I agree that self-deception is common. But there are at least three reasons why assuming good faith is still a useful strategy:

1. You shouldn't just think of the assumption of good faith as a reaction to other people's lack of self-deception; you should also think of it as a way of mitigating your own self-deception. If you assume bad faith, then it's very easy to talk yourself into doing all sorts of uncharitable or uncooperative rhetorical moves, like lying to them, or yelling at them, or telling them that they only have their position because they're a bad person. You can tell yourself that you need to work around the self-deceptive parts of them, by pushing the right buttons to make the interaction productive. Yet a lot of these rhetorical moves will in fact be driven by your own hidden motivations, like your desire to avoid backing down, or your desire to punish the outgroup. So assuming good faith gives those motivations less cover.
2. Discussions are an iterated game, and it's easy for one person to accidentally do something which is interpreted by the other as a sign of bad faith, which causes the second person to respond in kind, and so on. Assuming good faith is like adding (limited) amounts of forgiveness to this tit for tat interaction.
3. While everyone has hidden motives, it's hard to know which hidden motives are at play in any given discussion. So when Zack says "This is difficult to pull off, which is why most people most of the time should stick to the object level", this can be seen as another way of saying "actually, as a strong heuristic, assume good faith".

Having said all this: some people should assume more good faith than they currently do; others less; and it's hard to know where the line is.

This all seems correct. The one thing I might add is that imE the usual effect of stating, however politely, that someone may not be 100% acting in good faith is to turn the conversation into much more of a conflict than it already was, which is why pretending as if it's an object level disagreement is almost always the correct strategy. But I agree that actually believing the other person is acting in good faith is usually quite silly.

(I also think the term is horrendous; irrc I've never used either "good faith" or "bad faith" in conversation.)

((This post also contributes to this nagging sense that I sometimes have that Zack is the ~only person on this platform who is actually doing rationality in a completely straight-forward way as intended, and everyone else is playing some kind of social game in which other considerations restrict the move set and rationality is only used to navigate within the subset of still permissible moves. I'm not in the business of fighting this battle, but in another timeline maybe I would be.))

I do sometimes run into good faith disagreements, they feel very different from typical disagreements.

Example 1: someone says something on the phone about "Simon building a computer science model of his father's situation". I think it's referring to Simon A and a friend thinks it's Simon B. We bet and call the person back and I was wrong and feel silly.

Example 2: Someone says that standard financial prudence calls for minimizing market beta. I think this is wrong and it calls for increasing it in most cases. Then I look it up and realize it's because you can lever up a low market beta to a high one.

It feels really different from a normal non-trivial disagreement. In both cases it felt at the time like I was very probably correct and it was confusing that the other person disagreed. There is usually some mix of bad faith and good faith in typical cases, and that makes the resolution a lot slower.

If I meet a friend at a café to talk, then there's nothing hidden about a key motivation being the social interaction with the friend. If the friend would say "You are talking in bad faith because I thought you just care about learning information from me but then you are actually here to enjoy the social interaction with me" that would feel very weird to me. 

Partial notes so far:

So, things I explicitly agree with:

• "You're acting in bad faith" is pretty non-specific and much less useful.
• The spectrum between "object level" and "full-contact psychoanalysis" is a useful frame for considering how to deal with problems of bias/deception/motivated-cognition/etc. (I don't know that it's the only frame, but seems like a nice default if you haven't thought of a better one).
• I think the "generally stick to object level, bring out the psychoanalysis when it seems particularly important" is a pretty good BATNA.

Thing I agree with although I'm not sure it has quite the same implication you argue:

• "Most people are doing some flavor/degree of bias/duplicitousness/motivation/deception most of the time." 
  
  It seems true, although it feels Fallacy of Gray-ish? The question is how often this comes up to a degree that really gets in the way.  It seems right that one should at least consider "hmm, this is a spectrum that is almost never on the "zero" degree, so maybe I should hypothesize that its 'significant' more often." But it feels like this post is implying a higher degree of "assume things are at a 'significant' end of the spectrum."

I'm not sure how much of a direct response this post is to Assuming Positive Intent, but I want to revisit So8res' stated definition there:

First, a few words on what I mean by “good faith”.  Imagine you’re having a conversation with someone. 

Sometimes, your conversation partner is acting with virtuous conversational motives: maybe they’re curious, maybe they’re trying really hard to understand your arguments, maybe they think you’re wrong about something important and they’re struggling to get you to understand what they’re saying. 

