Some cultures used to, and maybe still do, have a solution to the hostile telepaths problem you didn't list: perform rituals even if you don't mean them.
If a child breaks their mom's glasses, the mom doesn't care if they are really sorry or not. All she cares about is if they perform the sorry-I-broke-your-glasses ritual, whatever that looks like. That's all that's required.
The idea is that the meaning comes later. We have some non-central instances of this in Western culture. For example, most US school children recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day (or at least they used to). I can remember not fully understanding what the words meant until I was in middle school, but I just went along with it. And wouldn't you know it, it worked! I do have an allegiance to the United States as a concept.
The world used to be more full of these rituals and strategies for appeasing hostile telepaths, who just chose not to use their telepathy because everyone agreed it didn't matter so long as the rituals were performed. But the spread of Christianity and Islam has brought a demand for internalized control of behaviors to much of the world, and with it we get problems like shame and guilt.
Now I'm not saying that performing rituals even if you don't mean them is a good solution. There are a lot of tradeoffs to consider, and guilt and shame offer some societal benefits that enable higher trust between strangers. But it is an alternative solution, and one that, as my Pledge of Allegiance example suggests, does sometimes work.
I'm sure my allegiance to these United States was not created just by reciting the Pledge thousands of times. In fact, I resented the Pledge for a lot of my life, especially once I learned more about its history.
But if I'm honest with myself, I do feel something like strong support for the ideals of the United States, much stronger than would make sense if someone had convinced me as an adult that its founding principals were a good idea. The United States isn't just my home. I yearn for it to be great, to embody its values, and to persist, even as I disagree with many of the details of how we're implementing the dream of the founders today.
Why do I think the Pledge mattered? It helped me get the feeling right. Once I had positive feelings about the US, of course I wanted to actually like the US. I latched onto the part of it that resonates with me: the founding principals. Someone else might be attracted to something else, or maybe would even find they don't like the United States, but stay loyal to it because they have to.
I'm also drawing on my experience with other fake-it-until-you-make-it rituals. For example, I and many people really have come to feel more grateful for the th...
2I bet something similar could work for getting kids to appologize.
Also, for getting them to say thank you. When kids are at a certain age, adults frequently seem to be reminding them to say thank you for gifts and such; I have a vague memory of adults also reminding me of this, when I was at that age. But these days I automatically say thank you for various things, and mean it.
Corollaries:
Honesty
- If you want to become more honest and less self-deceiving, acquire power
- If you want to make other people more honest and less self-deceiving, provide them with power (including power to protect themselves from you)
- If you know someone who is more powerful than you but cant guarantee an upper bound on their power (and future power), then occlumency no longer works
Unboundedness
- If you want an unlimited amount of power (such as a utility maximiser), there will almost always be coalitions of people more powerful than you against whom self-deception works
- As long as there exist (hostile) coalitions of people unboundedly more powerful than you, completely removing self-deception from yourself is impossible
More than just yourself
- If you want more examples of honesty and lack of self-deception available to you, ask powerful people to speak about their life experience. If you want these examples to be public, make them public
- If you want two agents hostile to each other to both simultaneously be honest and not self-deceiving, provide them defensive rather than offensive power
- If you want to achieve world peace, consider building defensive but not offensive power
I like this a lot! A few scattered thoughts
- This theory predicts and explains "therapy-resistant dissociation", or the common finding that none of the "woo" exercises like focusing, meditation, etc, actually work. (c.f. Scott's experience as described in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/are-woo-non-responders-defective). If there's an active strategy of self-deception, you'd expect people to react negatively (or learn to not react via yet deeper levels of self-deception) to straightforward attempts to understand and untangle one's psychology.
- It matches and extends Robert Trivers' theory of self-deception, wherein he predicts that when your mind is the site of a conflict between two sub-parts, the winning one will always be subconscious, because the conscious mind is visible to the subconscious but not vice versa, and being visible makes you weak. Thus, counterintuitively, the mind we are conscious of - in your phrase the false self - is always the losing part.
- It connects to a common question I have for people doing meditation seriously - why exactly do you want to make the subconscious conscious? Why is it such a good thing to "become more conscious"? Now I can make the question mor
Now I can make the question more precise - why do you think it's safe to have more access to your thoughts and feelings than your subconscious gave you? And how exactly do you plan to deal with all the hostile telepaths out there (possibly including parts of yourself?).
