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lessdazed comments on How to understand people better - Less Wrong
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Comments (164)
If by this you mean "Alice would explode at being called a liar," then I agree.
Communication is the transfer of information from speaker to listener: while I cannot reduce intent to the explicit meaning of words in this case I can reduce actual transfer to the explicit meaning of words (and a bit extra). The man in question is likely to be literal-minded, otherwise he would have picked up on the hint. (Men tend to be more literal than women.) Alice is the one who has an easier path to avoid communication breakdown.
They are in a fight about when they talk about it, and she is the one that elevated it from discussion to fight.
This habit is not conducive to relationship success.
This is true, but as it is different from other fights about when to talk about it, the point stands. She escalated to a particular form of fight at a particular time for reasons she partially understands and partially doesn't understand.
Possibly this isn't failure for both or either of them, though such things usually are. They do things, those actions have consequences, and we can judge those consequences against their stated preferences, idealized preferences, revealed preferences...whatever.
So for:
I think it reflects poorly on whoever is losing utility. I'm not too interested in apportioning blame among for example a mugger, his abusive parents, the guy who he mugged in the dark alley, the engineer who should have put a light there, etc.
ETA: I changed my mind to arrive at a similar position. It's not that behavior reflects poorly on people dependent upon the loss of utility that the behavior causes. Behavior less than what an entity expects to cause them the most utility (however weighted and whatever it is, including the right to e.g. be scope insensitive) reflects poorly on their character, and expectations divergent from those a perfectly rational agent would have reflect poorly on their minds.
So someone is still nuts if he or she fervently believes that if he or she enters a car that has a vowel on its license plate, the car will spontaneously explode even if this belief saves his or her life; and if one day a meteoroid unexpectedly drops out of the sky and kills you, giving you huge negative utility, that doesn't make you somehow dumber than the people outside around you.
Which point? As I understand it, Jack gave a large number of plausible reasons why she might respond the way she did. I selected the two most self-destructive and criticized them. It's still true that they're plausible reasons, and so in that sense "the point stands," but they aren't reasons that should be cultivated.
Then it's not clear to me why you're posting in this tree? If you go up to the root, taryneast posted blaming the man for being lazy; then Silas posted about blaming the woman for being uncommunicative; then TimS posted about blaming the man for being domineering; then I posted blaming the woman for being unhelpful/dishonest; then Jack posted blaming the man for not understanding women; then I posted blaming Alice for not understanding her audience.
Perhaps you're trying to move from 'blame' towards 'consequences,' and sure, I support that move. But I don't think the comment tree as is will move very easily.
Weeding is part of gardening.
But really, Silas posted about the man not being to blame for lack of communication, so I can stand behind that. I also thought it a description of fact without necessarily involving blame when you described the woman as putting the man in a no-win situation. So I didn't read that as you blaming her. I read your next sentence as blaming her, but on a different topic, as "out-and-out lie" implies a lot of judgement. I may or may not agree with Jack's next comment, depending on what he meant by "lie". She communicated poorly on the crystal-to-mud clarity scale, using a literal falsehood that had a relatively high likelihood of conveying the truth, for a literal falsehood. I don't see any moral problem with that as such.
So I find myself agreeing with whoever is defending a character, it gives me a coherent side in each sub-part of the argument.
I think you have some formatting errors with the start of your comment.
I see how Alice's strategy is different; I don't see how the subject of the fight is different. In example 1, Bob says "let's talk now" and Alice responds with a subtextual "no." In example 2, Bob says "let's talk now" and Alice responds with a textual "no, how about later?" Is that enough for you to call it a different fight?
To be clear my main point was just: "Alice is not lying". She may well be uncooperative and self-destructive but she is not lying. Whether or not she is being uncooperative or self-destructive is not obvious to me from the skeleton dialog. It would be dependent on details we don't have-- though I think it is likely her chosen path is not ideal. I think the man is being a bit dense and uncooperative by the end but he is not obviously in the wrong. Please interpret my comments as disagreement with precisely what you said not as support for TimS's comment or signifying that I blame or care about blaming one party or the other.
