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Alicorn comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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It upset me. I don't like to see lying defended. I would react about the same way to an equally cogent "Defense of Pickpocketing" or "Defense of Throwing Paint On People", though I imagine those would be much more difficult to construct.
I think there should be negative social consequences to announcing one's willingness to lie and that there should be significant backlash to issuing a public request that people put up with it.
I think you're exaggerating the difficulty both of identifying lies and of omitting/deflecting.
"I think about killing my characters off pretty regularly, though often I come up with more creative things to do instead. As far as I know I'm an average amount of susceptible to intrusive thoughts, if that's what you're asking, but why are you asking?"
Or if I don't even trust them with that answer I can just stare at them in silence.
Thanks for telling the truth. But downvoted for "I dislike this position, don't want to hear it defended, and will punish those who defend it." This is a much stronger rationalist anathema than white lies to me.
I think it's worth distinguishing between punishing discourse in general and personal social consequences. Chris, the OP, has literally been physically in my house before and now I have learned that he endorses a personal social habit that I find repellent. I'm not trying to drive him out of Less Wrong because I don't like his ideas - I didn't even downvote the OP! - but it seems weird that you feel entitled to pass judgment on the criteria I have for who is welcome to be in my house.
Edit: separated these two quotes. LessWrong comment formatting stuck them together.
I don't care whether you let him in your house. You've publicly shamed him, and you are saying that this kind of status-attack is the just response to a particular argument, regardless of how it's presented. You also seem to be vilifying me and dodging my complaint by portraying my judgement as against your home-invitation policy, rather than against your public-backlash policy, which I resent as well.
"Vilifying you"? Because I didn't understand the thrust of your criticism because you didn't understand the point of my post? I'm tapping out, this is excessive escalation.
Sorry, that was uncharitable. Tapping out is a good idea.
If you want to share arguments for socially unacceptable ideas you can wrap them into an abstract layer.
When you however call for people changing their action in a way that causes harm I see no reason why that shouldn't be punished socially.
This is a forum for discussing ideas, it's not a forum for playing social games. (I'm saying this as someone who is extremely reluctant about white lies and who hates the idea that they are socially expected to lie. Asking a question when one doesn't want an honest answer is just silly.)
If you are just want to discus ideas, keep out words like I.
Don't say: "But I will implore you to do one thing: accept other people's right to lie to you."
Say: "Here are reasons why you might profit from accept other people's right to lie to you."
Maybe even: "Here are reasons why a person might profit from accept other people's right to lie to them"
You have a point there.
Except when you're looking for the social / mental equivalent of a shibboleth.
Okay. Asking as question and then being offended and/or hurt when one gets an honest answer is just silly (alternatively, evil).
Except when acting offended and/or hurt signals solidarity and prompts your allies to attack the alien who got the shibboleth wrong. (You can argue that that's evil, of course, but then you're trying to break away from some very, very deeply ingrained instincts for coalition politics.)
I think that's covered by "alternatively, evil". ;) More seriously, though: how is "knowing what the preferred answer is and either agreeing with it or being willing to lie" a reasonable criterion by which to filter your group?
It proves that you value loyalty to your group more than you value your own capacity to reason, which means that authoritarian leaders don't have to consider you a threat (and thus destroy you and everything you hold dear) if they order you to do something against your self-interest. Thus, perversely, when you're in an environment where power has already concentrated, it can be in your self-interest to signal that you're willing to disregard your self-interest, even to the point of disregarding your capacity to determine your self-interest.
Once ingrained, this pattern can continue even if those authoritarian leaders lose their capacity to destroy you - and perversely, the pattern itself can remain as the sole threat capable of destroying you if you dissent.
(Put a few layers of genteel classism over the authoritarian leadership, and it doesn't even have to look autocratic in the first place.)
Definitely covered by "alternatively, evil". Especially when considering a two-person relationship!
What if it doesn't really cause that much harm? What if it does more good than harm? Then this sort of punishing behaviour entraps us in our mistake.
(In the role of a hypothetical interlocutor)
"See this here?" (Pulls out his Asperger's Club Card) "I have trouble distinguishing what's socially acceptable to ask from what isn't, and since you're such a welcoming host, I hope you also welcome my honest curiosity. I wouldn't want to lie -- or suppress the truth -- about which topic interests me right this moment.
As for the reason for my interest, you see, I'm checking whether your deontological barrier against lying can withstand the social inconvenience of (ironically) telling the truth about a phenomenon (fantasizing about killing someone) which is wildly common, but just as wildly lied about.
Your question answered, allow me to make sure I understood you correctly: My question was referring to actual people. Have I inferred correctly that you did in fact fantasize about killing living people (non-fictional) on multiple occasions?"
ETA:
I see. Unfortunately, unlike "pleading the fifth", not answering when one answer is compromising is kinda giving the answer away. The symmetrical answering policy you'd have to employ in which you stare in silence regardless of whether the answer would be "yes" or "no" is somewhat hard to sell (especially knowing that silence in such a case is typically interpreted as an answer*). Unless you like to stare in silence, like, a lot. And are known to do so.