An answer I'd give is that for a lot of people, most of the hostile telepaths are ultimately not that dangerous if you're confident enough to be able to deal with them. As Valentine mentioned, often it's enough to notice that you are actually not anymore in the kind of a situation where the strategies would be necessary.
Unfortunately, many of the strategies also behave in such a way as to make themselves necessary, or to prevent the person from noticing that they could be abandoned:
- Maybe I had a parent that wanted me to be dependent on them, so that they could control me. Even if I manage to break away from that parent, I may still have the belief that if someone wants to control me, then I have to genuinely believe that I cannot escape their control or they'll hurt me. This belief will tend to get me into abusive relationships... and then that strategy again becomes necessary for protecting me while in the relations
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1This reminds me… maybe muscle tension is a frequent solution to this problem?
Some context: Lately I've been wondering, Why do we often experience feelings as things in the body? For example, why do I feel anxiety in my chest rather than just “knowing” I'm anxious?
For example, my previous chronic neck pain seemed to be related to information that manifested in my neck:
I suspect the feeling in my neck represented the information "I have the choice to leave the social situation I'm in right now" and/or "I am disliking/suppressing myself."
Why might this feeling have manifested in my neck?
What if feelings use the body as a screen to communicate information with others? If you have a certain feeling in your chest, maybe others can see that.
BUT: What if a feeling represents information that your system doesn't want other people to know? Hostile telepaths problem.
Im my case:
The feeling represented the awareness that I was insecure, and there were probably situations (probably social situations) in which it partially benefited me to be partially unaware of the fact that I was insecure.
Well, in that case, your system could create muscle tension to "jam the signal...
2From the related book Elephant in the Brain:
Here is the thesis we’ll be exploring in this book: We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others.
Like if there's an email I keep freezing around. I can tell there's something there. I might even have some intuitive guesses about what it is!
…but I do not check. I don't introspect on whether my guesses feel right.
Instead, I hypothesize. What hostile telepath problem might someone in my shoes be trying to solve such that this behavior arises?
I tried doing this and it felt promising, and then I noticed a familiar feeling of wanting tell a person affected by my possible self-deception how I'd now solved the problem and would behave differently from now on. And I remembered that on each previous time when I'd had that feeling and told the other person something like that, my behavior had in fact not changed at all as a consequence.
And now I'm chuckling at myself.
I've been thinking along very similar lines for a while (my inside name for this is "mask theory of the mind": consciousness is a "mask"). But my personal conclusion is very different. While self-deception is a valid strategy in many circumstances, I think that it's too costly when trying to solve an extremely difficult high-stakes problem (e.g. stopping the AI apocalypse). Hence, I went in the other direction: trying to self-deceive little, and instead be self-honest about my[1] real motivations, even if they are "bad PR". In practice, this means never making excuses to myself such as "I wanted to do A, but I didn't have the willpower so I did B instead", but rather owning the fact I wanted to do B and thinking how to integrate this into a coherent long-term plan for my life.
My solution to "hostile telepaths" is diving other people into ~3 categories:
- People that are adversarial or untrustworthy, either individually or as representatives of the system on behalf of which they act. With such people, I have no compunction to consciously lie ("the Jews are not in the basement... I packed the suitcase myself...") or act adversarially.
- People that seem cooperative, so that they deser
1
1So in many cases, "trauma processing" can basically mean noticing you're not a child anymore. You have power. So you don't have to appease the hostile telepaths just because they're adults.
Yes, definitely. And this is also why it's often so important for the therapist - if this is done in the context of therapy - to exhibit unconditional positive regard toward the client. If the therapist is genuinely accepting of any thoughts and feelings that the client brings up, then that opens the door for the client's parts to start considering the possibility that maybe they can tell the truth and still be accepted. And once it has become possible to tell the truth to at least one person, it becomes possible to tell it to yourself as well.
(Though maybe I should say that the therapist needs to either experience unconditional positive regard toward the client, or successfully deceive themselves and the client into thinking that they do. Heh.)
One additional tangle is that often the client's issue is less about needing to act in a certain way, and more about needing to be a certain way. At some point, one frequently goes from "it's bad to break something and not be genuinely sorry on that partic...
I'm often surprised how little people notice, adapt to, or even punish self deception. It's not very hard to detect when someone's deceiving them self, people should notice more and disincentivise that
2By "psychopath" I mean someone with the cluster B personality disorder.
