You had a good point, you made it, and you pointed out the problems with the responses to it. All of these comments were upvoted, many to double digits. But then your comments turned into personal attacks on Luke (suggesting he doesn’t understand the material he posts, suggesting he is lying about not seeing an earlier comment of yours). At that point, I felt (as, I’m guessing, did others), that your comments were actively counterproductive in trying to learn more about the minicamp, as well as promoting a community norm of insulting each other and assuming bad faith.
I also tend to get annoyed by, and downvote, comments to the effect of “The fact that I was downvoted reflects badly on all of you, who obviously downvoted me for [reason]” since I usually didn’t downvote for the reason mentioned and I don’t see them as a sincere attempt to understand the source of disagreement.
as well as promoting a community norm of insulting each other and assuming bad faith.
(The community norm should be to assume bad faith as much as is suggested by evidence. The extent to which bad faith is assumed shouldn’t be a product of a community norm. Insulting is rarely useful, of course.)
Given the human tendency to get emotionally involved in an argument, I think a rule of “assume bad faith as much as is suggested by evidence” qucikly devolves into “assume bad faith”. If you want to argue for a community norm of “assume bad faith as much as suggested by the evidence even after updating on all theevidence that people are really bad at evaluating other people’s motives”, I wouldn’t neccesarily disagree, but in practice, I think that looks a lot like “assume good faith”.
If there are known flaws in a method of inference, taking them into account should be part of what’s done when performing an inference, or what’s meant when suggesting to perform it. There should be no distinction between suggesting to look for a fact and suggesting to take into account possible flaws in the method of looking for that fact. This is simple exercise of the human power, something to encourage, not work around.
But, for instance, we know that flaws in our way of thinking about politics are so pervasive that we’ve decided to avoid it as much as possible. I would argue that flaws in our way of assessing whether other people in an online argument are arguing in good faith are nearly as pervasive, to the extent that assuming good faith is a better heuristic than assuming bad faith as much as is suggested by evidence.
And people who use an “assume good faith” model still change their mind once the evidence starts to accumulate; it’s about what your default assumption is, not whether it’s ever appropriate to say “You are arguing in bad faith.”
I really don’t think that’s the problem here.
You had a good point, you made it, and you pointed out the problems with the responses to it. All of these comments were upvoted, many to double digits. But then your comments turned into personal attacks on Luke (suggesting he doesn’t understand the material he posts, suggesting he is lying about not seeing an earlier comment of yours). At that point, I felt (as, I’m guessing, did others), that your comments were actively counterproductive in trying to learn more about the minicamp, as well as promoting a community norm of insulting each other and assuming bad faith.
I also tend to get annoyed by, and downvote, comments to the effect of “The fact that I was downvoted reflects badly on all of you, who obviously downvoted me for [reason]” since I usually didn’t downvote for the reason mentioned and I don’t see them as a sincere attempt to understand the source of disagreement.
(The community norm should be to assume bad faith as much as is suggested by evidence. The extent to which bad faith is assumed shouldn’t be a product of a community norm. Insulting is rarely useful, of course.)
Given the human tendency to get emotionally involved in an argument, I think a rule of “assume bad faith as much as is suggested by evidence” qucikly devolves into “assume bad faith”. If you want to argue for a community norm of “assume bad faith as much as suggested by the evidence even after updating on all the evidence that people are really bad at evaluating other people’s motives”, I wouldn’t neccesarily disagree, but in practice, I think that looks a lot like “assume good faith”.
If there are known flaws in a method of inference, taking them into account should be part of what’s done when performing an inference, or what’s meant when suggesting to perform it. There should be no distinction between suggesting to look for a fact and suggesting to take into account possible flaws in the method of looking for that fact. This is simple exercise of the human power, something to encourage, not work around.
But, for instance, we know that flaws in our way of thinking about politics are so pervasive that we’ve decided to avoid it as much as possible. I would argue that flaws in our way of assessing whether other people in an online argument are arguing in good faith are nearly as pervasive, to the extent that assuming good faith is a better heuristic than assuming bad faith as much as is suggested by evidence.
And people who use an “assume good faith” model still change their mind once the evidence starts to accumulate; it’s about what your default assumption is, not whether it’s ever appropriate to say “You are arguing in bad faith.”