cousin_it comments on Not Technically Lying - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Psychohistorian 04 July 2009 06:40PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 July 2009 06:15:35AM 20 points [-]

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.

Comment author: cousin_it 06 July 2009 09:29:05AM *  0 points [-]

I just had a funny thought. In the spirit of your theory of Newcomblike problems, you will lie (or NTL) if you can extrapolate that the other person would have been thankful for it. On the other hand, adopting this strategy makes stupidity and self-deception beneficial to you, so scratch that.