Background: As can be seen from some of the comments on this post, many people in the LessWrong community take an extreme stance on lying. A few days before I posted this, I was at a meetup where we played the game Resistance, and one guy announced before the game began that he had a policy of never lying even when playing games like that. It's such members of the LessWrong community that this post was written for. I'm not trying to encourage basically honest people with the normal view of white lies that they need to give up being basically honest.


Mr. Potter, you sometimes make a game of lying with truths, playing with words to conceal your meanings in plain sight. I, too, have been known to find that amusing. But if I so much as tell you what I hope we shall do this day, Mr. Potter, you will lie about it. You will lie straight out, without hesitation, without wordplay or hints, to anyone who asks about it, be they foe or closest friend. You will lie to Malfoy, to Granger, and to McGonagall. You will speak, always and without hesitation, in exactly the fashion you would speak if you knew nothing, with no concern for your honor. That also is how it must be.

- Rational!Quirrell, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

This post isn't about HMPOR, so I won't comment on the fictional situation the quote comes from. But in many real-world situations, it's excellent advice.

If you're a gay teenager with homophobic parents, and there's a real chance they'd throw you out on the street if they found out you were gay, you should probably lie to them about it. Even in college, if you're still financially dependent on them, I think it's okay to lie. The minute you're no longer financially dependent on them, you should absolutely come out for your sake and the sake of the world. But it's OK to lie if you need to to keep your education on-track.

Oh, maybe you could get away with just shutting up and hoping the topic doesn't come up. When asked about dating, you could try to evade while being technically truthful: "There just aren't any girls at my school I really like." "What about _____? Why don't you ask her out?" "We're just friends." That might work. But when asked directly "are you gay?" and the wrong answer could seriously screw-up your life, I wouldn't bet too much on your ability to "lie with truths," as Quirrell would say.

I start with this example because the discussions I've seen on the ethics of lying on LessWrong (and everywhere, actually) tend to focus on the extreme cases: the now-cliché "Nazis at the door" example, or even discussion of whether you'd lie with the world at stake. The "teen with homophobic parents" case, on the other hand, might have actually happened to someone you know. But even this case is extreme compared to most of the lies people tell on a regular basis.

Widely-cited statistics claim that the average person lies once per day. I recently saw a new study (that I can't find at the moment) that disputed this, and claimed most people lie rather less often than that, but it still found most people lie fairly often. These lies are mostly "white lies" to, say, spare others' feelings. Most people have no qualms about those kind of lies. So why do discussions of the ethics of lying so often focus on the extreme cases, as if those were the only ones where lying is maybe possibly morally permissible?

At LessWrong there've been discussions of several different views all described as "radical honesty." No one I know of, though, has advocated Radical Honesty as defined by psychotherapist Brad Blanton, which (among other things) demands that people share every negative thought they have about other people. (If you haven't, I recommend reading A. J. Jacobs on Blanton's movement.) While I'm glad no one here is thinks Blanton's version of radical honesty is a good idea, a strict no-lies policy can sometimes have effects that are just as disastrous.

A few years ago, for example, when I went to see the play my girlfriend had done stage crew for, and she asked what I thought of it. She wasn't satisfied with my initial noncommittal answers, so she pressed for more. Not in a "trying to start a fight" way; I just wasn't doing a good job of being evasive. I eventually gave in and explained why I thought the acting had sucked, which did not make her happy. I think incidents like that must have contributed to our breaking up shortly thereafter. The breakup was a good thing for other reasons, but I still regret not lying to her about what I thought of the play.

Yes, there are probably things I could've said in that situation that would have been not-lies and also would have avoided upsetting her. Sam Harris, in his book Lyingspends a lot of arguing against lying in that way: he takes situations where most people would be tempted to tell a white lie, and suggesting ways around it. But for that to work, you need to be good at striking the delicate balance between saying too little and saying too much, and framing hard truths diplomatically. Are people who lie because they lack that skill really less moral than people who are able to avoid lying because they have it?

Notice the signaling issue here: Sam Harris' book is a subtle brag that he has the skills to tell people the truth without too much backlash. This is especially true when Harris gives examples from his own life, like the time he told a friend "No one would ever call you 'fat,' but I think you could probably lose twenty-five pounds." and his friend went and did it rather than getting angry. Conspicuous honesty also overlaps with conspicuous outrage, the signaling move that announces (as Steven Pinker put it) "I'm so talented, wealthy, popular, or well-connected that I can afford to offend you."

If you're highly averse to lying, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to convince you to tell white lies more often. But I will implore you to do one thing: accept other people's right to lie to you. About some topics, anyway. Accept that some things are none of your business, and sometimes that includes the fact that there's something which is none of your business.

Or: suppose you ask someone for something, they say "no," and you suspect their reason for saying "no" is a lie. When that happens, don't get mad or press them for the real reason. Among other things, they may be operating on the assumptions of guess culture, where your request means you strongly expected a "yes" and you might not think their real reason for saying "no" was good enough. Maybe you know you'd take an honest refusal well (even if it's "I don't want to and don't think I owe you that"), but they don't necessarily know that. And maybe you think you'd take an honest refusal well, but what if you're lying to yourself?

If it helps to be more concrete: Some men will react badly to being turned down for a date. Some women too, but probably more men, so I'll make this gendered. And also because dealing with someone who won't take "no" for an answer is a scarier experience with the asker is a man and the person saying "no" is a woman. So I sympathize with women who give made-up reasons for saying "no" to dates, to make saying "no" easier.

Is it always the wisest decision? Probably not. But sometimes, I suspect, it is. And I'd advise men to accept that women doing that is OK. Not only that, I wouldn't want to be part of a community with lots of men who didn't get things like that. That's the kind of thing I have in mind when I say to respect other people's right to lie to you.

All this needs the disclaimer that some domains should be lie-free zones. I value the truth and despise those who would corrupt intellectual discourse with lies. Or, as Eliezer once put it:

We believe that scientists should always tell the whole truth about science. It's one thing to lie in everyday life, lie to your boss, lie to the police, lie to your lover; but whoever lies in a journal article is guilty of utter heresy and will be excommunicated.

I worry this post will be dismissed as trivial. I simultaneously worry that, even with the above disclaimer, someone is going to respond, "Chris admits to thinking lying is often okay, now we can't trust anything he says!" If you're thinking of saying that, that's your problem, not mine. Most people will lie to you occasionally, and if you get upset about it you're setting yourself up for a lot of unhappiness. And refusing to trust someone who lies sometimes isn't actually very rational; all but the most prolific liars don't lie anything like half the time, so what they say is still significant evidence, most of the time. (Maybe such declarations-of-refusal-to-trust shouldn't be taken as arguments so much as threats meant to coerce more honesty than most people feel bound to give.)

On the other hand, if we ever meet in person, I hope you realize I might lie to you. Failure to realize a statement could be a white lie can create some terribly awkward situations.

Edits: Changed title, added background, clarified the section on accepting other people's right to lie to you (partly cutting and pasting from this comment).

Edit round 2: Added link to paper supporting claim that the average person lies once per day.

White Lies
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There are certain lies that I tell over and over again, where I'm 99% sure lying is the morally correct answer. Stereotypical example: my patient is lying in a lake of poop, or is ringing the call bell for the third time in 15 minutes to tell me that they're thirsty or in pain or need a kleenex, and they're embarrassed and upset because they're sure I must be frustrated and mad that they're making me do so much work. "Of course I don't mind," I've said over and over again. "This doesn't bother me. I've got plenty of time. I just want you to be comfortable, that's my job." When it's 4 am and I desperately want to go on break and eat something, none of these things are true. But it's my job, and I want to want to do it, so the fact that sometimes I desperately don't want to do it is kind of moot. But the last thing a patient in the ICU needs to hear from their nurse is "yes, I'm pissed that you shat in the bed again because I was about to go on break and now I can't and I'm hungry and cranky." I keep that to myself.

...Other than that, I generally don't lie to friends, although I do lie by omission, especially when it comes to my irrational feelings of fr... (read more)

When a student asks me to write her a letter of recommendation and expresses some concern that this will be a bother for me I have said "Don't worry, that's part of my job" to signal that the request is appropriate.

Upvoted for a rare case of lying where I find myself unable to suggest a good alternative way to not lie, even for people with high verbal SAT scores.

"Don't worry about it."

Imperatives are often a nice fallback.

But is that literally as good for a patient in an ICU who really, really needs to not shut up about these things? i mean, in that situation, it would probably occur to me that the nurse might still be lying... but telling a lie like that is still a kind of permission to bother her which "Don't worry about it" isn't.

Agreed. One of the things I think is wrong with lying in general is that it can mess up the incentives for behaviours you want to see more of (i.e. a white lie to your friend, claiming to like her awful haircut, doesn't do anything to help your friend improve her future haircuts.) In my example, I'm lying with respect to my first-order desires, but telling the truth according to my second-order desires. I may first-order want a few more minutes to drink tea and socialize with the other nurses, but I don't endorse myself wanting that, and I certainly don't want to encourage my patients to not call me because they're worried I'm too busy or tired or cranky. I second-order want to encourage the behaviour where my patients call me for all the little things and 90% of the time it's annoying and stupid but 10% of the time it's super important.

If I ever had a patient with a rationalist background, maybe I could explain all of that, but maybe not even then; most people aren't at their best for following complex logic when they're loopy on drugs or having trouble breathing or whatnot. So I go for the emotional reassurance, because that gets through. Still working on different phrasings, and I don't always succeed; I was helping out another nurse with her patient who had diarrhea, putting her on the bedpan every half hour, and at one point she fell asleep and pooped in the bed while asleep and then cried with frustration the whole time I changed her, and I wasn't able to reassure her.

You can expand "Don't worry about it" to include permission to bother her. "Don't worry about it - please never give it a second thought if you need me for anything. That's what I'm here to do."

8private_messaging
I don't think "This doesn't bother me" gets parsed literally anyway. In either case what ever you say they are pretty sure it is annoying for you, albeit they do want reassurance that it is not so annoying that you would snap "yes this is annoying!".
[-][anonymous]140

Well, that's a good idea right there. You could tell them: "Please don't be embarrassed, and don't hesitate to call me. You're in an ICU and it's very important that you communicate with us, even if it's just a matter of discomfort. You shouldn't assume you can tell the difference between something trivial and something serious, or something that requires immediate attention and not."

[-]Benquo140

I would interpret that as a straightforward confirmation that it was in fact annoying. There would be no resulting awkwardness but it would definitely not make me more likely to speak up again.

8Raoul589
"Taking care of you is my sacred duty. I care about you. It is important that you tell me if there is something wrong." This is true literally and in spirit.
0[anonymous]
To invoke a cheesy meme, I wish I could upvote twice, once for phrasing something that doesn't involve telling a white lie, and the second time for consciously reinforcing that patient care is a sacred duty.
1Jiro
I would count it as a white lie. It's literally accurate, but it implies a number of things. Some of those things are correct (you consider it important to care for the patient and be informed of any problems), but some of those things are incorrect (you are not annoyed). It isn't disqualified as a lie just because you believe that your annoyance is not important.
1Raoul589
I don't think that the nurse is implying that he is not annoyed. Both the patient and the nurse recognise that the 'crapping the bed' situation is an annoying one, and the nurse is not denying that. The nurse is simply making it clear that his annoyance is a secondary concern, and that instead the welfare of the patient is the primary concern. The nurse genuinely believes that his own annoyance is relatively less important, and he is conveying that literally to the patient. This is actually the true situation, so I am confused about how you think he is lying, even implicitly.
0Lumifer
If you go sufficiently upthread, you'll find that it started with a post by Swimmer963 who is a nurse and is relating her own experience. In particular, she says:
0Raoul589
Sorry, I should clarify. I was saying that: Is precisely something that Swimmer963 could say even though she's annoyed. She doesn't have to deny that she's annoyed, or even imply it. In fact it's probably futile to try... of course she's annoyed, and the patient suspects that. That is exactly the motivation for her lie in the first place. The statement above nevertheless conveys her overall commitment to the patient's wellbeing, and encourages the patient to understand that "Obviously, my nurse is annoyed about the crap in the bed, but there are more important factors at play here." As an extra bonus, I don't think it's a lie, hence providing a response to Eliezer's implied challenge. On the contrary, her claimed standard response: Contains three lies, none of which will probably even be believed by the patient: My point is that Swimmer963's strategy probably doesn't really achieve her goals, lying or no lying, and in my original post I was suggesting a possible (honest) alternative.
0Lumifer
If a nurse started talking to me about her "sacred duty", I certainly would not believe her.
2Raoul589
What about if she just said: 'duty'?
0Lumifer
That's not quite sufficient as it's the word "sacred" which does the heavy lifting. Saying it's her duty isn't particularly meaningful for a nurse -- it's her job, that's what she is paid to do. She is not doing you a favour, cleaning up shit is right there in her job description.
1Raemon
Would you believe them more or less than if they said they're not annoyed that you shat the bed?
0Lumifer
That depends. Mostly on the non-verbal clues that accompany the statement, but also on what do I know about this particular nurse.
8brazil84
Well the classic lie in medicine is when a sibling confides in the doctor that he doesn't want to donate a kidney to his brother or sister and he's just getting tested out of family pressure. I understand that in such a situation, the doctor will normally lie and say that they ran the tests and the sibling is not a compatible donor.