There isn't a cluster B personality disorder called psychopathy. Psychopathy has never been a formal disorder and the only time we've ever been close to it is way back in 1952 when the DSM-1 had a condition called "Sociopathic Personality Disturbance". The closest you'll get these days is Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is a garbage bin diagnosis that covers a fairly broad range of antisocial behaviours, including the thing most people have in mind when they say "psychopath", but also plenty of other personality archetypes that don't seem particularly psychopathic, like adrenaline junkies and people with impulse control issues.
Curated![1]
I think this is an excellent post on a tricky subject. I found here an articulate description of a great many internal experiences and thoughts I've had but have never well-named or seen written down clearly (e.g. 'occlumency' is a skill I have practiced a lot). I find this topic pretty hard to talk and think openly about, in large part due to the adversarial dynamics, so I am especially grateful for this post (and the ensuing discussion section). One of my favorite posts on LW this year, I think.
Personally, I frame the "Having power" solu...
it's not information about whether I'm secretly trying to two-box
It's still Bayesian evidence. Someone with a different policy (always deeply investigating themselves), could get Omega-C to have a higher credence of them one-boxing. We'd have to specify how sure Omega has to be to offer the large payment (and what priors Omega has) to know if the choice of policy matters.
The fact that Bob has this policy in the first place is more likely when he's being self-deceptive. Sure, some people will glomorize even when they have nothing to hide, but more often it will be the result of Bob noticing that he's the sort of person who might have something to hide.
It's a general rule that if E is strong evidence for X, then ~E is at least weak evidence for ~X.
This jogged a lot of thinking about how it fits into various modalities. I think the lack of an actual solution to hostile mind-reading might be a flaw in several modalities I've tried which could be part of why I've struggled to have the progress I made with them stick. Many of these at least point toward alternative methods of dealing with self-deception which could be useful and I think authentic relating suggests at least one idea for an alternative method of occlumency which feels a little more virtuous (definitely felt some aversion to your solutions...
I can secondhand lend some affirmation to the newcomb case. A friend with DID from a childhood with a BPD mom later became a meditator and eventually rendered transparent the shell game that was being played with potentially dangerous preferences and goals to keep them out of consciousness, since the mom was extremely good at telepathy and was hostile for the standard BPD reason: other beings with other goals are inherently threatening to their extremely fragile sense of their own preferences and goals.
Another solution is illegible-ization/orthogonalizatio...
11I think this is a great outline of how these strategies form. A very similar idea is described in The Elephant in the Brain, but this is straightforwardly written and more visceral in a way I felt the book (and most other attempts to describe it) lacked. Kudos!
The drive to be "perfectly rational" and push all slivers of self-deception out with force is, I think, one of the core psychological errors made in rationalist circles (including the writing) for exactly the reasons you lined out. Well explained!
Honesty, and specifically self-honesty, is held as one...
Organizations and communities can also face hostile telepaths. My pet theory that sort of crystalized while reading this is that p-hacking is academia’s response to a hostile telepath that banned publication of negative results.
This of course sucks for non traditional researchers and especially journalists who don’t even subconsciously know that p=0.05002 r=1e-7 “breakthrough in finding relationship between milk consumption and toenail fungus” is code for “We have conclusively found no effect and want to broadcast to the community that there is no effect here; yet we cannot ever consciously acknowledging that we found nothing because our mortgages depend on fooling a hostile telepath into believing this is something”
This is coherent with my experience. I'm pretty sure there are other problems solved by self-deception other than hostile telepaths. One other such problems solved by self-deception which I'm pretty sure I've seen in people is preserving motivation: if something is really important for me and I need to put in a lot of effort to make it happen and probability of success is very low (let's say epsilon), and if know that the probability of success is epsilon would totally annihilate my motivation to work towards it, then maybe hiding to myself that low probab...
My experience is very different. I feel unitary, without any IFS or jungian shadow or other sort of subconscious parts trying to deceive my conscious self. I violate quite a lot of social norms without feeling any shame or guilt about it, because I've got an 'internal scorecard'. So long as I'm true to my own values/morality, and I can protect myself with some combination of power / occlumency / disengaging, all three of which come easily to me, social norms don't matter in private.
