141–150 of 374 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This "feature" of Reddit has always really bothered me. Who is Reddit helping when a user's comment is removed but they're tricked into thinking it's still up?
I know this is likely a rhetorical question but since you asked: it benefits whoever controls the narrative
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> at a personal level: have you ever tried to put in practice "highly skilled, non-naive good faith communication" ? If you did, you've probably noted that more often than not, it doesn't make you weaker. It increases your value, your status, even your financial success. Opposite experience. It leads to wasting time, especially compared to getting to the same conclusions using more effective, if less 'true', tactics.…
That's funny, my main drive for choosing this strategy is taking account of opportunity costs ie. not wasting time. I've felt that not focusing on the fact that people may have bad faith and we need tactics etc freed a lot of time and energy to invest somewhere more useful
If you're talking to people who, for w/e reason, have large influence on your life, who you are stuck with and who are not very numerous, investing heavily in enforcing communications standards should pay off. Similarly in cooperative setting with aligned incentives you would expect assuming good faith to work out well.
Now, in social media, sales or a large fluid organization...
I have realized when browsing some twitter culture war exchanges that people almost never respond to the opposing party's arguments. They imagine a set of arguments that uses some of the same words and then argue with that. This type of exchange never results in agreement -- or even the exchange of information! It's unhinged from any communicative act. It's merely inflammatory. I do think this is extremely problemati…
Hmm. I no longer log into Twitter, but I do browse it without being logged in[0]. At least with regard to Brexit (about which it seems the argument is still raging), pro and anti do seem to engage with each other, the problem is they reject each other’s evidence. [0] The annoying popups you get when you scroll too far without being logged in, do at least prevent me from doom-scrolling
I feel the same way! When they come up, my reaction is "nice"+cmd-w. Thanks, twitter!
To your response: I mean, there are some curious people on twitter. Curious people don't engage in the problematic dynamics outlied in the article, so some exchange of information happens there. That's clearly not representative of the bigger picture though, simply because the most people can't afford curiosity, courtesy of their cognitive functions (if you subscribe to Jungs model) and/or their position in maslows pyramid.
Article doesn't move us forward even an inch. If the solution was providing people with a list of bad faith tactics we would have been done with it at least twice by now: first when Socrates was arguing with Sophists 2500 years ago and another time when Schopenhauer wrote Eristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right . And before you think 'maybe someone doesn't know yet': yes, you are correct. Someone…
Definitely. One thing that I think is unappreciated is the extent to which we see "preference falsification". This is a game people play where they pretend to have different preferences to better fit in with their in-group.
It's common for preference falsification to be manufactured intentionally – I think Robin Hanson formalized it with the idea of a "meta-norm", a norm that not says: you must ostracize people who do AND you must ostracize people who don't follow this rule. I think when people complain about "cancel culture", this is the real thing they're unhappy about, they just lack the vocabulary to articulate it. The sneaky thing about the meta-norm is that it's self-reinforcing. Once enough people follow the meta-norm, following the meta-norm becomes a stable equilibrium where no individual person gains from not following it.
From Scott Alexander:
> Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.
> So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures.
The subtlety of this is that you might genuinely believe that everyone supports the electric shocks, because you'll never hear anyone speaking out against it, even though everyone hates it.
I think this dynamic is so powerful that it's almost innate. I remember once when a friend of a friend cheated on her boyfriend regularly. I obviously thought negatively of the cheater and didn't want to be around her, but I also thought negatively of my friend for continuing to be around the cheater. The instinct is that punishing cheaters by social ostracism is socially useful, so we should also punish people who fail to ostracize cheaters by ostracising them, and so on. This can be good like in the case of punishing cheaters, but the problem is that it could work for any social norm even if 100% of people disagreed with it.
I think this is a real and powerful social dynamic that leads to a huge amount of people having no choice but to act in bad faith. If this is a real social dynamic, how can it be neutralized? One approach I think is promising is to use local opinion polls, only structured as opinion elections. If everyone could vote anonymously, I'm sure they would say "I'm not such a fan of these electric shocks" (and the anonymity protects them from the fear of socially-enforced retaliation). Once it becomes common knowledge that almost nobody around you likes the electric shocks, it's much easier to coordinate "let's stop punishing people for not shocking themselves". Electric shocks are just an example, you could use this for any hot-button political issue. For example, in the US's antebellum South I'm sure there was immense social pressure to be pro-slavery, but opinion elections might have helped pro-abolition people understand if they were even in the minority (and if so, by how much).