Actually, regardless of the reason, they just say that "no suitable donor is available." If pressed, they say they never release potential donors' medical information to recipients, for confidentiality and to protect donors from coercion.

3brazil84
That's interesting . . . what happens if the potential donor asks for (and is willing to sign a release) so that his medical information can be released?
4Kawoomba
Depends. Different countries have different laws governing such. For the most part, if the hospital sees any legal liability at all, they'll do the standard CYA. Signing waivers / releases often doesn't do a whole lot, some of your rights you cannot sign away. Regarding your question, with releasing medical information, such waivers shouldn't be a problem, although the transplant scenario may be a special case. Regardless of the legalese, transplant doctors typically get to know you quite well, and more information slips out (implicitly and explicitly) than may be allowed by law (HIPAA be damned). Nullum ius sine actione, as they say. If noone complains, noone sues. Bit like driving without seatbelts.
-11brazil84
-4Eugine_Nier
This is an interesting situation, after all, a simple utility calculation says that the receiver's life is worth more than the donor's annoyance. Then again, we're getting close the the cases where utilitarianism fails horribly here.
6brazil84
Well I think most people are reasonably comfortable with the idea that every adult should have complete discretion over what -- if anything -- is done with his organs. The more interesting question is what to make of people who lie to conceal decisions in this area, especially physicians.
-4Eugine_Nier
Yes, but what do you mean by "complete discretion"? After all, the donor was in fact willing to go through with it despite the misgivings, i.e., he valued his relationship with his family more then the annoyance of donating. And while we're on the subject of the donor's preferences, note that both seem to score higher than his sibling's life. Draw your own disturbing conclusions from that.
9Jiro
By that reasoning if there was some situation where he had to sell himself into slavery to save his sibling's life, similarly disturbing conclusions could be drawn from his refusal to do that. You're making an awful lot of assumptions, including the assumption that the person is a utilitarian and that their reasons for not wanting to donate don't also involve life or considerations that a wide range of people consider as important as life.
1brazil84
I mean that a potential donor should be able to decline for pretty much any reason, no matter how trivial or silly. I'm not sure who you are talking about here. In the hypothetical I presented, the potential donor was not willing go through with the donation. Disturbing or not, it's reality. A lot of people would not donate a kidney to save a sibling. Either because they hate their sibling and hope that he or she dies sooner rather than later; or because they are selfish and wouldn't lift a finger to save a family member; or for some other reason. Anyway, you keep trying to change the subject away from the issue of lying. Please stop it.
-4Eugine_Nier
Well, in the example he can decline, he will simply have to deal with the consequences. In which case, what would he do if the tests came back positive? I'm pointing out flaws in the rationalization for lying.
2brazil84
Agree, but so what? Positive for what? What exactly is the flaw in your view? I'm not saying there is none, I'm just trying to understand your position.
-5Eugine_Nier
4ThisSpaceAvailable
Huh? We aren't discussing the sibling's decision to give or not give the kidney, we're discussing the doctor's decision, given that the sibling isn't donating the kidney, to tell the patient that the sibling is a match. Are you implying that the doctor should reveal the match, so the patient will pressure the sibling into donating?
-2Eugine_Nier
That is what the basic utility calculation shows, yes.
6ThisSpaceAvailable
Your reference to SAT scores is rather odd. I suppose there is probably some correlation, but they are really quite different skill sets.
0dreeves
How about adding a tiny bit of ambiguity (or evasion of the direct question) and making up for it with more effusiveness, eg, "it's not only my job but it feels really good to know that I'm helping you so I really want you to bug me about even trivial-seeming things!" All true and all she's omitting is her immediate annoyance but that is truly secondary, as she points out below about first-order vs second-order desires.

I'm not sure there's a lie happening... it seems to me that in said circumstances the meanings of the sentences are conventionally mapped, like:

"yes, I'm pissed that you shat in the bed again because I was about to go on break and now I can't and I'm hungry and cranky." -> I'm incredibly angry with you and I'm going to find out a way to kill you so you don't bother me again. (Exaggerating a bit here for effect)

"Of course I don't mind" -> of course I do mind but it is not as bad as the example above.

Sentences mean what the listener makes of them, that's why you have to speak a foreign language when talking to a foreigner who doesn't speak your language.

4ThisSpaceAvailable
A similar argument occurred to me, but I think it does border on proving too much. It also depends on knowing what the listener will make of the sentence. I think that the concept of "lying" does depend largely on the idea that the explicit, plain meaning of a sentence having a privileged position, over implications, signalling, Bayesian updates caused by the statement, etc. If someone says "Well, the probability of me telling you that I am not having an affair, given that I am having an affair, is not much smaller than the probability given that I am not having an affair, so if you significantly updated your prior simply because of my denial, the blame is on your end, not mine", I don't think many people would find that a reasonable response.
7private_messaging
I think I pinned down the distinction here. If you tell something like this: "yes, I'm pissed that you shat in the bed again because I was about to go on break and now I can't and I'm hungry and cranky.", the patient is going to form a lot of important beliefs regarding the question they're asked that are not true, more than if you say "this doesn't bother me". You have to say what ever sentence ends up misleading the patient the least about what they want to know. For the affair on the other hand, it is not so, they'd form more valid beliefs if you said that you are having an affair, than if you say you don't. The truth is such word noises, body language, intonation, and so on, that mislead the listener the least. Usually has to be approximate due to imperfect knowledge and so on.
2private_messaging
Having an affair is discrete, while the annoyance level is continuous. There's simply no explicit, plain meaning possible for continuous variable like that, one has to deduce it from the tone of the voice, body language, etc etc etc etc. One could of course have friendly body language and tone while saying something like "yes, it is incredibly annoying" but that would merely confuse the listener.
6badtheatre
My ex wife is in Geriatrics and I've heard a few situations from her where she, possibly appropriately, lied to patients with severe dementia by playing along with their fantasies. The most typical example would be a patient believing their dead spouse is coming that day for a visit, and asking about it every 15 minutes. I think she would usually tell the truth the first few times, but felt it was cruel to be telling someone constantly that their spouse is dead, and getting the same negative emotional reaction every time, so at that point she would start saying something like, "I heard they were stuck in traffic and can't make it today." The above feels to me like a grey area, but more rarely a resident would be totally engrossed in a fantasy, like thinking they were in a broadway play or something. In these cases, where the person will never understand/accept the truth anyway, I think playing along to keep them happy isn't a bad option.
4Alicorn
I'm curious about how you, being a nurse, would prefer that the patient behave in situations like this? There don't seem to be great options - is there a least-bad attitude?

...I feel like a lot of that boils down to stuff out of patients' control, like "don't be confused or delirious." Assuming that my patient is totally with it and can reasonably be expected to try to behave politely, I prefer that patients tell me right away when they need something, listen to my explanation of what I'm going to do about it and when I'll be able to do it, or why I can't do anything about it, and then accept that and not keep bringing up the same complaint repeatedly unless it gets worse. I have had patients who rang the call bell every 5 minutes for hours to tell me that they were thirsty, when I'd already explained that I couldn't give them anything by mouth, or that their biggest concern was being thirsty but I was more concerned that their heart rate was 180 and I really really needed to deal with that first.

I obviously prefer it when patient's aren't embarrassed and I can joke around with them and chat about their grandkids while cleaning their poop. But emotional reactions aren't under most people's control either, so it's not a reasonable thing to ask.

1A1987dM
Relevant recent Slate Star Codex post
0[anonymous]
Of course, there being enough nurses might make the job more consistently enjoyable so that they wouldn't have to lie to their patients as often. Same applies to doctors. Shit in itself isn't that bad. It's the shit plus hurry that kills you.
0Shmi
Just saying "this is part of my job and I love my job" is not good enough? I wonder if there is a better way of handling this, other than telling your best friend that you are not going to be a part of this game and risking a backlash... In a similar situation I ended up curtailing my interactions with the party I'd have to lie habitually to, which is rather suboptimal.
8Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
It sounds evasive and not like the natural response, and I'm not all that worried about my patients yelling "no, you're a liar!" and getting mad if I tell them I don't mind at all, and I don't have any particular reason to want to not lie in this situation.
3hyporational
What's good enough for alleviating discomfort so cheaply as with a few words if there's still better left? Showing you care about the people instead of some abstraction called a job usually works better for making them comfortable.
[-]shware610

I find it takes a great deal of luminosity in order to be honest with someone. If I am in a bad mood, I might feel that its my honest opinion that they are annoying when in fact what is going on in my brain has nothing to do with their actions. I might have been able to like the play in other circumstances, but was having a bad day so flaws I might have been otherwise able to overlook were magnified in my mind. etc.

This is my main fear with radical honesty, since it seems to promote thinking that negative thoughts are true just because they are negative. The reasoning going 'I would not say this if I were being polite, but I am thinking it, therefore it is true' without realizing that your brain can make your thoughts be more negative from the truth just as easily as it can make them more positive than the truth.

In fact, saying you enjoyed something you didnt enjoy, and signalling enjoyment with appropriate facial muscles (smiling etc) can improve your mood by itself, especially if it makes the other person smile.

Many intelligent people get lots of practice pointing out flaws, and it is possible that this trains the brain into a mode where one's first thoughts on a topic will be ... (read more)

If I am honest without accuracy... if I am proud to report my results of my reasoning as they are, but my actual reasoning is sloppy... then I shouldn't congratulate myself for giving precise info, because the info was not precise; I simply removed one source of imprecision, but ignored another.

Saying "you are annoying" feels like an extremely honest thing, and I may be motivated to stop there.

However, saying "sorry, I'm in a bad mood today; I think it's likely that on a different day I would appreciate what you are trying to do, but today it doesn't work this way, and it actually annoys me" is even more honest, and possibly less harmful to the listener.

A cynical explanation is that while attempting to be extremely honest, we refuse to censor the information that might hurt the listener... but we still censor the information that would hurt us. For example, the short version of "you are annoying" contains the information that may hurt my friend, but conceals the information about my own vulnerability.

Perhaps a good heuristic could be: Don't hurt other people by your honesty, unless you are willing to hurt yourself as much (or 20 % more, to balance for your own biased perception) -- and even this only if they agreed to play by these rules. (Of course you are allowed to select your friends according to their ability and willingness to play by these rules. But sometimes you have to interact with other people, too.)

[-]pjeby160

This is my main fear with radical honesty, since it seems to promote thinking that negative thoughts are true just because they are negative. The reasoning going 'I would not say this if I were being polite, but I am thinking it, therefore it is true' without realizing that your brain can make your thoughts be more negative from the truth just as easily as it can make them more positive than the truth.

My own (very limited) observation of trying to be radically honest has been that until I first say (or at least admit to myself) the reaction of annoyance, I can't become aware of what lies beyond it. If I'm angry at my wife because of something else that happened to me, I usually won't know that it's because of something else until I first express (even just to myself) that I am angry at my wife.

Until I actually tried being honest about such things, I didn't know this, and practicing such expression seemed beneficial in increasing my general awareness of thoughts and emotions in the present or near-present moment. I don't even remotely attempt to practice radical honesty even in my relationship with my wife, but we've both definitely benefited from learning to express what we fe... (read more)

This made me think; I may have some luminosity privilege that needs checking...

