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Lumifer comments on You have a set amount of "weirdness points". Spend them wisely. - Less Wrong
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Well, you never actually say anything untrue; you're just acting uncertain in order to have a better chance of getting through to the other person. It seems intuitively plausible that the reputational effects from that might not be as bad as the reputational effects that would come from, say, straight-out lying; I accept that this may be untrue, but if it is, I'd want to know why. Moreover, all of this is contingent upon you being found out. In a scenario like this, is that really that likely? How is the other person going to confirm your mental state?
YMMV, of course, but I think what matters is the intent to deceive. Once it manifests itself, the specific forms the deception takes do not matter much (though their "level" or magnitude does).
This is not a court of law, no proof required -- "it looks like" is often sufficient, if only for direct questions which will put you on the spot.
Well, yes, but are they really going to jump right to "it looks like" without any prior evidence? That seems like major privileging the hypothesis. I mean, if you weren't already primed by this conversation, would you automatically think "They might be lying about being unconvinced" if someone starts saying something skeptical about, say, cryonics? The only way I could see that happening is if the other person lets something slip, and when the topic in question is your own mental state, it doesn't sound too hard to keep the fact that you already believe something concealed. It's just like passing the Ideological Turing Test, in a way.
Humans, in particular neurotypical humans, are pretty good at picking up clues (e.g. nonverbal) that something in a social situation is not quite on the up-and-up. That doesn't necessarily rise to the conscious level of a verbalized thought "They might be lying...", but manifests itself as a discomfort and unease.
It's certainly possible and is easy for a certain type of people. I expect it to be not so easy for a different type of people, like ones who tend to hang out at LW... You need not just conceal your mental state, you need to actively pretend to have a different mental state.
Fair enough. How about online discourse, then? I doubt you'd be able to pick up much nonverbal content there.
It is much easier to pretend online, but it's also harder to convince somebody of something.
Would you say the difficulty of convincing someone scales proportionally with the ease of pretending?
Hm. I don't know. I think it's true when comparing a face-to-face conversation with an online one, but I have no idea whether that can be extended to a general rule.