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drethelin comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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My instant urge when you compared polite lies to slashing your tires is to insult you at length. I don't think this would be pleasant for anyone involved. Radical Honesty is bad for brains running on human substrate.
I do not and have never endorsed indiscriminate braindumping.
I advocate refraining from taking actions that qualify as "lying". Lying does not include, among other things: following Gricean conversational maxims, storytelling, sarcasm, mutually-understood simplification, omission, being choosy about conversational topics, and keeping your mouth shut for any reason as an alternative to any utterance.
There is no case where merely refraining from lying would oblige you to insult me at length. I don't know why everyone is reading me as requiring indiscriminate braindumping.
An emotional response to your statement is not indiscriminate braindumping. I'm not talking about always saying whatever happens to be in my mind at any time. Since I've probably already compromised any chance of going to a rationalist dinner party by being in favor of polite lies, I might as well elaborate: I think your policy is insanely idealistic. I think less of you for having it. But I don't think enough less of you not to want to be around you and I think it's very likely plenty of people you hang out with lie all the time in the style of the top level post and just don't talk to you about it. We know that humans are moist robots and react to stimuli. We know the placebo effect exists. We know people can fake confidence and smiles and turn them real. But consequentialist arguments in favor of untruths don't work on a deontologist. I guess mostly I'm irate at the idea that social circles I want to move in can or should be policed by your absurdity.
I don't think the above constitutes an indiscriminate braindump but I don't think it would be good to say to anyone face to face and I don't actually feel confident it's good to say online.
Upvoted for the entire comment, but especially this.
And this.
This is a summary reasonably close to my opinion.
In particular, outright denouncement of ordinary social norms of the sort used by (and wired into) most flesh people, and endorsement of an alternative system involving much more mental exhaustion for the likes of people like me, feels so much like defecting that I would avoid interacting with any person signalling such opinions.
Incidentally (well after this thread has sort of petered out) I feel the same sort of skepticism or perhaps unenthusiasm about Tell Culture. My summarized thought which applied to both that and this would be, "Yes, neat idea for a science fiction story, but that's not how humans work."
Depending on the context, lies of omission can be as bad as, if not worse than, blatant lies (due to being all the more convincing).
Imagine that I ask you, "did you kill your neighbour ?", and you answer "no". The next week, it is discovered that you hired a hitman to kill your neighbour for you. Technically, you didn't lie... except by omission.
Personally, I'd categorize putting a hit on somebody as killing them, but if you really, sincerely didn't think of the words as meaning that, and I asked you that question, and you told me 'no', then I wouldn't add lying to your list of crimes (but you'd already be behaving pretty badly).
The thing I'm measuring here is not, actually, the distance traveled in the audience towards or away from omniscience. It's something else.
Something perplexes me about the view you describe, and it's this:
What is the point?
That is to say: You say lying is bad. You describe a certain, specifically circumscribed, view of what does and does not count as lying. The set of conditions and properties that define lying (which is bad) vs. things that don't count as lies, in your view, are not obvious to others (as evidenced by this thread and other similar ones), though of course it does seem that you yourself have a clear idea of what counts as what.
So my question is: what is the point of defining this specific set of things as "lying, which is bad"? Or, to put it another way: what's the unifying principle? What is the rule that generated this distribution? What's the underlying function?
Ok, that's fair; so what would be an example of an omission that, in your model, does not count as a lie and is therefore acceptable ?
What kind of scope of omission are you looking for here? If someone asks "what are you up to today?" or "what do you think of my painting?" I can pick any random thing that I really did do today or any thing I really do think of their painting and say that. "Wrote a section of a book" rather than a complete list, "I like the color palette on the background" rather than "...and I hate everything else about it".
Also, not speaking never counts as lying. (Stopping mid-utterance might, depending on the utterance, again with a caveat for sincere mistake of some kind. No tricks with "mental reservation".)
Ok, that makes sense. But still, from my perspective, it still sounds like you're lying; at least, in the second example.
I don't see the any difference between saying, "I think your painting is great !"; and saying something you honestly expect your interlocutor to interpret in the same way, whereas the literal meaning of the words is quite different. In fact, I'd argue that the second option involves twice the lies.
What, never ? Never is a long time, you know. What if your friend asks you, "let me know if any of these paintings suck", and you say nothing, knowing that all of them pretty much suck ?
I would understand it if your policy was something like, "white lies are ok as long as refusing to engage in the would cause more harm in the long run"; but, as far as I can tell, your policy is "white lies are always (plus or minus epsilon) bad", so I'm not sure how you can reconcile it with the above.
If your friend asks you to serve as a painting-reviewer and you say you will and then you don't, that's probably breach of promise. If your friend asks you to do them this service and you stare blankly at them and never do it, you're probably being kind of a jerk (it'd be nicer to say "I'm not gonna do that" or something) but you are not lying.
I understand your point, but I still do not understand the motivation behind it. Are you following some sort of a consequentialist morality, or a deontological one that states "overt lies are bad, lies of omission are fine", or something else ?
As I see it, if a friend asks you "do you like this painting ?" and you reply with "the background color is nice", the top most likely outcomes are:
Similarly, if your friend asks you to review his paintings and you refuse, you'd better have a good reason for refusal (i.e., the truth or some white lie); otherwise, anyone of average intelligence will interpret your response as saying "I hate your paintings but I won't tell you about it".
None of what I wrote above matters if you only care about following prescribed rules, as opposed to caring about the effects your actions have on people. Perhaps this is the case ? If so, what are the rules, and how did you come by them ?
I'm Less Wrong's token deontologist. I thought most people around here knew that. I wrote this article about it and my personal brand of deontology is detailed in this comment.