5Benquo
Wow. This comment made me happy, even with the jargon. Positive reinforcement for thinking about how your experience might be atypical and other people might have needs or disabilities you hadn't considered! If you are interested in some more things that may distinguish your experience from ChrisHallquist's, you might consider that his examples are mainly about lying in self-defense to hostile people or people who have deliberately asked questions that are costly to evade or answer honestly. Picture an Aikido expert who lives and works in a safe neighborhood getting angry at a janitor who lives in a violent slum for saying they reserve the right to throw a punch if the situation calls for it. I might think the poor janitor has the right to defend themself, but that doesn't mean I'd be very likely at all to punch someone at your dinner party.
3Alicorn
Some of his examples were like that. The part of his post that most bothered me was "accept others' right to lie to you", and the title has now been changed to "White Lies", which I've never heard used conversationally to cover things like "no, Mom, not gay".
6Vaniver
I have always interpreted "white lies" as "lies I approve of" rather than "small lies," because the size of a lie is clearly a subjective measurement. It looks like wiki mostly agrees.
6blacktrance
"Lies I approve of" and "white lies" are overlapping sets, but aren't quite the same. For example, if a Nazi asks you if you're hiding any Jews (and you are), I approve of lying to them, but this isn't a white lie. On the other hand, if your horrible racist aunt asks you if she's racist, telling her that she's not would be a white lie, but not one that I approve of.
2Vaniver
Looking at Augustine's taxonomy the terminology seems clearer, as it differentiates "lies told to please others in smooth discourse," which is what I think Alicorn would associate with 'white lies,' with "lies that harm no one and that protect someone from bodily defilement." (And note how the lies in religious teachings mirrors the discussion of lies in science!) As expected, Augustine thinks it's better to lie to the Nazi than to lie to your aunt. But again it seems the subjectivity shines through in the definition of harm, if you want to put the hidden Jew lie in Augustine's last category. Isn't the Nazi harmed when you lie to him, and he doesn't get to catch the hidden Jew?
8drethelin
most people WANT the nazi to be harmed.
1Vaniver
Indeed.
-4blacktrance
I would argue that the Nazi isn't really harmed when you lie to him, because not having a preference satisfied is not necessarily harm.
-5Eugine_Nier
-1Benquo
I went back and looked at the examples again, and in each case it seemed to me that the question, plus what we know about the asker and their relation to the answerer, when combined with an expectation that the answerer will actually tell the truth, imposes a large expected cost on the person being asked. Am I missing something? I wouldn't have read "others' right to lie to you" as implying that you personally, Alicorn, must be okay with any person, even your friends and guests, lying to you when you have specifically and credibly indicated that you prefer they would not, and can handle the truth. But I can see how you might easily read it that way. Also maybe could you explain what's objectionable about that while tabooing "lie" and "right"? Somewhat tangentially, that seems like a really nice way to live in some respects. Have you written about what it's like, and when/how you started choosing exclusively truthtellers to be your friends anywhere?
0Alicorn
I have begun to suspect that there is some kind of misreading here, but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to read in an undisclaimed second-person pronoun in an article I'm reading if it's not "I claim this applies to Alicorn". Actually, in my framework, "right to lie to you" is very nearly ungrammatical. You have the ability to lie; talking about the right to do it is approximately nonsense - if someone interferes with your ability to lie, somehow, this would usually be wrong for reasons not having anything to do with your ability to lie in particular. My objection to it is that I think making statements that you believe to be false and intend your audience to believe is morally wrong barring atypical-for-people-making-utterances cases, and I don't think people are under any obligation to tolerate moral wrongs being done to them, and urging people to do this is... I'm gonna go with "sketchy".
[-]Benquo170

Usually when I think of "white lies" I think of things that are not primarily intended to produce a belief about the literal content of that sentence at all - they're a totally different type of social move only loosely related to their "meaning". I'm thinking about things like this:

Alice is at a party and sees her friend Bella walk in, wearing a new dress. Bella asks Alice what she thinks of her new dress. Bella is making a bid for reassurance, not a request for information - it's too late to go home and change, she wants to hear that she looks good in this dress in order to feel more confident at the party.

Charlie passes Doris in the hallway at work. "How are you?" asks Doris. "Fine," says Charlie, who five minutes ago got a call from the doctor telling him that he has a life-threatening illness. Charlie is not fine, but doesn't want to talk about it. He wouldn't mind Doris knowing about his condition, but couldn't think fast enough of a way to politely avoid bringing up the topic except by lying. He correctly assumes that Doris won't actually update her opinion of how he is or take his response seriously anyway.

Later, Charlie is talking

... (read more)
4Alicorn
In this comment I list some things that are not lying, which include many of your examples. I'll add now that I think anybody can waive any right they don't happen to want, including the right not to be lied to, and reiterate also that you have to intend to be believed to count as lying, and clarify that being mistaken - including sincere mistaken-ness about remembering to include a caveat necessary for factual accuracy - does not constitute a lie. If Bella has successfully communicated to Alice what she's looking for, if Charlie isn't making an attempt to cause Doris to believe he's fine, likewise with Edward - then that might well be fine. (Is it a coincidence that every single name you chose except Doris is a Twilight character?) ...then you may well have forfeited contextually relevant rights. I read Chris's post, saw an undisclaimed second-person pronoun telling me to respect others' right to lie to me, and was like: "But... I didn't do anything."
2Benquo
Sometimes people cause others to feel cornered or threatened, without knowing it. That doesn't make them bad people, but it would explain what might otherwise be "bad behavior" on others' parts. And if anyone finds that people seem to regularly lie to them about certain kinds of thing, they should seriously consider the hypothesis that they are misunderstanding the interaction. I know what that feels like. I've had that response to a lot of things that turned out not to be about me at all. It hurts at first. I try to read those things a second time, when I'm not feeling indignant anymore, to figure out whether it's actually about me, or things I do. I try to avoid the generic "you" and "we", and abstract pronouncements like that, for exactly that reason - I don't want to be misunderstood in that way.
1Benquo
Not intentional, I was just looking for common names in alphabetical order, but likely Alicorn -> Luminosity made those names more available. :)
4Said Achmiz
These are good examples. I want to add one that I've observed/experienced, somewhat related to this one: Sometimes, you're talking to a person who has some importance in your life — a relative, let us say — and they ask you a question about your life (some aspect of your life that doesn't affect them directly). You know that, if you tell them the truth, their reaction will be to lecture you, berate you, give you unwanted advice, yell at you, or otherwise engage you in an unproductive mode of interaction. You know this because this has happened before; you are quite sure that this interaction won't change your mind (because you have good reasons for living your life the way you do, as opposed to the way your interlocutor wants you to), nor will your protests or arguments change their mind (because of their irrationality). Neither is it likely that this person will respond to requests to drop the subject. So, you lie. Result: continued peaceful, pleasant conversation. What do people here think of the moral status of such lies? I am genuinely curious. I myself am somewhat torn, and I'd like opinions.
1blacktrance
I don't think such lies are particularly wrong, but they aren't the best way to go about dealing with the situation. Not that telling them the truth is better, because it leads to them acting as you describe. I think it's best to say "I don't want to talk about that" or "That's personal", and shame them if they pry. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I'm not close to any of my relatives.
3Said Achmiz
Heh. "I don't want to talk about that" or "That's personal" don't come anywhere close to working in certain cultures (by which I mean both the unique culture specific to a family, and cultural groups such as e.g. Ashkenazi Jews — the archetypal Jewish mother who says "So, are you meeting any nice girls? What do you mean it's none of my business?? Of course it's my business! I'm your mother!" etc. etc.). Edit: What's with the downvotes all over this thread...?
1blacktrance
If it doesn't work, I recommend ending the conversation, saying something like, "If you're not going to respect my boundaries, I'm not going to talk to you". This doesn't apply if you're financially dependent on said relative. If so, go ahead and lie as much as you need to.
1Said Achmiz
Yeah, I have heard this sort of recommendation. I... don't think I've ever actually seen anyone use it. I don't know, it could be a good one. It's a rather harsh thing to say, though, especially to, say, one's grandmother. I don't think I could do it. I guess the point is, sometimes, not lying is hard? (If you're the type to take an absolute stance against lying, your response might be along the lines of "Yes, doing the right thing is hard. That makes it no less right." I remain... unconvinced.)
0blacktrance
I've come close to using it, and it just approaching it has been enough to get people to back down. In the long run, it teaches them not to ask you about those things, which is what you want. I can see it being rather harsh, though. I guess I have some difficulty imagining being in an interpersonal relationship in which I both feel strongly positively towards a person (enough to make me reluctant to say something like that) and at the same time having things that I have to lie about.
0Burgundy
If someone wants to pry into your affairs and berate you about them, then you are perfectly justified in lying to avoid them getting on your case. And moreover, if they know they will get on your case if you tell them the truth, then they shouldn't even expect you to tell the truth. In this view, if they are clearly defecting on you by trying to get into your business, then you are justified in defecting on them. If they are laying a trap, and you walk into it, then you may encourage them to engage in that behavior in the future. Tit-for-tat. To be extra clear, when I support lying to people who want to pry "pry into your affairs," I am specifically referring to private information which isn't their business. I am not referring to lying to cover up wrongdoing you've committed, or in ways that will cause them tangible harm. Those situations are more complicated. By "private" information, I am talking about information which is widely considered private in which culture is relevant, and which tangibly effects mostly you, not other people. I am also following your premise that this person likely can't be reasoned with based on a persistent pattern of their behavior, or persuaded to be more accepting of your behavior. Evasion, persuasion, and avoidance are preferable if they work. Lying to people as tit-for-tat punishment seems valuable to me, but only within confines of a narrow set of situations involving people who have demonstrated a consistent pattern of being hostile or controlling, and where evasion is infeasible. My endorsement of this notion should not taken as a defense of lying in a broad range of situations.
1Said Achmiz
Indeed, this has been my exact answer in cases where such lies have been found out. Agreed entirely. Also, agreed entirely.
0Eugine_Nier
The thing is that the prying person likely considers the private affair to potentially involve wrongdoing. So if you were in a culture that permitted say, slavery, and considered how one treats one's slaves a private affair, you would you still be willing to apply the above reasoning.
1Burgundy
Maybe. There are several scenarios: 1. A prying person might believe that you might be engaged in actual wrongdoing. 2. A prying person believes that you are engages in something that they think is wrong, but actually isn't wrong. 3. A prying person doesn't believe that you are doing anything wrong. They are just trying to get on your case because they are controlling or malicious. Or they think it's fun. In SaidAchmiz's example of a nosy relative, it's not at all clear that the relative believes he might be engaging in any moral infraction, unless that relative has an incredibly expansive notion of morality, as some relatives do. No, and I don't think this is accurate reading of my comment, though perhaps I allowed for confusion. In my comment, I discuss multiple conditions for ethically lying to people prying into private information: 1. That information is considered private in the relevant culture, such that the questioner knows (or should know) they are asking for information that is culturally considered private. If they know they are potentially defecting on you, then their behavior is worse. If they don't know they are defecting on you, then their apparent defection may have been a mistake on their part, in which case, you should be less enthusiastic to engage in tit-for-tat defection. 2. The "private" information does not include " lying to cover up wrongdoing you've committed, or in ways that will cause them tangible harm." Since slavery is wrongdoing, then a slaveholder is not justified in lying about treatment of slaves, even in a past culture where slavery was considered acceptable and private. Yes, some slaveholders may have believed that slavery was justifiable, and they were then justified in lying to cover up their treatment of slaves. But they were wrong, and they should have known better. To conclude, I suggest there are some circumstances where it is justified to lie in response to prying questions about private information. This p
1Said Achmiz
What if you consider the information private, but the person asking does not (and you are both aware of the other's views)? (That is, they know you think it should be private, but they disagree with you on that point.)
2Burgundy
Good questions. If you know that the other person believes that the information isn't private, then you know that they aren't knowingly doing something which they believe is prying. So they don't have mens rea for being an asshole by their own standards. (Yes, I believe that sometimes people are assholes by their own standards, and these are exactly the sort of people who don't deserve the truth about my private matters.) If they don't know my feelings about privacy, then they are not knowingly intruding. But if they do know my views on the privacy of that information, they are knowingly asking for information that I consider private. That could be...disrespectful. If my feelings about privacy on that matter are strong, and they ask anyway, then they may have mens rea for being an asshole by my standards. Perhaps they believe that my standards are wrong and that I should not judge them as an asshole for violating them. If I thought there was legitimate disagreement about whether the information should be considered private, then I wouldn't view the other person as defecting on me, and I wouldn't feel motivated to lie to them to punish their defection. If I still felt motivated to lie, it would be for purely self-defensive reasons (for instance, I might lie to conceal health issues which don't effect anyone else). As examples, I think there are many questions between relationship partners, where the ethics of privacy vs. transparency are up for debate, e.g. "how many partners have you had in the past?", "do you still have feelings for your ex?", "have you had any same-sex partners?" On the other hand, if I thought their view of privacy was ridiculous, and they can't defend their view against mine, then I would be pretty annoyed if they still pressured me for information anyway. That sounds like a breakdown of cooperative communication, or the beginning of a fight. Lying might be an acceptable way to get out of this situation. Surely there is some point where co
0Eugine_Nier
You should also consider the possibility: 1a. A prying person believes that you are engages in something that is wrong, but that you mistakenly think isn't wrong. Yes, I know this is technichally a special case of 1., but it's worth considering separately since people tend to be bad at considering the possibility that they are wrong.
2Said Achmiz
I think one of the problems here is that most people just don't agree with you on that. And given this, your treatment of people who do a thing that you consider wrong, but they do not, is (in their eyes) very not-nice. The fact is, you could (especially since you're a deontologist) decide that any old thing is morally wrong. Perhaps looking at one's watch is morally wrong. Perhaps using the word "moist" is morally wrong. Perhaps wearing green socks is morally wrong. I (that is, someone interacting with you socially) just don't know. Perhaps your declarations of what is or is not morally wrong make sense to you, but to other people, they just look arbitrary. And so what it looks like is that you have decided, apparently somewhat arbitrarily, that a thing that most people do regularly is morally wrong; and now you're declaring that anyone who disagrees with you is a Bad Person, and not even straightforwardly: you're making insinuations about their character ("sketchy"). This, to observers (or at least, to me), just doesn't seem very nice or reasonable. Well, in one sense, no is under any obligation to behave decently and reasonably to their fellow humans. It sure would be nice, but if you protest that you don't have a duty to do, then sure, I won't argue. But insofar as anyone does have an "obligation" to behave decently, I think that saying you're not obligated to refrain from disparaging the character of anyone who violates one of your arbitrary, personal moral rules is, to use a term from your own comments... not welcoming. To say the least. (So, for example, if you decided that wearing green socks is morally wrong, I think I would say that you have an "obligation" to tolerate people wearing green socks around you.)
-4Alicorn
This is actually not an accusation I've had leveled at me before. Consequentialists tend to object to how rigidly I define moral rules, not which ones are on my list. I'm pretty sure this is a strawman. This is just an uncharitable misreading of me. I don't think I'll engage you in particular any further on this subject unless you produce a dramatically better understanding of my position.
8Said Achmiz
When people misunderstand or misread what I say — as happens sometimes, a couple of comments to this post being examples — my response is usually an attempt to clarify my position, correct the misreading, etc. Most of the people with whom I have engaged here on LessWrong do similarly. A response to an alleged misreading that consists of saying "That's not what I meant; I won't explain what I meant; and I won't talk to you about this anymore" is not a particularly honorable discussion tactic. If you think I have misread you — as is, of course, possible — please explain how.
-11Alicorn
-2Eugine_Nier
This is what "slash their tires" analogy is meant to cover.
0Benquo
Right - I am suggesting an alternative metaphor that is slightly but materially different.
2Armok_GoB
Probably. I mean, you literally wrote the book. And the sequence. Even the name... I'm sure a floodlight is of great use up on your hill, but it doesn't do much deep down here (wherever here is) in what might be fog and might be mud I can't tell because I can't see it well enough.
0Vulture
...what? Some kind of extended metaphor? Your meaning is totally unclear.
4Alicorn
In the sequence Armok_GoB mentions I use light as an extended metaphor for self-knowledge.
0Vulture
Hmm. I haven't read your full sequence (one of these days!), so if that's the reference point then that explains my confusion. Thanks!
3ChristianKl
In that case a real honest answer might be: "I felt uncomfortable during that activity but I don't know whether it's because of the activity or because it's I generally focus to much on the negative." That gives the person you are dealing with a lot of useful information to interact with you. Sharing something deeper about yourself builds trust. If the person is well intentioned they can use the information in a way that makes the interaction for both of you better. The goal of honest communication is to give the other person useful information. Transmitting more useful information is being more honest. If you just say your loathe the activity or you say you liked it, you might be holding something back. If you have a trustworthy friendship than knowing about your emotional state is useful information for your friend. Your friend might be good at reading body language and be able to tell the difference between your fake smile and a real smile but it makes it so much harder for a friend to help you when you aren't open about what you are feeling. To me not being open about your emotions on a deep level when you are with friends or loved ones feels like defecting in a prisoner dilemma. You might get some immediate benefit but overall it's not the path of the game tree that's optimal. To the extend that there are people who can't deal with me being open about what I feel I don't want them as friends or loved ones.

