nshepperd comments on Crisis of Faith - Less Wrong

57 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 October 2008 10:08PM

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Comment author: TimFreeman 22 June 2013 07:55:59PM *  1 point [-]

You seem to think that if you can imagine even one possible short-term benefit from lying or not-disclosing something, then that's sufficient justification to do so.

That's not what I said. I said several things, and it's not clear which one you're responding to; you should use quote-rebuttal format so people know what you're talking about. Best guess is that you're responding to this:

[learning to lie really well] might be the compassionate thing to do, if you believe that the people you interact with would not benefit from hearing that you no longer believe.

You sharpened my "might be" to "is" just so you could disagree.

But where exactly is the boundary dividing those things that, however uncomfortable or even devastating, must be said or written and those things about which one can decieve or dupe those one loves and respects?

This is a rhetorical question, and it only makes sense in context if your point is that in the absence of such a boundary with an exact location that makes it clear when to lie, we should be honest. But if you can clearly identify which side of the boundary the alternative you're considering is on because it is nowhere close to the boundary, then the fact that you don't know exactly where the boundary is doesn't affect what you should do with that alternative.

You're doing the slippery slope fallacy.

Heretics have been burned at the stake before, so compassion isn't the only consideration when you're deciding whether to lie to your peers about your religious beliefs. My main point is that the Litany of Gendlin is sometimes a bad idea. We should be clear that you haven't cast any doubt on that, even though you're debating whether lying to one's peers is compassionate.

Given that religious relatives tend to fubar cryonics arrangements, the analogy with being burned at the stake is apt. Religious books tend to say nothing about cryonics, but the actual social process of religious groups tends to be strongly against it in practice.

(Edit: This all assumes that the Litany of Gendlin is about how to interact with others. If it's about internal dialogue, then of course it's not saying that one should or should not lie to others. IMO it is too ambiguous.)

Comment author: nshepperd 22 June 2013 09:29:31PM 7 points [-]

The Litany of Gendlin is specifically about what you should or should not believe, and your feelings about reality. It says nothing about telling people what you think is true — although "owning up to it" is confusingly an idiom that normally means admitting the truth to some authority figure, whereas in this case it is meant to indicate admitting the truth to yourself.