Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The endgames of bad faith communication

consilienceproject.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 374 posts

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#201

Post by beaconstudios »

tempestn wrote: post #102
Dracophoenix wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The liberal-conservative dichotomy is a modern invention that only came about sometime during the 60's. There have been various parties and coalitions within parties throughout American history.

I'm not sure about that. Polarization in the United States has certainly ebbed and flowed over time, but if you study history, there has been a rough liberal-conservative dichotomy in nearly every society I can think of, going back at least hundreds of years. There's a great podcast actually, Revolutions, by Mike Duncan - it devotes a season to each of several famous historical revolutions. Currently it's in the last…

There's also reactionaries who want to run the clock back - traditionally these would take the form of loyalists after a monarchy was already deposed, like the Bonapartists in France.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#202

Post by tempestn »

tome wrote: post #189
tempestn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I agree that 4-5 year old transgender kids are something that strike most people as absurd. That is, unless they know some transgender people and talk to them about their experiences. I have a couple of close friends who are trans, and know several others (including a good friend of my son's in elementary school). All of them describing knowing their true gender with just as much certainty as you or I know ours…

> All of them describing knowing their true gender with just as much certainty as you or I know ours from about age 4 Did you? I don’t recall “knowing” my truer gender from age 4. That’s something that I took years to grow into, and didn’t become a question at the fore of my mind until teenage years.

I meant as much as we know ours now, not at age 4. I don't recall what or whether I thought about gender at all at that age. But I don't remember ever really thinking about my gender except in the context of conversations around gender topics like this one. Presumably for cisgender folks there's not normally any motivation to do so, any more than you'd spend time specifically thinking about other aspects of your person. But I can see how one would be much more likely to think about it if the gender they experience doesn't match their physical body and how others perceive them. And I've spoken to enough people with very similar experiences that I have no reason to doubt them.

And I guess that's what I don't understand about those who find transgender kids implausible. From what I can tell, the vast majority of transgender people will tell you they became aware of it in early childhood. Why would they lie? I can't come up with a speculation that doesn't sound like an absurd straw man.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#203

Post by watwut »

gkaly wrote: post #200
watwut wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine.

Greenwald (and Tulsi Gabbard) quoted Nuland directly, who admitted that there were biological research labs. Greenwald had previously worked on the Anthrax story of 2001, where a couple of high profile people got sent a sophisticated Anthrax variant in the mail. It was supposed to be foreign terrorism at first, later it was found that the strain came from a U.S. research facility . Biological weapons aren't allowed b…

> admitted that there were biological research labs

Which is fairly normal thing to have in a developed country. And is much different thing the bioweapons lab.

This muddying things does not make Greenwald's sound better. It makes him exactly what he is - someone building conspiracy theory.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#204

Post by beaconstudios »

bccdee wrote: post #76
foxes wrote: post #59

At this stage I just reject communication anyway, I am never going to reach some dumb compromise with conservatives, [homo,trans]-phobes, racists, oligarch supporters, climate change deniers etc. In my view they are morally, ethically, scientifically wrong so there is absolutely nothing constructive to even engage with. I don't think the fundamental problem is: >wow if only you just were good faith and were able to e…

I think the fundamental mistake this article makes is in assuming that bad-faith tactics are non-partisan. It's not as if fake news is coming from equally both sides of the spectrum. It's not as if there can be any equivocacy between Trump's administration and Biden's administration in terms of their willingness to lie. Right-wing media and left-wing media do not manipulate the truth to equivalent degrees. Science do…

There's also the advent of the political dogwhistle, which is a pretty effective form of doublespeak invented by the right to court fiscal conservatives and racists simultaneously [1], that's done tons of damage to discourse. Part of the reason many on the left are trigger-happy with accusations that seem to come from nowhere is because Trump mainstreamed far right dogwhistling into American politics.

1: this has been explicitly admitted: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#205

Post by gkaly »

cycomanic wrote: post #91
colordrops wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is consistently what Glenn Greenwald has done and the smear campaign against him by the DNC and liberal establishment has taken him from a world famous Oscar and Pulitzer prize winning journalist to a pariah and supposed Russian right wing shill, kicked out of the organization he founded, The Intercept. His beliefs and ideas are clearly left wing and he has remained consistent, but by doing what you suggest he h…

I think it's not quite so simple. I previously believed in some of the strong ad honimems against him (and I have revised that position). However, I am very critical of some of his behaviour, he himself has used bad faith communication (often adopted from right wing pundits) strategies to criticise "his side/the left" and had the same time goes onto shows like Tucker Carlsson and does not use it to engage in critical…

Of course he goes on Tucker Carlson's show, because stories like the Hunter Biden laptop were suppressed by CNN, Facebook, Twitter and others. In fact they were called "Russian disinformation".