A few years ago, for example, when I went to see the play my girlfriend had done stage crew for, and she asked what I thought of it. She wasn't satisfied with my initial noncommittal answers, so she pressed for more. Not in a "trying to start a fight" way; I just wasn't doing a good job of being evasive. I eventually gave in and explained why I thought the acting had sucked, which did not make her happy. I think incidents like that must have contributed to our breaking up shortly thereafter. The breakup was a good thing for other reasons, but I still regret not lying to her about what I thought of the play.

Boy, I sure wouldn't want to date a person like this (your girlfriend-at-the-time). She asked for your opinion; pressed you to actually give it, thus communicating (by any reasonable measure) that she actually wanted your opinion; and then, when you gave it honestly, was unhappy about it? That's horrible.

I don't think I'd ever willingly choose to be close to someone to whom I'd ever regret not lying in response to being asked for my opinion. The thought of living like that, living with the knowledge that honest communication is basically impossible because any time the person asks me (and presses me) about my opinion, I have to consider the possibility that what they actually want is lies — that this person prefers lies both to truths and to no comment — repulses me.

Demand by rational men for rational women exceeds supply, even taking into account that some of the women have harems. If you're one of the lucky men, or a woman, be aware of your privilege and don't criticize men who lack it.

I think the set of women you can be honest with in a relationship is much larger than the set of women who are full on CFAR style rationalists.

6Eliezer Yudkowsky
My experience is more like "real honesty, in or out of a relationship, only works with the upper echelon of CFAR style rationalists" though admittedly exposure to the naked, sharp gears of my own intellect may have more Lovecraftian results than it would in the population average.
0Viliam_Bur
Honest about carefully selected safe topics? Or about the weird ones?

I agree with the point in your first sentence, but I'm not sure I follow what your advice is in the second sentence.

Are you suggesting that my criticism comes from having rational women to date, whereas Chris (at the time of the anecdote) did not, and so was forced to date an irrational woman, for which I was criticising him?

Those are three wrong things, it seems to me:

  1. I don't find it to be the case that rational women occur in abundance in my dating pool;

  2. No one (presumably) forced Chris to date the young lady in question;

  3. I wasn't criticising him for his dating choices; if I was criticising anything, it was his advice that we accept such behavior in our partners / friends, and expressing the view that I, personally, would not accept such behavior.

P.S.

some of the women have harems

Really?

4hairyfigment
That surprises you? Do you think rational women wouldn't want harems? Scott tells us that polyamory seems like a suboptimal way to get sex, and I assume this holds true even for women - technically. But sex is not fungible.
1Said Achmiz
Um... sure, that surprises me a bit. Also that they have the harems, even given wanting them. I don't really know what you are saying in your second paragraph. Please explain?
0hairyfigment
...What?! You're surprised that rational people who are in demand can get what they want? I may try to explain the second part later, but in my current condition I don't get your confusion.
1Said Achmiz
Depending on what "what they want" is, yeah, I might be surprised. I mean, clarify for me, what are we talking about here? "Polyamory is relatively common in rational circles, and poly relationships in said circles often/sometimes/commonly consist of (i.e., are circumscribed by) one woman who is dating several men"?
-2[anonymous]
Harem is a bit misleading as it implies dominance and ease. Polyamory presumably requires work to keep the people around you and to prevent drama, and that situation doesn't seem obviously preferable.
2A1987dM
That doesn't entitle any irrational woman to date any rational man. Men are allowed to stay single, you know.
-2blacktrance
It's better to be single than to date someone irrational.
1Protagoras
If everyone thought like that, I'd never get a date (and neither would anyone else, of course).
1blacktrance
Perhaps (though I'm not sure*), but even if so, that's no great loss, because getting a date isn't good in itself, it's only good if it's with someone with whom you're compatible, and rationality is critically important for that. Also, this would have the effect of making rationality a more desirable trait, and irrationality a more costly one. .*It's definitely not true for everyone, as there are relationships in which both partners are rational.

As best I can tell, "people who sometimes ask questions they might not want to hear the answer to" are a large majority of the population. "Does this dress make me look fat" is a cliche put-you-on-the-spot question for a reason.

Sometimes is an important word here. Too often, and it might be an issue, but it's not like this was a regular occurrence with her. (A big THANK YOU here to Pablo and hyporational for noticing they shouldn't be making too many assumptions based on one anecdote.)

Now, another approach is to exclusively date people who value total honesty at all times. But (1) there are other qualities I value more in a mate and (2) I suspect such openness to "total honesty at all time" tends to correlate with being social inept and overly honest even with people who don't want that, qualities I'd like to avoid.

Now, another approach is to exclusively date people who value total honesty at all times. But (1) there are other qualities I value more in a mate and (2) I suspect such openness to "total honesty at all time" tends to correlate with being social inept and overly honest even with people who don't want that, qualities I'd like to avoid.

To reiterate a point I have made several times in this post's comments:

"Valuing total honesty at all times" and "refraining from pressing someone for an honest answer when what you actually want is a lie" are two very different things.

Correspondingly, being totally honest at all times, unprompted, is not the same as being honest when specifically pressed for an honest answer.

"Does this dress make me look fat" is a cliche put-you-on-the-spot question for a reason.

I try to restrict my circle of friends to people who do not ask precisely such put-you-on-the-spot questions. That, among other policies and attitudes, makes my circle of friends small.

Or, to put it another way: people worth being friends with are rare. And those are the only people I want to be friends with.

"Does this dress make me look fat"

(BTW, I usually answer that with "you looked better in that other one", so I don't offend her but I still help her choose flattering clothes.)

7Lumifer
You're misunderstanding the message. "Does this dress make me look fat?" is not really a question. It's a request for a compliment. If I may engage in gender generalization for a moment, men usually understand words literally. This annoys women to no end as they often prefer to communicate on the implication level and the actual words uttered don't matter much.
5ChrisHallquist
In a sense, yes. But less-cliche questions sometimes get used the same way, and you have to be on guard with that. (You can argue that giving the expected responses to such questions isn't technically lying, but that seems like semantic hair-splitting to me.)
[-]gjm160

Boy, I sure wouldn't want to date a person like this [...]

Depends on the details. I don't think there's anything necessarily unreasonable about the following sequence of events: A wants some information from B, and presses for it despite B's reluctance. When the truth actually comes out, A finds it upsetting. ("Do you love me?" "Yes, of course." "It sometimes doesn't seem that way. Seriously, and honestly, do you really love me?" "Well ... no, not really. I just enjoy having sex with you." "Oh, shit.")

Now, being upset because your boyfriend thinks the acting in a play wasn't much good? Yeah, that seems less reasonable. So I agree that this probably wasn't a great relationship to be in. But I really can't endorse any general claim that it's bad to press for someone's opinion when one of the possible answers would upset you.

Having the truth upset you, and being angry at a person for telling you the unpleasant truth, are two very different things.

[-][anonymous]100

But there are times when both are appropriate. Example: "did you strangle my puppy?" It's hardly unreasonable to expect an honest answer and then be angry at the person when the honest answer is "yes."

More generally, it is not inherently contradictory to expect total honesty and to be occasionally angry at what that honesty reveals.