This is just one mechanism I think might be workable, but I'm sure if we sat down and thought about it we could come up with many others, like reputation systems for those who make accurate predictions for the future, debates where people have an incentive to call-out their counterparty's selective reporting of the facts, etc.
Here's an alternative ending: what if good faith communication was superior to bad faith in a systemic way ? Clues: - at a personal level: have you ever tried to put in practice "highly skilled, non-naive good faith communication" ? If you did, you've probably noted that more often than not, it doesn't make you weaker. It increases your value, your status, even your financial success. So maybe this could also be a co…
Imagine the war scenario. The honest, good-faith communication would be like: If we capitulate outright, the worst thing that happens is paying taxes to somewhere else, and the set of faces on TV news will change to a different set of faces. Anyway, please go and die to prevent that from happening, while the people who have the most at stake hide in safety
It's not difficult to see why bad-faith war propaganda beats that every time
I have realized when browsing some twitter culture war exchanges that people almost never respond to the opposing party's arguments. They imagine a set of arguments that uses some of the same words and then argue with that. This type of exchange never results in agreement -- or even the exchange of information! It's unhinged from any communicative act. It's merely inflammatory. I do think this is extremely problemati…
It's turtles all the way down, where each turtle is yelling at the one on top.
The root problem is: the 90% of people who are not inherently driven by curiosity want to contribute/validate their viewpoint/seek peer confirmation.
This, left alone, leads to nothing good, which is why we came up with this funny concept of "culture".
But culture is dead, courtesy of
* the social-laissez-faire-boogaloo of the US' concept of "total freedom"
* the decay of stability-providing social structures
* existential dread/people trapped in the lower levels of Maslows pyramid
Imagine how smart the smartest people out of one million are. Pretty smart, huh? We have 7000 of them, and they have lots of things to say, but nobody gives a fuck, because people don't actually seek to understand. They seek validation, righteousness and stability. And you don't have to be the smartest out of a million to be worth listening to, but the simple fact that our "culture" (which is decayed to complete archaic groupthink) sets up the wrong reward incentives should paint a clear picture and be accessible to understand for everyone. Its not that stupid people get famous, its that people who are not curious get famous. That is where we fail.
The answer to this must be culture, again. But this time one that matches the world we've built since the last one collapsed, namely one that provides the stability people seek across the board. When the framework for that stability was religion, critically relevant people could not find social stability when they questioned god. That's why religion as a framework sucks, it doesn't capture the entire group.
The solution is easy: curiosity. Curious people are worth listening to, everyone else is not. This is something we have to cement in every piece of art and work we create. Literally: show the people who's minds are trapped in a simpler place their limits, very gently, and offer salvation: man, there are lots of intelligent people out there who try to make the world a better place. You don't have to understand it all, and you wont anyway, so don't stress yourself. We can do this, together. This, roughly, is the rhetoric picture we'll have to paint over the last decades. That, and only that, fixes the problem at its root.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyway, I could talk about this stuff for days, it's what I do for work, teaching myself and others how to communicate to better resolve such conflict. How do you approach conflict resulting from bad faith interaction? How do you deescalate such conflict?
I find one of the most effective ways has been for me to try to feel closer to them first. I think a lot of conflict leads into attacks, such as blame, guilt tripping, rejection, etc, and so I practice replying to such attacks in a way where I might feel closer to them after than when I started. To get back on the same team, per say. It doesn't mean they will, but I've found that if at least think they're on my team,…
In reality, we are in a world where there is absolutely 0 reason to be arguing in good faith for anything you truly care about. The most effective way you convince people of something is using all of the bad faith tactics listed here - you get no bonus points from the audience for avoiding these, since a very small amount of people are willing to say something about it, and by avoiding these tactics you are just letting your opponents use them to gain an upper hand.
If there is something you truly care about, something that you think swaying general opinion could make a real difference in your life, arguing in "good faith" is foolish.
I was really confused about what the author’s actual experience was like until I realized that this was published by some sort of think tank. This whole article is basically a big bongrippy, chin stroking hand-wave about the importance of Decorum.
Props to whoever got paid money to write this silly piece. Whoever is funding this stuff clearly has too much money to interface with reality and it’s a good thing that they’re (hopefully) being fleeced to the max by writers that are happy to churn out drivel