Now in 2022, many of the same outlets suddenly acknowledge the authenticity of the story. CNN has James Clapper as its own security analyst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clapper#CNN_national_sec...), why would Greenwald appear there after all that has happened in 2013?

Many of Greenwald's "conspiracy theories" are facts two years later.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#206

Post by Gibbon1 »

watwut wrote: post #199
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine was morally indefensible from the start, as was the Nazi invasion of Europe; with the latter though, they had captured the "hearts and minds" of their own people thanks to over a decade of increasing propaganda. Hitler pulled Germany from an economic downturn post-WW2, and the showy militaristic theming really got people excited. And it still does, but for a much smaller demographic - current-day nazis like t…

> Hitler pulled Germany from an economic downturn post-WW2 and the showy militaristic theming really got people excited You probably meant WWI, but afaik, historians dispute that one. He was not that good in economy. I t

There are two periods of economic problems in Germany in the 1920's. The first involved economic collapse and hyper inflation in the early 20's immediately after WWI. The second started in 1929 and was a deflationary event. Argument I've seen is the sooner a country got off the gold standard the sooner things improved. Everyone but the French did that. Which is to say the solution wasn't rocket science.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#207

Post by JetAlone »

hans1729 wrote: post #147

Here is my model: 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…

Exhibit A:

>Curious people are worth listening to, everyone else is not

Exhibit B:

>The answer to this must be culture

>The solution is easy: curiosity.

It's an interesting model, but there's a serious contradiction here. You're claiming curiosity to be the 1-to-1 justification for being given an audience, yet making dogmatic assertions and setting out a viewpoint-driven agenda - you are not curious about curiosity, you dive right into how to . Therefore there must be a value that makes a non-curious person with a viewpoint-driven agenda (in this case, you) worth listening to.

For brevity, the "90% of people who... want to contribute/validate their viewpoint/seek peer confirmation" can be more or less labelled "vainglorious".

I think you're right about vainglory leading to nothing good. But, the hope of enacting that "something good" that there should be instead is the real reason to listen to non-curious people. And most everyone hopes to enact "something good", so now we're back where we started, listening to ideologues, be they curious or not.

My suggestion is to modify the model by instead seeking to listen to people who are not vainglorious. I think finding people who aren't vainglorious to listen to, and finding out how to not be vainglorious myself is the right direction to point my curiosity.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#208

Post by gkaly »

watwut wrote: post #203
gkaly wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenwald (and Tulsi Gabbard) quoted Nuland directly, who admitted that there were biological research labs. Greenwald had previously worked on the Anthrax story of 2001, where a couple of high profile people got sent a sophisticated Anthrax variant in the mail. It was supposed to be foreign terrorism at first, later it was found that the strain came from a U.S. research facility . Biological weapons aren't allowed b…

> admitted that there were biological research labs Which is fairly normal thing to have in a developed country. And is much different thing the bioweapons lab. This muddying things does not make Greenwald's sound better. It makes him exactly what he is - someone building conspiracy theory.

[dead]

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#209

Post by watwut »

gkaly wrote: post #208
watwut wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> admitted that there were biological research labs Which is fairly normal thing to have in a developed country. And is much different thing the bioweapons lab. This muddying things does not make Greenwald's sound better. It makes him exactly what he is - someone building conspiracy theory.

[dead]

The jump from "bioresearch lab" which to bioweapons. Making it sound as if there was something to "admit" in Ukraine having same labs as everyone has. Then you try to confuse it with bioweapons, anthrax attacks in America and completely irrelevant treaties about bioweapons.

If he wanted to make historical point about Antrax, he did not had to make it in context of Ukraine. If he wanted to make point about bioresearch labs in general, he could have made that one. He did not wanted to do either. He wanted to muddy waters precisedly at the time when is sounded like Ukraine has bioweapons precisedly when they were invaded.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#210

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

rocqua wrote: post #95
switchbak wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue being that you're operating in good faith, while they're putting on a show. You're immediately at a disadvantage because they can use any tool at their disposal, whereas you have to stick to truth and rationality. Unfortunately, the latter two don't typically scale all that well, especially as the bad actor hones their ability to put you in a rhetorical box.

I think the continuation of this line of thought is often the argument 'their bad faith communication is so effective we have to counter it with our own'. I hope that this argument under-estimates the intelligence of the silent majority.

That is another good way to phrase the problem described by the parent post of yours.

There is not a way to beat bad faith communication with good faith communication at scale, because the latter doesn't scale, because the average/median person is not intelligent enough for it. I wish they were.

Post reply on HN