3Kaj_Sotala
In that case, you're not angry at the person for telling the truth, you're angry at them for having strangled your puppy. Similarly, in the love example, the problem isn't so much the fact that B told A the truth, the problem is that B had systematically lied to A in order to get sex before. In neither case are you actually angry at the person for telling you the truth, you're angry at them for committing a separate moral wrong. This seems different from "did you like my play", since disliking a play isn't a moral wrong by itself. In that case you really are angry at someone for telling the truth.
2[anonymous]
I personally am not so much of a saint as to only get mad at people for moral wrongs. I can absolutely see myself getting angry at a close person for not liking a book I wrote / play I directed / whatever. It still has nothing to do with truth -- I want them to be honest, I just want them to honestly like my stuff! (Of course that isn't entirely mature and fair, but people get their emotions all tied up in their artistic work).
6gjm
That's exactly my point. And I conjecture that what upset Chris's girlfriend was the fact that her boyfriend wasn't impressed by her friends' acting. I could, of course, be wrong. If her problem was simply that he'd been tactless enough to tell her what she asked him to tell her, then indeed she was bring grossly unreasonable.
4Said Achmiz
If that's indeed what upset her, then she was also being unreasonable. Consider: * Chris could have been unimpressed because the acting was, in fact, bad. (Let's not get into whether art can be objectively bad, or any such thing; that's not the point of the discussion.) If so, then his reaction is information that the acting is bad. Being angry at the messenger who is conveying this information to you is unreasonable. * On the other hand, Chris could have thought the acting sucked because of differing tastes, and not any objective badness of the acting. If so, then what his girlfriend has just found out is that their tastes don't entirely align in this arena. Being angry at Chris for this revelation is, also, unreasonable. So, in either case, being angry at your boyfriend for not being impressed with your friends' acting is unreasonable. Unless, of course, you take the view (as did another poster elsewhere in the comments) that one may, and should, alter one's opinions on the basis of what one thinks will please one's close ones. I strongly reject such views.
7Alicorn
It could be that she thought the most likely explanation for him not liking their acting was because he had unrealistic expectations or didn't watch the show with an open mind.
2Said Achmiz
Both of those suggestions confuse me. "Their acting sucked. I expected it to be good!" "Well, that was unreasonable of you! Clearly, you should have expected it to suck!" "Oh, well, in that case... yep, it sucked." ??? What on earth does that mean...?
7Alicorn
More like: "That show was not in the top 30% of all entertainment I have ever consumed." "...How was it as amateur theater goes?" "Oh, easily top fifteen percent there." The open-mindedness criterion is a little harder to explain.
0[anonymous]
But unfortunately humans aren't very good at telling them apart. (But on the other hand some humans are worse than others and you have no obligation to date one of the former.)
3plex
In that scenario lying may be better for both in the short term, but lying about being in love with someone to trick them into sleeping with you seems pretty likely to upset them more in the long term. And there are more gentle ways to put it which could make honestly explaining that it's mostly a physical thing which would reduce the immediate negativity considerably, though the amount depends on the listener's disposition. I agree that it's not necessarily unreasonable for a truth to be upsetting, but it is somewhat unreasonable to press someone for a truthful answer (especially something important), then be upset with them specifically for being honest, especially if they have indicated discomfort giving a direct answer and tried skirting around the subject (since this hints that it's something which may be an uncomfortable truth they may want to avoid), even if it's pretty common in many circles.
1gjm
For the avoidance of doubt, in that situation I agree that one shouldn't lie. I was commenting not on B's behaviour and attitude but on A's. And, also for the avoidance of doubt, if Chris's girlfriend was upset that he told her the truth rather than that he didn't like her friends' acting then she was being 100% unreasonable. (And, as I said, even if it was the latter, still pretty unreasonable. I was making a more general point.)
9Pablo
Human beings are complex creatures, and the decision to date a person involves weighing up the different elements that make up that complexity. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I'd say that in your current state of almost total ignorance about the physical and psychological traits of Chris's ex girlfriend, you are simply not in a position to know whether or not you'd want to date her. (Perhaps a focusing illusion--"nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it"--was involved in causing you to believe otherwise.) ETA: After reading the replies below, I realize I had misinterpreted Said's comment above as making an all-things-considered claim, when it fact the claim was supposed to be subject to a ceteris paribus clause.
6wedrifid
It seems this objection could largely be ameliorated by the inclusion of a ceteris paribus clause. Or, given the way you phrased it, perhaps a measure of how just how many units on the Craziness/Hotness scale the behavioural pattern moves her. EDIT to remove references to mythical three headed guardians of hades.
0Pablo
Yeah, it seems I misunderstood the original comment.
5wedrifid
To be fair on your reply the original comment is worded rather strongly and without care for precision. As such your reply is valid even if slightly less charitable than it could have been.
2hyporational
I'm pretty sure I got it wrong too.
1Said Achmiz
So, essentially, this is: "yeah, sure, my boyfriend/girlfriend has this horrible aspect of their personality, but they were otherwise a good person / the sex was great / whatever". Ok. Sure. If your criticism would be obviated by the addition of a ceteris paribus clause to my comment, then consider it added. You can say that about almost any undesirable personality trait, though. That doesn't make said trait any more desirable. Many things can be very undesirable without being hard dealbreakers (especially if discovered after you're already involved with the person). All else being equal, though, I would certainly prefer dating a person without the trait in question, than with.
7hyporational
Looks pretty normal to me. One incident isn't a strong indicator of personality, I think. There are situations where a significant fraction of people want to be lied to in a reassuring way, and these situations can be recognized reliably enough if one has the necessary skills to do so. There are skills that allow you to discern when people actually want your opinion and when they're just asking for reassurance. Wouldn't you rather have those?

Looks pretty normal to me.

That word always¹ sounds to me like its only point is to sneak in the connotation that what's usual must therefore also be desirable.

“Normal is a cycle on a washing machine.”


  1. Not literally.
4hyporational
My point is you mostly don't get to choose what's normal whether it's good or bad, so might as well consider adapting to it*. If you come up with a less disagreeable expression of usuality that fits this case, I'll make the switch. *this obviously applies only if this fits your other goals
1wedrifid
I'm torn between upvoting this comment for the footnote and upvoting this comment for the insight. Decisions, decisions.
5Said Achmiz
A significant fraction of people do all sorts of things. That doesn't mean I want to associate with them, much less data them. Yes, I would definitely want to have those skills — and I would just as definitely want to not have to use them on someone I was dating, or otherwise close to.
3hyporational
Those people you're narrowing out might have other redeeming qualities that will be less available to you because of this restriction. Why is this one so horrible that they aren't even worth considering?
5Said Achmiz
Well, I didn't exactly say such people wouldn't be worth considering. (See my reply to Pablo_Stafforini.) I do think this one's pretty bad, though. (Elaboration here.) As for "but if you rule out X, then you won't get the chance to potentially get Y!", I find such arguments unconvincing, because they generalize so easily. "If you rule out serial killers as potential friends, you might miss out on some people with whom you could hold such interesting after-dinner conversation, not to mention the many other redeeming qualities that a person might have in spite of a predilection for axe murder!" Sure, maybe, but I think I can manage to find interesting friends without a history of violent crime. I don't have to settle. Likewise with abhorrent personality traits: my choice isn't "accept people who are terrible in some important way" or "be alone forever". (And even if it were, I might strongly consider option b.) There's always "find someone who isn't terrible in any important way". Such people exist, it seems to me. I don't know, maybe I'm just an optimist?
3hyporational
The obvious difference here is that serial killers are rare. White liars are extremely common and the kind of honesty you're preferring is rare, so you're ruling out a lot more people. (ETA: in those elaborated comments you seem more specific and reasonable than I thought.) How probable do you think it is that you're hanging out with people who are more dishonest than you think they are? Are you comfortable with your ability to discern these kinds of qualities in people? Do you acknowledge the prior?
7A1987dM
But each of the people you're ruling out is in turn ruling out lots of people other than you and therefore is more likely to be available. In other words, honesty is a high-variance strategy.
3hyporational
That makes sense. The only problem it seems is recognizing the right individuals. The goth guy vs normal guy is much more obvious than the honesty guy vs pretending-to-be-honesty-guy. Everyone benefits from being seen as honest.
0A1987dM
The kind of honesty where you're willing to owning up to disliking the play your girlfriend did stage crew for doesn't seem to me like something that many people successfully fake.
0Protagoras
Some people seem to use honesty as an excuse for being deliberately obnoxious. Though I don't know how often what they do would count as successfully faking anything.
0A1987dM
Well, the OP did not specify which words he used to tell his then-girlfriend that.
0Creutzer
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the number of occasions where you get to display such honesty and thereby differenciate yourself from normal moderately-honest people isn't that large. Combine this with the low base-rate of extremely honest people, and they may easily end up never finding each other.
-1Said Achmiz
Whoa whoa. Who said the category of people I was referring to is as broad as white liars? I don't hang out with all that many people, and those I do hang out with, I've know for some time, so I would say: not very probable. Comfortable enough to spot honesty after knowing someone for ten years or more, yeah.
2hyporational
Yeah sorry about the misunderstanding, I edited the gp accordingly.
1Creutzer
The trouble is, you have to be really good with those skills and get things right almost all of the time before they're worth much, since people weigh negatively-perceived interactions much more strongly than positively-perceived interactions in close relationships.
6pianoforte611
That actually reminded me of my parents. My dad is not allowed to say that he dislikes a dish prepared by my mom, even if asked for his opinion. Whenever I ask him if he liked one of my dishes, if I notice any hesitation I usually qualify it with "You can say no".

Wow. Yeah, see, that's exactly the kind of relationship dynamic of which the very thought horrifies me.

I, too, sometimes make similar comments to people to convey that yes, I really do want their feedback on my cooking/baking, because getting better is important to me. Empty praise is worthless to me.

2Mestroyer
Empty praise is actually useful, for absence of evidence reasons. Especially if the work you want feedback on is the type that that person should be able to effectively critique. Once you start considering empty praise to be evidence of dislike, you may also want to fake people into thinking you think they like things, because they are probably modeling you using themselves when they decide that lying is best for you. They are not truth-obsessed rationalists, so they probably prefer to think their attempt to trick you was successful. Being asked for a critique of someone's work can be uncomfortable, and thinking you've hurt their feelings is even more uncomfortable.

Ok, that's beyond my ability to keep a chain of models-within-models straight in my head. Could you elaborate?

Actually, you know what — scratch that. The more salient point, I think, is that having to strategize basic conversation to that extent is a) much too hard for my preference, and more importantly, b) something I definitely do not want to be doing with close friends and loved ones. I mean, good god. That sounds exhausting. If someone forces me to go through such knots of reasoning when I talk to them, then I just don't want to talk to them.

