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White Lies
Background: As can be seen from some of the comments on this post, many people in the LessWrong community take an extreme stance on lying. A few days before I posted this, I was at a meetup where we played the game Resistance, and one guy announced before the game began that he had a policy of never lying even when playing games like that. It's such members of the LessWrong community that this post was written for. I'm not trying to encourage basically honest people with the normal view of white lies that they need to give up being basically honest.
Mr. Potter, you sometimes make a game of lying with truths, playing with words to conceal your meanings in plain sight. I, too, have been known to find that amusing. But if I so much as tell you what I hope we shall do this day, Mr. Potter, you will lie about it. You will lie straight out, without hesitation, without wordplay or hints, to anyone who asks about it, be they foe or closest friend. You will lie to Malfoy, to Granger, and to McGonagall. You will speak, always and without hesitation, in exactly the fashion you would speak if you knew nothing, with no concern for your honor. That also is how it must be.
- Rational!Quirrell, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
This post isn't about HMPOR, so I won't comment on the fictional situation the quote comes from. But in many real-world situations, it's excellent advice.
If you're a gay teenager with homophobic parents, and there's a real chance they'd throw you out on the street if they found out you were gay, you should probably lie to them about it. Even in college, if you're still financially dependent on them, I think it's okay to lie. The minute you're no longer financially dependent on them, you should absolutely come out for your sake and the sake of the world. But it's OK to lie if you need to to keep your education on-track.
Oh, maybe you could get away with just shutting up and hoping the topic doesn't come up. When asked about dating, you could try to evade while being technically truthful: "There just aren't any girls at my school I really like." "What about _____? Why don't you ask her out?" "We're just friends." That might work. But when asked directly "are you gay?" and the wrong answer could seriously screw-up your life, I wouldn't bet too much on your ability to "lie with truths," as Quirrell would say.
I start with this example because the discussions I've seen on the ethics of lying on LessWrong (and everywhere, actually) tend to focus on the extreme cases: the now-cliché "Nazis at the door" example, or even discussion of whether you'd lie with the world at stake. The "teen with homophobic parents" case, on the other hand, might have actually happened to someone you know. But even this case is extreme compared to most of the lies people tell on a regular basis.
Widely-cited statistics claim that the average person lies once per day. I recently saw a new study (that I can't find at the moment) that disputed this, and claimed most people lie rather less often than that, but it still found most people lie fairly often. These lies are mostly "white lies" to, say, spare others' feelings. Most people have no qualms about those kind of lies. So why do discussions of the ethics of lying so often focus on the extreme cases, as if those were the only ones where lying is maybe possibly morally permissible?
At LessWrong there've been discussions of several different views all described as "radical honesty." No one I know of, though, has advocated Radical Honesty as defined by psychotherapist Brad Blanton, which (among other things) demands that people share every negative thought they have about other people. (If you haven't, I recommend reading A. J. Jacobs on Blanton's movement.) While I'm glad no one here is thinks Blanton's version of radical honesty is a good idea, a strict no-lies policy can sometimes have effects that are just as disastrous.
A few years ago, for example, when I went to see the play my girlfriend had done stage crew for, and she asked what I thought of it. She wasn't satisfied with my initial noncommittal answers, so she pressed for more. Not in a "trying to start a fight" way; I just wasn't doing a good job of being evasive. I eventually gave in and explained why I thought the acting had sucked, which did not make her happy. I think incidents like that must have contributed to our breaking up shortly thereafter. The breakup was a good thing for other reasons, but I still regret not lying to her about what I thought of the play.
Yes, there are probably things I could've said in that situation that would have been not-lies and also would have avoided upsetting her. Sam Harris, in his book Lying, spends a lot of arguing against lying in that way: he takes situations where most people would be tempted to tell a white lie, and suggesting ways around it. But for that to work, you need to be good at striking the delicate balance between saying too little and saying too much, and framing hard truths diplomatically. Are people who lie because they lack that skill really less moral than people who are able to avoid lying because they have it?
Notice the signaling issue here: Sam Harris' book is a subtle brag that he has the skills to tell people the truth without too much backlash. This is especially true when Harris gives examples from his own life, like the time he told a friend "No one would ever call you 'fat,' but I think you could probably lose twenty-five pounds." and his friend went and did it rather than getting angry. Conspicuous honesty also overlaps with conspicuous outrage, the signaling move that announces (as Steven Pinker put it) "I'm so talented, wealthy, popular, or well-connected that I can afford to offend you."
If you're highly averse to lying, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to convince you to tell white lies more often. But I will implore you to do one thing: accept other people's right to lie to you. About some topics, anyway. Accept that some things are none of your business, and sometimes that includes the fact that there's something which is none of your business.
Or: suppose you ask someone for something, they say "no," and you suspect their reason for saying "no" is a lie. When that happens, don't get mad or press them for the real reason. Among other things, they may be operating on the assumptions of guess culture, where your request means you strongly expected a "yes" and you might not think their real reason for saying "no" was good enough. Maybe you know you'd take an honest refusal well (even if it's "I don't want to and don't think I owe you that"), but they don't necessarily know that. And maybe you think you'd take an honest refusal well, but what if you're lying to yourself?
If it helps to be more concrete: Some men will react badly to being turned down for a date. Some women too, but probably more men, so I'll make this gendered. And also because dealing with someone who won't take "no" for an answer is a scarier experience with the asker is a man and the person saying "no" is a woman. So I sympathize with women who give made-up reasons for saying "no" to dates, to make saying "no" easier.
Is it always the wisest decision? Probably not. But sometimes, I suspect, it is. And I'd advise men to accept that women doing that is OK. Not only that, I wouldn't want to be part of a community with lots of men who didn't get things like that. That's the kind of thing I have in mind when I say to respect other people's right to lie to you.
All this needs the disclaimer that some domains should be lie-free zones. I value the truth and despise those who would corrupt intellectual discourse with lies. Or, as Eliezer once put it:
We believe that scientists should always tell the whole truth about science. It's one thing to lie in everyday life, lie to your boss, lie to the police, lie to your lover; but whoever lies in a journal article is guilty of utter heresy and will be excommunicated.
I worry this post will be dismissed as trivial. I simultaneously worry that, even with the above disclaimer, someone is going to respond, "Chris admits to thinking lying is often okay, now we can't trust anything he says!" If you're thinking of saying that, that's your problem, not mine. Most people will lie to you occasionally, and if you get upset about it you're setting yourself up for a lot of unhappiness. And refusing to trust someone who lies sometimes isn't actually very rational; all but the most prolific liars don't lie anything like half the time, so what they say is still significant evidence, most of the time. (Maybe such declarations-of-refusal-to-trust shouldn't be taken as arguments so much as threats meant to coerce more honesty than most people feel bound to give.)
On the other hand, if we ever meet in person, I hope you realize I might lie to you. Failure to realize a statement could be a white lie can create some terribly awkward situations.
Edits: Changed title, added background, clarified the section on accepting other people's right to lie to you (partly cutting and pasting from this comment).
Edit round 2: Added link to paper supporting claim that the average person lies once per day.
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Comments (893)
There are certain lies that I tell over and over again, where I'm 99% sure lying is the morally correct answer. Stereotypical example: my patient is lying in a lake of poop, or is ringing the call bell for the third time in 15 minutes to tell me that they're thirsty or in pain or need a kleenex, and they're embarrassed and upset because they're sure I must be frustrated and mad that they're making me do so much work. "Of course I don't mind," I've said over and over again. "This doesn't bother me. I've got plenty of time. I just want you to be comfortable, that's my job." When it's 4 am and I desperately want to go on break and eat something, none of these things are true. But it's my job, and I want to want to do it, so the fact that sometimes I desperately don't want to do it is kind of moot. But the last thing a patient in the ICU needs to hear from their nurse is "yes, I'm pissed that you shat in the bed again because I was about to go on break and now I can't and I'm hungry and cranky." I keep that to myself.
...Other than that, I generally don't lie to friends, although I do lie by omission, especially when it comes to my irrational feelings of frustration or irritation with things they do. I'm generally not bothered by being very open with people about i.e. my relationships or other personal things, so I'm confused when other people want to lie or conceal information about these sorts of things. I actually have a really hard time keeping up with other people's systems of lying; when you're friends with two people who both have specific lists of things they don't want you to ever tell the other person, it gets complicated. (For almost a year my best friend was dating a man without telling her ex-husband, and I was seeing her ex-husband every time I went to play with my godson, and I had to remember to lie about a whole bunch of random things like "what did you and my ex-wife do on Saturday?" I respected that it was her choice whether or not to tell him, but I still found this really, really irritating.)
When a student asks me to write her a letter of recommendation and expresses some concern that this will be a bother for me I have said "Don't worry, that's part of my job" to signal that the request is appropriate.
Upvoted for a rare case of lying where I find myself unable to suggest a good alternative way to not lie, even for people with high verbal SAT scores.
"Don't worry about it."
Imperatives are often a nice fallback.
But is that literally as good for a patient in an ICU who really, really needs to not shut up about these things? i mean, in that situation, it would probably occur to me that the nurse might still be lying... but telling a lie like that is still a kind of permission to bother her which "Don't worry about it" isn't.
Agreed. One of the things I think is wrong with lying in general is that it can mess up the incentives for behaviours you want to see more of (i.e. a white lie to your friend, claiming to like her awful haircut, doesn't do anything to help your friend improve her future haircuts.) In my example, I'm lying with respect to my first-order desires, but telling the truth according to my second-order desires. I may first-order want a few more minutes to drink tea and socialize with the other nurses, but I don't endorse myself wanting that, and I certainly don't want to encourage my patients to not call me because they're worried I'm too busy or tired or cranky. I second-order want to encourage the behaviour where my patients call me for all the little things and 90% of the time it's annoying and stupid but 10% of the time it's super important.
If I ever had a patient with a rationalist background, maybe I could explain all of that, but maybe not even then; most people aren't at their best for following complex logic when they're loopy on drugs or having trouble breathing or whatnot. So I go for the emotional reassurance, because that gets through. Still working on different phrasings, and I don't always succeed; I was helping out another nurse with her patient who had diarrhea, putting her on the bedpan every half hour, and at one point she fell asleep and pooped in the bed while asleep and then cried with frustration the whole time I changed her, and I wasn't able to reassure her.
You can expand "Don't worry about it" to include permission to bother her. "Don't worry about it - please never give it a second thought if you need me for anything. That's what I'm here to do."
I don't think "This doesn't bother me" gets parsed literally anyway. In either case what ever you say they are pretty sure it is annoying for you, albeit they do want reassurance that it is not so annoying that you would snap "yes this is annoying!".
Well, that's a good idea right there. You could tell them: "Please don't be embarrassed, and don't hesitate to call me. You're in an ICU and it's very important that you communicate with us, even if it's just a matter of discomfort. You shouldn't assume you can tell the difference between something trivial and something serious, or something that requires immediate attention and not."
I would interpret that as a straightforward confirmation that it was in fact annoying. There would be no resulting awkwardness but it would definitely not make me more likely to speak up again.
Well the classic lie in medicine is when a sibling confides in the doctor that he doesn't want to donate a kidney to his brother or sister and he's just getting tested out of family pressure. I understand that in such a situation, the doctor will normally lie and say that they ran the tests and the sibling is not a compatible donor.
Actually, regardless of the reason, they just say that "no suitable donor is available." If pressed, they say they never release potential donors' medical information to recipients, for confidentiality and to protect donors from coercion.
That's interesting . . . what happens if the potential donor asks for (and is willing to sign a release) so that his medical information can be released?
Depends. Different countries have different laws governing such. For the most part, if the hospital sees any legal liability at all, they'll do the standard CYA. Signing waivers / releases often doesn't do a whole lot, some of your rights you cannot sign away. Regarding your question, with releasing medical information, such waivers shouldn't be a problem, although the transplant scenario may be a special case.
Regardless of the legalese, transplant doctors typically get to know you quite well, and more information slips out (implicitly and explicitly) than may be allowed by law (HIPAA be damned). Nullum ius sine actione, as they say. If noone complains, noone sues. Bit like driving without seatbelts.
"Taking care of you is my sacred duty. I care about you. It is important that you tell me if there is something wrong."
This is true literally and in spirit.
Your reference to SAT scores is rather odd. I suppose there is probably some correlation, but they are really quite different skill sets.
How about adding a tiny bit of ambiguity (or evasion of the direct question) and making up for it with more effusiveness, eg, "it's not only my job but it feels really good to know that I'm helping you so I really want you to bug me about even trivial-seeming things!" All true and all she's omitting is her immediate annoyance but that is truly secondary, as she points out below about first-order vs second-order desires.
I'm not sure there's a lie happening... it seems to me that in said circumstances the meanings of the sentences are conventionally mapped, like:
"yes, I'm pissed that you shat in the bed again because I was about to go on break and now I can't and I'm hungry and cranky." -> I'm incredibly angry with you and I'm going to find out a way to kill you so you don't bother me again. (Exaggerating a bit here for effect)
"Of course I don't mind" -> of course I do mind but it is not as bad as the example above.
Sentences mean what the listener makes of them, that's why you have to speak a foreign language when talking to a foreigner who doesn't speak your language.
A similar argument occurred to me, but I think it does border on proving too much. It also depends on knowing what the listener will make of the sentence. I think that the concept of "lying" does depend largely on the idea that the explicit, plain meaning of a sentence having a privileged position, over implications, signalling, Bayesian updates caused by the statement, etc. If someone says "Well, the probability of me telling you that I am not having an affair, given that I am having an affair, is not much smaller than the probability given that I am not having an affair, so if you significantly updated your prior simply because of my denial, the blame is on your end, not mine", I don't think many people would find that a reasonable response.
