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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I am certain there were quite a few people back then saying "the same" about Galileo Galilei. And maybe that the church only had their best interest at heart... to protect them from quacks and heretics.

I find your view dangerous. You believe the chances, that his person is "right" are vanishingly small? That's of course a good reason to flag (delete) that article. Why allow an discussion or other to read the piece and have their own opinion. I cannot believe people are saying things like that with a good conscience.

I understand exactly what you're saying. And I stand by the idea that this work does not meet the minimum bar for discussion (I'm qualified to evaluate that) and that its dissemination risks causing more harm than hurt, by convincing people of something which isn't really true through selective information and reasoning.

Note that there is an entire scientific literature where experts in this field argue these things and that is where the "heretics" need to go make their arguments. This work is propaganda designed to make people doubt the public health establishment, not a good-faith argument.

> This work is propaganda designed to make people doubt the public health establishment, not a good-faith argument.

Let's assume you are correct.

Your claim seems to presuppose that the author believes the opposite of what the piece suggests ("not a good faith argument"). Why did the author go to such lengths to design this propaganda? Why do they want to make people doubt the public health establishment? How do they profit from that?

I could see claiming that they are wrong (though I'm not qualified to evaluate that), I just don't at all understand the claim of bad faith.

This is usually how I feel about claims of bad faith in general (and the internet is lousy with them of late). Maybe I am just naive. I tend to think it's more likely that people believe what they say and are potentially incorrect than that they are incorrect and know it, yet still make the claims anyway.

The author of the article believes what they say. The bad faith is that they mostly use rhetorical tricks and cherry picked data to make their point.

Am I misunderstanding what bad faith means? Merriam Webster: lack of honesty in dealing with other people.

It sounds like you're saying they are incompetent, not dishonest.

I ask because I see this all over the place, and almost every time I see "bad faith" or "disingenuous" (which I think are synonymous) I wonder if the person writing it just saw someone else use it incorrectly and never learned what it actually means, or if I just don't understand what it means myself.

For the sheer quantity of usages like yours, I should probably assume I'm wrong, but I'm having trouble reconciling that with the definition.

Nope, I'm saying they are dishonest. Cherry picking data and using rhetorical tricks (or other tricks commonly used in social media) is dishonesty and acftually is a sign of a competent person- somebody who knows they can fool most people with a slick argument instead of a correct one.

Aren't there some contradictions there?

You say upthread that they believe the thing they are trying to convince us of. You also say that they are competently using tricks to fool us into believing the thing that they believe is true. Why would they be fooling us into believing something that they believe to be true? And if they were, would that even be deceptive?

This doesn't seem coherent to me. What am I missing?

I dunno about you, but all my training in writing and rhetoric was based on the idea that the author is right, and should, above all, have the goal of convincing the reader, that not all readers can be convinced without the use of cherrypicked data or illogical reasoning, and that it's acceptable to do so (this is the "all effective writing is propaganda" school of thought).

We were also taught how to identify this and counteract it. In high school we spent a lot of time analyzing William F Buckley's article https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/07/16/s... which uses rhetoric to make a utilitarian argument.

I can't say that I've had any formal training in rhetoric, so I can't speak to that.

> ... the author is right, and should, above all, have the goal of convincing the reader ...

It still seems logically inconsistent to me to call that bad faith.

Let me try from a different angle. In my mental model, bad faith requires that the author try to convince you of something that they know is untrue (or at least may likely be untrue). Is my model wrong? If so, how?

the author intentionally crafted a lengthy piece of misinformation, in bad faith, with the intention of having it be misleading, using cherry-picking and rhetorical/social media tricks, intentionally trying to fool most people with a slick arguments instead of correct ones... but she somehow believes her own line of bullshit 100% genuinely, even though she was the one who spun it to begin with?

you can't just call everyone who disagrees with your worldview L. Ron Hubbard and be done with it.

It's quite common to do this. Most op-eds I read fall into the category of "author believes, uses rhetoric to cover up weak argument, to convince normies".

No, after the means are in place for getting rid of the heretical information there is no more long run.

You will simply continue chanting how right you were ad-infinitum regardless of actual evidence for or indeed against it.

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