When you say defensiveness, does that include something like “act as though you’ve been attacked viciously by a person who is biased against you because they’re bad”? Because that, to me, is the defensiveness behavior I’d find the most suspicious (other facets of defensiveness less so).
The problem with the “immediately focus on maximally discrediting the accusers” is that is that it is awfully close to the tactic that actually guilty people might want to use to discredit or intimidate their accusers (or, in movies, discredit law enforcement that has good reasons for asking questions/being suspicious).
Of course, in complex interpersonal contexts, it’s often the case that accusers are in fact the troublemakers (and maybe every once in a blue moon, law enforcement asking what they say are “standard” questions might be part of a conspiracy to frame you), so the behavior is only suspicious when there’s a perfectly valid explanation as to why people are pointing at you, and you not only do not see it from that perspective (or acknowledge that you’re seeing it), but you then put on behavior designed to make onlookers believe that something incredibly outrageous has just happened to you.
One admittedly confounding factor is “honor culture”—not a big thing in LW circles, but if we’re thinking of movies where they arrest or ask accusing questions to people in regions or cultures where one’s reputation is really important, and being accused of something is seen as a massive insult, then I can understand that this is a strong confounding factor (to actually being guilty).
When you say defensiveness, does that include something like “act as though you’ve been attacked viciously by a person who is biased against you because they’re bad”? Because that, to me, is the defensiveness behavior I’d find the most suspicious (other facets of defensiveness less so).
I mean, suppose I belong to ideology A, and someone from rival ideology B accuses me of something we both agree is bad, but I do not believe I have done.
Given our relative positions and probably pre-existing animosity and mistrust, it’s entirely possible for me to genuinely believe “he is a B, therefore his being <long list of ideological grievances I have with Bs that make me believe their epistemics and/or morals are bad> makes him more likely to accuse me of random stuff just because I’m an A”, and say so. Meanwhile the B may as well have had the same kind of bias in deciding that I could probably be guilty of the thing he accused me of. If that is the case, we could both be in good faith and thinking the other is in bad faith, both biased, and the situation be perfectly symmetrical. But if you look with suspicion at defensiveness you give by default the advantage to whoever strikes first, which creates also a nasty incentive to do so. And in fact we do see this happening a lot in public discourse.
When you say defensiveness, does that include something like “act as though you’ve been attacked viciously by a person who is biased against you because they’re bad”?
Yeah.
The problem with the “immediately focus on maximally discrediting the accusers” is that is that it is awfully close to the tactic that actually guilty people might want to use to discredit or intimidate their accusers
Agree. But it’s also a strategy that innocent people might want to use to show that the people accusing them don’t have clean motives, or just something that they do automatically to defend themselves because they’re under stress and it does work as a general-purpose defense strategy. So it doesn’t seem like clear Bayesian evidence one way or the other?
I haven’t thought this through in detail but my first thought would be to suspect that this is a strategy that weakly favors people who are actually innocent, assuming that the audience is reasonably discerning and it doesn’t just degenerate into a popularity contest. In that while you can of course dig up dirt on anyone, being able to find accusation-relevant dirt (“this police accusing me has been known to take bribes and accuse innocent people before”) seems more likely to happen in cases where you are in fact falsely accused.
Of course, if that’s the only defense they offer and they don’t bother refuting any of the actual accusations in any substantial way, that’s certainly very suspicious. But then the suspicious thing is more the lack of an object-level response rather than the presence of a defensive response.
Of course, if that’s the only defense they offer and they don’t bother refuting any of the actual accusations in any substantial way, that’s certainly very suspicious. But then the suspicious thing is more the lack of an object-level response rather than the presence of a defensive response.
Yeah, I’m starting with this part of your response because I agree and think it is good to have clear messaging on the most unambiguously one-directional (“guilty or not”) pieces of evidence. Nothing comes close to having persuasive responses to the most load-bearing accusations.
“It’s fine to be outraged/go on the counterattack, but it becomes suspicious if you use this to deflect from engaging with the evidence against you” seems like a good takeaway.
What shouldn’t happen is that onlookers give someone a pass because of reasoning that goes as follows: “They seem to struggle with insecurity, and getting accused is hard, so it’s okay that they’re deeming it all so outrageous that it’s beneath them to engage more on the object-level.” Or, with less explicit reasoning, but still equally suboptimal, would be an onlooker reaction of, “This is just how this person responds to accusations; I will treat this as a fact of the world,” combined with the onlookers leaving it at that and not flagging it as unfortunate (and suspiciously convenient) that the accused will now not do their best to gather information they can voluntarily disclose to immediately shed more light on their innocence.
