You are declaring everything gray here so that verbally everything is equal.
There are people with no knowledge in physics and no inventions to their name, whose first 'invention' is a perpetual motion device. You really don't see anything dishonest about holding an unfounded belief that you're this smart? You really see nothing dishonest about accepting money under this premise without doing due diligence such as trying yourself at something testable, even if you think you're this smart?
There are scientists whom are trying very hard to follow processes that are not prone to error, people trying to come up with ways to test their beliefs, do you really see them as all equal in the level of dishonesty?
There are people whom are honestly trying to make a perpetual motion device, whom sink their money into it, and never produce anything that they can show to investors, because they are honest and don't use hidden wires etc. (The equivalent would have Eliezer moving out to a country with a very cheap living, canceling his cryonics subscription, and so on, to maximize the money available for doing the very important work in question)
You can talk all day in qualitative terms how it is the same, state unimportant difference as the only one, and assert that you 'don't see the moral difference', but this 'counter argument' you're making is entirely generic and equally applicable to any form of immoral or criminal conduct. A court wouldn't be the least bit impressed.
Also, I don't go philosophical. I don't care what's going on inside the head unless i'm interested in neurology. I know that the conduct is dishonest, and the beliefs under which the honest agent would have such conduct lack foundation, there isn't some honest error here that did result in belief that leads honest agent to adopt such conduct. The convincing liars don't seem to work by thinking 'how could I lie', they just adopt the convenient falsehood as high priority axiom for talk and as low priority axiom for walk, as to resolve contradictions in most useful way, and that makes it very very murky as to what they actually believe.
You can say that it is honest to act on a belief, but that's an old idea, and nowadays things are more sophisticated and it is a get out of jail free card for almost all liars, whom first make up a very convenient, self serving false belief with not a trace of honesty to the belief making process, and then act on it.
Your hypothetical is a good one. And you are correct: I don't think you are dishonest if you are sincerely trying to build or sell a perpetual motion machine. You're still wrong, and even silly, but not dishonest. I need a word to refer to conscious knowing deception, and "dishonest" is the most useful word for the purpose. I can't let you use it for some other purpose; I need it where it is.
The argument is not applicable to all criminal conduct. In American criminal law, we pay a lot of attention to the criminal's state of mind. Having the appro...
I've spent so much time in the cogsci literature that I know the LW approach to rationality is basically the mainstream cogsci approach to rationality (plus some extra stuff about, e.g., language), but... do other people not know this? Do people one step removed from LessWrong — say, in the 'atheist' and 'skeptic' communities — not know this? If this is causing credibility problems in our broader community, it'd be relatively easy to show people that Less Wrong is not, in fact, a "fringe" approach to rationality.
For example, here's Oaksford & Chater in the second chapter to the (excellent) new Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, the one on normative systems of rationality:
Is it meaningful to attempt to develop a general theory of rationality at all? We might tentatively suggest that it is a prima facie sign of irrationality to believe in alien abduction, or to will a sports team to win in order to increase their chance of victory. But these views or actions might be entirely rational, given suitably nonstandard background beliefs about other alien activity and the general efficacy of psychic powers. Irrationality may, though, be ascribed if there is a clash between a particular belief or behavior and such background assumptions. Thus, a thorough-going physicalist may, perhaps, be accused of irrationality if she simultaneously believes in psychic powers. A theory of rationality cannot, therefore, be viewed as clarifying either what people should believe or how people should act—but it can determine whether beliefs and behaviors are compatible. Similarly, a theory of rational choice cannot determine whether it is rational to smoke or to exercise daily; but it might clarify whether a particular choice is compatible with other beliefs and choices.
From this viewpoint, normative theories can be viewed as clarifying conditions of consistency… Logic can be viewed as studying the notion of consistency over beliefs. Probability… studies consistency over degrees of belief. Rational choice theory studies the consistency of beliefs and values with choices.
They go on to clarify that by probability they mean Bayesian probability theory, and by rational choice theory they mean Bayesian decision theory. You'll get the same account in the textbooks on the cogsci of rationality, e.g. Thinking and Deciding or Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.