7Mestroyer
I wouldn't want to be in that kind of relationship long-term either. But I still have to interact with normal people too, and enjoyment is often not the goal there. Edit: also family, whose company you don't want to discard entirely because of a few flaws like playing social games like this. Sorry if I said it unclearly, but all I meant was, "make them think they tricked you."
0Bayeslisk
No, empty praise is still worthless, because Said's cooking and baking not perfect, and there is with near certainty some small flaw, some awkward stylistic choice that could use improvement. Best is the gentle nitpicking of these flaws with a prepended (This is amazing, but) and with the consequent inference that the bread/food/what have you is actually already REALLY GOOD.
0Mestroyer
There is value to knowing the quality of your work apart from knowing ways to improve it. For example, "Should I personally cook something for this upcoming potluck, or should I let my spouse do it?"
-3Bayeslisk
The problem is that knowing how well you cook doesn't really affect who should cook past a certain basic point of competence, as far as I can tell.
0Said Achmiz
I agree with your point but I think you may have misunderstood Mestroyer's comment (totally understandable, as I found his comment difficult to parse, myself). I take from your response that you interpret Mestroyer as referring to a scenario where there's nothing in my work to criticize, and I ask for feedback and receive praise, and correctly interpret the absence of criticism as evidence for there being nothing to criticize. I don't actually think that's the scenario Mestroyer had in mind, based on his second paragraph. (Or was it? If so, then he ought to adjust his terminology, because the term "empty praise" is not appropriate in that context.)
1Lumifer
Not if it's explicit, well-understood and is just one of the rules of how the game is played. There are LOTS of way to convey meaning besides just blurting it out.
6Said Achmiz
Mmmnope, that definitely doesn't change the horror. (I'm not sure how to take what looks to be a correction to a statement about my feelings about something. Regardless, it's misplaced.)
3Lumifer
That was just a shorthand way of saying "I am surprised that you feel this way given that I see the world in a way that..."
1Said Achmiz
Fair enough. In that case, to clarify my response: I acknowledge that your view of things is plausible in many cases; taking said view does not change my feelings about the situations in question.
0Lumifer
Well, let me clarify, too, then :-) I didn't really have the particular situation of pianoforte611 in mind. I am sure there are many families where the communication between spouses is ritualized, lacks meaningful content, no one can actually say what they really feel, and is a mess in general. My point was -- and I should have phrased it better -- is that, for example, a prohibition of criticizing cooking, may be a symptom of such a dysfunctional relationship, but does not necessarily have to be. Relationships tend to have many implicit rules about what means what. I can easily imagine a good, healthy, intimate relationship where you just can't tell your girlfriend "Oh, today you look terrible" in the morning even if she, in fact, does look terrible. And that doesn't sound horrible to me.
6Said Achmiz
To make this point yet again[1], there's a difference between not wanting (or outright forbidding) spontaneous criticism, to forbidding criticism that is provided when asked. In pianoforte611's example, his dad is forbidden from saying the cooking's bad even if he's asked for his opinion. Telling your girlfriend "Oh, today you look terrible", apropos of nothing, seems like a reasonable thing for said girlfriend to object to. If she asks you "How do I look today? Please be honest", and then you're not allowed to answer honestly, lest you break the Rules Of The Relationship — that seems obviously dysfunctional to me. [1] Sorry if I sound frustrated, but people seem to keep ignoring this distinction. Edit: Upon a bit more consideration, pianoforte611's example seems even more dysfunctional than at first glance. I mean, if you forbid someone from criticizing you even in response to a request for an opinion, and both parties are aware of this prohibition, what does it signify when you go ahead and ask them for their opinion anyway? It seems like a really ugly power dynamic: one person says "Well, what do you think of my cooking, honey? Hm? Be honest, now..."; all the while knowing full well that the other person can't answer honestly, lest they break The Rules; holding this over the other person; and fully expecting, correctly, that the other person will dutifully lie, while dutifully pretending that they're telling the truth — in other words, will submit to the first person's display of dominance in the relationship. Of course that could be an exaggeration in the particular case of pianoforte611's family. But I've actually seen this exact dynamic play out in real life, and it's a common enough cultural script, as offered up regularly by e.g. Hollywood.
3Lumifer
That depends. Words are only one of many levels of communication between a couple. You should understand your girlfriend enough to know when she actually means "Please be honest" and when she doesn't even if she says the same words and their literal meaning is "be honest". Again -- it may well be a symptom of a dysfunctional relationship but it does not automatically have to be. A lot of communication is non-verbal. A lot of meaning flies across regardless of which words are being said. I feel it is a mistake to focus solely on the literal meaning of the words pronounced.
2Said Achmiz
Well, ok. I suppose if people are ok with having relationship where communication is that complicated, and it works for them, then far be it from me to speak against that. (Not being sarcastic or passive-aggressive here; I generally genuinely don't care how other people conduct their relationships so long as it doesn't affect me.) But I certainly am not interested in being with someone who would say "Please be honest", but then expect me not to be honest, but only sometimes, and then expect me to know when is which. Nooo sir, I surely am not.
0Lumifer
People come as complete packages :-) Some things maybe deal-breakers but some things may be compensated by other advantages. Oh, and communication is complicated.
0Said Achmiz
I refer you to this comment thread and also this comment here.
6Antisuji
I understand the sentiment, but I'd caution that the desire to be able to express yourself freely can be seen as cover for having license to say whatever you want without regard to how it effects the other person. This is bad even if you don't intend to use it that way: you should be spending some cycles thinking about how the other person will feel about what you say. I speak from experience: saying what's on my mind has at times been hurtful to people I care about and I should have censored it or redirected the impulse. Perhaps part of what you're objecting to is not that the person prefers you to lie, but that they prefer a world that can't exist to exist. If this were really what's going on, that would be a severe lapse of rationality. But that world can exist: our opinions are mutable and it's quite possible to decide to like the play. The conversation is actually about something completely different: whether you're willing and able to emphasize the positive over the negative aspects of something for her sake, which is an essential skill in any relationship. The conversation is also about asking for acknowledgement and approval for something she's worked hard on and probably partially identifies with. Please note that I'm not saying this is easy or obvious. Empathy is a difficult skill and requires training (or socialization), followed by practice and attention even for those to whom it comes easily.
8Said Achmiz
(and now, the other part of my reply to your comment, with a quite intentional difference in tone) Certainly. I'm not suggesting that you ought to just run your mouth about any opinion that pops into your head, especially without giving any thought to whether expressing that opinion would be tactful, how the other person will feel about it (especially if it's a person you care about), etc. Often the best policy is just to shut up. The problem comes when someone asks you for an opinion, and communicates that they really want it. If they then take offense at honesty, then I am strongly tempted to despise them immediately and without reservation. (Tempted, note; there may be mitigating factors; we all act unreasonably on occasion; but patterns of behavior are another thing.) One of the issues with behaving like this is: so what happens when you really do want the person's opinion? How do you communicate that? You've already taught your partner that they should lie, tell you the pleasing falsehood, rather than be honest; how do you put that on hold? "No, honey, I know that I usually prefer falsehood to truth despite my protestations to the contrary, but this time I really do want the truth! Honest!" It erodes communication and trust — and I can think of few more important things in a relationship. Behavior like this also makes your partner not trust your rationality, your honesty with yourself; I don't think I could be with a person whom I could not trust, on such a basic level, to reason honestly. I couldn't respect them. Yes. Certainly. Heck, I sometimes don't want to hear the truth, or someone's honest opinion of me. Not because I am necessarily in denial, or any such thing, but because I don't want to think about it at the moment; or any number of reasons. But you know what I don't do in that case? I don't ask them for their honest opinion! I don't do what the girlfriend in the anecdote did, which is essentially demand that someone close to her to lie to her,
0Eugine_Nier
One scary thought I had a while back is that this is essentially what friendship and especially love is, i.e., sabotaging one's rationality, specifically one's ability to honestly asses one's friend's/lover's usefulness as an ally as a costly way to signal one's precommitment not to defect against the friend/lover even when it would be in one's interest to do so.
0Richard_Kennaway
On the other hand, it's just as easy to make up a story in the opposite direction: friendship and love are what we call having a true judgement of a person's fundamental virtue that is unswayed by transient, day to day circumstances.
0Said Achmiz
"Love is the inability to follow a logical argument concerning the object of one's affection." ... is a quote along those lines, from a former classmate; with which I do not actually agree. But "usefulness as an ally" does not at all fully capture a loved one's value to me, even absent any failures of rationality. (Not that you said it does, I'm just pre-empting likely replies.)
-1Eugine_Nier
Feel free to substitute whatever you feel is appropriate for "usefulness as an ally".
-3Eugine_Nier
The difference is that I explain it in terms of game theory.
2Said Achmiz
Possible, but utterly abhorrent. Doublespeak for "doublethink, self-deception, and lies". One can acknowledge hard work without lying about outcomes. Approval given regardless of worth is meaningless and devalues itself (because if I approve of what you made, even if it's crap, then my approval is worthless, because it does not distinguish good work from bad, good results from dreck). Perhaps, then, she should heed Paul Graham's advice to keep her identity small; and apply the Litany of Tarski to whether the thing she worked on was good. Sure, but something can be difficult, non-obvious, and undesirable. I strongly disapprove of equating empathy with deception and tacit support for irrationality and emotional manipulation. They are not the same.
-2wedrifid
That is something the people do have actual conversations about, something that is, indeed, important to consider and a good reason to adopt the practice of emphasising positive things. However, it is not the kind of conversation that SaidAchmiz was talking about unless you read it extremely uncharitably. There is a rather distinct and obvious difference between emphasizing the positive aspects of something and emphasizing something that does not exist. In fact, choosing to emphasize something to exists entails outright failing to emphasize a positive aspect of the the thing in question. Sometimes that is necessary to do, but doing so does not constitute a converstation of the type you describe. Your reply has distinct "straw man" tendencies.
2Antisuji
You're right, I made some assumptions that probably don't apply to SaidAchmiz, and I realize my comment comes off poorly. I apologize. I was trying to refer to the situation from the OP, but found it difficult to write about without using a hypothetical "you" and I'm not entirely satisfied with the result. What I was trying to get across is that this kind of situation can be complex and that the girlfriend in the scenario can have legitimate emotional justification for behaving this way. I agree that wishing you'd lied is a bad situation to be in. I agree that the OP's story is not a very good mode of interaction even if handled the way Sam Harris would. I agree that people should be able to have explicit conversations about emphasizing positives rather than veiled ones (which I was trying to get at when I said the conversation was "actually" about that). I don't mean to imply that SaidAchmiz wants to feel completely free to say anything regardless of consequences. I'm trying to say that I have felt that tendency myself and have unintentionally taken advantage of a "we should be able to say anything to each other" policy as an excuse not to think about the effects of my speech. Hopefully this is clearer. I'm only trying to relay what I've learned from my experiences, but maybe I've failed at that.
1wedrifid
Particularly given the replies you have prompted it is worth emphasising the 'pressed you' phrase. The combination of pressing for honest feedback and handling it poorly is a very different thing to handling honesty poorly without attempting to force 'honest' feedback be given. (Note that the information given does not lead me to conclude that the girlfriend must have been executing that pattern but hypothetical people who do so do thereby lose some measure of want-to-date-them-ness.)
0NancyLebovitz
It's possible that she learned that pressing for an honest opinion isn't a good idea for her.
[-]CCC310

Failure to realize a statement could be a white lie can create some terribly awkward situations.

While this is true, it is also true that knowing that a given person won't lie, that they will tell you how bad the acting in your play is, makes their praise even more valuable; because one knows that it is not a white lie.

By allowing yourself the small lies, that is what you are trading away. Whether it's worth it or not, I can't say for sure...

8Douglas_Knight
In theory, committing to not lying has some advantages, but in my experience, it doesn't actually work. In my experience, people who commit to not lying are less accurate and less trusted than those who don't. And I'm pretty sure the causality flows from the commitment and not from a third factor.
2CCC
This runs contrary to what I would expect. Could it be that people who commit to not lying: * Do not follow up on their commitment * Proceed to twist their words so as to be dishonest without technically lying * Or is there some other reason for this?
3Douglas_Knight
Failure to keep the commitment is not the problem in my experience. A person who deceives by technical truths usually gets a reputation as a pathological liar; a well-deserved reputation, I would say. Self-deception is a much bigger problem for accuracy. But that hardly scratches the surface of the problems. You have a theory. Theories are great! But test it. Pay attention to people's reputations for honesty, accuracy, and trustworthiness.
0CCC
This will be difficult. In my limited experience, very few if any people are intentionally dishonest with me. (I may simply be very lucky in that respect). This puts me in a fairly poor position to gauge other people's reputations for honesty. Accuracy is another matter entirely. Accuracy is a function of intelligence and of the ability to accurately observe the environment. I can easily see accuracy being entirely independent of any commitment against lying.
[-]Ixiel280

This reminds me of something Mark Horstman (I think) said, that people are entitled to honest answers to questions to which they are entitled an answer. He was using it in a workplace context, for example that if one's boss asks about one's sex life it's okay to lie, because she is not entitled to an answer thus she is not entitled to an honest answer. Good post.

I think an important additional concept being invoked in the above example is that the person you are lying to has social power over you. While generally abiding by a wizard's code of speaking the literal truth, I consider there to be a blanket moral exemption on lying to the government. It is not always pragmatically wise to lie to a government official, but in a moral sense the option is at your discretion.

For example, when the TSA asks you if anything in your luggage could be used as a weapon, you just lie.

Certain interactions with the government (assuming you are behaving peacefully) seem like a special case of dealing with an adversarial or exploitative agent. When an agent has social power over you, they might easily be able to harm or inconvenience you if you answer some questions truthfully, whereas it would be hard for you to harm them if you lied. Telling the truth in that case hurts you, but lying harms nobody (aside from foiling the exploitative plans of the other agent, which doesn't really count).

A more mundane example would be if a website form asks you for more personal information than it needs, and requires this information. For instance, let's say the website asks for your phone number or address when there is suspiciously no reason why they should need to call you or ship you anything. If you fill in a false phone number to be able to submit the form, then you are technically lying to them, but I think it's justified. Same thing for websites that require you to fill in a name, but where they don't actually need it (e.g. unlike financial transactions, or social networks that deal with real identities).