I think I pinned down the distinction here.
If you tell something like this: "yes, I'm pissed that you shat in the bed again because I was about to go on break and now I can't and I'm hungry and cranky.", the patient is going to form a lot of important beliefs regarding the question they're asked that are not true, more than if you say "this doesn't bother me". You have to say what ever sentence ends up misleading the patient the least about what they want to know.
For the affair on the other hand, it is not so, they'd form more valid beliefs if you said that you are having an affair, than if you say you don't.
The truth is such word noises, body language, intonation, and so on, that mislead the listener the least. Usually has to be approximate due to imperfect knowledge and so on.
I'm curious about how you, being a nurse, would prefer that the patient behave in situations like this? There don't seem to be great options - is there a least-bad attitude?
...I feel like a lot of that boils down to stuff out of patients' control, like "don't be confused or delirious." Assuming that my patient is totally with it and can reasonably be expected to try to behave politely, I prefer that patients tell me right away when they need something, listen to my explanation of what I'm going to do about it and when I'll be able to do it, or why I can't do anything about it, and then accept that and not keep bringing up the same complaint repeatedly unless it gets worse. I have had patients who rang the call bell every 5 minutes for hours to tell me that they were thirsty, when I'd already explained that I couldn't give them anything by mouth, or that their biggest concern was being thirsty but I was more concerned that their heart rate was 180 and I really really needed to deal with that first.
I obviously prefer it when patient's aren't embarrassed and I can joke around with them and chat about their grandkids while cleaning their poop. But emotional reactions aren't under most people's control either, so it's not a reasonable thing to ask.
My ex wife is in Geriatrics and I've heard a few situations from her where she, possibly appropriately, lied to patients with severe dementia by playing along with their fantasies. The most typical example would be a patient believing their dead spouse is coming that day for a visit, and asking about it every 15 minutes. I think she would usually tell the truth the first few times, but felt it was cruel to be telling someone constantly that their spouse is dead, and getting the same negative emotional reaction every time, so at that point she would start saying something like, "I heard they were stuck in traffic and can't make it today."
The above feels to me like a grey area, but more rarely a resident would be totally engrossed in a fantasy, like thinking they were in a broadway play or something. In these cases, where the person will never understand/accept the truth anyway, I think playing along to keep them happy isn't a bad option.
Relevant recent Slate Star Codex post
I find it takes a great deal of luminosity in order to be honest with someone. If I am in a bad mood, I might feel that its my honest opinion that they are annoying when in fact what is going on in my brain has nothing to do with their actions. I might have been able to like the play in other circumstances, but was having a bad day so flaws I might have been otherwise able to overlook were magnified in my mind. etc.
This is my main fear with radical honesty, since it seems to promote thinking that negative thoughts are true just because they are negative. The reasoning going 'I would not say this if I were being polite, but I am thinking it, therefore it is true' without realizing that your brain can make your thoughts be more negative from the truth just as easily as it can make them more positive than the truth.
In fact, saying you enjoyed something you didnt enjoy, and signalling enjoyment with appropriate facial muscles (smiling etc) can improve your mood by itself, especially if it makes the other person smile.
Many intelligent people get lots of practice pointing out flaws, and it is possible that this trains the brain into a mode where one's first thoughts on a topic will be critical regardless of the 'true' reaction. If your brain automatically looks for flaws in something and then a friend asks your honest opinion you would tell them the flaws; but if you look for things to compliment your 'honest' opinion might be different.
tl;dr honesty is harder than many naively think, because our brains are not perfect reporters of their state, and even if they were good luck explaining your inner feelings about something across the inferential distance. Better to just adjust all your reactions slightly in the positive direction to reap the benefits of happier interactions (but only slightly, don't say you liked activities you loathed otherwise you'll be asked back, say they were ok but not your cup of tea etc)
If I am honest without accuracy... if I am proud to report my results of my reasoning as they are, but my actual reasoning is sloppy... then I shouldn't congratulate myself for giving precise info, because the info was not precise; I simply removed one source of imprecision, but ignored another.
Saying "you are annoying" feels like an extremely honest thing, and I may be motivated to stop there.
However, saying "sorry, I'm in a bad mood today; I think it's likely that on a different day I would appreciate what you are trying to do, but today it doesn't work this way, and it actually annoys me" is even more honest, and possibly less harmful to the listener.
A cynical explanation is that while attempting to be extremely honest, we refuse to censor the information that might hurt the listener... but we still censor the information that would hurt us. For example, the short version of "you are annoying" contains the information that may hurt my friend, but conceals the information about my own vulnerability.
Perhaps a good heuristic could be: Don't hurt other people by your honesty, unless you are willing to hurt yourself as much (or 20 % more, to balance for your own biased perception) -- and even this only if they agreed to play by these rules. (Of course you are allowed to select your friends according to their ability and willingness to play by these rules. But sometimes you have to interact with other people, too.)
My own (very limited) observation of trying to be radically honest has been that until I first say (or at least admit to myself) the reaction of annoyance, I can't become aware of what lies beyond it. If I'm angry at my wife because of something else that happened to me, I usually won't know that it's because of something else until I first express (even just to myself) that I am angry at my wife.
Until I actually tried being honest about such things, I didn't know this, and practicing such expression seemed beneficial in increasing my general awareness of thoughts and emotions in the present or near-present moment. I don't even remotely attempt to practice radical honesty even in my relationship with my wife, but we've both definitely benefited from learning to express what we feel... even if what we're feeling often changes in the very moment we express it. That change is kind of the point of the exercise: if you've completely expressed what you're resenting, it suddenly becomes much easier to notice what you appreciate.
I think that even Blanton's philosophy kind of misses or overstates the point: the point isn't to be honest about every damn thing, it's to avoid the sort of emotional constipation that keeps you stuck being resentful about things because you never want to face or admit that resentment, and so can never get past it.
This made me think; I may have some luminosity privilege that needs checking...
Wow. This comment made me happy, even with the jargon. Positive reinforcement for thinking about how your experience might be atypical and other people might have needs or disabilities you hadn't considered!
If you are interested in some more things that may distinguish your experience from ChrisHallquist's, you might consider that his examples are mainly about lying in self-defense to hostile people or people who have deliberately asked questions that are costly to evade or answer honestly. Picture an Aikido expert who lives and works in a safe neighborhood getting angry at a janitor who lives in a violent slum for saying they reserve the right to throw a punch if the situation calls for it. I might think the poor janitor has the right to defend themself, but that doesn't mean I'd be very likely at all to punch someone at your dinner party.
Some of his examples were like that. The part of his post that most bothered me was "accept others' right to lie to you", and the title has now been changed to "White Lies", which I've never heard used conversationally to cover things like "no, Mom, not gay".
I have always interpreted "white lies" as "lies I approve of" rather than "small lies," because the size of a lie is clearly a subjective measurement. It looks like wiki mostly agrees.
"Lies I approve of" and "white lies" are overlapping sets, but aren't quite the same. For example, if a Nazi asks you if you're hiding any Jews (and you are), I approve of lying to them, but this isn't a white lie. On the other hand, if your horrible racist aunt asks you if she's racist, telling her that she's not would be a white lie, but not one that I approve of.
Looking at Augustine's taxonomy the terminology seems clearer, as it differentiates "lies told to please others in smooth discourse," which is what I think Alicorn would associate with 'white lies,' with "lies that harm no one and that protect someone from bodily defilement." (And note how the lies in religious teachings mirrors the discussion of lies in science!) As expected, Augustine thinks it's better to lie to the Nazi than to lie to your aunt.
But again it seems the subjectivity shines through in the definition of harm, if you want to put the hidden Jew lie in Augustine's last category. Isn't the Nazi harmed when you lie to him, and he doesn't get to catch the hidden Jew?
most people WANT the nazi to be harmed.
Indeed.
Probably. I mean, you literally wrote the book. And the sequence. Even the name... I'm sure a floodlight is of great use up on your hill, but it doesn't do much deep down here (wherever here is) in what might be fog and might be mud I can't tell because I can't see it well enough.
In that case a real honest answer might be: "I felt uncomfortable during that activity but I don't know whether it's because of the activity or because it's I generally focus to much on the negative."
That gives the person you are dealing with a lot of useful information to interact with you. Sharing something deeper about yourself builds trust. If the person is well intentioned they can use the information in a way that makes the interaction for both of you better.
The goal of honest communication is to give the other person useful information. Transmitting more useful information is being more honest.
If you just say your loathe the activity or you say you liked it, you might be holding something back. If you have a trustworthy friendship than knowing about your emotional state is useful information for your friend.
Your friend might be good at reading body language and be able to tell the difference between your fake smile and a real smile but it makes it so much harder for a friend to help you when you aren't open about what you are feeling.
To me not being open about your emotions on a deep level when you are with friends or loved ones feels like defecting in a prisoner dilemma. You might get some immediate benefit but overall it's not the path of the game tree that's optimal. To the extend that there are people who can't deal with me being open about what I feel I don't want them as friends or loved ones.
While this is true, it is also true that knowing that a given person won't lie, that they will tell you how bad the acting in your play is, makes their praise even more valuable; because one knows that it is not a white lie.
By allowing yourself the small lies, that is what you are trading away. Whether it's worth it or not, I can't say for sure...
In theory, committing to not lying has some advantages, but in my experience, it doesn't actually work. In my experience, people who commit to not lying are less accurate and less trusted than those who don't. And I'm pretty sure the causality flows from the commitment and not from a third factor.
This runs contrary to what I would expect.
Could it be that people who commit to not lying:
Boy, I sure wouldn't want to date a person like this (your girlfriend-at-the-time). She asked for your opinion; pressed you to actually give it, thus communicating (by any reasonable measure) that she actually wanted your opinion; and then, when you gave it honestly, was unhappy about it? That's horrible.
I don't think I'd ever willingly choose to be close to someone to whom I'd ever regret not lying in response to being asked for my opinion. The thought of living like that, living with the knowledge that honest communication is basically impossible because any time the person asks me (and presses me) about my opinion, I have to consider the possibility that what they actually want is lies — that this person prefers lies both to truths and to no comment — repulses me.
Demand by rational men for rational women exceeds supply, even taking into account that some of the women have harems. If you're one of the lucky men, or a woman, be aware of your privilege and don't criticize men who lack it.
I think the set of women you can be honest with in a relationship is much larger than the set of women who are full on CFAR style rationalists.
My experience is more like "real honesty, in or out of a relationship, only works with the upper echelon of CFAR style rationalists" though admittedly exposure to the naked, sharp gears of my own intellect may have more Lovecraftian results than it would in the population average.
I agree with the point in your first sentence, but I'm not sure I follow what your advice is in the second sentence.
Are you suggesting that my criticism comes from having rational women to date, whereas Chris (at the time of the anecdote) did not, and so was forced to date an irrational woman, for which I was criticising him?
Those are three wrong things, it seems to me:
I don't find it to be the case that rational women occur in abundance in my dating pool;
No one (presumably) forced Chris to date the young lady in question;
I wasn't criticising him for his dating choices; if I was criticising anything, it was his advice that we accept such behavior in our partners / friends, and expressing the view that I, personally, would not accept such behavior.
P.S.
Really?
That surprises you? Do you think rational women wouldn't want harems?
Scott tells us that polyamory seems like a suboptimal way to get sex, and I assume this holds true even for women - technically. But sex is not fungible.
Um... sure, that surprises me a bit. Also that they have the harems, even given wanting them.
I don't really know what you are saying in your second paragraph. Please explain?
That doesn't entitle any irrational woman to date any rational man. Men are allowed to stay single, you know.
As best I can tell, "people who sometimes ask questions they might not want to hear the answer to" are a large majority of the population. "Does this dress make me look fat" is a cliche put-you-on-the-spot question for a reason.
Sometimes is an important word here. Too often, and it might be an issue, but it's not like this was a regular occurrence with her. (A big THANK YOU here to Pablo and hyporational for noticing they shouldn't be making too many assumptions based on one anecdote.)
Now, another approach is to exclusively date people who value total honesty at all times. But (1) there are other qualities I value more in a mate and (2) I suspect such openness to "total honesty at all time" tends to correlate with being social inept and overly honest even with people who don't want that, qualities I'd like to avoid.
To reiterate a point I have made several times in this post's comments:
"Valuing total honesty at all times" and "refraining from pressing someone for an honest answer when what you actually want is a lie" are two very different things.
Correspondingly, being totally honest at all times, unprompted, is not the same as being honest when specifically pressed for an honest answer.
I try to restrict my circle of friends to people who do not ask precisely such put-you-on-the-spot questions. That, among other policies and attitudes, makes my circle of friends small.
Or, to put it another way: people worth being friends with are rare. And those are the only people I want to be friends with.
(BTW, I usually answer that with "you looked better in that other one", so I don't offend her but I still help her choose flattering clothes.)
You're misunderstanding the message.
"Does this dress make me look fat?" is not really a question. It's a request for a compliment.
If I may engage in gender generalization for a moment, men usually understand words literally. This annoys women to no end as they often prefer to communicate on the implication level and the actual words uttered don't matter much.
In a sense, yes. But less-cliche questions sometimes get used the same way, and you have to be on guard with that.
(You can argue that giving the expected responses to such questions isn't technically lying, but that seems like semantic hair-splitting to me.)
