The binary classification leads to problems. We distinguish cooperative intent, defective intent and hostile intent. The person who optimizes his marketing for conversation without regard for the truth is acting defective and neither cooperative nor hostile.
There’s such a thing as hostile intent. Some people are intent to cause harm for other people but those aren’t the people with whom we have problems in this community.
I found this helpful. Distinguishing between treating people as friendly agents, tools, and enemy agents seems quite a bit better than the binary good/bad faith distinction. I think a lot of bad faith accusations feel like people are saying “this person is treating me like an enemy agent,” but are properly evidence for “this person is treating me like a tool,” which is itself sufficient reason to distrust and build common knowledge about them.
In some ways, “enemy agent” and “friendly agent” are more similar attitudes than either is to “tool”.
I would probably define “in bad faith” as “trying to deliberately mislead” (which itself is basically lying, just widened a bit to include cases like “but technically speaking this is a true statement” and “but I didn’t say anything, just wiggled my eyebrows suggestively”). Do you think it’s more complicated than that?
I’m skeptical of the work “deliberately” is doing there. If the whole agent determining someone’s actions is following a decision procedure that tries to push my beliefs away from the truth when convenient, then there’s a sense in which the whole agent is acting in bad faith, even if they’ve never consciously deliberated on the matter. At least, it’s materially different from unmotivated error, in a way that makes it similar to consciously lying.
Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit” introduced the distinction between lies and bullshit. The liar wants to deceive you about the world (to get you to believe false statements), whereas the bullshitter wants to deceive you about his intentions (to get you to take his statements as good-faith efforts, when they are merely meant to impress).
We may need to introduce a third member of this set. Along with lies told by liars, and bullshit spread by bullshitters, there is also spam emitted by spambots.
Like the bullshitter (but unlike the liar), the spambot doesn’t necessarily have any model of the truth of its sentences. However, unlike the bullshitter, the spambot doesn’t particularly care what (or whether) you think of it. But it optimizes its sentences to cause you to do a particular action.
To me it seems troll is also an important category. Most journalists don’t care whether you believe what they write but care that you engage with their writing. Whether you love it or hate it is secondary when you share the post on facebook and twitter.
This is a bit of a definitions dispute, but I want to distinguish between someone whose values/interests/goals do not coincide with yours but who’s quite open about it on the one hand, and someone who wants to manipulate you without you realizing what’s going on on the other hand. I wouldn’t apply the expression “in bad faith” to the former case (that could be a “hostile agent”, but that’s a different thing), but I would to the latter case.
tries to push my beliefs away from the truth when convenient
So if someone thinks the truth is different from what you think it is and tries to “push your beliefs away”, is he acting in bad faith? Consider e.g. your standard sincere Christian missionaries.
If someone’s mistaken, and tries to push my beliefs towards what they mistakenly believe to be the truth by offering the evidence they believe to be the most material, that seems like a good-faith error. On the other hand, telling simplified Bible stories that elide the problem of evil, and only addressing it once people are attached to the idea of God, would not seem like it’s in good faith.
On the other hand, telling simplified Bible stories that elide the problem of evil, and only addressing it once people are attached to the idea of God, would not seem like it’s in good faith.
Let’s flip the political arrow.
How do you feel about sincere people telling simplified climate change stories that elide the uncertainties and only addressing them once people are attached to the idea of fighting global warming?
Pretty bad. My trust in the establishment’s ability or willingness to honestly try to inform me about global warming is fairly low as a result. I think that global warming is happening, caused in part by human action, and is going to be somewhat costly, so I’m mildly in favor of measures like a global carbon tax, but I wouldn’t be shocked if some important part of the official narrative turned out to be deeply wrong.
Right, but we are not talking about global warming, we’re are talking about bad faith. Would you say that the sincere we’re-all-gonna-die-unless… environmentalists (and there are a lot of them) are acting in bad faith?
There is no particular need to dig into the details, the point is whether you think of sincere missionaries as different (in the sense of being more or less prone to acting in bad faith) from sincere environmentalists. There’s a lot of heterogeneity all around :-)
I think a lot of environmentalist advocacy is well-described as a bad-faith process executed by people trying to do good, much like a lot of religious education. I’m unsure what the relative extent of each is.
