from the standpoint of modeling information transmission, the difference between bias and deception is uninteresting—usually not relevant to what probability updates should be made.
I think this sentence is assuming a one-way conversation?
Yes, if you give a talk, and I watch it later on YouTube, then I agree that I shouldn’t care too much whether you are sincerely motivated to speak the truth but you have been led astray by self-serving rationalizations, versus you explicitly don’t care about the truth and are just mouthing whatever words will make you look good.
But if we’re in a room together, having a back-and-forth conversation, then those are two very different situations. For example, deception-versus-bias is relevant to my prospects for changing your mind via object-level discussion.
Hmm, actually, even in the one-way-conversation case, deception-vs-bias has nonzero relevance. For example, if I know that you are biased but not deceptive, and you make a very unambiguous claim that I know you know, but that I can’t check for myself (e.g. if you say “I have eaten calamari before”), then I should put more credence on that claim, if I know you’re biased but not deceptive, compared to the other way around.
Here’s another perspective: I find the terms “good faith” / “bad faith” to be incredibly useful in everyday life, and I’m not sure how you would explain that fact. Do you think I’m insufficiently cynical or something?
Here’s another perspective: I find the terms “good faith” / “bad faith” to be incredibly useful in everyday life, and I’m not sure how you would explain that fact. Do you think I’m insufficiently cynical or something?
Can you go into more examples/details of how/why?
I’m not Steven, but I know a handful of people who have no care for the truth and will say whatever they think will make them look good in the short term or give them immediate pleasure. They lie a lot. Some of them are sufficiently sophisticated to try to only tell plausible lies. For them debates are games wherein the goal is to appear victorious, preferably while defending the stance that is high status. When interacting with them, I know ahead of time to disbelieve nearly everything they say. I also know that I should only engage with them in debates/discussions for the purpose of convincing third party listeners.
It is useful to have a term for someone with a casual disregard for the truth. Liar is one such word, but also carries the connotation of accusing them that the specific thing they are saying in the moment is factually incorrect—which isn’t always true with an accusation of bad faith. They’re speaking without regard to the truth, and sometimes the truth aligns with their pleasure, and so they say the truth. They’re not averse to the truth, they just don’t care. They are arguing in bad faith.
They’re bullshitters. “Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavour either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. …The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” —Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Note that bullshitting is only one subtype of bad faith argument. There are other strategies of bad faith argument that don’t require making untrue statements, such as cherry picking, gish galloping, making intentional logical errors, or being intentionally confusing or distracting.
Oh yes, of course. I was only talking about the people Stephen mentioned, “who have no care for the truth and will say whatever they think will make them look good in the short term or give them immediate pleasure”.
I find the terms “good faith” / “bad faith” to be incredibly useful in everyday life, and I’m not sure how you would explain that fact. Do you think I’m insufficiently cynical or something?
I think this and some previousposts have been part of a multi-year attempt to articulate a worldview that our culture doesn’t already have standard language for; cynical is close, but not quite right.
Do you ever get accused of bad faith? How do you respond? I always want to point at the Wikipedia definition and say, “Can you be more specific? What motivation do you think I have here I haven’t been explicit about? I’m happy to clarify!”
Crucially, it’s not the case that there’s never going to be anything to clarify. Sometimes when I’m in a discussion on Twitter with someone who’s more of an ideologue than I am, I end up choosing my words carefully to make it sound like I’m “on their side” to a greater extent than I really am, because I’m afraid that they’d slam the door on me if they knew what I was really thinking, but they might listen to the intellectually substantive point I’m trying to make if I talk like a fellow traveler. (This is also point #7 of Scott Alexander’s nonfiction writing advice.)
Is that bad faith, or just effective rhetoric? I think it’s both! And I think human life is full of these little details where the way people naturally talk and behave needs to be explained in terms of social and political maneuvering, and you can’t just “not do that” because it’s not clear what exactly that would entail. (Refusing to signal is like refusing to allow time to pass.) The closest I can get to “not doing that” is by going meta on it—writing about it in posts like this, lampshading it when I can afford to.
Yes it’s possible to be more specific than “good faith” / “bad faith” but that doesn’t mean those phrases aren’t communicating something substantive and useful, right? By the same token, every possible word and phrase and sentence could be elaborated into something more specific.
I also agree that there are edge cases, but again, that’s a near-universal property of using language to communicate.
Here’s my defense of good faith / bad faith.
STEP 1: Conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives are not the only kind of motive, let alone the only influence on behavior, but they are a motive and an influence on behavior, and a particularly important one for many purposes.
For example, if I have a conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motive to murder you but find myself with cold feet, that’s a different situation than if I have a conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motive to not murder you but have anger and poor self-control. You very much care which one it is, when deciding what to say to me, guessing what’s gonna happen in the future, etc., even though both situations could be described as “you have some sources of desire to murder me and other sources of desire to not murder me”. That’s why we have terms like “self-control” and “self-awareness” that are relevant to how strongly one’s conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives determine behavior. It’s a common thing to be thinking about.