Depends on the details. I don't think there's anything necessarily unreasonable about the following sequence of events: A wants some information from B, and presses for it despite B's reluctance. When the truth actually comes out, A finds it upsetting. ("Do you love me?" "Yes, of course." "It sometimes doesn't seem that way. Seriously, and honestly, do you really love me?" "Well ... no, not really. I just enjoy having sex with you." "Oh, shit.")
Now, being upset because your boyfriend thinks the acting in a play wasn't much good? Yeah, that seems less reasonable. So I agree that this probably wasn't a great relationship to be in. But I really can't endorse any general claim that it's bad to press for someone's opinion when one of the possible answers would upset you.
Having the truth upset you, and being angry at a person for telling you the unpleasant truth, are two very different things.
But there are times when both are appropriate. Example: "did you strangle my puppy?" It's hardly unreasonable to expect an honest answer and then be angry at the person when the honest answer is "yes."
More generally, it is not inherently contradictory to expect total honesty and to be occasionally angry at what that honesty reveals.
In that case, you're not angry at the person for telling the truth, you're angry at them for having strangled your puppy. Similarly, in the love example, the problem isn't so much the fact that B told A the truth, the problem is that B had systematically lied to A in order to get sex before. In neither case are you actually angry at the person for telling you the truth, you're angry at them for committing a separate moral wrong.
This seems different from "did you like my play", since disliking a play isn't a moral wrong by itself. In that case you really are angry at someone for telling the truth.
I personally am not so much of a saint as to only get mad at people for moral wrongs. I can absolutely see myself getting angry at a close person for not liking a book I wrote / play I directed / whatever. It still has nothing to do with truth -- I want them to be honest, I just want them to honestly like my stuff! (Of course that isn't entirely mature and fair, but people get their emotions all tied up in their artistic work).
That's exactly my point. And I conjecture that what upset Chris's girlfriend was the fact that her boyfriend wasn't impressed by her friends' acting. I could, of course, be wrong. If her problem was simply that he'd been tactless enough to tell her what she asked him to tell her, then indeed she was bring grossly unreasonable.
If that's indeed what upset her, then she was also being unreasonable. Consider:
If so, then his reaction is information that the acting is bad. Being angry at the messenger who is conveying this information to you is unreasonable.
If so, then what his girlfriend has just found out is that their tastes don't entirely align in this arena. Being angry at Chris for this revelation is, also, unreasonable.
So, in either case, being angry at your boyfriend for not being impressed with your friends' acting is unreasonable.
Unless, of course, you take the view (as did another poster elsewhere in the comments) that one may, and should, alter one's opinions on the basis of what one thinks will please one's close ones. I strongly reject such views.
It could be that she thought the most likely explanation for him not liking their acting was because he had unrealistic expectations or didn't watch the show with an open mind.
Both of those suggestions confuse me.
"Their acting sucked. I expected it to be good!" "Well, that was unreasonable of you! Clearly, you should have expected it to suck!" "Oh, well, in that case... yep, it sucked."
???
What on earth does that mean...?
More like:
"That show was not in the top 30% of all entertainment I have ever consumed."
"...How was it as amateur theater goes?"
"Oh, easily top fifteen percent there."
The open-mindedness criterion is a little harder to explain.
In that scenario lying may be better for both in the short term, but lying about being in love with someone to trick them into sleeping with you seems pretty likely to upset them more in the long term. And there are more gentle ways to put it which could make honestly explaining that it's mostly a physical thing which would reduce the immediate negativity considerably, though the amount depends on the listener's disposition.
I agree that it's not necessarily unreasonable for a truth to be upsetting, but it is somewhat unreasonable to press someone for a truthful answer (especially something important), then be upset with them specifically for being honest, especially if they have indicated discomfort giving a direct answer and tried skirting around the subject (since this hints that it's something which may be an uncomfortable truth they may want to avoid), even if it's pretty common in many circles.
Human beings are complex creatures, and the decision to date a person involves weighing up the different elements that make up that complexity. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I'd say that in your current state of almost total ignorance about the physical and psychological traits of Chris's ex girlfriend, you are simply not in a position to know whether or not you'd want to date her. (Perhaps a focusing illusion--"nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it"--was involved in causing you to believe otherwise.)
ETA: After reading the replies below, I realize I had misinterpreted Said's comment above as making an all-things-considered claim, when it fact the claim was supposed to be subject to a ceteris paribus clause.
It seems this objection could largely be ameliorated by the inclusion of a ceteris paribus clause. Or, given the way you phrased it, perhaps a measure of how just how many units on the Craziness/Hotness scale the behavioural pattern moves her.
EDIT to remove references to mythical three headed guardians of hades.
So, essentially, this is: "yeah, sure, my boyfriend/girlfriend has this horrible aspect of their personality, but they were otherwise a good person / the sex was great / whatever".
Ok. Sure. If your criticism would be obviated by the addition of a ceteris paribus clause to my comment, then consider it added.
You can say that about almost any undesirable personality trait, though. That doesn't make said trait any more desirable. Many things can be very undesirable without being hard dealbreakers (especially if discovered after you're already involved with the person). All else being equal, though, I would certainly prefer dating a person without the trait in question, than with.
That actually reminded me of my parents. My dad is not allowed to say that he dislikes a dish prepared by my mom, even if asked for his opinion. Whenever I ask him if he liked one of my dishes, if I notice any hesitation I usually qualify it with "You can say no".
Wow. Yeah, see, that's exactly the kind of relationship dynamic of which the very thought horrifies me.
I, too, sometimes make similar comments to people to convey that yes, I really do want their feedback on my cooking/baking, because getting better is important to me. Empty praise is worthless to me.
Empty praise is actually useful, for absence of evidence reasons. Especially if the work you want feedback on is the type that that person should be able to effectively critique.
Once you start considering empty praise to be evidence of dislike, you may also want to fake people into thinking you think they like things, because they are probably modeling you using themselves when they decide that lying is best for you. They are not truth-obsessed rationalists, so they probably prefer to think their attempt to trick you was successful. Being asked for a critique of someone's work can be uncomfortable, and thinking you've hurt their feelings is even more uncomfortable.
Ok, that's beyond my ability to keep a chain of models-within-models straight in my head. Could you elaborate?
Actually, you know what — scratch that. The more salient point, I think, is that having to strategize basic conversation to that extent is a) much too hard for my preference, and more importantly, b) something I definitely do not want to be doing with close friends and loved ones. I mean, good god. That sounds exhausting. If someone forces me to go through such knots of reasoning when I talk to them, then I just don't want to talk to them.
I wouldn't want to be in that kind of relationship long-term either. But I still have to interact with normal people too, and enjoyment is often not the goal there.
Edit: also family, whose company you don't want to discard entirely because of a few flaws like playing social games like this.
Sorry if I said it unclearly, but all I meant was, "make them think they tricked you."
No, empty praise is still worthless, because Said's cooking and baking not perfect, and there is with near certainty some small flaw, some awkward stylistic choice that could use improvement. Best is the gentle nitpicking of these flaws with a prepended (This is amazing, but) and with the consequent inference that the bread/food/what have you is actually already REALLY GOOD.
There is value to knowing the quality of your work apart from knowing ways to improve it.
For example, "Should I personally cook something for this upcoming potluck, or should I let my spouse do it?"
Looks pretty normal to me. One incident isn't a strong indicator of personality, I think. There are situations where a significant fraction of people want to be lied to in a reassuring way, and these situations can be recognized reliably enough if one has the necessary skills to do so.
There are skills that allow you to discern when people actually want your opinion and when they're just asking for reassurance. Wouldn't you rather have those?
That word always¹ sounds to me like its only point is to sneak in the connotation that what's usual must therefore also be desirable.
“Normal is a cycle on a washing machine.”
My point is you mostly don't get to choose what's normal whether it's good or bad, so might as well consider adapting to it*. If you come up with a less disagreeable expression of usuality that fits this case, I'll make the switch.
*this obviously applies only if this fits your other goals
A significant fraction of people do all sorts of things. That doesn't mean I want to associate with them, much less data them.
Yes, I would definitely want to have those skills — and I would just as definitely want to not have to use them on someone I was dating, or otherwise close to.
The trouble is, you have to be really good with those skills and get things right almost all of the time before they're worth much, since people weigh negatively-perceived interactions much more strongly than positively-perceived interactions in close relationships.
I understand the sentiment, but I'd caution that the desire to be able to express yourself freely can be seen as cover for having license to say whatever you want without regard to how it effects the other person. This is bad even if you don't intend to use it that way: you should be spending some cycles thinking about how the other person will feel about what you say. I speak from experience: saying what's on my mind has at times been hurtful to people I care about and I should have censored it or redirected the impulse.
Perhaps part of what you're objecting to is not that the person prefers you to lie, but that they prefer a world that can't exist to exist. If this were really what's going on, that would be a severe lapse of rationality. But that world can exist: our opinions are mutable and it's quite possible to decide to like the play. The conversation is actually about something completely different: whether you're willing and able to emphasize the positive over the negative aspects of something for her sake, which is an essential skill in any relationship.
The conversation is also about asking for acknowledgement and approval for something she's worked hard on and probably partially identifies with.
Please note that I'm not saying this is easy or obvious. Empathy is a difficult skill and requires training (or socialization), followed by practice and attention even for those to whom it comes easily.
(and now, the other part of my reply to your comment, with a quite intentional difference in tone)
Certainly. I'm not suggesting that you ought to just run your mouth about any opinion that pops into your head, especially without giving any thought to whether expressing that opinion would be tactful, how the other person will feel about it (especially if it's a person you care about), etc. Often the best policy is just to shut up.
The problem comes when someone asks you for an opinion, and communicates that they really want it. If they then take offense at honesty, then I am strongly tempted to despise them immediately and without reservation. (Tempted, note; there may be mitigating factors; we all act unreasonably on occasion; but patterns of behavior are another thing.)
One of the issues with behaving like this is: so what happens when you really do want the person's opinion? How do you communicate that? You've already taught your partner that they should lie, tell you the pleasing falsehood, rather than be honest; how do you put that on hold? "No, honey, I know that I usually prefer falsehood to truth despite my protestations to the contrary, but this time I really do want the truth! Honest!" It erodes communication and trust — and I can think of few more important things in a relationship.
Behavior like this also makes your partner not trust your rationality, your honesty with yourself; I don't think I could be with a person whom I could not trust, on such a basic level, to reason honestly. I couldn't respect them.
Yes. Certainly. Heck, I sometimes don't want to hear the truth, or someone's honest opinion of me. Not because I am necessarily in denial, or any such thing, but because I don't want to think about it at the moment; or any number of reasons.
But you know what I don't do in that case? I don't ask them for their honest opinion! I don't do what the girlfriend in the anecdote did, which is essentially demand that someone close to her to lie to her, and furthermore without acknowledging that this is what she was asking! To demand that your partner subvert their reason, and engage in doublethink to support your own irrationality... I really have a hard time finding words strong enough to express how much the very idea revolts me.
But then, this might be one of those "different people have different values/preferences" things.
One scary thought I had a while back is that this is essentially what friendship and especially love is, i.e., sabotaging one's rationality, specifically one's ability to honestly asses one's friend's/lover's usefulness as an ally as a costly way to signal one's precommitment not to defect against the friend/lover even when it would be in one's interest to do so.
Possible, but utterly abhorrent.
Doublespeak for "doublethink, self-deception, and lies".
One can acknowledge hard work without lying about outcomes. Approval given regardless of worth is meaningless and devalues itself (because if I approve of what you made, even if it's crap, then my approval is worthless, because it does not distinguish good work from bad, good results from dreck).
Perhaps, then, she should heed Paul Graham's advice to keep her identity small; and apply the Litany of Tarski to whether the thing she worked on was good.
Sure, but something can be difficult, non-obvious, and undesirable.
I strongly disapprove of equating empathy with deception and tacit support for irrationality and emotional manipulation. They are not the same.
Particularly given the replies you have prompted it is worth emphasising the 'pressed you' phrase. The combination of pressing for honest feedback and handling it poorly is a very different thing to handling honesty poorly without attempting to force 'honest' feedback be given.
(Note that the information given does not lead me to conclude that the girlfriend must have been executing that pattern but hypothetical people who do so do thereby lose some measure of want-to-date-them-ness.)
I endorse the vast majority of the post. Lying in most of those circumstances seems like an entirely appropriate choice, particularly to people you do not respect enough to expect them to respond acceptably to truth. Telling people the truth when those people are going to screw you over is unethical (according to my intuitive morality which seems to consider 'being a dumbass" abhorrent.)
People have the right to lie. People do not have the right to lie without consequences. I suggest people respond to being lied to in whatever way best meets their own goals and best facilitates their own wellbeing. Those adept at navigating a sea of social bullshit and deception may choose to never treat lies as defections or provide any negative consequences. Those less adept at that kind of thinking may be better served by being less tolerant of lies from those with a given degree of closeness to them.
I implore you to respect other's right to treat lies, liars, and you in whatever way suits them.
I personally assume people lie all the time (or, more technically, I assume they bullshit all the time). However, speaking about other people you may encounter I hope you realize that some people do not interpret lies the way you hope. Failure to realize that your lie will create some terribly awkward situations is your behaviour and your consequence (as well as a consequence to the non-savvy recipient). As the person who is (presumably) more socially aware of the two parties and the person who has analysed the subject more you are going to be better equipped to adapt. So either don't lie to people when it's going to create terribly awkward situations or avoid talking to people when you expect your preferred behavioural pattern will not work with them (eg. based on apparently clumsy body language).
