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The endgames of bad faith communication

consilienceproject.org

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Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#261

Post by ohwellhere »

I find myself really inspired by the work The Consilience Project and a few other people are putting out about sensemaking, consensus building, and maybe generally empathy.

I've started to feel that it might be my answer to "The Hamming Question." [0]

I'm a burnt out software engineer. Do you have any advice on careers to explore to work on the above societal issue?

[0]: > Mathematician Richard Hamming used to ask scientists in other fields "What are the most important problems in your field?" partly so he could troll them by asking "Why aren't you working on them?" and partly because getting asked this question is really useful for focusing people's attention on what matters.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#262

Post by tome »

tempestn wrote: post #202
tome wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pers…

Ah, so are you saying

* "We" had a weak sense of our true gender at age 4

* "We" have a strong sense of our true gender now

* Transgender people had a strong sense of their true gender at age 4

> 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.

I think it would strengthen your argument if everyone who had a strong sense of being transgender at age 4 maintained that sense into adulthood. I don't know how one would find that out though.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#263

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

watwut wrote: post #233
gatgy wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As we see in Wuhan, a virus can be devastating no matter if it escapes from a research facility, a wet market or a deliberate bioweapon. That was the primary concern of Tulsi Gabbard. In Ukraine, matters are exacerbated by the fact that these research facilities, according to the left wing newspaper The Guardian, were U.S. funded: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/11/russia-biologi... Ukraine does operate bi…

> They know that Putin is a bully with 6,000 nuclear weapons, so they try to understand his thinking and possible reactions. This would require reading what Putin wrote and commenting on it. This would require listening to his speeches in Russia. This would require close listening to Russian ideology and mythology disseminated in Russia itself and commenting on it. This would required reading Russian and Easter Europ…

>And somehow, that concern exists only when Russia is trying to excuse invasion by bioweapons labs. Somehow, magically, this concern did not existed before, nor in other countries and stopped existing as it turned out not many people are buying it as excuse for invasion.

Seriously, like are we supposed to believe Russia has no biological labs? Or that only Russia is allowed to, and not other countries like Ukraine?

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#264

Post by bena »

watwut wrote: post #121
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…

Nah, Glenn Greenwald is not arguing in good faith and was not for a long time. And I did not needed to "smear campaign" against him to figure that out. All I needed was was to read his twitter feed regularly - as I was. He is good at strong words and insults, but not at good faith discussion at all. > His beliefs and ideas are clearly left wing and he has remained consistent, Kinda yes and no, not really. He has some…

I mean, I don't think colordrops/gkaly is defending Greenwald in good faith either.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#265

Post by ModernMech »

Jensson wrote: post #238
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 have never seen anyone get converted by bad faith arguments, but I have seen people get converted by good faith arguments. So it seems good faith arguments are inherently much stronger, while bad faith arguments are useless except for frustrating the other side.

The ultimate bad faith argument is government propaganda, which definitely works wonders in shaping public opinion.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#266

Post by shkkmo »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #211
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…

It's totally normal and expected for biological research labs to have biological samples with which to do research. What is being described is beyond that, with thinly veiled suggestions of covert maliciousness sprinkled in.

> What is being described is beyond that

Instead of describing it, why not provide a quote with a citation to its context?

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#267

Post by LichenStone »

overthemoon wrote: post #251

With the caveat that I very much believe in civil, good faith discourse, I find that in being a formal critique of the discourse, it can nevertheless introduce the author's own ideological preferences (fine) in a way that appears neutral (not fine) or purely formal (very not fine). Here are two examples: > Calls for good faith communication are understood at best as naive requests to calm the outrage and conflict tha…

I agree that this article perhaps veers a little too far into the kind of 'objective' territory that you mention, it's something I see and dislike often in similar pieces, though to be fair I think it's probably quite hard to avoid while remaining personally relatable to many people.

My strategy in general for taking in ideas is to simply pick and choose the bits that seem interesting and productive, and internally reinterpret those parts to remove the author's biases and excessions that don't seem relevant.

