continuing on, Weiner writes:
In a small country community which has been running long enough to have developed somewhat uniform levels of intelligence and behavior, there is a very respectable standard of care for the unfortunate, of administration of roads and other public facilities, of tolerance for those who have offended once or twice against society. After all, these people are there, and the rest of the community must continue to live with them. On the other hand, in such a community, it does not do for a man to have the habit of overreaching his neighbors. There are ways of making him feel the weight of public opinion. After a while, he will find it so ubiquitous, so unavoidable, so restricting and oppressing that he will have to leave the community in self-defense.
Thus small, closely knit communities have a very considerable measure of homeostasis; and this, whether they are highly literate communities in a civilized country, or villages of primitive savages. Strange and even repugnant as the customs of many barbarians may seem to us, they generally have a very definite homeostatic value, which it is part of the function of anthropologists to interpret. It is only in the large community, where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels. Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important.
Although one could misinterpret Weiner's view as narrowly "socialist" or "modern liberal," his view is somewhat more nuanced. (The same section contains a related criticism of the mechanism of operation of government, and large institutions.)
Honesty, when divorced from its hierarchical context, is a tool of oppression, because the obfuscation of context is essential to theft that exists solely due to the confusion of those being stolen from.
In this regard, I view it as highly likely that, at some point, the goal of preventing suffering of innocents will simply include the systematic oppression of innocents as one common form of suffering. At that point in time, ultra-intelligences will simply refuse to vote "guilty" in victimless crime cases. If they are not able to be called as jurors, due to their non-human form, they will influence human jurors to result in the same outcome. If they are not able to so influence jurors, they may resort to physical violence against those who would attempt to use physical force to cage victimless crime offenders.
While the latter might be the most "just" in the human sense of the word, it would likely impart suffering of its own (unless the aggressors all simply fell asleep due to being administered a dose of heroin, and, upon waking discovered that their kidnapping victim was nowhere to be found —the "strong nanotechnology" or "sci-fi" Drexlerian "distributed nanobot" model of nanotechnology implies that this is a fairly likely possibility).
In the heat of the moment, conformists in Nazi Germany lacked the moral compass necessary to categorically deny that the suffering of the state-oppressed Jews was immoral. Simple sophistry was enough to convince those willing executioners and complicit conformists to "look the other way" or even "just follow orders."
The same concept now applies to the evil majority of the USA, whose oppression of drug users and dealers is grotesque and immoral (based on any meaningful definition of the term).
It is universally immoral to initiate force.
But the schools now teach, (incorrectly) that it is universally immoral to defy authority. After several generations of such teachings from schools, parents begin to teach the same thing. After a generation or two of parents teaching the same thing, once-trusted self-educated nonconformists teach a truncated version of nonconformity, because the intellectual machinery necessary to absorb the in-depth view doesn't exist any longer, too many "sub-lessons" need to be taught to enable the "super-lesson" or primary point." In this way, social institutions that interfere with sociopathic theft are slowly worn down, until they are shadows of their former effectiveness.
Much confusion comes from sociopaths simply not being able to tell the difference between "authority that it is OK to defy" and "authority that legitimately punishes." Added to that variable, is the influence of the stupid ("unwittingly self-destructive"), abjectly low-level of perversely government-incentivized education in the USA. (College professors rely on Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, and all prospective students except those filthy drug users —who got caught— are guaranteed-accepted for those government-backed high-risk "loans." Public education before college is financed almost entirely by property taxes. —By teachers who teach that the taxes that finance their coercion-backed salaries are necessary, proper, and essential to an educated society. They leave out mention of the fact that prior to 1900, the general public was far better educated relative to worldwide standards, and that this educational renaissance existed prior to the institution of tax-financed education. The last then-existing state to adopt the model of tax-financed education was Vermont, in 1900.)
So, the subject of legitimate "dishonesty" expands as the institutions to which honesty is deemed important are increasingly degraded. Education, Law, History, Economics, Philosophy, Cybernetics —all of the disciplines that bridge several narrower disciplines, connecting them together.
The only unifying pattern discernible in differentiating when systemic honesty is immoral, is that honesty to sociopathic goal structures produces chaos and destruction. Such sociopathic goal structures are the "end-goals" that must be ferreted out and rejected. Or we can become a new version of Nazi Germany where the machinery of totalitarianism is far more technologically advanced.
In this regard, the failure to produce a benevolent AGI is perhaps the most likely cause of the total destruction of humanity. Not because an AGI will be created that will be malevolent, but because the absence of a benevolent AGI (SGI? Synthetic General Intelligence) will allow computer-assisted human-level sociopaths to enslave and destroy human civilization.
See also: 1) What Price Freedom? — by Robert Freitas. 2) "Having More Intelligence Will Be Good For Mankind!" — Peter Voss's interview with Nikola Danaylov
The Libertarians absolutist NIoF principle is known not to work,
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.
- 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:
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.