One implication of this is that we can develop heuristics for how bad different lies. The basic idea is that lies that likely to spread (especially if their effectiveness depends on them spreading) are particularly bad. Especially if they're likely to spread within your movement (note lies used to increase support for your movement count here, since they'll bring in new recruits who believe them).
Note: that using these heuristics we can see that the classic example used to justify lying: "There are no Jews in my basement" is in fact much less bad then Yvain's example: "A man is more likely to be struck by lightning than be falsely accused of rape."
Would you elaborate?
First, I'm not sure what it means to say that "There are no Jews in my basement" is unlikely to spread. In a sense it's a "pre-spread" lie, since the lack of Gestapo breaking down your doors implies that they are all already fairly confident of the falsehood; you're just lying to decrease the probability that they'll stop believing it.
Second, to add my own hypothetical: I can see an isomorphism (in terms of how the lie spreads) between "There are no Jews in my basement" and "There are no embezzled cha...
Scott, known on LessWrong as Yvain, recently wrote a post complaining about an inaccurate rape statistic.
Arthur Chu, who is notable for winning money on Jeopardy recently, argued against Scott's stance that we should be honest in arguments in a comment thread on Jeff Kaufman's Facebook profile, which can be read here.
Scott just responded here, with a number of points relevant to the topic of rationalist communities.
I am interested in what LW thinks of this.
Obviously, at some point being polite in our arguments is silly. I'd be interested in people's opinions of how dire the real world consequences have to be before it's worthwhile debating dishonestly.