This post does a good job of laying out compelling arguments for thoughts adjacent to areas I've previously already enjoyed thinking about.
For the record, this sentence popped into my head while reading this: "Wait, but what if I'm Omega-V, and [Valentine] is a two boxer?"
(Edit: the context for this thought is my previous thoughts having read other posts by Valentine, which I find both quite elucidating, but also somehow have left me feeling a bit creeped out; that being said, my opinion about this post itself is strongly positive)
I like this except for the reference to "Newcomblike" problems, which, I feel, is misleading and obfuscates the whole point of Newcomb's paradox. Newcomb's paradox is about decision theory - If you allow cheating then it is no longer Newcomb's paradox. This article is about psychology (and possibly deceptive AI) - cheating is always a possible solution .
Regarding this
Such as the moms in the abusive partners example above: each one could acknowledge her self-deception once it was safe for her abusive partner to know too. She got enough power (financial or social) to protect herself and her child, making the telepathic scan no longer a dire threat.
I would add that most abusive people don't really like crushing their loved ones and it is sometimes easy to get them to stop, eg by having a peer of the abuser get a private word with the two parties separately. I think it is common for there to be simple mis...
I think this means that if you care both about (a) wholesomeness and (b) ending self-deception, it's helpful to give yourself full permission to lie as a temporary measure as needed. Creating space for yourself so you can (say) coherently build power such that it's safe for you to eventually be fully honest.
The first sentence here, I think, verbalizes something important.
The second [instrumental-power] is a bad justification, to the extent that we're talking about game-theoretic power [as opposed to power over reductionistic, non-mentalizing Nature]. LD...
It is worth noting that Ziz has already proposed the same idea in False Faces, although I think Valentine did a better job of systematizing and explaining the reasons for its existence.
Another interesting direction of thought is the connection to Gregory Bateson’s theory that double binds cause schizophrenia. Spitballing here: it could be that a double bind triggers an attempt to construct a "false face" (a self-deceptive module), similar to a normal situation involving a hostile telepath. However, because the double bind is contradictory, the internal mec...
Very powerful reasoning. I would add that a relevant form of self-deception that should be investigated in this framework is religious faith, given its place as as foundational to societies worldwide.
Religious faith seems like an optimal form of solution to hostile telepaths problem, in certain contexts it seems like a mixture of the three solutions you outlined. (Newcomblike self-deception, Having power and Occlumency)
Religious faith seems to provide psychological power through feelings of absolute certainty and over-confidence that religious people...
I think this is really along the wrong path and misunderstanding a lot of things, but so far along the incorrect path of thought and misunderstanding so much, that it's hard to untangle
Epistemic status: model-building based on observation, with a few successful unusual predictions. Anecdotal evidence has so far been consistent with the model. This puts it at risk of seeming more compelling than the evidence justifies just yet. Caveat emptor.
Imagine you're a very young child. Around, say, three years old.
You've just done something that really upsets your mother. Maybe you were playing and knocked her glasses off the table and they broke.
Of course you find her reaction uncomfortable. Maybe scary. You're too young to have detailed metacognitive thoughts, but if you could reflect on why you're scared, you wouldn't be confused: you're scared of how she'll react.
She tells you to say you're sorry.
You utter the magic words, hoping that will placate her.
And she narrows her eyes in suspicion.
"You sure don't look sorry. Say it and mean it."
Now you have a serious problem. You don't have an internal "actually mean it" button. And yet here's Mom peering into your soul and demanding that you both have that button and press it. Trying to appease her didn't work. She needs you to be different — and she's checking.
What can you do now?
This is a template for what I've come to call "the hostile telepaths problem". I think it's a common feature of social problems. The hostile telepaths problem is when you're dealing with a being (a) who can kind of read your internal experiences and (b) whom you don't trust won't make your situation worse due to what they find in you.
There are lots of solutions to the hostile telepaths problem. I don't claim to know all of them. But recognizing some common ones has helped clarify a lot of my thinking — particularly around self-deception and akrasia.
And getting very clear on the nature of the problem makes identifying real solutions way easier. This fact produces some previously-surprising-to-me predictions, especially for trauma processing and for making emotionally difficult decisions.
I'll try to spell out what I mean with some theory and a few examples.
Newcomblike self-deception
There's one really tricky solution to the hostile telepaths problem. It deserves some special front-loaded attention before I name some other solutions.
