. What substance is it pointing to?
AFAICT the post never fleshes this out. The ‘hidden motives’ definition that Zack gave fleshes out his understanding of the term, which is different from what these people mean.
Tabooing words, when different people are using the word differently, typically means giving substance to both meanings (e.g. “acoustic vibrations” and “auditory experiences” for sound).
If Zack wanted to set aside the question of what other people mean by “bad faith” and just think about some things using his understanding of the term, then he could’ve done that. (To me that seems less interesting than also engaging with what other people mean by the term, and it would’ve made it a bit strange to start the post this way, but it still seems like a fine direction to go.) That’s not what this post did, though. It keeps coming back to what other people think about bad faith, without tracking that there are different meanings.
Consider this from Zack: “The conviction that “bad faith” is unusual contributes to a warped view of the world”. This is more on the topic of what other people think about “bad faith”. Which meaning of “bad faith” is it using? If it means Zack’s ‘hidden motives’ definition then it’s unclear if people do have the conviction that that’s unusual, because when people use the words “bad faith” that’s not what they’re talking about. If it means whatever people do mean by the words “bad faith”, then we’re back to discussing some substance that hasn’t been fleshed out, and it’s unclear if their conviction that it’s rare contributes to a warped view of the world because it’s unclear what that conviction even is.
Okay I think I have more of an idea where you’re coming from. (although I get some sense of something being at stake for you here that I still don’t understand).
I maybe want to clarify, when I suggested “taboo bad faith” as a title, I was imagining a pretty different purpose for the title (and I don’t super strongly defend that title as a good one here). I was looking for a succinct way of describing the suggestion “when you want to accuse someone of bad faith, you should probably say something more specific instead.” (i.e. “Taboo Bad Faith” is a recommendation for what to do in the wild, rather than “a thing the post itself was doing.”)
+4. I most like the dichotomoy of “stick to object level” vs “full contact psychoanalysis.” And I think the paragraphs towards the end are important:
I think maybe the title of this post is misleading, and sort of clickbaity/embroiled in a particular conflict that is, ironically, a distraction.
The whole post (admittedly from the very first sentence) is actually about avoiding the frame of bad faith (even if the post argues that basically everyone is in bad faith most of the time). I think it’s useful if post titles convey more of a pointer to the core idea of the post, which gives it a shorthand that’s more likely to be remembered/used when the time is right. (“Taboo bad faith”? “The object level, vs full-contact psychanalysis”? Dunno. Both of those feel like they lose some nuance I think Zack cares about. But, I think there’s some kind of improvement here)
...
That said: I think the post is missing something that lc’s comment sort of hints at (although I don’t think lc meant to imply my takeaway)
I think the post does give a couple concrete strategies for how to navigate the, er, conflict between conflict and truthseeking, which are one flavor of “prosocial.” I think it’s missing something about what “assume good faith” is for, which isn’t really covered in the post.
The problem “assume good faith” is trying to solve is “there are a bunch of human tendencies to get into escalation spirals of distrust, and make a bigger deal about the mistakes of people you’re in conflict with.” You don’t have to fix this with false beliefs, you can fix this by shifting your relational stance towards the person and the discussion, and holding the possibility more alive that you’ve misinterpreted them or are rounding them off to and incorrect guess as to what their agenda is.
I think the suggestions this post makes on how to deal with that are reasonable, but incomplete, and I think people benefit from also having some tools that more directly engage with “your impulse to naively assume bad faith is part of a spirally-pattern that you may want to step out of somehow.”
The “Taboo bad faith” title doesn’t fit this post. I had hoped from the opening section that it was going in that direction, but it did not.
Most obviously, the post kept relying heavily on the terms “bad faith” and “good faith” and that conceptual distinction, rather than tabooing them.
But also, it doesn’t do the core intellectual work of replacing a pointer with its substance. In the opening scenario where someone accuses their conversation partner of bad faith, conveying something along the lines of ‘I disapprove of how you’re approaching this conversation so I’m leaving’, tabooing “bad faith” would mean articulating what pattern of behavior (they thought that) they saw and why disapproval & departure is an appropriate response. Zack doesn’t try to do this, he just abandons this scenario to talk about other things involving his definition of “bad faith”. (And similarly with “assume good faith”.) I briefly hoped that the post would go in the “taboo your words” direction, describing what was happening in that sort of scenario with a clarity and precision that would make the label “bad faith” seem crude by comparison, but it did not.
This post also doesn’t manage to avoid the main pitfall that tabooing a word is meant to prevent, where people talk past each other because they’re using the same word with different definitions. Even though he says at the start of the post that other people are using the term “bad/good faith” wrong according his understanding of the term, when he talks about the advice “assume good faith” he just plugs in his definition of “good faith” (and “assume”) without noting that he’s making an interpretation of what other people mean when they use the phrase and that they might mean something else. And similarly in other places like “being touchy about bad faith accusations seems counterproductive” and “the belief that persistent good faith disagreements are common would seem to be in bad faith”. When someone says “you’re acting in bad faith” are they claiming that you’re showing the thing that Zack means by “bad faith”? Keeping that sort of thing straight is rationality 101 stuff that tabooing words helps with, and which this post repeatedly stumbles over.
I am sort of confused at what you got from this post. You say “But also, it doesn’t do the core intellectual work of replacing a pointer with its substance.”, but, I think he explicitly does that here?
It feels like you wanted some entirely different post, about how to navigate when someone accuses someone of bad faith, for a variety of possible definitions of bad faith? (As opposed to this post, which is mostly saying “Avoid accusing people of bad faith. Instead, do some kind of more specific and useful thing.” Which honestly seems like good advice to me even for most people who are using the phrase to mean something else. “I disapprove of what you’re doing here and am leaving now” seems totally fine)
This post begins:
The second paragraph uses the term “bad faith” or “good faith” three times. What substance is it pointing to?
AFAICT the post never fleshes this out. The ‘hidden motives’ definition that Zack gave fleshes out his understanding of the term, which is different from what these people mean.
Tabooing words, when different people are using the word differently, typically means giving substance to both meanings (e.g. “acoustic vibrations” and “auditory experiences” for sound).
If Zack wanted to set aside the question of what other people mean by “bad faith” and just think about some things using his understanding of the term, then he could’ve done that. (To me that seems less interesting than also engaging with what other people mean by the term, and it would’ve made it a bit strange to start the post this way, but it still seems like a fine direction to go.) That’s not what this post did, though. It keeps coming back to what other people think about bad faith, without tracking that there are different meanings.
Consider this from Zack: “The conviction that “bad faith” is unusual contributes to a warped view of the world”. This is more on the topic of what other people think about “bad faith”. Which meaning of “bad faith” is it using? If it means Zack’s ‘hidden motives’ definition then it’s unclear if people do have the conviction that that’s unusual, because when people use the words “bad faith” that’s not what they’re talking about. If it means whatever people do mean by the words “bad faith”, then we’re back to discussing some substance that hasn’t been fleshed out, and it’s unclear if their conviction that it’s rare contributes to a warped view of the world because it’s unclear what that conviction even is.
Okay I think I have more of an idea where you’re coming from. (although I get some sense of something being at stake for you here that I still don’t understand).
I maybe want to clarify, when I suggested “taboo bad faith” as a title, I was imagining a pretty different purpose for the title (and I don’t super strongly defend that title as a good one here). I was looking for a succinct way of describing the suggestion “when you want to accuse someone of bad faith, you should probably say something more specific instead.” (i.e. “Taboo Bad Faith” is a recommendation for what to do in the wild, rather than “a thing the post itself was doing.”)