[bxk1]

> The elephant in the room not addressed in this essay is the widespread use of bad faith arguments, and the absence or dismissal of evidence in preference of beliefs and feelings. On some issues it can be extremely difficult to find good faith arguments and evidence on each side of the issue.

"Good faith", "bad faith" labeling is not logical, it's more of an attempt to apply morality and ideology to reasoning to reject something based on your own preferred beliefs and feelings. Similarly illogical is evaluating evidence "from each side", this is not how to evaluate anything, there needs to be some base rate to compare the evidence to and all the evidence has to be compared, not just something cherry picked from each side, and not just evidence, known unknowns and unknown unknowns have to be considered too, and so on. It's way more complicated than people want it to be.

And it's very hard to have good logical arguments not full of fallacies. You will certainly never see them in mass media, as mass media needs to influence your opinion, not provide background for making a good decision.

Daniel Kahneman in his Thinking fast and slow book wrote plenty on reasoning, check it out if you haven't, it'll open your eyes on reasoning (I know the book had some crucial things wrong for his theory, but a lot of things throughout the book are still ok).

[watwut]

I mostly agree with you, except one thing.

There is such a thing as bad faith argument. There is such a thing as lying or manipulating truth so that it sounds like a lie. There is such a thing as throwing as much mud as you can waiting for something to stick.

There are fallacies and mistakes too, sure. There are differences of opinion. But, there is also such a thing as person standing confidently in front of camera making claims or insinuations that person knows are false.

[Natsu]

There are bad faith arguments, but there are also people who label any argument that they don't want to or can't deal with as 'bad faith', so... yeah. At some point we can't avoid the fact that people are human and tend to seize upon things they agree with.

[unishark]

I suspect you're talking about individuals while the TS is talking about the press. Press outlets will certainly make bad faith arguments to get ratings. For example by twisting someone's words into the most outrage-provoking interpretation possible. Even if they personally feel that the politician probably just misspoke or meant something benign or whatever.

As for private individuals, like posters arguing on the internet, yes they probably tend to believe what they say in the moment. A big problem there, perhaps ironically, is people assuming bad faith about each other.