Here I'll try to spell out its logic with a modification of Newcomb's Problem.
Suppose that instead of Omega, you're dealing with Omega-V. Omega-V is an extremely good but imperfect predictor of someone's box choice.
Through some clever sleuthing, you deduce why. Omega-V is scanning only folks' visual thinking for a little while prior to their box choice. It's extremely good at tracking the difference between the mental visualizations of one-boxers vs. two-boxers… provided they don't know Omega-V is scanning specifically their visual thinking.
So now you have an edge. Maybe you can trick Omega-V. Maybe you can visually think like a one-boxer and use other modes of reasoning (like inner talk) to plan on actually two-boxing. You just have to be very careful to have any "leaks" of reasoning into visualization look totally normal for a one-boxer.
If you decide it's worth the risk to try for this deception, the visual reasoning part of your mind has to be kind of siloed from the rest. It's like you have a subagent that truly honestly believes you're a one-boxer. It's the non-visual reasoning parts of you that are aware of the real plan.
Another way of saying this is: in normal Newcomb's Problem, you can't tell whether you're in the real world being faced with Omega's offer or if you're instead Omega's simulation of real-you and you're revealing what real-you will do. The situation is similar with Omega-V, but in this case it's specifically your visual reasoner (viewed as kind of a subagent) that has to be built in such a way that it can't tell whether it's a simulation. Many other parts of you can tell perfectly well what's going on![1] But for the deception to work, the way in which you plan on two-boxing cannot be something your inner visual reasoner can even deduce.
Now, let's take this one step further.
Let's suppose we're instead dealing with Omega-C. Also an imperfect predictor. But this time you learn that Omega-C scans specifically all of — and only — your conscious thinking.
At this point, the right strategy is to consciously decide you're going to one-box.
But some people still find themselves two-boxing and winning. Even while consciously intending to one-box. Sometimes they get confused and say the wrong thing or push the wrong button. Some of them trip and accidentally grab both boxes. Some laugh and grab both boxes and find them both full.
Assuming that at least some of those outcomes are strategic… how?
Hint: now you (by which I mean conscious parts of you) are maybe the siloed part. Basically an illusion meant to trick Omega-C.
The thing is, you cannot tell. Because if you could, then the deception — if it were there — wouldn't work.
Which is to say: on the inside, you cannot tell the difference between running this Omega-C deception strategy and honestly truly just being a one-boxer.
And furthermore, it's actually to your advantage not to check. Even if you were to find some way of being able to tell the difference!
But because of that, if you're aware of this deception strategy, it might work best if you honestly (from your perspective) look for some way to tell if you're running it. Actively trying to "come clean". That's a pretty powerful signal to Omega-C that you really are a one-boxer.
So if you can make it so that it seems to you like you really are looking, including accounting for awareness of possible non-conscious "shadow" reasoning, and you find none, but you still two-box in the end…
…well, you win!
…while the conscious parts of you are confused and surprised. And possibly quite dismayed.
Sketch of a real-world version
I call this pattern "Newcomblike self-deception" as a nod to Nate Soares' point that Newcomblike problems are the norm.
The deal is that people are kind of telepathic, in the sense of using things like vocal tone and body language and microexpressions and so on to intuitively deduce what might otherwise be hidden in others. They're scanning for things like intent and strategy and emotional tone. Often this telepathy is in service of synching up ("Hey, you seem upset, is something wrong?"), but it doubles as threat detection.
This telepathy is imperfect. Which means that sometimes Newcomblike self-deception is in fact a viable strategy.
I'd like to name one way I think this type of self-deception can actually happen in a person. It might be the main way it happens, or it might be rare. I honestly don't know. But it's one I've in fact seen in myself[2] and I think I've observed in some others.
By some mysterious method, it's possible to contract your awareness — by which I mean, the space of things you're actually aware of can be smaller than the space of sensory inputs (including mental experiences like thoughts and memories). Lots of people experience this when watching TV (losing awareness of the room), or when deep in flow work (not noticing hunger for hours while programming).
If you construct a sort of fake self in your mind, and then contract your awareness around that fake self, it can seem to you on the inside like you really are the way depicted in the fake self. Like it's not fake, it really is who you are.
If you also build up explanations to your fictitious self about why things outside that fiction either are consistent with it or don't matter, then you both (a) can honestly display to hostile telepaths that you (here meaning fake you) are being fully sincere in not hiding anything and (b) possibly give the telepaths ways of discounting the unavoidable signals that you (here meaning you holistically) are hiding something.