The website probably isn't trying to violate your rights, but it's ... (read more)

8private_messaging
Most people are neither too dull to imagine or recall from a movie the ways to use ordinary items in their luggage as weapons, nor lying, when they say no...
2Said Achmiz
Either you have included an unintended negative, or you are saying that nothing in most people's luggage could be used as a weapon.

Or it's just that "lying" implies an attempt to deceive.

Words are meant to communicate meaning. I wouldn't consider it lying if someone communicates in a sense that properly answers the meaning of the question, even if the question is clumsily asked.

Likewise, I would consider it lying if someone uses words which are literally true, but does so in a manner meant to deceive the listener.

9private_messaging
There's no time to explain in excruciating detail that TSA wants to hear about, say, handguns that people forget to remove from their luggage, tools such as nail guns, assorted sharp pieces, etc, but not about how you can hit someone on the head with a laptop. And that if it's here by mistake, a lot of time is saved by you telling about it and them not having to assume that you're a bad guy trying to conceal it. And within the limited number of sufficiently short sentences there's not a single one that exactly describes what is meant. Words have to be used, in lieu of telepathy, such as "weapon" meaning something that is sufficiently weapon-like and effective as a weapon to be a problem. As much as we need accessibility, there is just no practical way to accommodate for communication related disabilities in a screening line at an airport.
0[anonymous]
Eliezer would quote the relevant HPMoR scene, were he trying to be honest.
-1JRMayne
Wait, what? You're saying it''s never morally wrong to lie to the government? That the only possible flaw is ineffectiveness? Either I am misreading this, you have not considered this fully, or one of us is wrong on morality. I think there are many obvious cases in which in a moral sense, you cannot lie to the government.
0Said Achmiz
Example, please?
3JRMayne
Let's start with basic definitions: Morality is a general rule that when followed offers a good utilitarian default. Maybe you don't agree with all of these, but if you don't agree with any of them, we differ: -- Applying for welfare benefits when you make $110K per year, certifying you make no money. Reason: You should not obtain your fellow citizens' money via fraud. -- "Officer Friendly, that man right there, the weird white guy, robbed/assaulted/(fill in unpleasant crime here) me.." Reason: It is not nice to try to get people imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. -- "Yes it is my testimony that Steve Infanticider was with me all night, and not killing babies. So you shouldn't keep him in custody, your honor." Reason: Even if you dislike the criminal justice system, it seems like some respect is warranted. -- "No, SEC investigators, I, Bernie Madoff, have a totally real way of making exactly 1.5% a month, every month, in perpetuity." Reason: You shouldn't compound prior harm to your fellow humans. -- "I suffer no sudden blackouts, Department of Motor Vehicles." Reason: You should not endanger your fellow drivers. That was five off the top of my head. This is in response to SaidAchmiz, because I still think it's possible that Eliezer meant something different than I interpreted, though I don't understand it. I also think that in the U.S. you shouldn't lie on your taxes, lie to get on a jury with the purpose of nullifying, lie about bank robberies you witness, lie about your qualifications to build the bridge, lie about the materials you intend to use to build the bridge, lie about the need for construction change orders, lie about the number of hours worked... you get the picture. I understand that some disagree. I also understand that if you live in North Korea, the rules are different. But I think a blanket moral rule that lying to the government has only one flaw - you might get caught or it might not work - is a terrible moral rule. Because t
1Said Achmiz
I'm not entirely sure what "a good utilitarian default" means, but I suspect I disagree, since (I strongly suspect) I am not a utilitarian. It's not clear to me that deserving or needing your fellow citizens' money is what entitles you to their money (assuming anything does), so I don't think I entirely agree. This is one of those cases where it feels to me like I'd be doing something wrong, but trying to pin down exactly what that something is, is difficult. "not nice" is quite an understatement, so yes, I agree. Why is some respect warranted? What warrants it? I neither understand finance well enough to grasp this situation, nor do I have any idea what "compound prior harm" means, so I can't comment on this one. Agreed. It seems like the pattern so far is: lying to the government is clearly bad when it would clearly cause harm to your fellow humans. Otherwise, the situation is much more murky. And I think that's consistent with the way I interpreted Eliezer's comment, which was something to this effect: "There's nothing inherently wrong with lying to the government, per se (the way there might be with lying to a person, regardless of whether your lie harmed them directly and tangibly); however, lying to the government may well have other consequences, which are themselves bad, making the lie immoral on those grounds." That is, I don't think Eliezer was saying that if you lie to the government, that somehow automatically counterbalances any and all negative consequences of that act merely because the act qualifies, among other things, as a lie to the government. Let's see if we can't apply this principle to the rest of your examples: I would certainly never attach my name to any suggestion that I endorse lying to the IRS. This seems fine to me. Depends a whole lot on the circumstances. I can't make a blanket comment here. Such lies might very well harm people, and so are bad on those grounds. This does seem bad for rule-consequentialist reasons. Seem
3TheOtherDave
This example particularly amuses me, since this is the first year in a while where I won't have to lie on my federal tax return about my marital status, and I'm really happy about that.
1Eugine_Nier
That's not lying. To see this try tabooing "marital status".
1Said Achmiz
No doubt! I do wonder what JRMayne would say about cases like yours, though. To me it seems obvious that you did nothing wrong in those previous years.
3TheOtherDave
(nods) I think even by the government's standards, I didn't actually do anything wrong. Come to that, I'm not sure I was even lying, technically speaking, as I'm not sure if filing single-head-of-household is technically asserting that I'm unmarried in the first place. It just felt like it.
6Jiro
Assuming it is asserting that you're not married, it's asserting that you're not married by the Federal tax definition. You weren't, so it's not a lie.
0Nornagest
Bernie Madoff is a stockbroker who ran a famous Ponzi scheme that came to light a few years ago, at the height of the financial crisis. Judging from the Wikipedia page, the fraud wasn't a terribly complicated one: basically, he was taking investors' money and hanging onto it rather than investing it, while fabricating (unusually consistent) paper investment returns for his clients and paying them out of pocket if they ever wanted to cash out.
0Said Achmiz
Yes, I know who Bernie Madoff is, I'm just not clear on what are the implications of the quoted statement to the government. What does it mean? How was it false? Are there legal obligations to disclose something in such a case? What are they? What are the consequences (practical, not legal) of that lie? Who is harmed by the lie? Who is harmed, on the other hand, by the actual fact which you are lying about? Etc. I just don't have anywhere near enough context for any of this.
2Nornagest
It means that Madoff was claiming he'd invested his clients' money at an annual rate of return of... let's see... a little under 20% (Wikipedia cites 10.5 to 15) when he'd actually had it in the bank at a RoR in the low single digits. Because of that, there would have been an increasingly large gap (probably around 10% annually, compounded over the life of his fund) between the figures he'd cited to his clients and the actual money he'd have available to return to them, and if and when enough of them decided to collect, they'd have found themselves short in proportion to that gap plus whatever Madoff took out for himself (a sum in the millions). This is straightforward fraud: Madoff promised a service, deliberately failed to deliver, and pocketed compensation for it anyway. The harm done by Madoff extracting compensation is obvious (it's basically theft); the harm done by him not doing his job is a little more complicated, but also substantial once you take into account opportunity cost. I don't know the exact legal requirements.
1Said Achmiz
Ok, thanks. That makes sense. If you don't mind a bit of followup explanation: where does the lie to the government come into this? Like, clearly Madoff defrauded his clients and that's terrible, but I'm still not clear on the role of the disclosure to government institutions (or lack thereof). Is it just that the government in this case is the channel by which one disclose information about operations to one's clients, i.e. the government acting on behalf of the clients? Or is it something else...?
0Nornagest
The SEC's basically acting as an enforcement body and a standards organization in this case. Lying to them allowed Madoff to perpetuate his fraud, and perhaps more importantly to legitimize it; he wouldn't likely have been able to manage billions of dollars if he'd been operating outside the regulatory framework. I'm not sure I'd call that intrinsically immoral, even with my deontology emulator on, but in this context I think I'd be comfortable saying that it acted to exacerbate the situation. It looks like he'd tried to stay out of their sights as much as possible, though. Judging from Wikipedia, most of the investigation here was carried out by his competitors.
-1Said Achmiz
Understood. Yes, given this explanation I think I agree that lying to the SEC was immoral in this case.
2Said Achmiz
This seems like a good heuristic to cover my "nosy relatives" example, as well as many others, and fits my moral intuitions. Good work, Mark Horstman (or whoever)!
0[anonymous]
Do you think it fits the girlfriend case in the OP? I mean, do you think you are wronging your partner if, when they press you for an assessment of their performance, you lie to spare their feelings? (I agree with you that they'd be wrong to then get upset of you respond honestly and negatively, but that's a different question.) Are you wronging your partner even if you know you are fulfilling their preferences by lying? (or does that disentitle them to an answer?)
2Said Achmiz
I do not. I think you are entitled to the truth about your partner's opinion of things that are important to you. Your partner's, note; perhaps also your close friends'; not anyone's. I would feel wronged, if I was said partner. I think that if you're in a relationship with a person who values truth, then yes, you are wronging them by withholding it to spare their feelings. If your partner is someone who does not value truth, then, I think, you are not wronging them by lying to spare their feelings. I'm not sure about this. To me, it is a moot point; since I've noted, I would never want to be with such a person. The question of whether they are entitled to the truth is not actually relevant, as they are not asking for the truth in such a situation; they are asking for something else (validation? support? I don't know).
1Burgundy
Yes. There are also questions which interviewers are legally prohibited from asking during job interviews, which probably have good moral reasons behind them, not just legal ones. In my recent comments, I've been developing the concept of a "right to information," or "undeserving questions."
-1[anonymous]
That seems right to me, though we should probably say something about what you're then allowed to say. You can't lie to your nosy (monamorous) boss and say "Great! I have sex with your partner all the time." Yet if you are sleeping with your boss' partner, maybe it's not quite right to lie. Is she entitled to an answer in that case?
0[anonymous]
I think your case is different from the OP's: means that you are already doing something much more immoral and lying is not your biggest moral issue.

I don't normally like to blather on about myself, but I feel that a bit of self-exposition might help some people with their apparent ... Fundamental Attribution Error, perhaps?

I have an extremely malleable identity in certain types of social situations, to the point that I literally come to believe whatever I need to believe in order to facilitate rapport with whomever I'm talking with.

For example, I normally have a pretty strong aversion to infidelity in relationships, but on a few occasions I've deeply connected through prolonged conversation with friends who were engaged in relationship infidelity. It is sort of a running joke among my closest friends that I can get almost anybody to open up to me and share their deepest darkest secrets, and the way I do it is that I am genuinely nonjudgemental, and the method by which I am genuinely nonjudgemental is that I have a "core" module that has my actual beliefs and then I have my surface chameleon module which is actually talking which just says whatever it needs to say to establish the connection.

All of this babbling is to convey that if you were to interrupt me in the middle of doing this and say, "moridinamael, was... (read more)

9Said Achmiz
Well, I'm not going to call you a monster or anything, but I will say that I sure would hate to find out one of my friends was the way you describe yourself. I don't think I could continue to be friends with that person, and I sure wouldn't choose to be close to a person if I knew in advance they were like this. Basically, it seems like you're saying: I am really good at self-deception, and so when I lie to you, it's not really a lie because I'm also lying to myself! And believing that lie! Which doesn't change the fact that what you're saying, in such a circumstance, isn't the truth. Your attitude seems to boil down to: "Truth? Haha! What is truth anyway, eh? If I believe any old lie I can come up with, then it becomes my truth, doesn't it? That's just as good as 'the truth'! Whatever that is!" Furthermore and separately: Once you decide to not care about whether your beliefs are true, almost any conversation I could have with you about any of your beliefs, or that is based on any of your beliefs, becomes pointless. Because I know that what you believe has no correlation with truth, and that you just don't care about whether it does. If you'll say anything to establish a rapport with me — even if you make yourself believe that thing while you're saying it — then that rapport is worthless to me; because (however much you may protest the terminology) that rapport is based on a lie. (However, all of that said, I do think your post is valuable, as it contributes a useful data point, as was your stated intention.)
5Bugmaster
I agree with everything you said on a personal level, but I think you're committing the fallacy of false generalization. You (and I) both place a very high value on truth over comfort. We feel incredibly uncomfortable -- perhaps even painfully so -- when we suspect that any of our beliefs might be false. Therefore, for us, finding out that a friend was lying to us (as well as to himself) is tantamount to experiencing a direct attack. However, not everybody in the world is like us. Other people place a very high value on comfort and positive reinforcement. When they talk to their friends, they do so not in order to Bayes-adjust their beliefs, but in order to reinforce their feeling that they are valued, needed, and cared about. Note that this does not necessarily mean that such people do not care about truth. They often do; but truth-seeking is not the reason why they engage in conversations. So, for people who value comfort in their relationships, having a friend like moridinamael would be ideal. And I can't state with any amount of certainty that their worldview is inferior to mine.
6Said Achmiz
Well, sure. That's why I phrased my comment the way I did, referencing what I like/prefer/feel. I agree with your assessment of how we (you and I, and others here on Lesswrong) compare to most other people. However, I don't entirely agree with this: I, too, like feeling that I am valued, needed, and care about; and I don't necessarily engage in conversations only for truth-seeking. I sometimes have conversations for the purposes of entertainment, or validation, or comfort. It's not like truth-seeking is my only reason for talking to another human-being, ever. But! But. One thing I never want is to be entertained by lies[1]; to be validated with lies; to be comforted by lies. As I said in another thread, truth may be brutal, but its telling need not be. There are many ways to comfort and to validate without lying. If I come to a friend for comfort, and they comfort me by lying, I would feel somewhat betrayed. How betrayed, to what extent — that would depend on the subject matter and magnitude of the lie, I suppose. [1] Obvious exceptions include storytelling, hyperbole, sarcasm, performance, and all the other scenarios wherein a person says something that they don't believe is the truth, but they correctly expect that their audience is not expecting that statement to be true, and is not going to believe it as the truth.

