I've seen an article on LW about Santa Claus and most people were very keen on not lying to their kids (and I agree). I have a little kid who is generally quite truthful, innocent enough not to lie in most cases. I noticed recently that when someone asks him, "How are you", he usually answers in detail because, well, you asked, didn't you? When I was a teenager I hated people who lied and I tended to ignore these unwritten social rules to the extent I could. I.e. I didn't ask if I didn't want to know and people thought I was rude. So, my question is, should I teach him to lie upon these occasions?
More broadly, I was thinking, why am I committed to being truthful, in general? I guess because I would hate to be lied to myself. This is a kind of magical thinking maybe, or maybe it's a part of the social contract. This sort of lying in fact promotes the social well-being because to answer truthfully creates an unwelcome burden on my interlocutor who asked out of politeness and is not in truth interested. But it still feels wrong to lie. Even more wrong to teach your kid to do so.
The phrase "how are you" is no different from a TCP Handshake. In order to establish communication, the first initiating computer will send out a synchronize, the responder sends a synchronize-acknowledge, then the initiator will give back a single acknowledge. This is just how human language does it, with a slight order change.
"How are you?" - Synchronize request
"Good, how are you?" - Acknowledge synchronize request, send sync request of your own
"I'm good too" - Acknowledge
Just like in computers, the purpose is not to convey information in itself. It is to establish communication including the rules of communication each side will be using. If you want to change the transfer protocol over to UDP, that is also acceptable (eg, "how are you?" "ugh terrible! ). You can also throw up halt flags before conversation begins (eg, "how are you?" "sod off"). The initial synack is also good for pinging (eg, "how are you?" ... "sorry I was busy thinking").
However, the one thing that neither humans nor computers use synack for is transmitting information. Doing so is simply a breach of information transfer protocol and may result in you defecting by accident.
I really like this reply. The initial point about the TCP Handshake makes a lot of sense and relates to the core point, and the supporting parts about other communication types gives me some fresh insights that I can try to use in other conversations.