STEP 2: Conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives can vary continuously along many dimensions, but “good-faith” / “bad-faith” tends to label two opposite ends of one important such dimension of variation, in a generally pretty clear way (in context). As in the fallacy of gray, the existence of a spectrum does not reduce the usefulness of labeling its opposite ends.
Do you ever get accused of bad faith? How do you respond?
I can’t immediately recall any specific examples from my own life.
I would probably explicitly spell out what I interpret the accusation of bad faith to mean, and then say that this accusation is not true (if it isn’t). For example, if I wrote a critical book review, and someone said I was criticizing the book in bad faith, maybe I would say “I understand your comment to be something like: You think I set out with an explicit goal to do a hit job on this book, because I’m opposed to its conclusions, and I am just saying whatever will make the book look bad without regard to being fair and honest. If that is what you mean, then…”
…and then maybe I would say “that’s totally wrong. I came in really hoping and expecting to like this book, and was surprised and disappointed about how bad it was.” or maybe I would say “I admit that I felt really defensive when reading the book, but I did really earnestly try to give it a fair shake and to be scrupulously honest in my review, and I feel bad if I fell short of that” or whatever.
So yeah, it’s not like there’s no gray area or scope to elaborate. But the original “bad faith” accusation is a perfectly good starting point from which to elaborate if necessary. By the same token, if I say “you’re confused about X”, then yeah that could sure benefit from elaboration, but that doesn’t mean I was doing something wrong by saying that in the first place, or that we should drop the word “confused” from our vocabulary. Conversations always rely on lazy evaluation—you clarify things when it turns out that they’re both unclear to the other person and important to the conversation. You can’t just preemptively spell out every detail. It’s not practical.
I just did a quick search of my public writings for “good faith” / “bad faith”. The first three I found were this comment, and a footnote in that same post, and a comment here. All three used the term “good faith” rather than “bad faith”. When I think about it, I guess I do use “good faith” more often than “bad faith”. I usually use “good faith” as meaning something similar to “earnestly” and “actually trying” and “acting according to explicit motivations that even my opponents would endorse”.
Ah, here’s an example of me saying “bad faith”. You might find this interesting: I actually wrote ““Hype” typically means Person X is promoting a product, that they benefit from the success of that product, and that they are probably exaggerating the impressiveness of that product in bad faith (or at least, with a self-serving bias).” Note that I call out “bad faith” and “with a self-serving bias” as two different things, one implicitly worse than the other. The salesperson who knowingly lies and misleads from an explicit goal to advance his own career is one thing, the salesperson who sincerely (albeit incorrectly) believes his product will help the customer and is explicitly acting from that motivation is a different thing, and it is useful to distinguish one from the other, even if there’s a spectrum between them with gray area in between.
I think this sentence is assuming a one-way conversation?
Yes, if you give a talk, and I watch it later on YouTube, then I agree that I shouldn’t care too much whether you are sincerely motivated to speak the truth but you have been led astray by self-serving rationalizations, versus you explicitly don’t care about the truth and are just mouthing whatever words will make you look good.
But if we’re in a room together, having a back-and-forth conversation, then those are two very different situations. For example, deception-versus-bias is relevant to my prospects for changing your mind via object-level discussion.
Hmm, actually, even in the one-way-conversation case, deception-vs-bias has nonzero relevance. For example, if I know that you are biased but not deceptive, and you make a very unambiguous claim that I know you know, but that I can’t check for myself (e.g. if you say “I have eaten calamari before”), then I should put more credence on that claim, if I know you’re biased but not deceptive, compared to the other way around.
Here’s another perspective: I find the terms “good faith” / “bad faith” to be incredibly useful in everyday life, and I’m not sure how you would explain that fact. Do you think I’m insufficiently cynical or something?
Can you go into more examples/details of how/why?
I’m not Steven, but I know a handful of people who have no care for the truth and will say whatever they think will make them look good in the short term or give them immediate pleasure. They lie a lot. Some of them are sufficiently sophisticated to try to only tell plausible lies. For them debates are games wherein the goal is to appear victorious, preferably while defending the stance that is high status. When interacting with them, I know ahead of time to disbelieve nearly everything they say. I also know that I should only engage with them in debates/discussions for the purpose of convincing third party listeners.
It is useful to have a term for someone with a casual disregard for the truth. Liar is one such word, but also carries the connotation of accusing them that the specific thing they are saying in the moment is factually incorrect—which isn’t always true with an accusation of bad faith. They’re speaking without regard to the truth, and sometimes the truth aligns with their pleasure, and so they say the truth. They’re not averse to the truth, they just don’t care. They are arguing in bad faith.
They’re bullshitters.
“Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavour either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. …The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”
—Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Note that bullshitting is only one subtype of bad faith argument. There are other strategies of bad faith argument that don’t require making untrue statements, such as cherry picking, gish galloping, making intentional logical errors, or being intentionally confusing or distracting.
