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The endgames of bad faith communication

consilienceproject.org

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Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#71

Post by kilburn »

goatlover wrote: post #28
thedudeabides5 wrote: post #2

The end game of bad faith communication is that noise begins to dominate the channel. Humans, reacting to this degradation in signal rely less and less on channels that are dominated by noise. This opens up opportunities for technology to build new channels, which accumulate users, engagement and momentum by supporting good faith communication (truth). Thus the cycle continues.

> 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 exampl…

The truth in this case is that there's no programming language that is better in all regards. There are programming languages that are better at certain things, or that provide certain benefits that are more important for some tasks.

Turning the conversation away from "X language is better" to "X works best than Y to accomplish Z", trying to gauge by how much (e.g.: will it pay of for you to learn X if you only have to do Z once in your lifetime?), etc.. is what I'm understanding "good faith" communication to entail in such situations.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#72

Post by RyanShook »

rhaksw wrote: post #16

To say nothing of communication issues caused by social media users themselves, the platforms can have built-in miscommunication. For example, on reddit your removed comments are shown to you as if they are live, as shown here [1]. You can try it yourself in r/CantSayAnything [2]. You can be having a conversation with someone that suddenly stops because a 3rd party removed the last reply. Often, neither of the speake…

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?

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#74

Post by usernomdeguerre »

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 some other responders have touched lightly on this but I feel it should be explicitly said that sometimes engaging in conversation is not actually what the other party is doing, even though it might look like it.

Sometimes they are not speaking to you at all, but rather to your listeners. And the larger your pool of listeners the more likely you'll encounter arguments in bad faith because it turns out that if the goal is persuasion then good-faith arguments don't scale.

A tangent here is that on private-public platforms like twitter "your listeners" could be an entirely separate set from the people you actually have contact with. Algorithms that signal-boost opinions out of their actual social circle become essentially propaganda posters for a host of varying in and out groups.

My personal opinion is that this is a misaligned incentive that social platforms should correct structurally, rather than via governance or policies. And pushing the corrective actions back down to the individual is a cop-out.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#75

Post by pdonis »

jimkleiber wrote: post #63
pdonis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who defines what the goal is? The person doing the communication. So if that's you, you ask yourself the self-reflection question. If it's the other person, you have to try to figure out what their goal is in communicating with you: are they trying to achieve mutual understanding, or are they trying to get you to do what they want by hook or by crook? Of course any actual conversation is two-way, so you need to ask…

Ah ok, I think one of the hardest things I've worked on is trying to defend/believe in my own good intentions. I had an ex who somewhat insinuated I was manipulating her and it almost broke me, because I started to believe it. The next day, I reflected and came to the belief (not answer) that if I can't defend my own good intentions, who the heck would? And have been working on this since, 7 or so years ago. I guess…

I've generally found that if someone accuses you of manipulating them, they're projecting. (By which I mean "projecting" in the sense in which psychologists use the term: the person senses the presence of a quality they don't like, but they don't want to admit to themselves that it's coming from them, so they project it onto someone else. In this case, your ex correctly sensed the presence of manipulativeness because she was actually the one being manipulative, but she didn't want to admit to herself that the manipulativeness she sensed was coming from her, so she projected it onto you.) So in the case of your ex, I would say she was engaging in bad faith communication (though possibly without consciously being aware she was doing so).

In the case of the woman you describe, I don't think she falls into either category we've been discussing. She was just expressing her own pain. I don't think every single human interaction has to fall within one of the two categories we've been discussing ("good faith communication" or "bad faith communication".)

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#76

Post by bccdee »

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 does not equally support liberal and conservative ideas about medicine and the environment.

I'm not saying that no elements of the left operate in bad faith, or that elements of the right do not operate in good faith. I'm saying that (as the saying goes) reality has a liberal bias, and the question is not "how do we fix the discourse," but rather "how do we fix what conservatives have deliberately done to the discourse."

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#77

Post by beebeepka »

ajross wrote: post #48
tux1968 wrote: post #15

It would be great for people who desire good faith communication to call out people who are resorting to bad faith techniques. Especially, and most importantly, when those bad actors are of the same political stripe. It's impossible for those bad actors to hear criticism from "the enemy". Only people who share a position of almost total fundamental agreement, can maybe be heard in any criticism of how to better deal…

> It would be great for people who desire good faith communication to call out people who are resorting to bad faith techniques. In fact that practice is expressly disallowed on this very site, whose guidelines demand we assume good faith on the part of other commenters.

Thank you. I wondered how many others have reached the same conclusion. I know I did almost immediately

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#78

Post by cycomanic »

Generally a good article, but unfortunately it falls into the political trap.

> Both ends of the political spectrum (the far left and the far right) express this view. Both sides believe that “the other side” simply can’t be trusted and therefore cannot be engaged in good faith.

I find it unfortunate that they blame this behaviour only on the extremes, because it is prevalent amongst moderates who often even state "you can't discuss/negotiate with extremists" and engage in bad faith communications towards the extremes.

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#79

Post by beebeepka »

RyanShook wrote: post #72
rhaksw wrote: post #16

To say nothing of communication issues caused by social media users themselves, the platforms can have built-in miscommunication. For example, on reddit your removed comments are shown to you as if they are live, as shown here [1]. You can try it yourself in r/CantSayAnything [2]. You can be having a conversation with someone that suddenly stops because a 3rd party removed the last reply. Often, neither of the speake…

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

Re: The endgames of bad faith communication

#80

Post by bittercynic »

RyanShook wrote: post #72
rhaksw wrote: post #16

To say nothing of communication issues caused by social media users themselves, the platforms can have built-in miscommunication. For example, on reddit your removed comments are shown to you as if they are live, as shown here [1]. You can try it yourself in r/CantSayAnything [2]. You can be having a conversation with someone that suddenly stops because a 3rd party removed the last reply. Often, neither of the speake…

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?

If the user could tell they were banned they might be quicker to create a new account and continue the behavior they were banned for.

I get the practicality of it, but still think it's a pretty nasty thing to do. Even to a troll.

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