* "Do you love me?" - silence, also cf. Paul Watzlawick's "You cannot not communicate."
You or your character or both have confused "not lying" with "answering all questions put to one". And for that matter "inviting people who ask rude questions indiscriminately to parties in the first place".
I'd hoped I addressed this in the edit, "cannot not communicate" and such.
You may find yourself in situations (not at your parties, of course) in which you can't sidestep a question, or in which attempts to sidestep a question (ETA: or doing the silent stare) will correctly be assumed to answer the original question by the astute observer ("Do you believe our relationship has a future?" - "Oh look, the weather!").
Given your apparently strong taboo against lying, I was wondering how you'd deal with such a situation (other than fighting the hypothetical by saying "I won't be in such a situation").
Sorry, I didn't see your edit before.
Questions I really can't sidestep are usually ones from people who, for reasons, I have chosen to allow to become deeply entangled in my life. If one of my boyfriends or my fiancé decides to ask me if our relationship has a future I will tell him in considerable and thoughtful detail where I'm at on that topic, and because I choose to date reasonable human beings, this will not be an intolerable disaster. Occasionally if I'm really wedged (at a family holiday gathering, parent asks me something intrusive, won't back off if I say it's none of their business) I can solve the problem by deliberately picking a fight, which is usually sufficient distraction until I am not in their physical presence and can react by selectively ignoring lines in emails, but I don't like doing that.
I don't stare at people in silence a lot, but I do often give the visual appearance of wandering attention, and often fail to do audio processing such that I do not understand what people have said. Simply not completing the steps of refocusing my overt attention and asking people to repeat themselves can often serve the purpose when it's not someone I have chosen to allow to become deeply entangled in my life; if we're the only people in the room it works less well, but if I know a person well I'll only be in a room alone with them if I trust them yea far, and if I don't know them well and they start asking me weird questions I will stare at them incredulously even if the answer is in fact completely innocuous ("Have you ever committed grand theft auto?"; "are you a reptilian humanoid?").
I think of such tactics as Aes Sedai mode :-)
I knew you were a deontologist (I am a cosequentialist), but I had sort of assumed implicitly that our moralities would line up pretty well in non-extreme situations. I realized after reading this how thoroughly alien your morality is to me. You would respond with outrage and hurt if you discovered that someone had written a defense of throwing paint on people? Or pickpocketing? Although I have never practiced either of those activities and do not plan to ever do so, my reaction is totally different.
Pickpocketing is a perfectly practical technique which, like lockpicking, might be used for unsavory purposes by shortsighted or malicious people, but is probably worth knowing how to do and makes a great party trick. And throwing paint on people? Hilarious. It's not a terribly nice thing to do, especially if the person is wearing nice clothes or is emotionally fragile, but I think most people who can compose a cogent philosophical essay can also target their prankstering semi-competently.
Pickpocketing-as-theft is to lying-in-general as pickpocketing-as-consensual-performance-art is to, say, storytelling, I suppose I should clarify. I think we legitimately disagree about throwing paint on people unless you are being facetious.
In terms of pickpocketing, I agree that we seem to pretty much agree; I think that pickpocketing for the purposes of stealing what doesn't belong to you is rarely justified. I was not being facetious about the paint part, though.
A more realistic example would be something like "In Defense of Taxation to Fund the Welfare State" - which would be different from "In Defense of Lying", because even if I think that taxation to fund the welfare state is immoral, I don't think that someone who holds the opposite position is likely to hold me at gunpoint and demand that I give money to a beggar, but if someone who thinks lying is okay to the degree that OP does, there is a real risk of them lying to me in personal life. More generally, advocating something bad in the abstract isn't as bad as advocating something bad that I'm likely to experience personally.
You should try not paying your taxes on the grounds that you don't want to support the welfare state. If you persist, I'm quite sure at some point men with guns will show up at your doorstep.
Yes, but my friend who is advocating for a welfare state will not be among them. I have nothing to fear from him.
Other than that he probably votes for people who pass laws telling you how much of your money will be taken "for the beggars" and who have no problems sending men with guns to enforce their commands.
He only has one vote out of the many necessary to send men with guns after me. Even if he changed his mind and voted against the welfare state, the probability that anything would change is minuscule. The expected harm from him voting for the welfare state is smaller than that of him sitting next to me after not showering for a couple of days.
But if the pool of voters were much smaller, I'd take a more negative view of his actions.
There's still cash, right? Might have to change your line of work from bits to bricks too for that to work though.
There is, of course, cash, and the grey economy is not small. But it certainly has its limitations :-/
You lost me there so hard that I am wondering if we're talking about the same thing - throwing paint at people doesn't seem to happen in my corner of the world and I've never known anyone who got paint thrown at them, so maybe I'm misunderstanding something. So, to be sure, are we talking here about throwing paint, as in the stuff you paint walls with, at people, ruining their clothes, pissing them off, interrupting their day to get washed and changed and all? Is that what you find funny and defensible?