Oh yes, of course. I was only talking about the people Stephen mentioned, “who have no care for the truth and will say whatever they think will make them look good in the short term or give them immediate pleasure”.
I think this and some previous posts have been part of a multi-year attempt to articulate a worldview that our culture doesn’t already have standard language for; cynical is close, but not quite right.
Do you ever get accused of bad faith? How do you respond? I always want to point at the Wikipedia definition and say, “Can you be more specific? What motivation do you think I have here I haven’t been explicit about? I’m happy to clarify!”
Crucially, it’s not the case that there’s never going to be anything to clarify. Sometimes when I’m in a discussion on Twitter with someone who’s more of an ideologue than I am, I end up choosing my words carefully to make it sound like I’m “on their side” to a greater extent than I really am, because I’m afraid that they’d slam the door on me if they knew what I was really thinking, but they might listen to the intellectually substantive point I’m trying to make if I talk like a fellow traveler. (This is also point #7 of Scott Alexander’s nonfiction writing advice.)
Is that bad faith, or just effective rhetoric? I think it’s both! And I think human life is full of these little details where the way people naturally talk and behave needs to be explained in terms of social and political maneuvering, and you can’t just “not do that” because it’s not clear what exactly that would entail. (Refusing to signal is like refusing to allow time to pass.) The closest I can get to “not doing that” is by going meta on it—writing about it in posts like this, lampshading it when I can afford to.
Yes it’s possible to be more specific than “good faith” / “bad faith” but that doesn’t mean those phrases aren’t communicating something substantive and useful, right? By the same token, every possible word and phrase and sentence could be elaborated into something more specific.
I also agree that there are edge cases, but again, that’s a near-universal property of using language to communicate.
Here’s my defense of good faith / bad faith.
STEP 1: Conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives are not the only kind of motive, let alone the only influence on behavior, but they are a motive and an influence on behavior, and a particularly important one for many purposes.
For example, if I have a conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motive to murder you but find myself with cold feet, that’s a different situation than if I have a conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motive to not murder you but have anger and poor self-control. You very much care which one it is, when deciding what to say to me, guessing what’s gonna happen in the future, etc., even though both situations could be described as “you have some sources of desire to murder me and other sources of desire to not murder me”. That’s why we have terms like “self-control” and “self-awareness” that are relevant to how strongly one’s conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives determine behavior. It’s a common thing to be thinking about.
STEP 2: Conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives can vary continuously along many dimensions, but “good-faith” / “bad-faith” tends to label two opposite ends of one important such dimension of variation, in a generally pretty clear way (in context). As in the fallacy of gray, the existence of a spectrum does not reduce the usefulness of labeling its opposite ends.
I can’t immediately recall any specific examples from my own life.
I would probably explicitly spell out what I interpret the accusation of bad faith to mean, and then say that this accusation is not true (if it isn’t). For example, if I wrote a critical book review, and someone said I was criticizing the book in bad faith, maybe I would say “I understand your comment to be something like: You think I set out with an explicit goal to do a hit job on this book, because I’m opposed to its conclusions, and I am just saying whatever will make the book look bad without regard to being fair and honest. If that is what you mean, then…”
…and then maybe I would say “that’s totally wrong. I came in really hoping and expecting to like this book, and was surprised and disappointed about how bad it was.” or maybe I would say “I admit that I felt really defensive when reading the book, but I did really earnestly try to give it a fair shake and to be scrupulously honest in my review, and I feel bad if I fell short of that” or whatever.
So yeah, it’s not like there’s no gray area or scope to elaborate. But the original “bad faith” accusation is a perfectly good starting point from which to elaborate if necessary. By the same token, if I say “you’re confused about X”, then yeah that could sure benefit from elaboration, but that doesn’t mean I was doing something wrong by saying that in the first place, or that we should drop the word “confused” from our vocabulary. Conversations always rely on lazy evaluation—you clarify things when it turns out that they’re both unclear to the other person and important to the conversation. You can’t just preemptively spell out every detail. It’s not practical.
I just did a quick search of my public writings for “good faith” / “bad faith”. The first three I found were this comment, and a footnote in that same post, and a comment here. All three used the term “good faith” rather than “bad faith”. When I think about it, I guess I do use “good faith” more often than “bad faith”. I usually use “good faith” as meaning something similar to “earnestly” and “actually trying” and “acting according to explicit motivations that even my opponents would endorse”.
Ah, here’s an example of me saying “bad faith”. You might find this interesting: I actually wrote ““Hype” typically means Person X is promoting a product, that they benefit from the success of that product, and that they are probably exaggerating the impressiveness of that product in bad faith (or at least, with a self-serving bias).” Note that I call out “bad faith” and “with a self-serving bias” as two different things, one implicitly worse than the other. The salesperson who knowingly lies and misleads from an explicit goal to advance his own career is one thing, the salesperson who sincerely (albeit incorrectly) believes his product will help the customer and is explicitly acting from that motivation is a different thing, and it is useful to distinguish one from the other, even if there’s a spectrum between them with gray area in between.