The endgames of bad faith communication

Edit: for those downvoting, I'm ok with you disagreeing or even feeling annoyed or angry with what I said. I sincerely also wish you would comment below so that I better understand what led to you downvoting. Currently I'm not sure what I did to lead to that and I'd like to know so that I might prevent it in the future.

Ooo, I feel really frustrated by the labeling of them as good or bad faith communication. In their box explaining good faith communication, they say that all those behaviors can be faked if someone is engaging in bad faith communication, so it leaves me wondering how does one actually know whether another or oneself is using good faith communication? I think this harkens back to the discussion on here the other day about always assume good intentions. After reading this article, I almost left it feeling more hopeless, as if it were saying most people communicate with bad intention (bad faith) and by using good and bad as labels, further ingrains the concept of binary good/evil, falling somewhat into a "bad faith" aspect of black/white polarizing categorization.

However, I feel grateful that they started this conversation and overall address the challenge that we have in communicating to resolve conflict. I personally believe they could simplify their good/bad faith classification by focusing more on how open people are communicating about what they're feeling and thinking and how open people are to hearing/imagining how others are feeling and thinking. I think underlying much of their distinction between good/bad faith is an element of more open or more closed, and that such language, especially with the more qualifier included, may not carry such connotations of good/bad.

I feel very confident that one of the largest challenges we face as a society is how to communicate more openly with each other—to say how we feel and think—when anything we say can be shared around the world, recorded, aggregated, etc.

Even after writing this, the idea of "good faith" vs "bad faith" communication really irks me lol. I believe most of us communicate out of how we are feeling based on the things that have happened and are happening in our lives and we are trying our best. In that way, I assume even the people acting in "bad faith" are acting out of "good faith" and perhaps that's the main issue I have with this. I have found assuming people to have good faith even if they and others assume they have bad faith, can drastically improve how I feel in conversations, relationships, and resolving conflict.

I think this is the hard part. How do you engage in good faith when everyone else seems to be engaging in bad faith tactics? How can you be open to changing your mind when no one else is open to changing theirs? Seems like you immediately lose every time.

I believe strongly in these good faith tactics, and I use them to engage with people I vehemently disagree with. Because of this I have a deeper understanding of them than many of my peers on the other side. But understanding doesn’t help the situation. The overall conversation continues to deteriorate year after year.

I think this page is a great definition of what is happening, but a poor prescription of what to do about it.

Digitization has clearly added lots of negatives that otherwise wouldn’t last. As simple as, does it really make sense for something local with only local and fittingly small consequences, to be discussed at a global level? But anybody can post a photo or video to be seen the world over. Depending on content there will even be users on the internet policing (“influencing”) other users in the internet to weigh in on whatever. But clearly human societies function at a level of cohesion that breaks apart at scale. Ie there isn’t one truly universal way to live that everyone can and in time could be made to live.

Edit-I’d venture even the ability for the internet to bring together people who would otherwise not have a cohort “breaks at scale” because people just don’t scale like that.

> by supporting good faith communication (truth)

You can have good faith communication over something like the Fermi Paradox or SETI, but the truth is unknown. With a lot of complex social and political realities, the truth is also unknown. Some facts are known, but how they fit whatever grand narrative is in dispute. And with technology, often the dispute centers around preference or what's popular, where for example, which programming language is better doesn't really have a truth value in the general sense.

At which point you’ve used a rhetorical tactic and turned a conversation into a game.

I’m saying the space of people communicating is larger than the space of people using words in rhetorical games.