I sent a few private notes to him early on about the way I reacted to his posts. This wasn’t a “bad faith” detector ( I don’t actually buy the premise—such a thing is VERY uncommon compared to honest incorrect values and beliefs), this was a pattern match to an overzealous overconfident newbie, possibly with under-developed social skills. You know, just like all of us a few years (or in my case decades) ago.
This all sounds right, but the reasoning behind using the wording of “bad faith” is explained in the second bullet point of this comment.
Tl;dr the module your brain has for detecting things that feel like “bad faith” is good at detecting when someone is acting in ways that cause bad consequences in expectation but don’t feel like “bad faith” to the other person on the inside. If people could learn to correct a subset of these actions by learning, say, common social skills, treating those actions like they’re taken in “bad faith” incentivizes them to learn those skills, which results in you having to live with negative consequences from dealing with that person less. I’d say that this is part of why our minds often read well-intentioned-but-harmful-in-expectation behaviors as “bad faith”; it’s a way of correcting them.
I sent a few private notes to him early on about the way I reacted to his posts. This wasn’t a “bad faith” detector ( I don’t actually buy the premise—such a thing is VERY uncommon compared to honest incorrect values and beliefs), this was a pattern match to an overzealous overconfident newbie, possibly with under-developed social skills. You know, just like all of us a few years (or in my case decades) ago.
This all sounds right, but the reasoning behind using the wording of “bad faith” is explained in the second bullet point of this comment.
Tl;dr the module your brain has for detecting things that feel like “bad faith” is good at detecting when someone is acting in ways that cause bad consequences in expectation but don’t feel like “bad faith” to the other person on the inside. If people could learn to correct a subset of these actions by learning, say, common social skills, treating those actions like they’re taken in “bad faith” incentivizes them to learn those skills, which results in you having to live with negative consequences from dealing with that person less. I’d say that this is part of why our minds often read well-intentioned-but-harmful-in-expectation behaviors as “bad faith”; it’s a way of correcting them.