As is the case with all notions about how people ought to interact with each other, if you attempt to enforce your own standards and don't adapt to the person you are interacting with you can expect things to go poorly. This applies to lying averse people interacting with liars. It applies to liars interacting with the lie-averse. It applies to 'Guess culture' people forcing their behaviour or interpretations on non-guessers and the reverse.
The most notable failure pattern that I observe is that of a wilful, stubborn, insistence that consequences are responsibility of the other party because "my" way is the naturally right way for the universe to be. A psychological disposition based precommitment not to swerve in a game of chicken.
Does this really serve many of them better though? Combine implicit high trust in people with judgmentality and poor lie detection in an environment where everybody lies. From an outside perspective the most extreme version of this seems like a recipe for lashing out at random people and alienating them. People openly judgmental about lying actually seem like good targets for deception, because you can expect them to be worse at spotting it.
Can lying averse people reliably spot the other nonliars?
Thanks!
Some lies should have consequences. But I think "respect other people's right to you [about some topics]" is a really important principle. Maybe it would help to be more concrete:
Some men will react badly to being turned down for a date. Some women too, but probably more men, so I'll make this gendered. And also because dealing with someone who won't take "no" for an answer is a scarier experience with the asker is a man and the person saying "no" is a woman. So I sympathize with women who give made-up reasons for saying "no" to dates, to make saying "no" easier.
Is it always the wisest decision? Probably not. But sometimes, I suspect, it is. And I'd advise men to accept that women doing that is OK. Not only that, I wouldn't want to be part of a community with lots of men who didn't get things like that. That's the kind of thing I have in mind when I say to respect other people's right to lie to you.
I agree with this. Though I think some degree of acceptance of white lies is the majority position, and figuring out when someone deviates from that and to what degree is tricky. Such social defaults tend to be worth going along with unless you have a pretty damn good reason not to.
Saying "some kinds of lies are actually okay" is bragging: "I am good at navigating social bullshit, so the presence of the white lies is a net benefit for me." -- Yeah, good for you. Might not work for me. I might hurt myself by trying to costly signal something I am not yet able to pay the cost of.
I don't normally like to blather on about myself, but I feel that a bit of self-exposition might help some people with their apparent ... Fundamental Attribution Error, perhaps?
I have an extremely malleable identity in certain types of social situations, to the point that I literally come to believe whatever I need to believe in order to facilitate rapport with whomever I'm talking with.
For example, I normally have a pretty strong aversion to infidelity in relationships, but on a few occasions I've deeply connected through prolonged conversation with friends who were engaged in relationship infidelity. It is sort of a running joke among my closest friends that I can get almost anybody to open up to me and share their deepest darkest secrets, and the way I do it is that I am genuinely nonjudgemental, and the method by which I am genuinely nonjudgemental is that I have a "core" module that has my actual beliefs and then I have my surface chameleon module which is actually talking which just says whatever it needs to say to establish the connection.
All of this babbling is to convey that if you were to interrupt me in the middle of doing this and say, "moridinamael, was that a lie?" I would answer "No." Because although I might be saying something that isn't in line with that "I" (whatever that is) don't really "believe" (whatever that means) it doesn't in that moment feel like a lie, it actually feels really good and pure and warm because I'm connecting with somebody over their pain.
Now, there are some people in this discussion thread who I feel like would think I am some kind of monster. And I think my brain probably works very, very differently than theirs, or at least the social circuitry is wired differently. But just bear in mind that people like me exist and we can't really help the way we are ... or if I could help it, I should say, it would basically cripple me.
Well, I'm not going to call you a monster or anything, but I will say that I sure would hate to find out one of my friends was the way you describe yourself. I don't think I could continue to be friends with that person, and I sure wouldn't choose to be close to a person if I knew in advance they were like this.
Basically, it seems like you're saying: I am really good at self-deception, and so when I lie to you, it's not really a lie because I'm also lying to myself! And believing that lie!
Which doesn't change the fact that what you're saying, in such a circumstance, isn't the truth. Your attitude seems to boil down to: "Truth? Haha! What is truth anyway, eh? If I believe any old lie I can come up with, then it becomes my truth, doesn't it? That's just as good as 'the truth'! Whatever that is!"
Furthermore and separately:
Once you decide to not care about whether your beliefs are true, almost any conversation I could have with you about any of your beliefs, or that is based on any of your beliefs, becomes pointless. Because I know that what you believe has no correlation with truth, and that you just don't care about whether it does. If you'll say anything to establish a rapport with me — even if you make yourself believe that thing while you're saying it — then that rapport is worthless to me; because (however much you may protest the terminology) that rapport is based on a lie.
(However, all of that said, I do think your post is valuable, as it contributes a useful data point, as was your stated intention.)
I agree with everything you said on a personal level, but I think you're committing the fallacy of false generalization.
You (and I) both place a very high value on truth over comfort. We feel incredibly uncomfortable -- perhaps even painfully so -- when we suspect that any of our beliefs might be false. Therefore, for us, finding out that a friend was lying to us (as well as to himself) is tantamount to experiencing a direct attack.
However, not everybody in the world is like us. Other people place a very high value on comfort and positive reinforcement. When they talk to their friends, they do so not in order to Bayes-adjust their beliefs, but in order to reinforce their feeling that they are valued, needed, and cared about.
Note that this does not necessarily mean that such people do not care about truth. They often do; but truth-seeking is not the reason why they engage in conversations.
So, for people who value comfort in their relationships, having a friend like moridinamael would be ideal. And I can't state with any amount of certainty that their worldview is inferior to mine.
Well, sure. That's why I phrased my comment the way I did, referencing what I like/prefer/feel. I agree with your assessment of how we (you and I, and others here on Lesswrong) compare to most other people.
However, I don't entirely agree with this:
I, too, like feeling that I am valued, needed, and care about; and I don't necessarily engage in conversations only for truth-seeking. I sometimes have conversations for the purposes of entertainment, or validation, or comfort. It's not like truth-seeking is my only reason for talking to another human-being, ever.
But!
But. One thing I never want is to be entertained by lies[1]; to be validated with lies; to be comforted by lies. As I said in another thread, truth may be brutal, but its telling need not be. There are many ways to comfort and to validate without lying.
If I come to a friend for comfort, and they comfort me by lying, I would feel somewhat betrayed. How betrayed, to what extent — that would depend on the subject matter and magnitude of the lie, I suppose.
[1] Obvious exceptions include storytelling, hyperbole, sarcasm, performance, and all the other scenarios wherein a person says something that they don't believe is the truth, but they correctly expect that their audience is not expecting that statement to be true, and is not going to believe it as the truth.
Yes, good point.
I agree, and I feel the same way. However, I believe that you and I see conversations somewhat differently from other people.
When you and I engage in conversation (unless I misunderstood your position, in which case I apologize), we tend to take most of the things that are said at face value. So, for example, if you were to ask "did you like my play ?", what you are really asking is... "did you like my play ?" And, naturally, you would feel betrayed if the answer is less than honest.
However, I've met many people who, when asking "did you like my play ?", really mean something like, "given my performance tonight, do you still consider me a a valuable friend whose company you'd enjoy ?" If you answer "no", the emotional impact can be quite devastating.
The surprising thing, though (well, it was surprising to me when I figured it out) is that such people still do care very much about the truth; i.e., whether you liked the play or not. However, unlike us, they do not believe that any reliable evidence for or against the proposition can be gathered from verbal conversation. Instead, they look for non-verbal cues, as well as other behaviors (f.ex., whether you'd recommend the play to others, or attend future plays, etc.).
So, as I said above, the two types of people view the very purpose of everyday conversation very differently; and hence tend to evaluate its content quite differently, as well.
This observation fits my model of others. Most people are not perfectionists, over-achievers, or ravenous truth-seekers above all. Consequently, I believe that people aren't those things unless they specifically give me reasons to believe they are. And I treat them accordingly, and interpret their requests for feedback in accordance with my impression of what they are looking for.
If someone wants more critical feedback from me, or more unvarnished opinions, then they can get it by (a) acting like the type of person who values those things and who can handle them, (b) asking me explicitly.
Why? Beanbag chairs can be useful, so long as you remember not to build your entire house out of them.
I'm not entirely sure I follow your analogy. Is it: "People with personality traits you hate can be fine to have as friends, so long as not all of your friends have personality traits you hate"?
If so, then I disagree.
Not being friends with people you hate is nearly a tautology. I'm saying you shouldn't hate and shun people just for prioritizing your comfort over their own integrity.
If your social circle consists entirely of straight-talkers, where will you go when you need to be comforted? If a putty-person wants to associate with you, but you have a well-established reputation for shunning putty-people and a relatively homogenous social circle... well, then, they'll pretend to be a straight-talker, because blending in is what they do. Eventually the game-theory of this makes you paranoid, which means more need and less opportunity for emotional comfort, which means any remaining infiltrators get more of your social bandwidth because they're better at providing that comfort.
Also, you seem to have missed the distinction between in-principle independently-verifiable fact and self-reported preference. If moridinamael told me, due to my apparent feelings on the issue rather than a legitimate misperception, that a particular gun had been loaded with only five bullets when in actuality it contained six, that would be a much more serious issue than inaccurately reporting how enjoyable some sort of entertainment media had been, even if the entertainment preference went on to influence purchasing decisions and the sixth bullet wasn't aimed at anything I cared about.
Oh, and:
To the "straight-talkers", of course. Can you find comfort only in lies?
If brutal honesty satisfied all human emotional needs the world would look very different than it does.
By "comfort" here I am referring particularly to the feeling of finding someone who agrees with you closely on some essentially subjective issue, such as taste in art or the moral worth of specific individuals. It is in principle possible to find someone who holds the ideally matched set of opinions persistently, for their own reasons, but there are search costs, and such a person might have other features inconvenient or prohibitive to long-term friendship. A less-close match provides a weaker degree of the feeling. Someone you know to be, on some level, insincere, also provides a weaker degree of the feeling, but that can be outweighed by them being effectively a closer match, and the reduced costs in other areas.
Is my reasoning flawed, or is this a matter of you experiencing the latter effect (suspension of disbelief) more strongly?
It's easier (though still non-trivial) to find a set of someones, each of whom holds matching views on some subset of the relevant opinions, and who together cover most or all relevant opinions. It's not easy to find people with whom you match thusly!
Finding good, true friends is not something that just happens trivially. But it's worth it. I wouldn't want to settle for less.
If I'm interpreting your phrasing correctly, then... um, yes. It's a matter of that. I value truth, and honesty. If I know someone is lying to me, I'm not just going to "suspend disbelief" and pretend I don't know they're lying. Not to mention: how am I going to get around the fact that their lies and deceptions make it very difficult for me to respect them? More pretending? More self-deception?
No thank you.
Finally:
Who said honesty has to be brutal? The truth may be, but its telling may not. And I am not comforted by lies.
Er, what? What are you talking about? This doesn't happen. Is that something you experience in your life? People infiltrating their way into friendships with you, when they know that their personality traits are something you hate? That must suck. :(
"You can't prove I hate your pie, so I might as well lie and say I like it."?
No thanks. If that's how you (the hypothetical you, a person who wants to be my friend) behave, then, all else being equal, I don't want to be your friend.
I suspect it happens to celebrities and very rich people all the time.
It is a thing which I have seen happen to people. There are known countermeasures, which I am attempting to discuss and you are discarding as repugnant.
Well, ok. Let's posit that this is a thing that happens. What are the countermeasures?
If you want me to boil it down to three words, "business before pleasure." Accumulate some people you can count on to cover their own specialties and communicate with you accurately and precisely, and some other people who are fun to be around. Optimize those groups separately. If someone wants to straddle the line, never let them apply leverage from one mode to the other. Never forget which mode you're currently operating in. Business gets priority in emergencies and strategic decisions, because survival, but there should be a balance overall: it's "before," not "instead of."
Wow. That sounds like a terrible life.
I thank you for the information/advice, but with respect, I am going to ignore it entirely. I will continue to have a small circle of close friends who are both fun to be around, and don't lie to me. I will continue to avoid closeness with people who lie to me; should any infiltrate my circle of friends (for reasons that I still can't imagine), I will cut them off utterly as soon as I discover their true nature.
I think I used to experience something like this when I was a teenager. I'd reflexively assume whatever identity was needed for rapport, not necessarily always with skill, and this seemed like lying only afterwards when I realized I had gone too far and would probably get caught. This was annoying because I didn't really have control over my lying. At some point in my early 20s this spontaneously stopped happening. I wonder if this simply had something to with my brain maturing and whatever represents the relevant parts of my identity solidifying.
Do you think your family has anything to do with your curious cognition? In my paternal family, lying seems more like a sport than anything morally reprehensible and successful deception is considered something to be proud of. I don't agree with them but can't say I hate them either.
I also discovered I was like this as a teenager -- that I had an extremely malleable identity. I think it was related to being very empathetic -- I just accepted whichever world view the person I was speaking with came with, and I think in my case this might have been related to reading a lot growing up, so that it seemed that a large fraction of my total life experience were the different voices of the different authors that I had read. (Reading seems to require quickly assimilating the world view of whomever is first person.)
I also didn't make much distinction between something that could be true and something that was true. I don't know why this was. or if it is related to the first thing. But if I thought about a fact, and it didn't feel currently jarring with anything else readily in mind, it seemed just as true as anything else and I was likely to speak it. So a few times after a conversation, I would shake my head and wonder why I had just said something so absurdly untrue, as though I had believed it.
In my early twenties, I found I needed to create a fixed world view -- in fact, I felt like I was going crazy. Maybe I was, because different world views were colliding and I couldn't hold them separate when action was required (like choosing an actual job) rather than just idle conversation.
