What is a "bad faith argument"?
Here's one post describing them. Here's another. In short, a person is arguing in bad faith when they refuse to even consider what others are saying. Examples include:
- Repeatedly failing to respond to the point another person is making.
- Repeatedly mischaracterizing another person's argument or position.
- Repeatedly ignoring reasonable evidence another person provides, and/or claiming unreasonably high standards of evidence.
- Arguing about material a person has not read/watched.
- Repeatedly refusing reasonable requests for sources, and/or asserting something without a source and then insisting that another person provide sources to prove it wrong.
Clearly, arguing in bad faith is bad for discussion. Instead of pursuing mutual understanding, a person arguing in bad faith is usually just interested in proving to themselves how clever they are.
What does a bad faith argument look like?
Skim through this comment and the responses it received. The original commenter directly addressed a few of OP's points, provided evidence to back their arguments, and made reasonable, limited claims. Most of the responses variously ignore that commenter's points, mischaracterize them, or dismiss the evidence provided without any evidence or reasoning of their own.
The original commenter produced well-informed, high-quality content. Subsequent comments ignored all this and provided almost nothing of value. The former is the type of discussion we want; the latter is the opposite.
So why are bad faith arguments allowed?
There's no good reason to allow bad faith arguments. The only difficulty is that there's some subjectivity in determining what constitutes a bad faith argument, but there's a subjective element to almost all of this sub's rules (e.g. circlejerking). Egregious examples of arguing in bad faith should be worthy of a temp ban.
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