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Xachariah comments on Exploiting the Typical Mind Fallacy for more accurate questioning? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think the heart of the disagreement is that your beliefs about communication are wildly divergent from my beliefs about communication. You mention communication as some sort of innately good thing that can be corrupted by speakers.
I'm of the school of thought that all language is about deception and signaling. Our current language is part of a never ending arms race between lies, status relationships, and the need to get some useful information across. The whole idea that you could have a tragedy of the commons seems odd to me. A new lying or lie detection method is invented, we use it until people learn the signal or how to signal around it, then we adopt some other clever technique. It's been this way since Ogg first learned he could trick his opponent by saying "Ogg no smash!"
If you hold that language is sacred, then this technique is bad. If you hold that language is a perpetual arms race of deception and counter-deception, this is just another technique that will be used until it's no longer useful.
Arms races waste utility. If you defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, then no matter what your opponent does, the sum of your and your opponent's utilities will be lower than if you'd cooperated. (For example, if the payoffs are (1,1) (3,0) (0,3) (2,2), then the sum goes either from 4 to 3, or from 3 to 2.) You can view cooperators as those who create value, though not necessarily for themselves, and defectors as those who destroy value, though not for themselves. So it might make sense to consider the commons sacred, and scold those who abuse it.
Promoting defection also makes sense in situations where being seen to promote defection rather than cooperation earns me status within the community (e.g., it seems cool, or seems clever, or seems contrarian, or what-have-you), and I believe that promoting defection does not significantly affect utility otherwise (e.g., I don't believe that anyone I care about might ever be in a prisoner's dilemma where the results actually depend in any way on the stuff I promote now).
I do not see why are you even interested in asking that sort of question if you have such a view - surely under such view you will steal if you are sure you will get away with it, just as you would e.g. try to manipulate and lie. edit: I.e. the premise seems incoherent to me. You need honesty to exist for your method to be of any value; and you need honesty not to exist for your method to be harmless and neutral. If the language is all signaling, the most your method will do is weed you out at the selection process - you have yourself already sent the wrong signal that you believe language to be all deception and signaling.
Well, there's two different questions here... the first is what is in fact true about human communication, and the second is what's right and wrong.
I might believe, as Xachariah does, that language is fundamentally a mechanism for manipulating the behavior of others rather than for making true statements about the world... and still endorse using language to make true statements about the world, and reject using language to manipulate the behavior of others.
Indeed, if I were in that state, I might even find it useful to assert that language is fundamentally a mechanism for making true statements about the world, if I believed that doing so would cause others to use it that way, even though such an assertion would (by my hypothetical view) be a violation of moral principles I endorse (since it would be using language to manipulate the behavior of others).
A fundamental technique of this arms race is honestly consciously believing in your lies. So given the OP's proposal, which incentives conscious lying, people feel uncomfortable.
The thing that can be corrupted is the general level of trust in conversation - if you're not lying and you're reasonably certain the other person also isn't lying (consciously), you can relax (consciously), and that feels good. So we don't like proposals for new social techniques or conventions where to get ahead (be hired) we would have to lie more than we think we do now.