Other times, your conversation partner may be acting with malicious conversational motives: they might be explicitly focused on embarrassing you in front of people whose favor they are trying to win, or they might be trying explicitly to cause other listeners to associate you with something distasteful (a la the worst argument in the world), or they might be explicitly attempting to manipulate your actions. We can characterize your conversation partner along this axis, which ranges roughly from “well-intentioned” to “ill-intentioned”.

This feels somewhat different from what you're talking about here. Whether you intended this post as part-of-that-conversation or not, I think tendency to conflate the thing-you're-talking-about-AFAICT and This Thing feels important to notice.

Most disagreements of note—most disagreements people care about—don't behave like the concert date or physics problem examples: people are very attached to "their own" answers. Sometimes, with extended argument, it's possible to get someone to change their mind or admit that the other party might be right, but with nowhere near the ease of agreeing on (probabilities of) the date of an event or the result of a calculation—from which we can infer that, in most disagreements people care about, there is "something else" going on besides both parties just wanting to get the right answer.

There is a big difference between the apple colours and concert dates and most typical disagreements: namely that for apples and concerts, there is ridiculously strong, unambiguous evidence that one side is correct. 

Looking at QM interpretations, for example, if a pilot wave theory advocate sits down with a Many-worlds person, I wouldn't expect them to reach an agreement in an afternoon, because the problem is too bloody complicated, and there is too much evidence to sift through. In addition, each person will have different reactions to each piece of evidence, as they start off with different beliefs and intuitions about the world. I don't think it's "bad faith" that people are not identical bayesian clones of each other. 

Of course, I do agree that oftentimes the reasons for interpreting evidence differently are influenced by bias, values, and self-interest. It's fair to assume that, say, a flat-earther will not be won over by rational debate. But most disagreements are in the murky middle, where the more correct sides is unlikely to win outright, but can shift the other person a little bit over to the correct side. 

I think this is the clearest articulation of this problem I've seen. I think it helps me understand what was going on with Bad intent is a disposition, not a feeling and Assuming Positive Intent. (I think "Assuming Positive Intent" wasn't quite talking about the same thing this post is talking about, but was heavily overlapping. I feel better able to think about the differences now)

I think I basically agree with everything written here as-stated, but will think for a bit and try to check/flesh-out my updated model.

I generally like the move of "talk about cost-benefit analyses" rather than arguing 'shoulds'.

I think that this post relies too heavily on a false binary. Specifically, the description of all arguments as "good faith" or "bad faith" completely ignores the (to my intuition, far likelier) possibility that most arguments begin primarily (my guess is 90% or so, but maybe I just tend not to hold arguments with people below 70%) good faith, then people adjust according to their perception of their interlocutor(s), audience (if applicable), and the importance of the issue being argued. Common signals of arguments in particularly bad faith advanced by otherwise intelligent people include persistent reliance on most listed logical fallacies (dismissing that criticism and keeping a given point after its fallacious nature is clearly explained; sealioning and whataboutism are prototypical exemplars), moving the goalposts, and ignoring all contradictory evidence.

Another false binary: this also ignores the possibility of both sides in an argument being correct (or founded on correct factual data). For example, today I spent perhaps 10 minutes arguing over whether a cheese was labeled as Gouda or not, because I'd read the manufacturer's label which did not contain that word but did say "Goat cheese of Holland" and my interlocutor read the price label from Costco which called it "goat Gouda." I'm marginally more correct because I recognized the contradiction in terms (in the EU gouda can only be made from milk produced by Dutch cows), but neither of us was lying or arguing in bad faith, and yet I briefly struggled to believe that we were inhabiting the same reality and remembering it correctly. They were a very entertaining 10 minutes, but I wouldn't want to have that kind of groundless argument more than once or twice a week, and that limit assumes a discussion of trivial topics as opposed to an ostensibly sincere debate on something which I hold dear.

“You can’t tell what someone is doing by watching what they’re doing.”

Bad faith and merely occluded thought processes are distinguished not by passive observation of what comes out of one’s interlocutor’s mouth, but by what happens when you push in various ways.

Hm. Interesting topic.

It sounds like in this post, you're mostly taking a sort of God's Eye perspective on the problem. Like, if you could look down and set group norms with respect to bad faith, what norms would you set?

