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MichaelVassar 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.
It seems likely to me that a reputation for Not Technically Lying, being highly unusual, would be highly salient, and so might lead to less trust than a reputation for lying at an average frequency – i.e., the null reputation, not salient at all.
I'm pretty sure that this is correct.
More precisely, I'm pretty sure that one simply doesn't want to have ANY reputation regarding trustworthyness, truth, or whatever. Make issues of truth salient and you loose. Even a reputation for always communicating honestly (no efforts at deception) costs you status because it makes you a less valuable ally, less capable of desirable forms of partiality, and above all, weird. Being seen as a trusted neutral third party is at best a weak consolation prize, and one that is only possible if you are also seen as either a) not having your own agenda, or b) not having an agenda that anyone is allowed to question.
By contrast, politicians who are caught in lies repeatedly pick themselves up and go back to being high status politicians after wiping the dirt off their faces.
You can have in someone's eyes a reputation of lying to everyone else but being truthful to this particular person because they're special. I've seen such cases.
Pope's weird. Wouldn't have much status if he were normal, he'd just be Chair (not CEO) of a large international corporation.
The Pope is a good neutral third party. He has taken the consolation prize of being the World's Most Moral Man because he can't be Vladimir Putin or Barack Obama, both of whom have more friends and more power.
In addition to the obvious position-of-authority thing, it might be relevant that the Pope's weirdness is a factor of (or at least can easily be attributed to) his situation, not his disposition (as honesty would be).