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ChristianKl comments on Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: MrMind 20 July 2015 06:55AM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 22 July 2015 03:33:23PM *  0 points [-]

No. There are two factors:
1) It's true. There are really no 100% safe jobs.
2) The likely update by the audience is in the direction of a more accurate belief.

Getting Alice to believe that Bob is an active poster on revenge porn forums by saying it likely doesn't fulfill either criteria 1) or criteria 2).

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 23 July 2015 08:44:23AM 0 points [-]

1) It's true. There are really no 100% safe jobs.

There is really no 100% safe anything, but I don't think that when DVH said "I will not leave a safe job for a startup" by "safe" he meant "100% safe".

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 July 2015 09:08:29AM *  0 points [-]

There is really no 100% safe anything

That doesn't prevent the statement from being true. The fact that there's no 100% safe anything doesn't turn the statement into a lie while the example that Lumifer provides happens to be clear lying.

meant

I didn't focus on what he "meant" but on my idea of what I believed his mental model to be.

I don't think DVH's mental models have getting inaccurate in any way as a result of my communication. He didn't pick up the belief "Startups as as safe as my current job". I didn't intent to get him to pick up that belief either. I don't believe that statement either.

My statement thus does fulfill the two criteria:
1) It's true on it's surface.
2) It didn't lead to inaccurate beliefs in the person I'm talking with.

Statement that fulfill both of those criteria aren't lies.

Comment author: Jiro 23 July 2015 03:27:47PM 0 points [-]

Statement that fulfill both of those criteria aren't lies.

That would mean that if you say something that is literally true but intended to mislead, and someone figures that out, it's not a lie.

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 July 2015 03:39:05PM 0 points [-]

I have no problem with including intentions as a third category but in general "see that you intention aren't to mislead" is very simply to "see that you reach an outcome where the audience isn't mislead" so I don't list it separately.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 23 July 2015 10:05:24AM 0 points [-]

That doesn't prevent the statement from being true.

It doesn't (though it does mostly prevent it from being useful), but the statement you made upthread was not that one. It was "Today there's nothing like a real safe job", in which context "safe" would normally be taken to mean something like "reasonably safe", not "exactly 100% safe".

1) It's true on it's surface.

What do you mean by "on its surface"? What matters is if it's true in its most likely reasonable interpretation in its context.

Meh. Enough with the wordplays and let's get quantitative. What do you think the P(DVH will lose his current job before he wants to|he doesn't leave it for a startup) is? What do you think he thinks it is?

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 July 2015 10:33:49AM 0 points [-]

in which context "safe" would normally be taken to mean something like "reasonably safe", not "exactly 100% safe".

I didn't just say "safe" I added the qualifier "real" to it. I also started the sentence with "today" with makes it more like a general platitude. I specifically didn't say your job isn't safe but made the general statement that no job is really safe.

It happens to be a general platitude commonly repeated in popular culture.

What do you think he thinks it is?

I think he didn't have a probability estimate for that in his mind at the time I was writing those lines. When you assume he had such a thing you miss the point of the exercise.