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Emily comments on Not Technically Lying - Less Wrong
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Maybe I'm just deluding myself, or as Michael Vassar would put it, expressing codes of morality that I learned by being socialized by fantasy novels as a kid...
...but for me, one of the primary motivations against lying is "Once a man gets a reputation for lying, he might as well be whistling in the wind." At least if you get a reputation for Not Technically Lying, your words still mean things, they just have to be carefully double-checked. Depending on how much trouble you go to in order to Not Technically Lie, when anyone else would just lie and be done with it, it expresses an odd sort of respect for the truth. A lot of that would depend on context and motivation, I expect. And maybe if you aren't socialized by fantasy novels you just don't care about the difference at all.
I think there are grades of Not Technically Lying, too. For example, there's Not Literally Lying According To Sentence Syntax But Lying If You Added Words That Appear By Gricean Implication, like the missing "because" in the opening paragraph. In contrast, Subtly Changing the Subject or Not Answering the Original Question, actually seem to me substantially less similar to outright lies - the original sentence becomes a lie if an implied word "because" is said out loud; Subtly Changing the Subject is more... semantic.
Grice's maxims are a very interesting factor to introduce here, and I think encapsulate very well what Psychohistorian is saying. You might argue that breaking any of them (Quality, Quantity, Relevance, Manner), with the possible exception of Manner, is a form of lying. Breaking Quality is direct lying. Breaking Quantity is excluding true information that is necessary for the listener to really understand what's going on. And what PH did here is a good example of breaking Relevance: introducing the computer information where it was actually irrelevant, thereby creating a not-technically-a-lie out of the fact that we assume he is complying with Grice's maxims.
Manner is a less obvious case. You might argue that you were not-technically-lying by breaking Manner if you spewed mountains of true information and buried the part that you want to not-technically-lie about among all the other true stuff so that no one took any notice of it. But that could also be expressed as breaking both Quantity and Relevance.
I'm smiling, shaking your hand. "Yes, this was a very productive conversation! I'm sure glad I met up with you and we had this discussion!"
You think I'm going to help support you in your efforts to do whatever you're going to do with the ideas or information you've shared with me tonight. Instead, I'm going to report it to another group that will stop you from doing what you want, take your ideas, or exploit the information in a way counter to your goals.
I've just lied by breaking the maxim of Manner.
[Edit: It's arguable that breaking Quantity would also cover this--I didn't say WHY it was productive--but it seems clear to me that it's essentially a violation of Manner.]