That's why I gravitated towards physical materialism. I needed something fixed, a territory behind all of these crazy maps. I think that the map that I have now is pretty good, and well-integrated with the territory, but it took 3-5 years. I'm still flexible with understanding other world views. For example, I was in a workshop a few days ago where we needed to defend different views, and I received one that was marginally morally reprehensible. I was the only one in my group able to defend it. (It wasn't such a useful skill there, I think most people just assumed I had that view, which is unfortunate, but I didn't mind -- if it was important to signal correctly at this workshop I would have lied and said I couldn't relate.)
FWIW my parents both possess aspects of what I think of as this skill of becoming whoever I need to be to fit whomever I'm talking to. I really do think of it as a bit of a superpower and I've intentionally developed it rather than letting it fade which it probably would have done naturally.
Perhaps you think of me as having curious cognition but my point in posting this was actually to express the converse -- that I see pieces of myself in everybody, that I see everybody doing this to some degree all the time, I'm just one of the rare people with the introspective awareness to see what I'm doing and guide it.
Ever go out to lunch/coffee/whatever with your boss or some figurehead of power, and witness how everybody except the boss transforms into an unimpeachable paragon of bland monotonous virtue? Folks are always selectively showing only the parts of themselves that they think need to be seen in a given context, and this is a type of deception through guiding expectations.
I don't think being genuinely nonjudgemental is lying. If I'm having an intellectual argument it's also not lying to agree for the sake of having a good argument with the opposing side on some points.
If I disagree with someone about A, B, C and D it's completely fine to assume for the sake of the discussion that A, B and C are true to convince them that D is right.
If specifically asked you might say that you don't believe A, B or C but you don't have to be open about everything that you disagree with by default. That just leads to confusion and no effective intellectual exchange.
Any good therapist learns that he doesn't tell his client everything that the therapist thinks but that he tells the client what's helpful for the client. A good therapist will still honestly answer direct questions about the beliefs of the therapist.
I put much more trust into the people who have a strong core and are judgmental so that they can morph into whatever they need to connect on a deep level with another person.
All the people who I would trust to jump from a bridge if they would tell me to jump from a bridge have that quality. My first reaction would be to ask: "Do you really think that's a great idea?" but to the extend that I know they come from a warm and pure place and are in strong empathy with me that's why I would follow them.
I wouldn't extend that kind of trust to someone at a lesswrong meetup who has the reputation of always telling the truth but who sometimes says things from a judgemental state and sometimes says things from a warm place.
Over the last year I developed a stronger personal identity and got more clear about what I value. On the other hand in a game of Werewolf people who could read my emotions to sometimes find out whether I'm lying can't anymore. Knowing who I am allows me to be a lot more socially flexible to do whatever I want in the game of Werewolf in a way that's not readable by the people I'm playing with.
This reminds me of something Mark Horstman (I think) said, that people are entitled to honest answers to questions to which they are entitled an answer. He was using it in a workplace context, for example that if one's boss asks about one's sex life it's okay to lie, because she is not entitled to an answer thus she is not entitled to an honest answer. Good post.
I think an important additional concept being invoked in the above example is that the person you are lying to has social power over you. While generally abiding by a wizard's code of speaking the literal truth, I consider there to be a blanket moral exemption on lying to the government. It is not always pragmatically wise to lie to a government official, but in a moral sense the option is at your discretion.
For example, when the TSA asks you if anything in your luggage could be used as a weapon, you just lie.
Certain interactions with the government (assuming you are behaving peacefully) seem like a special case of dealing with an adversarial or exploitative agent. When an agent has social power over you, they might easily be able to harm or inconvenience you if you answer some questions truthfully, whereas it would be hard for you to harm them if you lied. Telling the truth in that case hurts you, but lying harms nobody (aside from foiling the exploitative plans of the other agent, which doesn't really count).
A more mundane example would be if a website form asks you for more personal information than it needs, and requires this information. For instance, let's say the website asks for your phone number or address when there is suspiciously no reason why they should need to call you or ship you anything. If you fill in a false phone number to be able to submit the form, then you are technically lying to them, but I think it's justified. Same thing for websites that require you to fill in a name, but where they don't actually need it (e.g. unlike financial transactions, or social networks that deal with real identities).
The website probably isn't trying to violate your rights, but it's trying to profit from your private information, either for marketing to you (which you consider pointless), or selling the information (which is exploitative, and could result in other people intruding into your privacy). Gaining your info will predictably create zero sum or negative sum outcomes. Lying is an appropriate response to exploitation attempts like these.And if they aren't trying to exploit your private information, or use it to give you a service, then they don't really need it, so lying doesn't hurt them at all, and you might as well do it to be safe from spam.
Telling the truth is a good default because human relationships are cooperative or neutral by default. But the ethics of lying are much more complex in adversarial or exploitative situations.
Most people are neither too dull to imagine or recall from a movie the ways to use ordinary items in their luggage as weapons, nor lying, when they say no...
Either you have included an unintended negative, or you are saying that nothing in most people's luggage could be used as a weapon.
Or it's just that "lying" implies an attempt to deceive.
Words are meant to communicate meaning. I wouldn't consider it lying if someone communicates in a sense that properly answers the meaning of the question, even if the question is clumsily asked.
Likewise, I would consider it lying if someone uses words which are literally true, but does so in a manner meant to deceive the listener.
There's no time to explain in excruciating detail that TSA wants to hear about, say, handguns that people forget to remove from their luggage, tools such as nail guns, assorted sharp pieces, etc, but not about how you can hit someone on the head with a laptop. And that if it's here by mistake, a lot of time is saved by you telling about it and them not having to assume that you're a bad guy trying to conceal it.
And within the limited number of sufficiently short sentences there's not a single one that exactly describes what is meant. Words have to be used, in lieu of telepathy, such as "weapon" meaning something that is sufficiently weapon-like and effective as a weapon to be a problem.
As much as we need accessibility, there is just no practical way to accommodate for communication related disabilities in a screening line at an airport.
Yes. There are also questions which interviewers are legally prohibited from asking during job interviews, which probably have good moral reasons behind them, not just legal ones.
In my recent comments, I've been developing the concept of a "right to information," or "undeserving questions."
This seems like a good heuristic to cover my "nosy relatives" example, as well as many others, and fits my moral intuitions. Good work, Mark Horstman (or whoever)!
Do you think it fits the girlfriend case in the OP? I mean, do you think you are wronging your partner if, when they press you for an assessment of their performance, you lie to spare their feelings? (I agree with you that they'd be wrong to then get upset of you respond honestly and negatively, but that's a different question.) Are you wronging your partner even if you know you are fulfilling their preferences by lying? (or does that disentitle them to an answer?)
I do not. I think you are entitled to the truth about your partner's opinion of things that are important to you. Your partner's, note; perhaps also your close friends'; not anyone's.
I would feel wronged, if I was said partner. I think that if you're in a relationship with a person who values truth, then yes, you are wronging them by withholding it to spare their feelings. If your partner is someone who does not value truth, then, I think, you are not wronging them by lying to spare their feelings. I'm not sure about this. To me, it is a moot point; since I've noted, I would never want to be with such a person.
The question of whether they are entitled to the truth is not actually relevant, as they are not asking for the truth in such a situation; they are asking for something else (validation? support? I don't know).
If you extract the hyperbole this is an entirely valid reasoning. An observed pattern of lies (or an outright declaration of such a pattern) does mean that people should trust everything you say somewhat less than they otherwise would. Reputation matters. Expecting people to trust your word as much when you lie to them as when you don't would be foolish. This is a tradeoff that seems worthwhile but you must acknowledge that it is a tradeoff.
False. It is their problem and yours. People not believing you is obviously a negative consequence to you. Acknowledge it and choose to accept the negative consequence anyway because of the other benefits you get from lies. (Or, I suppose, you could use selective epistemic irrationality as a dominance move and as the typical way to defect on an ultimatum game. Whatever works.)
With the caveat that the 'most of the time' excludes all the time when it matters to them most. Assuming a vaguely rational liar the times when they should be least trusted are times when being believed would benefit them the most.
Really? Someone saying "I do the socially normal thing with white lies" is reason to distrust what they say about science?
Yes.
(I question the claim that this is merely an expression of normality but assume it for the sake of the answer.)
Yes, it is a reason to trust what they say about science less. The "socially normal" thing to do with respect to mentioning science is to be much more inclined to bring up findings that support one's own preferred objectives than to bring up other things. It also involves a tendency to frame the science in the most personally favourable light.
An above normal obsession with epistemic accuracy and truthfulness (which is somewhat typical of people more intellectually inclined and more interested in science) ought to (all else being equal) make one more comfortable trusting someone talking about science. I, for example, often can't help making references to findings and arguing against positions that could be considered "my side". That political naivety and epistemic honesty at the expense of agenda is some degree of evidence. Possibly evidence that I can't be trusted as a political ally on the social-perceptions battlefield but that I can be more useful as a raw information source.
Again, assume "all else being equal" is included in every second sentence above.
To some extent, though probably not to a large extent.
An older version of my recent article about trust used to have the following paragraphs, which I then cut since the essay was already long enough:
My views on lying are similar to your friend's. Thanks for having a charitable reaction.
After reading some of the attitudes in this thread, I find it disconcerting to think that a friend might suddenly view me as having inscrutable or dangerous psychology, if they found out that I believe in white lies in limited situations, like the vast majority of humans. It's distressing that upon finding this out, that they might so confused about my ethics or behavior patterns... even though presumably, since they were friends with me, they had a positive impression of my ethics and behavior before.
Maybe finding out that a friend is willing to lie causes you to change your picture of their ethics (rhetorical "you"). But why is it news that they lie sometimes? The vast majority of people do. Typical human is typical.
Maybe the worry is that if you don't know the criteria by which your friends lie, then they might lie to you without you expecting it.
If so, then perhaps there are ways to improve your theory of mind regarding your friends, and then avoid being deceived. You could ask your friends about their beliefs about ethics, or try to discover common reasons or principles behind "white lies." While people vary on their beliefs about lying, there is probably a lot of intersubjectivity. Just because someone isn't aware of intersubjective beliefs about the acceptability of lying, it doesn't mean that their neurotypical friends are capricious about lying. (Of course, if future evidence shows that everyone lies in completely unpredictable ways, then I would change my view.)
For example, if you know that your friend lies in response to compliment-fishing, then you can avoid fishing for compliments from them, or discount their answers if you do. If you know that your friend lies to people he believes are trying to exploit him, then you don't need to be worried about him lying to you, unless (a) you plan on exploiting him, or (b) you worry that he might think that you are exploiting him even if you aren't, and he lies rather than notify you.
If that's the case, then the real worry should be that your friend might feel antagonized by you without you realizing it and without him being able to talk to you about it. As long as you have good reasons to believe that you won't have conflict with your friend, or work it out if conflict occurs, then your friend lying for adversarial reasons is probably not likely.
Just because your friends don't give you (rhetorical "you") an exhaustive list of the situations where they might lie, or a formalized set of principles, it doesn't mean that you are in the dark about when they might lie, unless your theory of their mind leaves you in the dark about their behavior in general.
As you correctly observe in your excellent trust post, unforeseen circumstances are always a possibility in relationships. I think your post leads to the conclusion that trusting a person is related to your theory of mind regarding them.
Never-lies vs believes-that-at-least-some-lies-are-justified is probably not a very useful way to reduce unforeseen conflict. Someone who says that they "never lie" could have a different definition of "lies" than you. They might be very good at telling the literal truth in deceptive way. They might change their ethical view of lying without telling you. They might lie accidentally. Or they might be lying that they "never lie," or they may be speaking figuratively (and mean "I never lie about the important stuff").
The most useful distinctions between people is not if they will lie, but when. Predicting when your friends might lie is not just a function of your friends behavior, it's also a function of your theory of mind.
Saying "I do the socially normal thing" is pretty good evidence that you don't do the socially normal thing.
Structurally, this post and its comments are extremely similar to the pua threads.
There's a fundamental problem with lying unaddressed - it tends to reroute your defaults to "lie" when "lie"="personal benefit."
As a human animal, if you lie smoothly and routinely in some situations, you are likely to be more prone to lying in others. I know people who will lie all the time for little reason, because it's ingrained habit.
I agree that some lies are OK. Your girlfriend anecdote isn't clearly one of them - there may be presentation issues on your side. ("It wasn't the acting style I prefer," vs., "It's nice that you hired actors without talent or energy, because otherwise, where would they be?") But if you press for truth and get it, that's on you. (One my Rules of Life: Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to.)
But I think every lie you tell, you should know exactly what you are doing and what your goals are and consciously consider whether you're doing this solely for self-preservation. If you can't do this smoothly, then don't lie. Getting practice at lying isn't a good idea.
I note here that I think that a significant lie is a deliberate or seriously reckless untruth given with the mutual expectation that it would be reasonable to rely on it. Thus, the people who are untruthing on (say) Survivor to their castmates... it's a game. Play the game. When Penn and Teller tell you how their trick works, they are lying to you only in a technical respect; it's part of the show.
But actual lying is internally hazardous. You will try to internally reconcile your lies, either making up justifications or telling yourself it's not really a lie - at least, that's the way the odds point. There's another advantage with honesty - while it doesn't always make a good first impression, it makes you reliable in the long-term. I'm not against all lies, but I think the easy way out isn't the long-term right one.
When you tell one lie, it leads to another ...
That's exactly what I'd say too. And then, I'd commence the lying :-)
'Continue', you mean :-)
The problem is that such a policy logically requires also making a pre-game commitment to not answering the question "Are you a spy?" and also to not answer a question logically equivalent, and then the player has to keep track of logical implications and equivalences throughout the game, which leads to much poorer gameplay.