Basically, the asymmetry is that innocent people can often (though not always) disclose information voluntarily that makes their innocence more clear/likely. That’s the best strategy if it is available to you. It is never available to guilty people, but sometimes available to innocent people.
(In fact, this trope is overused in the show “Elementary” and once I realized it, it became hard to enjoy watching the show because it’s usually the same formula for the short self-contained episodes: The initial one, two, or three suspects will almost always be red herrings, and this will become clear quickly enough because they will admit to minor crimes that make clear that they would have lacked the motive for the more serious crime, or they would admit something surprising or embarrassing that is verifiable and gives them an alibi, etc.)
So, anything that deflects from this is a bit suspicious! Justifiably accused “problem people” will almost always attempt counterattacks in one form or another (if not calling into question the accuser’s character, then at least their mental health and sanity) because this has a chance of successful deflection.
The following paragraph is less important to get to the bottom of because I’m sure we both agree that the evidence is weak at best no matter what direction it goes in, but I still want to flag that I have opposite intuitions from you about the direction of evidence.
My sense is still that the strategy “act as though you’ve been attacked viciously by a person who is biased against you because they’re bad” does weakly (or maybe even moderately, but with important exceptions) correlate with people being actually guilty. That said, that’s importantly different from your example of “being able to dig up accusation-relavant dirt”. I mean, it depends what we’re picturing… I agree that “this police accusing me has been known to take bribes and accuse innocent people before” is quite relevant and concerning. By contrast, something that would seem a lot less relevant (and therefore go in the other direction, evidence-wise), would be things like, “the person who accused me of bad behavior had too much to drink on the night in question.” Even if true, that’s quite irrelevant because problem people may sometimes pick out victims precisely because they are drunk (or otherwise vulnerable) and also because “having too much to drink” doesn’t usually turn reliable narrators into liars, so the fact that someone being drunk is the worst that can be said about them is not all that incriminating.
Yeah, I’m starting with this part of your response because I agree and think it is good to have clear messaging on the most unambiguously one-directional (“guilty or not”) pieces of evidence.
That’s a cool conversational move! Appreciate it.
What shouldn’t happen is that onlookers give someone a pass because of reasoning that goes as follows:
Agree. When I wrote the post, I was thinking more of a case where someone does respond to the object-level claims but in a defensive way or with non-object-level arguments mixed in, not of a case where they entirely fail to present object-level-arguments.
Basically, the asymmetry is that innocent people can often (though not always) disclose information voluntarily that makes their innocence more clear/likely. That’s the best strategy if it is available to you. It is never available to guilty people, but sometimes available to innocent people.
I suspect we might disagree on exactly how frequently this strategy is available to innocent people. I do agree that it is sometimes available to innocent people, but there are also lots of situations where e.g. the innocent person can’t offer any solid evidence that their version of the story is the correct one, or where they have some other reason not to share the full truth (e.g. protecting someone else’s privacy or truth-telling requiring them to reveal something unrelated that they are embarrassed by or have a legal obligation not to reveal), or where the truth is complicated or unusual enough that third parties might not believe it, etc.
Also, as long as the innocents are not fully convincing, many people might go “I can’t tell who is telling the truth here so just out of caution I’ll distrust everyone involved”, which gives even innocent people a motive to leverage whatever extra weapons they have to increase the chances of being believed (or equivalently, the accuser not being believed).
Justifiably accused “problem people” will almost always attempt counterattacks in one form or another (if not calling into question the accuser’s character, then at least their mental health and sanity) because they work so well as deflection.
Agree. But a relevant question is, do innocent people attempt counterattacks at a significantly lower rate? If both innocent and guilty people are roughly equally likely to attempt counterattacks, then just the presence of a counterattack isn’t strong evidence. And as long as a counterattack is not less effective for an innocent person, you’d expect both innocent and guilty people to have a similar incentive to launch them.
WRT your last paragraph, I agree with your examples and think the difference probably comes from us thinking about different kinds of examples.
But a relevant question is, do innocent people attempt counterattacks at a significantly lower rate? If both innocent and guilty people are roughly equally likely to attempt counterattacks, then just the presence of a counterattack isn’t strong evidence.
In movies and series it happens a bunch that people find themselves accused of something due to silly coincidences, as this ramps up the drama. In real life, such coincidences or huge misunderstandings presumably happen very infrequently, so when someone in real life gets accused of serious wrongdoing, it is usually the case that either they are guilty, or their accusers have a biased agenda.