The binary classification leads to problems. We distinguish cooperative intent, defective intent and hostile intent. The person who optimizes his marketing for conversation without regard for the truth is acting defective and neither cooperative nor hostile.
There’s such a thing as hostile intent. Some people are intent to cause harm for other people but those aren’t the people with whom we have problems in this community.
I found this helpful. Distinguishing between treating people as friendly agents, tools, and enemy agents seems quite a bit better than the binary good/bad faith distinction. I think a lot of bad faith accusations feel like people are saying “this person is treating me like an enemy agent,” but are properly evidence for “this person is treating me like a tool,” which is itself sufficient reason to distrust and build common knowledge about them.
In some ways, “enemy agent” and “friendly agent” are more similar attitudes than either is to “tool”.
I would probably define “in bad faith” as “trying to deliberately mislead” (which itself is basically lying, just widened a bit to include cases like “but technically speaking this is a true statement” and “but I didn’t say anything, just wiggled my eyebrows suggestively”). Do you think it’s more complicated than that?
I’m skeptical of the work “deliberately” is doing there. If the whole agent determining someone’s actions is following a decision procedure that tries to push my beliefs away from the truth when convenient, then there’s a sense in which the whole agent is acting in bad faith, even if they’ve never consciously deliberated on the matter. At least, it’s materially different from unmotivated error, in a way that makes it similar to consciously lying.
Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit” introduced the distinction between lies and bullshit. The liar wants to deceive you about the world (to get you to believe false statements), whereas the bullshitter wants to deceive you about his intentions (to get you to take his statements as good-faith efforts, when they are merely meant to impress).
We may need to introduce a third member of this set. Along with lies told by liars, and bullshit spread by bullshitters, there is also spam emitted by spambots.
Like the bullshitter (but unlike the liar), the spambot doesn’t necessarily have any model of the truth of its sentences. However, unlike the bullshitter, the spambot doesn’t particularly care what (or whether) you think of it. But it optimizes its sentences to cause you to do a particular action.
To me it seems troll is also an important category. Most journalists don’t care whether you believe what they write but care that you engage with their writing. Whether you love it or hate it is secondary when you share the post on facebook and twitter.
This is a bit of a definitions dispute, but I want to distinguish between someone whose values/interests/goals do not coincide with yours but who’s quite open about it on the one hand, and someone who wants to manipulate you without you realizing what’s going on on the other hand. I wouldn’t apply the expression “in bad faith” to the former case (that could be a “hostile agent”, but that’s a different thing), but I would to the latter case.
So if someone thinks the truth is different from what you think it is and tries to “push your beliefs away”, is he acting in bad faith? Consider e.g. your standard sincere Christian missionaries.
If someone’s mistaken, and tries to push my beliefs towards what they mistakenly believe to be the truth by offering the evidence they believe to be the most material, that seems like a good-faith error. On the other hand, telling simplified Bible stories that elide the problem of evil, and only addressing it once people are attached to the idea of God, would not seem like it’s in good faith.
Let’s flip the political arrow.
How do you feel about sincere people telling simplified climate change stories that elide the uncertainties and only addressing them once people are attached to the idea of fighting global warming?
Pretty bad. My trust in the establishment’s ability or willingness to honestly try to inform me about global warming is fairly low as a result. I think that global warming is happening, caused in part by human action, and is going to be somewhat costly, so I’m mildly in favor of measures like a global carbon tax, but I wouldn’t be shocked if some important part of the official narrative turned out to be deeply wrong.
Right, but we are not talking about global warming, we’re are talking about bad faith. Would you say that the sincere we’re-all-gonna-die-unless… environmentalists (and there are a lot of them) are acting in bad faith?
I’d have to know more details about the case you’re thinking of. There’s lots of heterogeneity!
There is no particular need to dig into the details, the point is whether you think of sincere missionaries as different (in the sense of being more or less prone to acting in bad faith) from sincere environmentalists. There’s a lot of heterogeneity all around :-)
I think a lot of environmentalist advocacy is well-described as a bad-faith process executed by people trying to do good, much like a lot of religious education. I’m unsure what the relative extent of each is.
No one is evil in his own story.