Also, if one doesn't make such assurances, then any "lying" during the game is simply gameplay, but with the assurance being made outside of the game, any in-game lying becomes out-of-game lying.
I think the big thing to remember is that the meaning of something isn't the dictionary definitions of the words combined with the rules of syntax. If someone asks you what you though of a play, wanting to know what you thought of them, and you know this, saying "the acting was bad" is intentionally misinterpreting their question. It is an example of lying with truth.
I would expect someone who presses me for an answer would actually want to know the answer, but maybe I just have bad social skills.
There is one thing I dislike about lying. It's considered rude to tell the truth in certain situations, because it signals that you don't care about that person, because people who care lie, because people who care don't want to appear rude. If people didn't try to signal, things would be better off, but if you lie, you're not only signalling that you care, you're increasing the need everyone else has to signal. You're making things more confusing for other people. It's basically a large-scale prisoner's dilemma. It's like talking in a noisy room, where the other person can hear you if you speak up, but that just makes it noisier for everyone else.
The solution to the noisy room problem is to either pass notes, or lean over and speak at a low-to-normal volume as close as reasonably possible to the intended listener's ear. Alternative communication channels and building up trust/intimacy can be generalized to some, though probably not all, other versions of the problem.
Pressing for an answer could also mean you've said approximately the right thing, but your tone and phrasing didn't convey a sufficient degree of conviction, or that you've said something wrong-but-not-unconscionable and they're giving you a chance to retry. (I do not like "guess culture" very much.)
This is something I also struggled with for a long time and I'm definitely sure it was because I had (or probably still have) poor social skills. The thing I started to notice was that people might seem to be asking a question, but that question is really just a proxy for another question. It's like people were communicating at two different levels. Like the stereotypical asking a girl to get coffee at 2am; the guy isn't literally asking the girl if she wants coffee, and everyone knows this, and to answer as though he's literally asking for coffee is demonstrating poor social skills. If the girl says yes to the coffee suggestion, she's actually "lying" because she doesn't want coffee, but wants the implication of what the guy is asking for when he suggests coffee.
If a friend asks me what I thought about a poem she wrote, she might be asking me literally about the poem, or she might be asking some other underlying question like her worth as a person or something else, using the poem as a proxy for that question. Giving my honest opinion about the poem might be, to her, me giving my honest opinion about her underlying question.
I can see how a reputation for lying would be a bad thing to have, but I can also see why a reputation for not being capable of lying would be a bad thing (mainly in social contexts). From one of my other comments:
This was hard for me. There've been other times where I've slipped up and forgotten. Usually not in the context of friends explicitly telling me to lie about something, but in the context of Person X them telling me something which, to them, is obviously something that they want to conceal from Person Y because of conflicts it would cause. However, I don't model this–I model Person X and Person Y both as friends who I trust with details about my life, and assume that's commutative. I don't even think about it on a conscious level–it's not "I want to tell this person the truth about the thing this other person did because lying is complicated"–they just ask me a question and I answer it. I try to avoid having enemies because it makes things complicated, but that's not something I could force my friends to do, and it's not even something I would think was right to force them to do...I just don't get around to noticing potential conflicts.
Among certain groups of my friends, I've definitely earned the reputation for being a bit socially inept because of things like this.
You accidentally a verb.
Thanks. Fixed.
Off by one.
Okay. Now I think it's fixed.
I don't quite understand what are you imploring.
Of course other people have the right to lie to me. And I have a right to change my attitude and my expectations on that basis.
Rephrased in a slightly different way, other people have the right to lie to me but not the right to escape the consequences.
Another thing I should note that it can simply be a matter of human preferences. I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of having any truely close relationship (lover or close friend) with somebody who would be willing to lie to me. I see no reason why other wants should somehow override this one.
I agree that the immediate consequences of lying are sometimes better than telling the truth, however, one big problem is lying then having to tell the truth later or lying then getting caught. The more complex the lie, the bigger the risk. The social conventions surrounding lying - feel free to lie, accept other people's right to lie, the guess culture (don't make your desires and feelings explicit) - are a good solution to interacting with strangers since under those conventions, no one is making and effort to detect your lies. This is useful when you don't know how sensitive someone is so you need a strategy for dealing with them without treading on their toes.
I admit I don't have much of a justification for this but the idea of such a social norm within a romantic relationship makes me go Ugh. I'm okay with someone telling me "I don't want to talk about it" in fact I wish that most people were receptive to that. But the idea of someone I trust lying whenever its more convenient than telling the truth does not sit well with me. But perhaps I'm just being unreasonable.
I suggest you explore the concept of trust on a less binary basis. Trust makes no sense to me unless it has some kind of a rough probability estimate attached to it. Different truths have different probabilities and different moral weights.
True, but it is also true that you can't somebody on certain matters if they are willing to tell you white lies. It's better to try and hang around more honest types so you can learn to cope with the truth better.
I actually prefer the honest types, but don't judge normal people either. This preference is of minor importance. In most situations I can't choose who to interact with and being stubborn about it won't help.
I think this is a great post. I fully agree about accepting other people's right to lie... in limited circumstances, of course (which is how I interpreted the post). I figured it was primarily talking about situations of self-defense or social harmony about subjective topics.
I think privacy is very important. Many cultures recognize that some subjects are private or personal, and has norms against asking about people's personal business without the appropriate context (which might depend on friendship, a relationship, consent, etc...). Some "personal" subjects may include:
The ethics of lying when asked about personal subjects seems more complicated. In fact, the very word "lying" may poison the well, as if the default is that people should tell the truth. I do not accept such a default without privacy issues being addressed. I will suggest that people do not have a right to other people's truthful responses about private information by default; whether they do depends on the relationship and context.
If someone asks you for information about yourself in one of these areas, and this request is inappropriate or unethical in the current context, then you are justified in keeping the truth away from them.
There are two main ways of withholding the truth: evasion, or lying. As several people in this thread have observed, there are often multiple methods of evading the question, such as exiting the situation, refusing to answer the question, omitting the answer in your response, or remaining silent.
If an evasive solution is feasible, then it's probably morally preferable. But if evasion isn't feasible, because you are trapped in the situation, because refusal to answer to the question would lead to greater punishment, or because evading the question would tip off the nosy asker to the truth (which they don't have a right to know), then lying seems like the only option.
While I admire the creative methods proposed in this thread to evade questions, such a tactic isn't always cognitive available or feasible for everyone. Sometimes, when dealing with a hostile or capricious questioner, pausing to come up with a creative deflection, or refusing to answer, will indicate weaknesses for them to attack. And if dealing with an ignorant or bumbling (but non-malicious) questioner, refusing to answer a question might cause them more embarrassment than you want.
An example from my recent experience: I was at work, and grabbing some Ibuprofen from the kitchen. A new employee walking into the kitchen and asked, "oh, is that Ibuprofen? You're taking it for a headache, right?" I said, "yes."
I lied. I was taking Ibuprofen for a chronic pain condition, which I did not want to reveal.
To me, information about health conditions is private, and I considered the truth to be none of his business. I'm sure there are ways I could have evaded the question, but I couldn't think of any. I viewed his question as a social infraction, but not such a big infraction that I wanted to embarrass him by scolding him, or be explicitly refusing to answer the question (which would be another form of scolding). I didn't sufficiently understand his motivation to want to scold him; maybe he was genuinely curious about what Ibuprofen is used for.
It's possible that he would have liked me to reveal that his question was overly nosy, to improve his social skills in the future and avoid offending people. The problem is that I didn't know him very well, and I couldn't know he would desire this sort of feedback. In a work context, where social harmony is important, I wasn't feeling like educating him on this subject. It's too bad that he has no way of learning from his mistake, but it's not my job to give it to him when it's costly to me. In situations that don't involve my body's health conditions, I am vastly more enthusiastic about helping other people with epistemic rationality.
I endorse lying as a last resort in response to people being unethically, inappropriately, or prematurely inquisitive about private matters. Conversely, if I want to question someone else about a private matter, I keep in mind the relationship and context, I note that they may not be ready or willing to tell me the truth, and I discount their answers appropriately. That way, I am less likely to be deceived if they feel the need to lie to protect their privacy.
I want to have an epistemically accurate picture of people, but I don't want to inappropriately intrude into their privacy, because I consider privacy valuable across the board. I recognize that other people have traumas and negative experiences which might lead them to rationally fear disclosure of facts about themselves or their state of mind, and that it can be ethical for them to hide that information, perhaps using lies if necessary.
If the topic isn't entirely personal to them, and effects me in tangible ways, then I would expect them to be more truthful, and be less likely to endorse lying to hide information. Lying in order to protect privacy should be a narrowly applied tool, but these situations do come up. Consequently, I agree with the original post that there are at least some situations where we should accept that other people can ethically lie.
A note w.r.t. the quote:
-- The Author, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
As long as enemies exist, secrets must be kept.
And never forget, human minds are our own worst enemies. We run on broken substrates that are hurt more sharply than they should be by comments like "You look gross and I don't want to talk to you". We have enemies even within the minds of our closest friends. It's best not to awaken them.
I think the reason you're being downvoted is that people would prefer you to just edit this addendum into your original comment rather than replying to yourself. It's all I can think of since your point is in itself quite insightful.
Edit: Okay, would anyone care to explain what's actually going on, then?
Here's an excerpt from an attorney disciplinary code:
And from the commentary on that rule:
My take on this is that it's pretty much understood and accepted that in negotiations, people bullshit about their intentions all the time. (Whether it's a good idea or not is another question of course.) I was a bit surprised when I first read this rule.
To point out the obvious, speaking from personal experience, this is indeed a terrible idea.
A couple of months ago I told a lie to someone I cared about. This wasn't a justified lie; it was a pretty lousy lie (both in its justifiability and the skill with which I executed it) and I was immediately exposed by facial cues. I felt pretty awful because a lot of my self-concept up to that point had been based around being a very honest person, and from that point on, I decided to treat my "you shouldn't tell her _" intuitions as direct orders from my conscience to reveal exactly that thing, and to pay close attention to whether the meaning of what I've said deviates from the truth in a direction favorable to me, and as a consequence, I now feel rising anxiety whenever I feel some embarrassing thought followed by the need to confess it. I also resolved to search my conscience for any bad deeds I may have forgotten, which actually led to compulsive fantastic searching for terrible things I might have done and repressed, no matter how absurd (I've gotten moslty-successful help about this part.) She's long since forgiven me for the original lie and what I lied about, but continues to find this compulsive confessional behavior extremely annoying, and I doubt I could really function if I experienced it around people in general rather than her specifically.
I reject this idea for a fairly simple reason. I want to be in control of my own life and my own decisions, but due to lack of social skills I'm vulnerable to manipulation. Without a zero-tolerance policy on liars, I would rapidly be manipulated into losing what little control of my own life remains.
You seem to be treating lack of social skills as a static attribute rather than a mutable trait. This may not be the most productive frame for the issue.
Improving my social skills is HARD. I could invest a massive effort into it if I tried, but I'm at university right now and my marks would take a nosedive. It's not worth the price.
Neither the extreme of treating social skills as static nor the extremes of refusing to take into account current skill or refusing to acknowledge a comparative neurological weakness in that particular area are likely to be optimal.
I suspect this is inaccurate and you would be better off with rules like "I won't do large favors for friends who haven't reciprocated medium favors in the past" or "I won't be friends/romantic partners with people who tell me what to do in areas that are none of their business." Virtually none of the manipulation I've been harmed by in the past has involved actual lies. Though maybe your extended social circle (friends of friends of friends, people at university, etc.) has different preferred methods of manipulation than mine does.
I strongly suspect this is harming you in the long run, and you'd benefit from trying to work on your social skills. Does your social circle consist only of people whose social skills, feelings about lying, etc. are similar to yours?
Also, do you think you can distinguish between "people who never lie to me" and "people who sometimes lie to me" more reliably than "people who are mostly honest but tell socially acceptable white lies" and "people who will manipulate me in ways that will seriously harm me"?
If you have no social skills do you have enough status and enough friends to still have friends to hang out with with a zero-tolerance policy.
In the ordinary course of events, parents are allowed to not support their children in college. So I'm puzzled as to what the principal at work here is meant to be. "It's ok to deprive people of their autonomy on the basis of a moral belief of theirs, even if this belief doesn't cause them to undertake any actions that would be considered immoral in the absence of the moral belief"?
Suppose I think that being a communist is immoral. Is it thereby ok for me to found a charity called "Workers Communism", solicit donations from communists, and then secretly donate them to the US Republican Party?
I would say that it is possible that it may be moral to unconditionally do X or to unconditionally refuse to do X, yet immoral to do X based on conditions. For instance, it may be moral for a politician to vote against a bill, or to vote for the bill, but it would not be moral to vote for or against the bill based on whether I pay him a bribe. Few people would accept the argument "paying him the bribe doesn't cause him to take any actions that would be immoral in the absence of the bribe".
I would apply that to parents who will only pay for their child's college if the child is straight. Just because they could morally pay (period), or morally refuse to pay (period), doesn't mean that they can morally refuse to pay conditional on the child's sexuality.
And for the Communist analogy to work you would have to say something like "It is moral to pay a charity, and moral to not pay a charity, but immoral to pay a charity conditional on the charity being for a cause you like". which comes out as nonsense.
I find that, sometimes, perfectly honest words are interpreted as white lies because they sound like such.
"What are you doing this weekend?" Me (very early in the term) "Studying for midterms."