This logic would suggest that you’re right about counterattacks being ~equally frequent.
Perhaps once we go from being accused of serious wrongdoing to something more like “being accused of being a kind of bad manager,” misunderstandings, such as that the “accuser” just happened to see you on a bad day, become more plausible. In that case, operating from a perspective of “the accuser is reasonable and this can be cleared up with a conversation rather than by counterattacking them” is something we should expect to see more often from actually “innocent” managers. (Of course, unlike with serious transgressions/wrongdoing, being a “kind of bad” manager is more of a spectrum, and part of being a good manager is being open to feedback and willingness to work on improving onself, etc., so these situations are also more disanalogous for additional reasons.)
When you say defensiveness, does that include something like “act as though you’ve been attacked viciously by a person who is biased against you because they’re bad”? Because that, to me, is the defensiveness behavior I’d find the most suspicious (other facets of defensiveness less so).
The problem with the “immediately focus on maximally discrediting the accusers” is that is that it is awfully close to the tactic that actually guilty people might want to use to discredit or intimidate their accusers (or, in movies, discredit law enforcement that has good reasons for asking questions/being suspicious).
Of course, in complex interpersonal contexts, it’s often the case that accusers are in fact the troublemakers (and maybe every once in a blue moon, law enforcement asking what they say are “standard” questions might be part of a conspiracy to frame you), so the behavior is only suspicious when there’s a perfectly valid explanation as to why people are pointing at you, and you not only do not see it from that perspective (or acknowledge that you’re seeing it), but you then put on behavior designed to make onlookers believe that something incredibly outrageous has just happened to you.
One admittedly confounding factor is “honor culture”—not a big thing in LW circles, but if we’re thinking of movies where they arrest or ask accusing questions to people in regions or cultures where one’s reputation is really important, and being accused of something is seen as a massive insult, then I can understand that this is a strong confounding factor (to actually being guilty).
I mean, suppose I belong to ideology A, and someone from rival ideology B accuses me of something we both agree is bad, but I do not believe I have done.
Given our relative positions and probably pre-existing animosity and mistrust, it’s entirely possible for me to genuinely believe “he is a B, therefore his being <long list of ideological grievances I have with Bs that make me believe their epistemics and/or morals are bad> makes him more likely to accuse me of random stuff just because I’m an A”, and say so. Meanwhile the B may as well have had the same kind of bias in deciding that I could probably be guilty of the thing he accused me of. If that is the case, we could both be in good faith and thinking the other is in bad faith, both biased, and the situation be perfectly symmetrical. But if you look with suspicion at defensiveness you give by default the advantage to whoever strikes first, which creates also a nasty incentive to do so. And in fact we do see this happening a lot in public discourse.
Yeah.
Agree. But it’s also a strategy that innocent people might want to use to show that the people accusing them don’t have clean motives, or just something that they do automatically to defend themselves because they’re under stress and it does work as a general-purpose defense strategy. So it doesn’t seem like clear Bayesian evidence one way or the other?
I haven’t thought this through in detail but my first thought would be to suspect that this is a strategy that weakly favors people who are actually innocent, assuming that the audience is reasonably discerning and it doesn’t just degenerate into a popularity contest. In that while you can of course dig up dirt on anyone, being able to find accusation-relevant dirt (“this police accusing me has been known to take bribes and accuse innocent people before”) seems more likely to happen in cases where you are in fact falsely accused.
Of course, if that’s the only defense they offer and they don’t bother refuting any of the actual accusations in any substantial way, that’s certainly very suspicious. But then the suspicious thing is more the lack of an object-level response rather than the presence of a defensive response.
Yeah, I’m starting with this part of your response because I agree and think it is good to have clear messaging on the most unambiguously one-directional (“guilty or not”) pieces of evidence. Nothing comes close to having persuasive responses to the most load-bearing accusations.
“It’s fine to be outraged/go on the counterattack, but it becomes suspicious if you use this to deflect from engaging with the evidence against you” seems like a good takeaway.
What shouldn’t happen is that onlookers give someone a pass because of reasoning that goes as follows: “They seem to struggle with insecurity, and getting accused is hard, so it’s okay that they’re deeming it all so outrageous that it’s beneath them to engage more on the object-level.” Or, with less explicit reasoning, but still equally suboptimal, would be an onlooker reaction of, “This is just how this person responds to accusations; I will treat this as a fact of the world,” combined with the onlookers leaving it at that and not flagging it as unfortunate (and suspiciously convenient) that the accused will now not do their best to gather information they can voluntarily disclose to immediately shed more light on their innocence.
