The Halo Defense

Mateusz Bagiński

Once upon a time, A Relatively Famous Guy On The Internet was accused of having been simultaneously dating multiple women, without those women's knowledge, those women (according to the accusation) having been convinced that they were his exclusive partners all along. Then, one of his friends, another Relatively Famous Guy On The Internet, defended him by claiming that he is "a great friend, a wonderful human being, and that his podcast was incredibly helpful to a lot of people".

This is a great example of what I came to call the "halo defense".

The halo defense involves "defending" someone from allegations by bringing up traits of X that are meant to be interpreted positively, without addressing the allegations on the basis of which X is being "attacked".

I'll give two more examples from my personal experience:

A university professor (with a PhD in ethics!) is accused by several of his female students of sexual harassment. The dean demands that the faculty staff take the professor's side, because he is a "vital part of their community", not engaging to any extent with the validity of accusations.
A (different) university professor is afflicted by a strange curse: students express little to no interest in his lectures. He kinda threatens his students that if they don't start regularly attending the lectures, he will not let them pass the exams (where he technically doesn't have the right to deny them passing the exams). His colleague, during her own class, tries to give the same students reasons to attend the lectures that have nothing to do with their intellectual value.

The halo defense seems to occur not too infrequently. For example, it is one of the main drivers of community disputes. I haven't seen it named yet, and the name "halo defense" fits perfectly.

It is a special case of the halo effect:

the tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, country, brand, or product in one area to positively influence one's opinion or feelings of a person, company, country, brand, or product in another area"

of the noncentral fallacy:

X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member

and of the affect heuristic:

Finucane et al. found that for nuclear reactors, natural gas, and food preservatives, presenting information about high benefits made people perceive lower risks; presenting information about higher risks made people perceive lower benefits; and so on across the quadrants.⁵ People conflate their judgments about particular good/bad aspects of something into an overall good or bad feeling about that thing.

The common pattern underlying all of them is a spillover of evaluative judgments made on one axis (e.g., "helpful to people", "efficient") to all other axes.

PS: A phenomenon related to the halo defense is that people seem to be insufficiently aware of the fact that many persons' distribution of behaviors is long- and heavy-tailed, and thus extrapolating the behavior observed in most circumstances to all circumstances may not work. Relatedly, the typical mind fallacy leads people to reasoning in terms of (something like) asking themselves a question "Under what circumstances and modifications of my own mind, could I imagine myself doing such a thing?". Upon this question returning a null result ("Never. Under no circumstance or modification of my own mind."), they come to conclude that this allegation cannot be true.

Relatedly, if someone you know is accused of acting poorly toward another person, the observation that they never act that way toward you may provide nearly zero Bayesian evidence in their favor.

A very common example:

Alice: "My boyfriend is controlling and abusive toward me, and disrespectful of other women."
Bob: "I don't believe that. He never acted that way toward me!"
Alice: "...Yeah. Duh. You're not a woman."

You should probably disagree with me here, but that's exactly what I mean when I say "x person / group selects on vibes (or rather, someone else's testimony of someone's "vibes")" in the context of not having a clear and transparent selection policy.

I guess halo effect may be something that affects judgment and not necessary for "vibes based selection ". But I'd find it helpful to clarify my thoughts.

I mean, to the extent that people are selecting based on "vibes" but are not aware of it and actually think that they're selecting based on something else, this is totally a halo effect thing.

The common pattern underlying all of them is a spillover of evaluative judgments made on one axis (e.g., "helpful to people", "efficient") to all other axes

So it is basically a failure to decouple the values when they diverge?

IDK how broadly you tend and intend to use the term "value", but for me, applying it here is quite a stretch.

If you're measuring the performance of a program, and notice that it's very fast/time-efficient, and consequently conclude that it must therefore also be space-efficient (use as little memory as possible), and elegantly written, then you're definitely confusing various axes of evaluation — i.e., the thing I pointed at in the part of the post you're replying — but it seems like a big stretch to call time-efficiency, space-efficieny, and source code elegance three distinct values that are being confused here.

Oh, I didn't mean value as "measure of worth" but value as in the math definition of "amount denoted by reference".