This is a different question from the question of what to do in everyday life. I think in everyday life, accusing people of acting in bad faith is almost always going to be a bad idea. For starters, I think most people believe "bad faith" means "with ill intent" (I did before reading this post). So you'd have to start by clarifying that you are talking about something different. But still, after doing so, I think the result is likely to be a) the conversation devolves and b) you stir up animosity with the other person. Something more How To Win Friends And Influence People style seems wiser.

On the other hand, in talking to people whom you're very close to, I could see it being fruitful sometimes. But even then, I suspect it'd be best to not bring it up in the midst of the current conversation, and instead bring it up eg. the next day as a separate conversation. Like, "Hey, remember that conversation we had yesterday? I was a little unhappy with something. Mind if we talk about it?"

As for the God's Eye perspective, one thing is that I think it depends on the group. For example, I don't think "psychoanalyze as you wish" would work very well in a group of middle school aged girls. For a group of experienced rationalists, I'd be more optimistic.

For groups like rationalists where it's more plausible to work, I'm having trouble thinking about guidelines for when it is and when it isn't ok to psychoanalyze. Maybe "use your judgement" would be fine?

I do really like the idea though of it being a norm eg. in rationalist circles to not get touchy about bad faith accusations. But in other circles I could see touchiness being a useful norm, although I'm not sure. Chesterton's Fence and Memetic Immune Systems seem like things to keep in mind there.

I think that I largely agree with this post. I think that it's also a fairly non-trivial problem. 

The strategy that makes the most sense to me now is that one should argue with people as if they meant what they said, even if you don't currently believe that they do. 

But not always - especially if you want to engage with them on the point of whether they are indeed acting in bad faith, and there comes a time when that becomes necessary. 

I think pushing back against the norm that it's wrong to ever assume bad faith is a good idea. I don't think that people who do argue in bad faith do so completely independently - for two reasons - the first is simply that I've noticed it clusters into a few contexts, the second is that acting deceptively is inherently more risky than being honest, and so, it makes more sense to tread more well-trodden paths. More people aiding the same deception gives it the necessary weight.

It seems to cluster among things like morality (judgements about people's behaviors), dating preferences (which are kind of similar), and reputation. There is kind of a paradox I've noticed in the way that people who tend to be kind of preachy about what constitutes good or bad behavior will also be the ones who argue that everyone is always acting in good faith (and thus chastise or scold people who want to assume bad faith sometimes). 

People do behave altruistically, and they also have reasons to behave non-altruistically too, at times (whether or not it is actually a good idea for them personally). The whole range of possible intentions is native to the human psyche. 

I'm not fully clear on the concrete difference between "assume good faith" and "stick to the object level", as instrumental strategies. I'll use one of Zach's examples, written as a dialog. Alice is sticking to the object level. I'm imagining that she is a Vulcan and her opinions of Zach's intentions are inscrutable except for the occasional raised eyebrow.

• Alice: "Your latest reply seems to contradict something you said earlier."
• Zach: "Look over there, a distraction!"
• Alice: "I don't understand how the distraction is relevant to resolving the inconsistency in your statements that I raised."

Here is my attempt at the same conversation with Bob, who aggressively assumes good faith.

• Bob: "Is there a contradiction between your latest reply and this thing you said earlier?"
• Zach: "Look over there, a distraction!"
• Bob: "I'd love to talk about that later, but right now I'm still confused about what you were saying earlier, can you help me?"

Is that the type of thing? Bob is talking as if Zach has a heart of gold and the purest of intentions, whereas Alice is talking as if Zach is a non-sentient text generator. In both cases admitting that you're doing that isn't part of the game. Both of them are modeling Zach's intentions, at least subconsciously. Both are strategically choosing not to leak their model of Zach to Zach at this stage of the conversation. Both are capable of switching to a different strategy as needed. What are the reasons to prefer Alice's approach to Bob's?

To be clear, I completely agree that assuming good faith is a disaster as an epistemic strategy. As well as the reasons mentioned above, brains are evolutionarily adapted to detect hidden motives and generate emotions accordingly. Trying to fight that is unwise.

A clarification:

Consider the premises (with scare quotes indicating technical jargon):

1. "Acting in Bad Faith" is Baysean evidence that a person is "Evil"
2. "Evil" people should be shunned

The original poster here is questioning statement 1, presenting evidence that "good" people act in bad faith too often for it to be evidence of "evil."

However, I belive the original poster is using a more broad definition of "Acting in Bad Faith" than the people who support premise 1.

