Telling the truth is an expression of trust, in addition to being a way to earn it: telling someone something true that could be misused is saying "I trust you to behave appropriately with this information". The fact that I would lie to the brownshirts as convincingly as possible shouldn't cause anyone else to mistrust me as long as 1) they know my goals; 2) I know their goals and they know that I do; 3) our goals align, at least contextually; and 4) they know that I'm not just a pathological liar who'll lie for no reason. The Nazis will be misled about (1), because that's the part of their knowledge I can manipulate most directly, but anyone with whom I share much of a trust relationship (the teenage daughter playing the piano, perhaps) will know better, because they'll be aware that I'm sheltering Jews and lying to Nazis.
The fact that I would lie to save the world should only cause someone to mistrust my statements on the eve of the apocalypse if they think that I think that they don't want to save the world.
Edited to not sound like I know what Eliezer is thinking:
In the Nazi example, there are only 3 likely options: Nazi, anti-Nazi, or self-interested. If non-Nazi C sees person A lie to Nazi B, C can assume, with a high degree of certainty, that person A is on the non-Nazi side. Being caught lying this way increases A's trustworthiness to C.
Radical honesty is a policy for when one is in a more complicated situation, in which there are many different sides, and there's no way to figure out what side someone is on by process of elimination.
In Eliezer's situat...
The Black Belt Bayesian writes:
Eliezer adds:
These are both radically high standards of honesty. Thus, it is easy to miss the fact that they are radically different standards of honesty. Let us look at a boundary case.
Thomblake puts the matter vividly:
So, let us say that you are living in Nazi Germany, during WWII, and you have a Jewish family hiding upstairs. There's a couple of brownshirts with rifles knocking on your door. What do you do?
I see four obvious responses to this problem (though there may be more)
I am certain that YVain could have a field day with the myriad ways in which response 4 does not represent rational discourse. Nonetheless, in this limited problem, it wins.
(It should also be noted that response 4 came to me in about 15 minutes of thinking about the problem. If I actually had Jews in my attic, and lived in Nazi Germany, I might have thought of something better).
However:
What if you live in the impossible possible world in which a nuclear blast could ignite the atmosphere of the entire earth? What if you are yourself a nuclear scientist, and have proven this to yourself beyond any doubt, but cannot convey the whole of the argument to a layman? The fate of the whole world could depend on your superiors believing you to be the sort of man who will not tell a lie. And, of course, in order to be the sort of man who would not tell a lie, you must not tell lies.
Do we have wiggle room here? Neither your superior officer, nor the two teenaged brownshirts, are Omega, but your superior bears a far greater resemblance. The brownshirts are young, are ruled by hormones. It is easy to practice the Dark Arts against them, and get away with it. Is it possible to grab the low-hanging fruit to be had by deceiving fools (at least, those who are evil and whose tires you would willingly slash), while retaining the benefits of being believed by the wise?
I am honestly unsure, and so I put the question to you all.
ETA: I have of course forgotten about the unrealistically optimistic option:
5: Really, truly, promote maximally accurate beliefs. Teach the soldiers rationality from the ground up. Explain to them about affective death spirals, and make them see that they are involved in one. Help them to understand that their own morality assigns value to the lives hidden upstairs. Convince them to stop being nazis, and to help you protect your charges.
If you can pull this off without winding up in a concentration camp yourself (along with the family you've been sheltering) you are a vastly better rationalist than I, or (I suspect) anyone else on this forum.