For instance, as a child whose mother says to you "Say you're sorry and mean it", you might be able to strategically misinterpret your fear of Mom's Wrath as "being really sorry". As long as you're not aware that that's what you're doing, it might work very well! She might read your distress as you really meaning it. ("I'm sorry I'm sorry I won't do it again please Mom I'm sorry…!") And you can keep yourself from being aware of this whole strategy by keeping your awareness contracted on the fictitious version of yourself that's "bad" and "very sorry", and keeping your understanding of the real problem outside of your awareness.
Possible examples in real life
Here are some examples I think I've actually seen — in culture, in others, and in myself:
Omega-C'sothers' scrutiny here by eliciting care & concern when you might otherwise get caught.I'm not trying to be exhaustive here. There are tons more examples.
Other solutions to the problem
We can't actually penetrate our own Newcomblike self-deception without having another viable (to us) strategy for dealing with hostile telepath problems.
However, if we do have another strategy in a given instance, then in that instance it can be safe to look. The self-deception can lift.
Having power
One alternative strategy type is, coming to trust that you're able to handle the consequences of being accurately seen.
Such as the moms in the abusive partners example above: each one could acknowledge her self-deception once it was safe for her abusive partner to know too. She got enough power (financial or social) to protect herself and her child, making the telepathic scan no longer a dire threat.
I think a lot of "trauma processing" amounts to this self-empowerment strategy. But it's more like, noticing you already have power. I bet a lot of foundational self-deception habits come from being a child faced with telepaths (adults) who have a lot of power over them. A kid who deals with Mother's "Say sorry and mean it" demand with self-deception might then grow up to become really apologetic and "have low self-esteem". But it's just an old strategy for dealing with Mother that hasn't made contact with the fact that Mother isn't that powerful over them anymore. It's now actually just fine for her to know they're not "really sorry". If this raw physical truth comes into contact with the impulse to "be sorry", the mental firewall might simply collapse, and the mislabeling will stop.
So in many cases, "trauma processing" can basically mean noticing you're not a child anymore. You have power. So you don't have to appease the hostile telepaths just because they're adults. They can just know your internal state, and you (trust that you) can handle the consequences of them knowing.
Building emotional resilience is like this, I think. If you (trust that you) can handle the emotional and somatic sensations of others being upset with you, then you don't have to hide the parts of you that might make them upset. They can just be upset. While you might not like it, you know you'll be fine.
(Not to say anything about what's ultimately good to do here. Caring about others' reactions totally makes sense for other reasons, like the health of the community we're in. Here I'm focusing specifically on what can solve the hostile telepaths problem without self-deception.)
Occlumency
Another solution type is occlumency. Which is to say, if you trust you can keep your real goals and/or strategies hidden from a hostile telepath even if you consciously know what your goals/strategies are, then it's safe to consciously know them.
(This is something like switching from Omega-C to Omega-V.)
A classic example is in WWII when Nazis come knocking and ask if you're harboring any Jews. The analog of one-boxing here is just not harboring Jews. Newcomblike self-deception doesn't seem plausible to me here. You very much don't have the power to handle the consequences of being caught "two-boxing". So if you're helping refugees, you probably have to lie convincingly. And if self-deception were a plausible strategy here, you wouldn't need it to the extent that you trust your ability to hide the truth from the Nazis even if you know the truth.
I think many psychopaths[3] use occlumency quite a lot. I've met some who know full well that they're trying to manipulate others and are presenting a façade to do so. It works for them in part because they don't send implicit distress signals around thinking they're bad for being manipulative: they're not nervous, so they don't need to explain their nervousness away.
There's a moral tangle here. Honesty is important for connection, integrity, and communal health. But you might not trust that it's safe to reveal the truth to a hostile telepath.[4] In this case, the moral injunction not to lie makes occlumency harder (because of fear of being caught, plus doubt about whether you should be using occlumency at all). This situation can leave self-deception as your only viable solution — which, incidentally, means you're still not being honest!
I think this means that if you care both about (a) wholesomeness and (b) ending self-deception, it's helpful to give yourself full permission to lie as a temporary measure as needed. Creating space for yourself so you can (say) coherently build power such that it's safe for you to eventually be fully honest.
