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hyporational comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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The obvious difference here is that serial killers are rare. White liars are extremely common and the kind of honesty you're preferring is rare, so you're ruling out a lot more people. (ETA: in those elaborated comments you seem more specific and reasonable than I thought.)
How probable do you think it is that you're hanging out with people who are more dishonest than you think they are? Are you comfortable with your ability to discern these kinds of qualities in people? Do you acknowledge the prior?
But each of the people you're ruling out is in turn ruling out lots of people other than you and therefore is more likely to be available.
In other words, honesty is a high-variance strategy.
That makes sense. The only problem it seems is recognizing the right individuals. The goth guy vs normal guy is much more obvious than the honesty guy vs pretending-to-be-honesty-guy. Everyone benefits from being seen as honest.
The kind of honesty where you're willing to owning up to disliking the play your girlfriend did stage crew for doesn't seem to me like something that many people successfully fake.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the number of occasions where you get to display such honesty and thereby differenciate yourself from normal moderately-honest people isn't that large. Combine this with the low base-rate of extremely honest people, and they may easily end up never finding each other.
Some people seem to use honesty as an excuse for being deliberately obnoxious. Though I don't know how often what they do would count as successfully faking anything.
Well, the OP did not specify which words he used to tell his then-girlfriend that.
Whoa whoa. Who said the category of people I was referring to is as broad as white liars?
I don't hang out with all that many people, and those I do hang out with, I've know for some time, so I would say: not very probable.
Comfortable enough to spot honesty after knowing someone for ten years or more, yeah.
Yeah sorry about the misunderstanding, I edited the gp accordingly.