Have you tabooed "definition" without tabooing arguments from definition?
Heh. Almost. I've replaced definition with conventional speaker-meaning and am arguing from conventional speaker-meaning.
So, hypothetical: if we were both standing outside under the clear blue sky and I said to you "The sky is green" you would say I was not lying? Assume we are speaking English, that both of us have working color vision, etc.
I'd be trying to figure out from your tone, body language, facial expressions etc what was going on. Is pedanterrific just being weird? Has he gone crazy? Have I gone crazy? Is he trying to performatively illustrate a position on the unknowability of qualia? You've made it sort of difficult by providing an example of an obviously false statement wherein there is no other information about what you're doing-- but I certainly don't feel compelled to call it a lie.
Consider sarcasm.
I guess where you and I differ is that I don't consider those mutually exclusive. If I'm stating something which I know to not be true, I'm lying. I may also be doing other things (e.g. stating a prearranged signal like "the eagle has landed"), but all that - "being weird", "performatively illustrating a position" etc. - doesn't mean I'm not lying.
I, for one, understand that the definition of lying you are choosing to use here is simply "making false statements." It does not make sense to argue over what definition is "correct." I do want to be sure you are aware that many people understand lying to be "intending to deceive," particularly when things are morally charged, and you would be wise to taboo "lie" when this is relevant.
As a matter of curiosity: pursuant to your particular definition of lying as you were using it above, would you call making a true statement with the intent that it deceive and the knowledge that it is likely to do so "a lie" or "not a lie"?
I certainly hope that's not what it looked like I was doing.
Oh, I am. I was just curious about Jack's specific definition.
In point of fact, I would call that a "deception", not a "lie". So, [a statement made with intent to deceive] = a "deception", and [a statement of something that is known to be false] = a "lie". So the two qualities are independent of each other. (Incidentally, [a statement of something that is false, but thought to be correct] would be a "mistake".)
I wonder whether the legal system considers "making a true statement with the intent to deceive" perjury?
It looked like what was generally happening - I'm not interested in meting out blame for it.
Good.
Alright, interesting. FWIW, I can go either way on that one.
To some extent, wouldn't this amount to most defenses when the accused is guilty? This seems like a bad idea, unfortunately.
Googles ...
Though I suppose this wouldn't protect someone from prosecution for sarcasm.
Yeah. I mean-- usage sometimes differs. I don't want to make this exactly a definition debate. But look at how Vaniver used the word:
That usage suggests to me a meaning of liar that implies deceit (though Vaniver later said he didn't mean to imply that).
I do think it would be a social/linguistic error to respond to weirdness, joking hyperbole, or sarcasm with with "Liar!" or similar variant in a sincere tone.
Generally I prefer "Get thee behind me, Prince of Lies!" or possibly "You should be a statistician!" if I'm feeling particularly vindictive.
But I get your point.
Do you intend to persuade your interlocutor that the sky is in fact green? If not, then you are not lying.
Okay. So, what word do you use to describe the act of "stating things which you know to not be true"? Or does your variant of English not have a word for that act?
Such an act has different names in different contexts. In your scenario, what motivated your statement that the sky is green?
Alternatively, if you need to sum up the action in any context, the phrase "stating things which you know to not be true" suffices...
It does, doesn't it? Fancy that.
I don't see how that is supposed to matter. But because I'm curious, some hypothetical situations:
My motivation was to find out how my interlocutor would describe my statement.
Assume that you don't and can't know my motivation, as is commonly the case in the real world.
It was due to a random causeless quantum fluctuation, similar in theory to the idea of a 'Boltzmann brain', which acted on my neurons in a such a way as to output that statement and make me rationalize it as my idea.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/#GriPro
Propositional theories of meaning fail precisely because they have a great deal of trouble accounting for situations where our words don't match our intentions.
Intention always matters.
When an actor says, "I am Hamlet, prince of Denmark" is he lying?
If yes, then why is there a negative connotation in the word lying?