"Let's be just friends from now on, okay?"
"You're a wonderful person, and I wish you the best of luck."
On another topic, I find myself lying, not to protect others' feelings but out of cowardice, to hide misdeeds, especially those that I irrationally didn't expect anyone to notice. The worst instances have involved frequent and compulsive food theft, and the occasional sneaking "improvements" into the minutes of a meeting or the report of an interview. Worst of all, for a rationalist, I tend to lie to myself, specifically by hiding my head in the sand and refusing to check on something that I expect will yield inconvenient truths, such as the state of my bank account, or whether I'm late in returning my books to the library. I feel that both kinds of lying are part of a same phenomenon of cowardice that I have yet to understand and resolve... Could it be as simple as "suck it up"?
Thanks very much for writing and posting this.
You're welcome!
I don't think this will work in practice. Lying is a habit. If you habitual lie in private life I won't you expect you to be completely honest when you are in academia. Even if you try to be honest I doubt you will be so completely. It relatively easy to try to control your data in different ways and then report the way that provided the best p value while not reporting the other ways. Yes, the p value is real for that statistic test but you weren't fully honest either.
Then there are the big lies such as: "The data that we have follows a normal distribution." which you find in a lot of papers and which you can't really escape.
I don't think lying in relationship with significant other is a great idea. There a girl with whom I dance fairly intimately. Two weeks ago I accidentally hit her with my elbow with a bit of force. She doesn't has that much experience but wants to dance fancy so I danced fancy with her. We both made a little mistake and my elbow hit her face.
She directly told me nothing happened and we continue dancing. Next week I meet her and she has a big bruise at the location and tells me my elbow was responsible. The fact that she told me in the moment that it didn't hurt was a lie. In the moment she got what she wanted by continuing the dance but it makes the whole interaction between us so much harder. Dancing relatively intimately without any good feedback about when you hurt the other person is hard.
Normally I have decent feedback about whether the kind of intimicy I have with a girl is a bit uncomfortable for the girl I'm dancing with and can adept in that moment. With her I don't feel like I can read her one that level. It feels like she made a decision that she wants to dance close and if that raises a bit of anxiety in her she won't show any sign of it because it might mean that I increase the distance.
I think my lack of reading her body even resulted in the situation of hitting her with my elbow.
The whole situation is pretty weird for me. I have a woman that I find attractive who wants physical intimacy during the dance but it doesn't feel right because I have no feedback about what she feels.
In intimate relationship I think it's very worthwhile to be open about feelings so that the other person can react to what you feel. When in doubt, focus on communicating what you feel instead of making judgements.
< In intimate relationship I think it's very worthwhile to be open about feelings so that the other person can react to what you feel. When in doubt, focus on communicating what you feel instead of making judgements.
I agree with this part. Derren Brown talks about communication in his book "tricks of the mind", and about what an important role it plays in relationships. He envisages a situation in which both members of the relationship are actually very much in love with one another, but their inability to express that affection leads to all sorts of complications and a lack of feeling of being loved back. As far as making judgments go, that part is not as much in your control as you think it is. Judgments are speedy mental processes and happen before you even realise that its happening. I doubt any one purposely thinks of all the ways in which their significant other is lacking and tries to use it to improve their position in the relationship (at least not in the kind of relationship that we are talking about here).
I dont believe the earlier part about the habit of lying transferring itself to academia automatically. Most people speak a certain way and write with another style. The difference between the two is that you simply have a lot more time in an academic situation in which you can analyse and decide exactly what you want to put across, something which is quite impractical in day to day communication. So unless you are already pre-decided on committing "Academic SIN" I doubt telling day to day white lies will send you to "Academic HELL".
Not only style -- if you aren't in an English-speaking country, you write academic articles in a different language altogether than what you speak with friends.
That depends on the amount of time you spent meditating and being aware of how your mind. I won't say I never make judgements because that's not true but I do think I have relatively good awareness.
I know how easy trust that one can use to affect the other person at a deep level can develop when you are in a state of mind of nonjudgement.
It might take years of hard work to get to that place but if you do the benefits that you get for your social interactions are bigger than the little benefits that you get through telling white lies.
I think there pretty good evidence that most people who let themselves be funded by the drug industry taint the papers that they write to be more in the interest of the drug industry and most of them don't think they are engaging in practice that sends them to "Academic Hell",
As you said above, making mental judgements is a speedy process. Few people have good self awareness that would be required to be unbaised. If the little lies that you tell in your research paper result in your result not replicating does it really matter whether you fulfill the technical definition for fraud? It takes practice at being honest to avoid lying in a way where you lie to yourself about it just as much as you are lying to the audience that reads your paper.
Why? Best case scenario is she keeps taking you to unenjoyable plays until you find you have to end the relationship yourself anyway or finally tell her the truth. Out of all the things in a relationship whose end was "a good thing for other reasons", one argument about whether a play was any good seems like a trivial thing to regret.
I can't favour lies as such. I am however on board with people honestly communicating the connotation that they care how you feel at the expense of the denotational literal meaning of their words.
In lies, the intention is not to soften but to deceive. So I don't even like the phrase "white lie". It's like, if you're going to stab me in the back, is it better if it's with a white knife?
You're mixing metaphors. A stab in the back is better with a smaller knife, deliberately aimed at a non-vital area.
It's a dodgy metaphor at best anyway, but 'point' taken. :)
I guess one problem that crops up when dealing with the issue of lying is that there is no clear litmus test. It may be possible to give broad guidelines such as "it is ok to lie in situations A,B and C, but most definitely not OK to lie in situations D,E and F." Real life is far more complex and subject to all manner of interpretation (not to mention all manner of bias as well). I strongly suspect that before we can rule on when it is ok to lie, or when it is ok to use a half truth we need to perfect the art of communication i.e. develop a system where we can keep perfect score of what words truly mean and how much deviation there is from the intent as well as how much effect the said deviation will have.
Your discussion of Harris's 'Lying' is a little terse, and does miss some of his arguments. I think anyone interested should get his book, its very short and can be read in about half an hour to an hour, depending on your speed. PM me for a PDF copy of the first edition (note: second edition is much updated).
Here's two extended quotes, that I think contains ideas not addressed in the post:
...
That's an interesting example, because in her more reflective moments, the friend is almost certainly already aware that she is fat and that it makes her significantly less sexually attractive. She is probably reminded of this unpleasant truth on a regular basis and it's not entirely clear that an additional reminder will be helpful. She has probably tried at least 10 or 15 diets and they have all failed.
If you are considering reminding a fat person that they are fat, you need to ask yourself what your motivations are for doing something which (1) will certainly cause short-term emotional pain; and (2) is unlikely to result in the person getting their shit together and losing the weight. Are you really trying to help them? Or are you just trying to make yourself feel superior at their expense?
My impression is that there are a lot of "concerned" people who are happy to give free advice to fatties (often something along the lines of "eat less and exercise more -- you're killing yourself") but unwilling to give $20 or $30 towards a gym membership for said fatties. This suggests that often the motivation is more status-mongering than actual concern.
Whatever the value in being honest with other people, I suspect there is more value in being honest with yourself.
Remember that we're discussing a case where the person asked you for your opinion. I certainly wouldn't just randomly say to someone "Hey, guess what? You're fat", especially if that person was my friend or someone else I cared about.
But if they asked me? That's a different story altogether.
Do you really think this is the case for good friends, or loved ones? Unwilling to give $20 or $30, really? And furthermore, do you in fact believe that not having the money for a gym membership is the important obstacle between an overweight person and an effective weight-less solution?
I wouldn't count non-literal use of language (“it was okay” when it's obvious to both interlocutors that the actual intended meaning is ‘[it sucked but I don't want to hurt your feelings]’) as lying.
But still, I prefer to be with people to whom I can also say why it sucked (so they get a chance to do better the next time) without hurting their feelings either. I can't choose my own parents and I can't choose whether the Nazis will come to my door, but I can choose whom to interact with in most other situations (excluding NPC-like situations, where topics I'd want to withhold my opinions about aren't likely to come up in the first place). Feeling like I'm walking on eggshells whenever talking to someone is not a pleasant sensation and kills most of the fun of talking to them in the first place. (YMMV.)
I think one of the reasons that we are hesitant to say negative things is that we leave out a lot of positive things. I noticed that it's a lot easier to say when someone is bothering you when you've let them know about the many times you've been glad they came over or you were happy they called. The same is true when critiquing things, accurately reflecting the good and bad in something as you see it causes you to say far more positive things than you might otherwise even realize.
Also, I think that a lot of our negative opinions are probably a result of our own limited perspective. For example, if a friend asks me "does this make me look fat"...I notice that I start thinking of women I see in .jpg's and fashion magazines, who aren't representative of the general population. So while I might think "yes" within that incorrect perspective, in comparison to the actual population of people and the average body they have (which I assume is the standard which "fat" reflects), the REAL correct answer is "no."
I agree that in some cases, including the homophobic parents example, lying can be justified. Even in significantly more mild cases, I can see lying as occasionally consequently the better course of action, even if you take into account the chance of the lie being found out and trust being lost/hurt to other people due to being lied to.
However, correct me if I am wrong but you seem to be arguing something much stronger than this? From my read this article promotes at least accepting, maybe even encouraging, using white lies as a way to ease potentially uncomfortable social situations. I'd guess some of the other commenters (particularly Alicorn) have a similar read, and that's prompting some strong reactions. While white lie culture may be common, and going against the grain (e.g. replying that you're not particularly keen on some item of clothing when asked by an acquaintance) may go against our social instincts, refusing to say you don't like things in many situations disallows useful opinion giving in all similar situations. If I want to get a second opinion on something, I want to ask someone who will give me information. If no matter their true opinion, they'll give some mild nicity/white lie to spare my feelings, I'm not going to learn much. If every time someone asks if their friends if their new hair cut suits them their friends must say yes, that person is both never going to learn they have a haircut few people like and maybe more importantly they're going to start automatically downgrading similar praise, quite correctly, because "people saying my haircut is nice" has zero correlation to the haircut being nice.
I accept that many, maybe even a significant majority of, people do just look for compliments or niceties some of the time. I accept that giving them those compliments rather than honesty may be better for their self-esteem in the short term. However, I have found that so long as I present myself as direct but gentle from the start and don't hide honesty from someone then spring it on them at a bad moment, a vast majority of even those compliment seekers at least respect gentle honesty and many of them find it refreshing. Perhaps this is in part due to my social group being unusually tolerant, and this strategy would fail elsewhere.
On the other side, I prefer people to be honest with me and attempt to self-modify towards being someone who would, in all but the most convoluted situations, prefer in the long term to be told the truth in response to all serious questions. I do this specifically so I can appear to be a person who it is better to tell the truth to in effectively every case, because I want to be able to reliably get true opinions. This is something I have never had a negative reaction to once explained, and has been the gateway to many interesting conversations.
Due to these working well for me and the large advantages of being able to communicate openly with greatly reduced fear of unintended offence provided by a general near-universal policy of honesty, I remain very skeptical of the idea that the habit of looking for reassurance at the expense of honest advice or opinions is something to be respected or encouraged (especially in rationalist circles where truth-seeking is prized).
Last note: I see the saying the truth but bending the meaning to be polite as signaling to someone that you don't quite mean what you're saying subtly enough that if (and only if) they care about your true opinion enough to pay attention to what you say and ask a followup question you'll tell them the full story. If they were just looking for a generic nicity, they either won't notice your slightly careful wording, or should not request information they do not want. This is useful for people who may have reason to want your true opinion, and as a way of avoiding getting into the habit of telling white lies. It's rarely hard to avoid the question or skip over it even if you can't come up with a convincing not-lie, so long as you don't get too obviously caught up in debating internally what to say or how to avoid offense first.
I think this is a great point. By verbally giving positive feedback, and nonverbally giving lukewarm feedback, you are not necessarily lying, because your communication is not just your words. If someone wants you to give a comprehensive critique, they can ask for it explicitly. This way, the people who want encouragement can get it, and the people who want critique can get it.
To me, the most intelligent default is that I consider a request for feedback to be a request for encouragement, but people can always override this default by explicitly asking me for a critique.
I agree with that being a useful default with most people, and reliable with even those who you don't know well enough to figure out how they'd react to criticism.
I'd put a bit more emphasis on how putting a white lie into the initial encouragement can cause issues though. If you've said something generally encouraging or picked out some positive, but not actually said anything which you think of as untrue then if they do explicitly ask for a critique then you can give them your opinions and suggestions in full. If you used what you hoped would be a white lie then you must either contradict your previous encouragement or withhold parts of your opinion even if the person genuinely requests it and wants feedback, both of which seem like bad options.
If someone asks you for how their haircut looks like and you think he's just finishing for a compliment you don't have to lie. There probably something about the person that's worth complimenting and if you compliment them on some other thing they will also be happy.
If you tell them: "I think the core of your beauty doesn't lie in your haircut but in the strength of your character, few people would complain." Someone who's specifically fishing for a compliment might even be much more impressed than if you would have said: "The haircut looks nice."
You don't impress people by giving them the default compliments they look for. Of course to give honest compliments that are deeper than the ones for which people are fishing you have to think deeply about what you appreciate about other people.
Can anyone point me to a defense of corrupting intellectual discourse with lies (that doesn't resolve into a two-tier model of elites or insiders for whom truth is required and masses/outsiders for whom it is not?) Obviously there is at least one really good reason why espousing such a viewpoint would be rare, but I assume that, by the law of large numbers, there's probably an extant example somewhere.
Do you believe that Sokal was immoral when he wrote his famous paper? There are people who suggest that Bem wrote his latest famous paper for the same reason.
