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JQuinton comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
Yep. People do communicate on multiple levels. Yes, different levels can say different things or even contradict each other. Yes, part of "social skills" is the ability to manage multiple-level communications. Yes, women are much better at that than guys. Yes, it's complicated.
:-)