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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.
If you can be accused of having intended to deceive it counts as a lie in most social functions. If you can't be, as in changes of subject or not answering the question, that counts as good manners. It can be infuriating to the questioner if you are less subtle than you think you are, but only really upsets fairly rare people. With those rare people though, it may be a better idea to just admit that you aren't willing to answer or to place a condition on answering. We have had conflicts over this in the past where you would have done better by doing so in any event.