That definition, concisely, would be "engaging in behavior that is recognized in context as moving towards a particular goal, without having that goal." Contrast this with the OP quote: bad faith is when someone's apparent reasons for doing something aren't the same as the real reasons. The persons apparent reasons don't matter, what matters is the socially determined values associated with specific behaviors, as in the Wikipedia examples. While some behavior (eg, a conversation) can have multiple goals, some special things (waving a white flag, arguing in court, and now in the 21st century that includes arguing outside of court) have specific expected goals (respectively: allowing a person to withdraw from a fight without dying, to present factual evidence that favors one side of a conflict, and to persuade others of your viewpoint). When an actor fails to hold those generally understood goals, that disrupts the social contract and "we" call it "Acting in Bad Faith"

The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

I think this elucidates the "everyone has motives" issue nicely. Regarding the responses, I feel uneasy about the second one. Sticking to the object level makes sense to me. I'm confused how psychoanalysis is supposed to work without devolving. 

For example, let's say someone thinks my motivation for writing this comment is [negative-valence trait or behavior]. How exactly am I supposed to verify my intentions?

In the simple case, I know what my intentions are and they either trust me when I tell them or they don't. 

It's the cases when people can't explain themselves that are tricky. Not everyone has the introspective skill, or verbal fluency, to explain their reasoning. I'm not really sure what to do in those cases other than asking the person I'm psychoanalyzing if that's what's happening. 

I fully disagree that "bad faith" is a useless distinction, though you're right that it's not the only reason for disagreement or miscommunication.  

Your examples show that "bad faith" comprises BOTH malign intent AND deception in the intent of a communication or negotiation.  It's saying one thing ("I surrender" or "I'll negotiate these terms") while maliciously meaning another ("I'm going to keep fighting" or "I am just wasting your time").  It's more specific than EITHER "deception" or "antagonism", because it's a mix of the two.

Honest conflicts can be resolved (or at least explored and then fought), and non-malign confusion or miscommunication can be identified and recovered from or isolated to cooperation-without-agreement or an actual conflict.  But "bad faith" combines these in a way that makes identification difficult, presumably because at least one party isn't interested in identifying and resolving the crux.

Good post, I largely agree with your point. This part in particular is relevant:

If I'm doing full-contact psychoanalysis, the problem with "I don't think you're here in good faith" is that it's insufficiently specific. Rather than accusing someone of generic "bad faith", the way to move the discussion forward is by positing that one's interlocutor has some specific motive that hasn't yet been made explicit---and the way to defend oneself against such an accusation is by making the case that one's real agenda isn't the one being proposed, rather than protesting one's "good faith" and implausibly claiming not to have an agenda.

I get accused of bad faith regularly (whether the accusation is earnest and made in "good faith" is another question) and I agree completely that a naked denial doesn't accomplish anything. Like you, I usually can see what the accusation is based on and so what I do is acknowledge that the suspicion is reasonable (it often is!) and then explain why it's wrong. If I can't see what it's based on, then I ask something along "what could convince you otherwise?" Sometimes there's nothing that could dislodge the truck stuck in the mud, and it's good to know that.

I find that this is a useful approach in everyday personal disagreements too because a lot of them are spawned out of suspicions. If someone shirks on a household chore, maybe it's because they genuinely forgot OR MAYBE it's because they are driven by animus and hatred towards their roommates. If the shirking continues as part of a regular pattern, it's perfectly reasonable for the roommates to become drawn to the latter hypothesis.

To your broader point, accusing someone of bad faith doesn't really accomplish much, and your proposed solutions (just stick to the object level or, in the alternative and if the circumstances warrant it, full-contact psychoanalysis) seem perfectly appropriate.

there is "something else" going on besides both parties just wanting to get the right answer

There are also different priors. While in general you might very well be right (or at least this post makes a lot of sense to me), I often have conversations where I'm pretty sure both my interlocutor and I am discussing things in good faith, but where we still can't agree on pretty basic things (usually about religion).

Oh that’s fun, Wikipedia caused me to believe for so many years that “bad faith” means something different from what it means and I’m only learning that now.

the most persuasive lie is the one you believe yourself

If someone really believes it, then I don't think they're operating in "bad faith". If the hidden motive is hidden to the speaker, that hiding doesn't come with intent.

It doesn't matter whether you said it was red because you were consciously lying or because you're wearing rose-colored glasses

It definitely matters. It completely changes how you should be trying to convince that person or behave around them.

It's different to believe a dumb argument than to intentionally lie, and honestly, humans are pretty social and honest. We mostly operate in good faith.