This tends to cause issues when I share things like this article though, people often seem to prefer to interpret the tone of the piece as a whole, and that overall or initial reading colours their view of the individual ideas that were espoused, making it harder for me and them to have a productive discussion about it.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#268

Post by slothtrop »

booboofixer wrote: post #4

A well-written article, especially clearly listing out the differences in the forms of communication helped make the point. But sadly, the people most prone to bad-faith communication are also probably least likely to take this criticism and improve. I have also resorted to bad-faith communications in conversations where it seems like that is the only way to be heard. Consider this example: Person A, displaying some…

I think to an extent people do this unconsciously, or offenders don't realize their projection onto others is bad faith. It's habit that is mistakenly believed to be a good heuristic. I expect this triggers as they switch to "argument" mode following contradiction, assuming a posture of attacking/defending, casting nuance aside.

As online spaces are concerned, one thing I liked about forums is that communities, while large, became increasingly familiar and you could reasonably expect some good faith discussion over time. On spaces like reddit, all the tip toeing in the world doesn't prevent it. You could be Mr Rogers speaking to someone's "elephant in the brain" and it wouldn't prevent it.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#269

Post by incomingpain »

>Decades of culture war have degraded civic discourse,

The culture wars or the neoliberalism stuff is over. It's surprising how many still believe this is happening. Culture wars ended 2009-2014 or so.

>Bad faith communication has become normalized.

Before social media we had newspapers and when tv news came along they were extremely regulated. Bad faith was the standard. The newspapers publish lie after lie and they got away with it for decades if not centuries.

>When open communication cannot be used to resolve conflict and coordinate behavior, societies are driven towards chaos, war, oppression, and authoritarianism.

Everyone knows this, it is diplomacy/talking that ends wars. The entities like Twitter who are censoring communication under false pretense knows they are breaking this rule. They also understand their objective and how this is their intention.

>There should be no illusion: today’s culture war cannot be won by any side.

The author needs the realization is that the culture war is over. They need to analyze and discover who was the victor.

Let me show the battles:

Climate Change: would you say we are doing much of anything for climate change? Even fake efforts like carbon taxes that dont do anything?

Gamergate: would you say mandolorian boob armor was a problem?

BLM: Fundamentally police brutality and racism is a problem but did BLM achieve anything? Are there any defunding police? Did the democrats pass anything?

Comicsgate: Did red skull jordan peterson really work out?

LGBT: Dave Chapelle put an end to that one single handed. LGBT can rejoice.

UBI/MMT: Just tried it in limited fashion. Nobody seriously bringing this up anymore.

White fragility: Yep, white people are all racists. We totally need to teach that to our children.

There's 1 side who won basically all of those in the end. When you lose battle after battle during the culture war. You eventually lose.

What happened is in their failure they became a religion. There are now heresies and the heretics must burn. You must pay penance for your sinning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_church_burnings

None of those church fires ever got investigated by police.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/horrible-attack-catholi...

I have never seen the government arrest so many religious leaders in my life. Our law in canada explicitly makes it illegal for police to arrest clergyman.

"arrest of officiating clergyman" is a crime that police are subject to, yet you can watch video on youtube of police breaking this law.

None of this is surprising. It's a new religion, new religions normally look to destroy their competitor religion.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#270

Post by SamPatt »

jayspell wrote: post #250
deadpannini wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the goal is persuasion then good-faith arguments don't scale. This is true, but only in a very narrow, specific sense. Arguments don't persuade on their own, they scale with the credibility of the speaker. Speakers gain credibility and respect by: - Giving good advice. - Showing good judgement and making accurate predictions. - Demonstrating that they understand various audience. constituencies, with bonus point…

I agree with you to a point, but it's not my experience that speakers gain credibility and respect by giving good advice / showing good judgement / making accurate predictions. This would be true in traditional discourse, but not online. Online it feels as if speakers gain an audience by demonstrating their world view as loudly and as viciously as possible. It's like a group of children where one has learned that the…

I know of many specific examples in my field where the most thoughtful people who operate the most frequently in good faith have nowhere near the following of bad faith loudmouths.

I assume it's entertainment. People enjoy watching drama. Social media is their drama hit, and genuine communicators are frankly more boring.

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