Basically, the asymmetry is that innocent people can often (though not always) disclose information voluntarily that makes their innocence more clear/likely. That’s the best strategy if it is available to you. It is never available to guilty people, but sometimes available to innocent people.
(In fact, this trope is overused in the show “Elementary” and once I realized it, it became hard to enjoy watching the show because it’s usually the same formula for the short self-contained episodes: The initial one, two, or three suspects will almost always be red herrings, and this will become clear quickly enough because they will admit to minor crimes that make clear that they would have lacked the motive for the more serious crime, or they would admit something surprising or embarrassing that is verifiable and gives them an alibi, etc.)
So, anything that deflects from this is a bit suspicious! Justifiably accused “problem people” will almost always attempt counterattacks in one form or another (if not calling into question the accuser’s character, then at least their mental health and sanity) because this has a chance of successful deflection.
The following paragraph is less important to get to the bottom of because I’m sure we both agree that the evidence is weak at best no matter what direction it goes in, but I still want to flag that I have opposite intuitions from you about the direction of evidence.
My sense is still that the strategy “act as though you’ve been attacked viciously by a person who is biased against you because they’re bad” does weakly (or maybe even moderately, but with important exceptions) correlate with people being actually guilty. That said, that’s importantly different from your example of “being able to dig up accusation-relavant dirt”. I mean, it depends what we’re picturing… I agree that “this police accusing me has been known to take bribes and accuse innocent people before” is quite relevant and concerning. By contrast, something that would seem a lot less relevant (and therefore go in the other direction, evidence-wise), would be things like, “the person who accused me of bad behavior had too much to drink on the night in question.” Even if true, that’s quite irrelevant because problem people may sometimes pick out victims precisely because they are drunk (or otherwise vulnerable) and also because “having too much to drink” doesn’t usually turn reliable narrators into liars, so the fact that someone being drunk is the worst that can be said about them is not all that incriminating.
That’s a cool conversational move! Appreciate it.
Agree. When I wrote the post, I was thinking more of a case where someone does respond to the object-level claims but in a defensive way or with non-object-level arguments mixed in, not of a case where they entirely fail to present object-level-arguments.
I suspect we might disagree on exactly how frequently this strategy is available to innocent people. I do agree that it is sometimes available to innocent people, but there are also lots of situations where e.g. the innocent person can’t offer any solid evidence that their version of the story is the correct one, or where they have some other reason not to share the full truth (e.g. protecting someone else’s privacy or truth-telling requiring them to reveal something unrelated that they are embarrassed by or have a legal obligation not to reveal), or where the truth is complicated or unusual enough that third parties might not believe it, etc.
Also, as long as the innocents are not fully convincing, many people might go “I can’t tell who is telling the truth here so just out of caution I’ll distrust everyone involved”, which gives even innocent people a motive to leverage whatever extra weapons they have to increase the chances of being believed (or equivalently, the accuser not being believed).
Agree. But a relevant question is, do innocent people attempt counterattacks at a significantly lower rate? If both innocent and guilty people are roughly equally likely to attempt counterattacks, then just the presence of a counterattack isn’t strong evidence. And as long as a counterattack is not less effective for an innocent person, you’d expect both innocent and guilty people to have a similar incentive to launch them.
WRT your last paragraph, I agree with your examples and think the difference probably comes from us thinking about different kinds of examples.
In movies and series it happens a bunch that people find themselves accused of something due to silly coincidences, as this ramps up the drama. In real life, such coincidences or huge misunderstandings presumably happen very infrequently, so when someone in real life gets accused of serious wrongdoing, it is usually the case that either they are guilty, or their accusers have a biased agenda.
This logic would suggest that you’re right about counterattacks being ~equally frequent.
Perhaps once we go from being accused of serious wrongdoing to something more like “being accused of being a kind of bad manager,” misunderstandings, such as that the “accuser” just happened to see you on a bad day, become more plausible. In that case, operating from a perspective of “the accuser is reasonable and this can be cleared up with a conversation rather than by counterattacking them” is something we should expect to see more often from actually “innocent” managers. (Of course, unlike with serious transgressions/wrongdoing, being a “kind of bad” manager is more of a spectrum, and part of being a good manager is being open to feedback and willingness to work on improving onself, etc., so these situations are also more disanalogous for additional reasons.)