(Cross-posted from Facebook.)
0: Tl;dr.
- A problem with the obvious-seeming "wizard's code of honesty" aka "never say things that are false" is that it draws on high verbal intelligence and unusually permissive social embeddings. I.e., you can't always say "Fine" to "How are you?" This has always made me feel very uncomfortable about the privilege implicit in recommending that anyone else be more honest.
- Genuinely consistent Glomarization (i.e., consistently saying "I cannot confirm or deny" whether or not there's anything to conceal) does not work in principle because there are too many counterfactual selves who might want to conceal something.
- Glomarization also doesn't work in practice if the Nazis show up at your door asking if you have fugitive Jews in your attic.
- If you would lie to Nazis about fugitive
...
I am verbally intelligent enough to spin up true-but-socially-plausible accounts of my thoughts unless I am pressed. It is easy to have cached a charming-but-honest way to respond to various adversarial or socially normative questions; it is difficult to come up with them in real time. Usually when I fail at this it's because I was visibly thinking, from which the interlocutor discerned that I wanted to say something unflattering.
I do not think I am verbally intelligent enough to pick, practice, and retain a subtle meta-honesty policy. It would increase th... (read more)