Solution space is maybe vast
I've named three solutions to the hostile telepaths problem:
These aren't the only ones. A pretty simple one is simply running away and avoiding them. Another is investigating whether the telepaths are in fact hostile and discovering they're not (if that's true). Yet another is to jam telepathic scans with emotional charge that backs privacy norms. ("It's none of your business whether I 'really am' sorry!")
The important part isn't that we have a full taxonomy. That might be helpful, I don't know. The important part, as far as I'm concerned, is that by being very clear about what problem we're solving, we can tell when something is — and is not — a solution.
Ending the need for self-deception
By this model, to end (Newcomblike) self-deception, we have to remove the need for it. This means solving each instance of the hostile telepath problem some other way.
This is kind of tricky in practice. When you use self-deception to deal with a hostile telepath, you can't know that that's what you're doing. You[5] can't even know which hostile telepath problem you're solving! So how do you come up with another solution?
I don't have a provably general answer, but I have a pretty general approach that makes sense to me and has clearly worked several times. I'll share that approach here.
Welcome self-deception
First is welcoming that I'll self-deceive.
But this isn't "Well, I'm going to do it anyway, so I might as well be okay with it." That's nonsense: you probably can't just "be okay" with it. And trying probably makes the problem worse![6]
I mean something more wholehearted. If I self-deceive, it's because it's the best solution I have to some hostile telepath problem. If I don't have a better solution, then I want to keep deceiving myself. I don't just tolerate it. I actively want it there. I'll fight to keep it there!
This is somewhat akin to dealing with Omega-C by saying:
This relieves pressure. If I have some sense that I'm self-deceiving, and my attitude is to back the deception instead of trying to penetrate it, then the hidden part of me running the deception doesn't have to engage in an internal arms race with me. We become same-sided.
Look away when directed to
Once I really back my own self-deception, it becomes easier to notice signs I'm doing it.
This works way better if I trust my occlumency skills here. If I don't feel like I have to reveal the self-deceptions I notice to others, and I trust that I can and will hide it from others if need be, then I'm still safe from hostile telepaths.
Seeing where I self-deceive doesn't mean I see what the deception is. In practice it's more indirect than that. What I mean are things like:
I don't mean this as an exhaustive list. Nor do I mean it as things to look out for. Nor do I mean that these always imply that self-deception is going on.
What I mean is, there are things a person does to maintain self-deception. If you basically promise the strategic not-conscious-to-you part that you really will respect the strategy, then it doesn't have to keep you so firmly out of the loop. Then you can potentially start picking up on some signposts like these ones.
Part of the deal is, when you notice such a possible signpost, you look away. You notice it and you drop the inquiry. Because until you have a non-self-deceptive strategy for whatever the real problem is, you don't want to break the one strategy you have.
For instance, sometimes I'll think about responding to an email… and I start getting sleepy. If I push, I start wanting to watch YouTube. These are signs that something in me doesn't trust it's safe for me to look there. Maybe it involves a decision that requires me to ask myself an unsafe question. I don't know — and I don't try to figure it out. At least not right away. Instead I back off and direct my attention elsewhere. Maybe I go cook something, or take a walk. I consciously distract myself from the tension point.
In my experience, this alone can often eliminate most of the stress involved in self-deception. It becomes fine. Annoying, glitchy, but no longer fraught with anxiety and self-doubt.
Hypothesize without checking
After a while I kind of get a "negative space" sense of what the self-deception is about. I continue not to look, out of something like respect. But I still have a hint.
Like if there's an email I keep freezing around. I can tell there's something there. I might even have some intuitive guesses about what it is!
…but I do not check. I don't introspect on whether my guesses feel right.
Instead, I hypothesize. What hostile telepath problem might someone in my shoes be trying to solve such that this behavior arises?
For instance, let's suppose the person is asking for me to run an event this weekend. I might hypothesize like this, intentionally referring to myself in third person:
Importantly, I am not introspectively checking. I'm not asking if I think the above really is what's going on with me. I'm just noticing that, viewing myself in third person, this model does seem to fit the evidence.
I'm also not trying to construct a plan to verify what's going on! Here Nature wants her secrets kept. I do not try to peek under her skirt.
Instead, I notice what Valentine (i.e., me in third person) in this hypothetical could maybe do instead of Newcomblike self-deception. What would be a viable alternative strategy for him?