If you think that the system is inherently flawed and corrupt and has no error correction build in, the strategy of placing lies into the system to make it blow up makes sense.
Daryl Bem? I think people suggesting Bem isn't being serious (though sadly mistaken) haven't talk to him. If Bem is trying to do something like Sokal, he has been doing an Andy Kaufman level job of trolling for many years now.
I think I remember reading that sentiment from someone who's a student with him on a blog. Bem is certainly deeply serious about his belief that the academia is full of hypocrites.
Even if Bem does belief in psi he's not as stupid as believing that the data he gathered for that paper proves that psi really exists. But if he can use that data to show how deeply wrong academia happens to be and shake up academia from his perspective maybe academics start to take data more seriously. To the extends that he beliefs taking data seriously leads to believing in psi shaking up academia serves that agenda.
In a world full of pseudoskeptics someone who's serious about evidence gets annoyed at pseudoskeptics. To the extend that you don't mentally distinguish pseudoskeptics from the real thing, it's hard to understand people like Bem.
I'm enough like Bem in that regard to feel with him. I'm the kind of person who goes on skeptic exchange to write a question asking for whether there evidence that supports the core assumptions of evidence-based medicine and have the highest upvoted answer be for a year a answer opposing evidence-based medicine.
Part of the trick was to take the most authoritative source as definition for evidence-based medicine and that source actually puts up a strawman that nobody in their right mind would defend at depth.
I'm deeply troubled when I read people saying that the evidence for climate change is comparable to the evidence for evolution because I think the evidence for evolution is pretty certain and better with p<<0.0000001 and climate change isn't in that reference class. I'm serious enough about evidence to find that claim a big lie that offends me, especially when made in highly authoritative venues.
Bem is deeply serious but that paper is him saying: "Even if I play by your strange and hypocritical rules of "evidence", I still can provide "evidence" that psi exists. Take that." I think that the data he measured is real but I don't think that he thinks the data of that particular experiment proves that psi is real. He might or might not believe that psi is real, I don't know.
It a different kind of lie to lie by following the rules to the letter then to lie that evolution and climate change in the same reference class but both are lies. Both aren't about telling the truth as is.
So you are bringing up a whole lot of unrelated, or only loosely linked ideas. I'll be honest, such a long reply of (at best) loosely connected ideas pattern matches to "axe-to-grind" for me, so I strongly considered not bothering with this post. As it is, lets limit the scope to discussing Bem.
Anyway, what exactly do you believe Bem is doing with his paper? I assumed the claim in your first post is that Bem was publishing silly results to highlight the danger of deifying p-values (as Sokal published a silly paper to highlight the low standards of the journal he submitted to). I contend this is not true, and Bem believes the following (based on interviews, the focuses of Bem's work, and a personal conversation with him): 1. psi is a real phenomena 2. ganzfeld experiments (as interpreted through standard statistical significance tests) are strong evidence for psi 3. "Feeling the Future" and other similar experiments are evidence for precognition
I contend all of these beliefs are mistaken.
In response to further claims you've made regarding the academic response to Bem, I further contend: 1. the academic community is right to be skeptical of such work, and in fact its a sort of informal Bayesian filter. 2. the academic response raised valid statistical objections to Bem's work
The biggest problem I see is that an effect has to have as ludicrously small a prior as Bem's before proper scrutiny is applied. Lots of small effect that warrant closer methodological scrutiny slip through the cracks.
I don't think that you can understand the position of people who fundamentally disagree with by reading a single paragraph. Yes, you can find easily a position where they seem to have another opinion than you do, but that doesn't mean that you understand what they actually believe.
Bem thinks that academic science is generally not taking the data of their experiments seriously and therefore coming to wrong conclusions in all sorts of domains.
Sokal thinks that the literature department can't tell true from false. Bem thinks the same is true of the psychology department. He thinks it lacks the same ability.
Sokal is not highliting some specific issue of how one technique that the literature department is using is wrong. His critique of the literature department is more fundamental. The same goes for Bem. Bem doesn't just think that academic psychology is wrong on one issue but that it's flawed on a more fundamental level.
Any good Bayesian holds that belief. If you look at a Lesswrong defence on what people learned from becoming Bayesian you will find:
There are a lot of people in academia who don't hold that belief and who aren't good Bayesians. Bem is completely on the right side on that point.
Can we taboo "intellectual discourse"? As I think about your question I realize that I'm not sure I understand what that phrase is being used to refer to in this context.
I'm trying to take the idea of not lying in science journals and broaden it to include fields other than science, and public discussion in places other than journals. A specific example would be Christian apologist William Lane Craig (who I've been following long enough to become convinced that the falsehoods he tells are too systematic to all be a matter of self-deception.)
It could be that the wrong lesson is being learned here. If someone were to write a relationship debugging cheatsheet flowchart it would almost certainly start with "Was I being a pussy[1]?". Weakness is the problem here, the honesty is secondary. The pattern described is:
That is one of the worst reply strategies imaginable[2]. It signals fear, lack of confidence, untrustworthiness, incompetence at navigating the flow of conversation and submissiveness. The precise details of the final reply there are not important. The reluctant honesty presented effectively as a 'confession' doesn't work well. Reluctantly getting badgered into lying to say what you think she wants you to hear isn't exactly optimal either.
If you want to lie in response to a social-feedback review situation then just do it, straight off. If you don't want to lie then an option is to honestly say that you enjoyed the play and particularly liked <one of the many things that didn't suck> and have a clear boundary against being pressed. Evasiveness then compliance is just way off.
People uncomfortable with that term can either replace it with a preferred one or do a search for previous discussions here of the etymology.
There are exceptions including but not limited to "get naked and start beating her with a maggot infested Koala liver".
I don't know -- depends on the context. Imagine a relationship that is strongly based on the Guess culture. The interpretation then would be quite different:
Certainly not the best way a conversation can develop, but it's mostly miscommunication, not lack of confidence or being not trustworthy.
I agree that the implications of a conversation can vary drastically based on the context. If we had a video of the conversation (even without the sound) we would have much more information about the social meaning than just seeing the words.
For whatever it is worth in my evaluation even in the 'guess culture' perspective would be that there is still some signal of both undesirable traits and likely of an underlying lack of respect when it comes to this kind of conversation. In not small part this is because guess culture initiates are supposed to get to the white lies sooner!
I can't claim particular expertise at social dynamics---I'm just a curious observer who tries to comprehend what was once incomprehensible as best he can. As best as I can establish from what I do know that particular configuration of social persona---in the 'normal' guess culture---has some degree of social weakness of the kind that tends to result in bad outcomes for both parties. It is the kind of thing that reduces respect and happens to an instance where that instinctive reduction in respect happens to be practical and not just the human desire for association with the socially powerful.
There are numerous ways you could have said the same thing (including the same connotations) without alienating parts of your audience. You clearly were aware you were going to alienate part of your audience, so why didn't you use an alternate phrasing?
This seems broadly correct, but could you say more about
What does that look like? (A bit of sample dialog or somesuch would be particularly appreciated.)
Hierarchical, Contextual, Rationally-Prioritized Dishonesty
This is an outstanding article, and it closely relates to my overall interest in LessWrong.
I'm convinced that lying to someone who is evil, who obviously has immediate evil intentions is morally optimal. This seems to be an obvious implication of basic logic. (ie: You have no obligation to tell the Nazis who are looking for Anne Frank that she's hiding in your attic. You have no obligation to tell the Fugitive Slave Hunter that your neighbor is a member of the underground railroad. ...You have no obligation to tell the police that your roommate is getting high in the bathroom, ...or to let them into your apartment.)
For example, I am a subscriber to the ideas and materialist worldview of Ray Kurzweil, but less so to the community of LessWrong, largely because I believe that Ray Kurzweil's worldview is somewhat more, for lack of a better term, "worldly" than what I take to be the LessWrong "consensus." I believe, (in the sense that I think I have good evidence for) the fact that Kurzweil's worldview takes into account the serious threat of totalitarianism, and conformity to malevolent top-down systems. (He claims that he participated in civil rights marches with his parents when he was five years old, and had an early understanding of right and wrong that grew from that sense of what they were doing. This became a part of his identity and value system. The goal of benevolent equality under the law is therefore built into his psyche more than it is built into the psychological identity of someone who doesn't feel any affinity with the "internally consistent" and "morally independent" mindset. Also, the hierarchical value system of someone who makes such self-identifications is entirely different than someone who is simply trying to narrowly "get ahead" in their career, or optimize their personal health, etc.)
Perhaps I can't do justice to the LessWrong community by communicating such a point. I'm trying to communicate something for which there might not be adequate words. I'm trying to communicate a gestalt. Whereas I think that Eliezer has empathy on the level of Kurzweil (as indicated by his essay about his brother Yehuda's unnecessary and tragic death), I don't think the same is true of the LW community. So far as I can see, there is little discussion of (and little concern for) mirror neurons differentiating sociopaths from empaths in the LW community. Yet, this is the primary variable of importance in all matters of social organization. Moreover, it has been recognized as such by network scientists since the days of Norbert Weiner's "Cybernetics."
A point I've often made is that "lying to the police" or "lying to judges and prosecutors" is different from lying in other areas. Lying to an (increasingly) unjust authority is, in fact, the centerpiece of a moral society. Why? Because unjust authority depends entirely on "hijacking" or "repurposing" general values in perverted narrow situations in order to allow sociopaths to control the outcome of the situation. As the example of primary importance, let me cite the stacking of the jury, before the trial. The purpose of "voir dire" (AKA "jury selection") historically, is to determine whether there is a legal "conflict of interest" (ie: whether a juror is a familial or business relation to one of the parties to the action, which might introduce an extreme bias of narrow self-interest into the trial) in the proposed construction of the jury. (Since the 1600s this has been true.) However, by expanding the definition of "voir dire" to assume that all existing laws are morally proper, correct, and legitimate, the side of the prosecution (and judge, since judges are subject to the exact same perverse incentives as the prosecutors) is itself morally wrong in most cases. Why "most" cases? Because most of the laws currently on the books criminalize behavior that lacks injury to a specific, named party, and also lacks intent to injure the same specific, named party (it lacks a "cause of action" or "corpus delicti" that targets a specific aggressor, for a specific act of aggression).
"Voir dire" actually translated to "to see the truth." It is the judge and prosecutor "seeing the truth" about the philosophy of the juror. Shouldn't this be considered a good thing? If you mindlessly (too narrowly) assume that the judge and prosecutor have good intentions, then "yes." If you make no such assumptions, then the answer is definitively, obviously "no, quite the opposite."
Too narrow honesty is actually the height of immorality. Honesty always involves a question of what goal is being served by the honesty. Honesty is simply one tool available aid human goals. When "human" goals are malevolent or destructive, the communication disruption caused by dishonesty is a blessing.
This is where the legitimate empathic priority hierarchies described in Kurzweil's The Power of Hierarchical Thinking presentation / speech / slideshow are vitally important. You see, both judge and prosecutor are commonly sociopaths. Their career choices have selected them as such, because in their professions, if seeing the destruction of young people's lives for "victimless crime offenses" or "mala prohibita" is bothersome to your brain (if it activates your mirror neurons, causing you pain), you cannot take the stress imparted by believing your job requirement to be immoral. So, you quit your job, or are outperformed by people who thrive on the misery and suffering of people who are sentenced to 10 years in prison for "crimes" like drug possession. And what of the people who dare to stand up for property rights, boldly declaring themselves "not guilty" in order to fight the unjust system? Well, the commonly-accepted view amongst prosecutors is that those heroic people (who stand in defense not just of their own property rights, but of the entire concept of a system that protects property rights) are to be crushed. Those heroic people don't get to "plea bargain" for 4 year sentences, they are sent to prison for the maximum term possible, as a punishment and disincentive for daring to declare themselves "not guilty," and standing up for such ideas as individual property rights, the constitution, individual freedom. Those who don't accept a plea "bargain," but who instead risk their lives to fight injustice at great personal risk are targeted for extreme "cruel and unusual punishment." At one point in the history of the USA (and the American colonies before the US was created) the most popular law book in the colonies was considered to be Giles Jacobs' book "The New Law Dictionary." His follow up book, almost as popular, was "Every Man His Own Lawyer." These two system-defining books, more than any others, afforded the view in the colonies that "All men are created equal," ie: "all men are (or should be) equal under the law."
Such a view was a high-level "honest-to-goodness" view. ("Honest to goodness" is an interesting concept. It bears repeating, because it implies that there can be "honest to evil" or "evil-serving honesty.")
The system sometimes prosecutes drug users in some countries, so the system is 100% sociopathic. No exaggeration there, then.
Liberal Holland is then getting this right....but not More Right.
Lying is acceptable when done to protect your life or livelihood, but for most of our lives, most opportunities to tell lies won't be in situations like that. You shouldn't lie to friends or romantic partners, because if you can't communicate with them honestly, they shouldn't be your friends/partners in the first place. And I'm not going to respect other people lying to me. Instead of teaching men to accept lies (as in your date example), teach them to accept a "no".
I've been trying to figure out which group I belong to, and reached the conclusion my strategy is entirely tangential: In between the oversimplification, steelmaning, multilayered metaphor, ambiguus sarchasm, faulty grammar, omission of disclaimers on source of information, bad epistemic standards etc. a truth value is simply not a property sounds coming out of my moth or symbols from my keyboard have. Including this post. Unless I'm making a very specific oath it should be fairly obvius a statement I make is not to be taken as actual knowledge or oppinion, simply brainstorming.