At this point I could just implement this possible solution. I don't have to check if it's relevant to my situation: there's not much cost in leaving myself a line of retreat this way.
If it turns out there's been Newcomblike self-deception going on, and if this hypothetical solution really did resolve the core problem that the self-deception was solving, then the self-deception should basically just lift.[7]
And if I still have an ugh field around the email, then I haven't addressed the real problem yet. Which is fine. Not ideal, but I'm still going to back any self-deception that might be there while I don't have a better option!
I can repeat this process. Hypothesize without checking, implement solutions that would work in the hypothetical, and find out what happens.
…at least unless and until I start getting frozen about this process. That might mean I'm getting too close to understanding the strategy before it's safe to do so.
Then I back off.
Does this solve self-deception?
I don't know.
I didn't originally set out to make sense of self-deception. I was just trying to understand why people sometimes view themselves as flawed and in need of fixing.
It just turned out that that question was tied to a lot of others. Self-deception being one of them. A lot of them unified by considering the problem of hostile telepaths.
It seems worth noting that a bunch of the method I describe here — particularly the "hypothesize without checking" part — is derived. It amounted to a prediction that I tested and discovered worked as the model anticipated.
Likewise, occlumency being helpful. There might be other explanations for why getting better at privacy makes more thoughts thinkable. But I derived it from this one. And, again, it (anecdotally) seems to have worked as predicted.
These approaches work remarkably well on shame too, by the way. I might write a separate post on shame. Its logic is a bit different, but with a few adjustments I've found that shame dissolves extremely well in contact with these ideas.
With all that said, I don't think I'm in a position to say that I've solved self-deception. I don't know how I could know that. I'm not even convinced I've solved Newcomblike self-deception! My method seems plausibly general, but I don't have even the sketch of a necessity argument yet.
So, more work needed.
Summary
It seems to me that self-deception is solving a real problem. If we don't solve that real problem differently in a given instance, then in that instance we can't stop self-deceiving.
It seems to me that the real problem is (at least sometimes) hostile telepaths.
When I view hostile telepaths as the real problem I'm trying to solve, the perspective suggests what alternative solutions might look like, and it lets me check whether a given approach even can work as a solution.
And it seems to me that when I implement those alternative solutions, the result is sometimes that self-deception visibly falls away, non-mysteriously. It becomes obvious to me what was going on, and why.
I don't know if this model captures all cases of what we might want to call "self-deception". Maybe it does. But my impression is that it at least captures some cases that matter, and quite a lot of them.
Note that having non-visual ways of thinking isn't enough to know you're not a simulation. What tells you you're not an Omega-V simulation is that you can reason in ways that (a) cannot be derived from your visual thinking and (b) change what you in fact do.
Of course, this is something I became aware of after unraveling the structure in a few cases. It's not something that reveals itself while the structure works.
By "psychopath" I mean someone with the cluster B personality disorder. I don't mean something derogatory. Nor am I (necessarily) referring to Gervais Principle psychopaths.
To be clear, "hostile telepath" is a role, not an identity. Someone is a hostile telepath to you when they're scanning your mind and you don't trust they won't create problems for you based on what they find. Someone being a hostile telepath is less like them being a criminal and more like them being your lover or your foe. I say this because it's not a solution to identify "the hostile telepaths" in a community and reform or expel them; that approach is gibberish made of confused reification.
If I were carefully describing this from the outside, I'd say that your false self can't know. "Self-deception" is really false self deception (as a strategy for deceiving hostile telepaths). The thing is, on the inside it doesn't feel like "your false self". That's the whole point! I'm describing this model in a way that's hopefully legible to the internal experience of actually running the strategy. Otherwise any instructions might make theoretical sense but won't be actionable. Sadly, this way of talking results in some ambiguities — precisely because the whole point of the strategy is to make something difficult to see clearly. Hopefully you can correct for this confusion as needed, sort of shifting to third-person and renaming things when the theory isn't clear.
Why? Well, you need to "be okay" with it. But you're not. So what do you do with the fact that you're not okay with it? Loosely speaking, you've just turned your own conscious mind into an internal hostile telepath!
In practice I find that not only does this work quite often, but now it sometimes works once I think of the alternative solution. I don't always need to implement it first. It feels to me like this result comes from having built internal trust that I really can and will respect my need for some strategy.