Well, sure. That's why I phrased my comment the way I did, referencing what I like/prefer/feel.

Yes, good point.

I sometimes have conversations for the purposes of entertainment, or validation, or comfort. ... But. One thing I never want is to be entertained by lies[1]; to be validated with lies; to be comforted by lies.

I agree, and I feel the same way. However, I believe that you and I see conversations somewhat differently from other people.

When you and I engage in conversation (unless I misunderstood your position, in which case I apologize), we tend to take most of the things that are said at face value. So, for example, if you were to ask "did you like my play ?", what you are really asking is... "did you like my play ?" And, naturally, you would feel betrayed if the answer is less than honest.

However, I've met many people who, when asking "did you like my play ?", really mean something like, "given my performance tonight, do you still consider me a a valuable friend whose company you'd enjoy ?" If you answer "no", the emotional impact can be quite devastating.

The surprising thing, though (well, it was surprising to me w... (read more)

0Said Achmiz
You make good points, and your assessment seems entirely correct. This seems accurate, yes. Strangely, I remember reading/learning/realizing this before, but I seem to have forgotten it. How curious. Perhaps it is because the mode of communication you describe is so unnatural to me. (As I am on the autism spectrum.) I am unsure how to apply all of this to the moral status of behaving the way moridinamael describes...
0Bugmaster
I have not internalized this point, either, and thus I have to continually remind myself of it during every conversation. It can be exhausting, and sometimes I fail and slip up anyway. I don't know where I am on the autism spectrum; perhaps I'm just an introvert... Yeah, it's a tough call. Personally, I think his behavior is either morally neutral, or possibly morally superior, assuming that people like ourselves are in the minority (which seems likely). That is to say, if you behaved in a way that felt naturally to you; and moridinamael behaved in a way that felt naturally to him; and both of you talked to 1000 random people; then, moridinamael would hurt fewer people than you would (and, conversely, make more people feel better). Of course, such ethics are situational. If those 1000 people were not random, but members of the hardcore rationalist community, then moridinamael would probably hurt more people than you would. On the third hand, moridinamael indicates that he can't help but behave the way he does, so that adds a whole new layer of complexity to the problem...
2Said Achmiz
Your analysis of the ethics involved is valid if you only take harm / comfort into account, but one aspect of my own morality is that I value truth intrinsically, not just for its harm/help consequences. So I don't think it's as simple as counting up how many people are hurt by our utterances.
0Bugmaster
If you value truth intrinsically, then reducing your ability to approach it would hurt you, so I think my analysis is still applicable to some extent. But you are probably right, since we are running into the issue of implicit goals. If I am a paperclip maximizer, then, from my point of view, any action that reduces the projected number of future paperclips in the world is immoral, and there's probably nothing you can do to convince me otherwise. Similarly, if you value truth as a goal in and of itself, regardless of its instrumental value; then your morality may be completely incompatible with the morality of someone who (for example) only values truth as a means to an end (i.e., achieving his other goals). I have to admit that don't know how to resolve this problem, or whether it has a resolution at all.
2Burgundy
This observation fits my model of others. Most people are not perfectionists, over-achievers, or ravenous truth-seekers above all. Consequently, I believe that people aren't those things unless they specifically give me reasons to believe they are. And I treat them accordingly, and interpret their requests for feedback in accordance with my impression of what they are looking for. If someone wants more critical feedback from me, or more unvarnished opinions, then they can get it by (a) acting like the type of person who values those things and who can handle them, (b) asking me explicitly.
1Strange7
Why? Beanbag chairs can be useful, so long as you remember not to build your entire house out of them.
1Said Achmiz
I'm not entirely sure I follow your analogy. Is it: "People with personality traits you hate can be fine to have as friends, so long as not all of your friends have personality traits you hate"? If so, then I disagree.
4Strange7
Not being friends with people you hate is nearly a tautology. I'm saying you shouldn't hate and shun people just for prioritizing your comfort over their own integrity. If your social circle consists entirely of straight-talkers, where will you go when you need to be comforted? If a putty-person wants to associate with you, but you have a well-established reputation for shunning putty-people and a relatively homogenous social circle... well, then, they'll pretend to be a straight-talker, because blending in is what they do. Eventually the game-theory of this makes you paranoid, which means more need and less opportunity for emotional comfort, which means any remaining infiltrators get more of your social bandwidth because they're better at providing that comfort. Also, you seem to have missed the distinction between in-principle independently-verifiable fact and self-reported preference. If moridinamael told me, due to my apparent feelings on the issue rather than a legitimate misperception, that a particular gun had been loaded with only five bullets when in actuality it contained six, that would be a much more serious issue than inaccurately reporting how enjoyable some sort of entertainment media had been, even if the entertainment preference went on to influence purchasing decisions and the sixth bullet wasn't aimed at anything I cared about.
4Said Achmiz
Oh, and: To the "straight-talkers", of course. Can you find comfort only in lies?
5Strange7
If brutal honesty satisfied all human emotional needs the world would look very different than it does. By "comfort" here I am referring particularly to the feeling of finding someone who agrees with you closely on some essentially subjective issue, such as taste in art or the moral worth of specific individuals. It is in principle possible to find someone who holds the ideally matched set of opinions persistently, for their own reasons, but there are search costs, and such a person might have other features inconvenient or prohibitive to long-term friendship. A less-close match provides a weaker degree of the feeling. Someone you know to be, on some level, insincere, also provides a weaker degree of the feeling, but that can be outweighed by them being effectively a closer match, and the reduced costs in other areas. Is my reasoning flawed, or is this a matter of you experiencing the latter effect (suspension of disbelief) more strongly?
3Said Achmiz
It's easier (though still non-trivial) to find a set of someones, each of whom holds matching views on some subset of the relevant opinions, and who together cover most or all relevant opinions. It's not easy to find people with whom you match thusly! Finding good, true friends is not something that just happens trivially. But it's worth it. I wouldn't want to settle for less. If I'm interpreting your phrasing correctly, then... um, yes. It's a matter of that. I value truth, and honesty. If I know someone is lying to me, I'm not just going to "suspend disbelief" and pretend I don't know they're lying. Not to mention: how am I going to get around the fact that their lies and deceptions make it very difficult for me to respect them? More pretending? More self-deception? No thank you. Finally: Who said honesty has to be brutal? The truth may be, but its telling may not. And I am not comforted by lies.
2Said Achmiz
Er, what? What are you talking about? This doesn't happen. Is that something you experience in your life? People infiltrating their way into friendships with you, when they know that their personality traits are something you hate? That must suck. :( "You can't prove I hate your pie, so I might as well lie and say I like it."? No thanks. If that's how you (the hypothetical you, a person who wants to be my friend) behave, then, all else being equal, I don't want to be your friend.
6Strange7
It is a thing which I have seen happen to people. There are known countermeasures, which I am attempting to discuss and you are discarding as repugnant.
4Said Achmiz
Well, ok. Let's posit that this is a thing that happens. What are the countermeasures?
8Strange7
If you want me to boil it down to three words, "business before pleasure." Accumulate some people you can count on to cover their own specialties and communicate with you accurately and precisely, and some other people who are fun to be around. Optimize those groups separately. If someone wants to straddle the line, never let them apply leverage from one mode to the other. Never forget which mode you're currently operating in. Business gets priority in emergencies and strategic decisions, because survival, but there should be a balance overall: it's "before," not "instead of."
3Said Achmiz
Wow. That sounds like a terrible life. I thank you for the information/advice, but with respect, I am going to ignore it entirely. I will continue to have a small circle of close friends who are both fun to be around, and don't lie to me. I will continue to avoid closeness with people who lie to me; should any infiltrate my circle of friends (for reasons that I still can't imagine), I will cut them off utterly as soon as I discover their true nature.
2blacktrance
Personally, I find people who lie aren't fun to be around.
4CCC
I suspect it happens to celebrities and very rich people all the time.
2ChristianKl
I don't think being genuinely nonjudgemental is lying. If I'm having an intellectual argument it's also not lying to agree for the sake of having a good argument with the opposing side on some points. If I disagree with someone about A, B, C and D it's completely fine to assume for the sake of the discussion that A, B and C are true to convince them that D is right. If specifically asked you might say that you don't believe A, B or C but you don't have to be open about everything that you disagree with by default. That just leads to confusion and no effective intellectual exchange. Any good therapist learns that he doesn't tell his client everything that the therapist thinks but that he tells the client what's helpful for the client. A good therapist will still honestly answer direct questions about the beliefs of the therapist. I put much more trust into the people who have a strong core and are judgmental so that they can morph into whatever they need to connect on a deep level with another person. All the people who I would trust to jump from a bridge if they would tell me to jump from a bridge have that quality. My first reaction would be to ask: "Do you really think that's a great idea?" but to the extend that I know they come from a warm and pure place and are in strong empathy with me that's why I would follow them. I wouldn't extend that kind of trust to someone at a lesswrong meetup who has the reputation of always telling the truth but who sometimes says things from a judgemental state and sometimes says things from a warm place. Over the last year I developed a stronger personal identity and got more clear about what I value. On the other hand in a game of Werewolf people who could read my emotions to sometimes find out whether I'm lying can't anymore. Knowing who I am allows me to be a lot more socially flexible to do whatever I want in the game of Werewolf in a way that's not readable by the people I'm playing with.
1hyporational
I think I used to experience something like this when I was a teenager. I'd reflexively assume whatever identity was needed for rapport, not necessarily always with skill, and this seemed like lying only afterwards when I realized I had gone too far and would probably get caught. This was annoying because I didn't really have control over my lying. At some point in my early 20s this spontaneously stopped happening. I wonder if this simply had something to with my brain maturing and whatever represents the relevant parts of my identity solidifying. Do you think your family has anything to do with your curious cognition? In my paternal family, lying seems more like a sport than anything morally reprehensible and successful deception is considered something to be proud of. I don't agree with them but can't say I hate them either.
5byrnema
I also discovered I was like this as a teenager -- that I had an extremely malleable identity. I think it was related to being very empathetic -- I just accepted whichever world view the person I was speaking with came with, and I think in my case this might have been related to reading a lot growing up, so that it seemed that a large fraction of my total life experience were the different voices of the different authors that I had read. (Reading seems to require quickly assimilating the world view of whomever is first person.) I also didn't make much distinction between something that could be true and something that was true. I don't know why this was. or if it is related to the first thing. But if I thought about a fact, and it didn't feel currently jarring with anything else readily in mind, it seemed just as true as anything else and I was likely to speak it. So a few times after a conversation, I would shake my head and wonder why I had just said something so absurdly untrue, as though I had believed it. In my early twenties, I found I needed to create a fixed world view -- in fact, I felt like I was going crazy. Maybe I was, because different world views were colliding and I couldn't hold them separate when action was required (like choosing an actual job) rather than just idle conversation. That's why I gravitated towards physical materialism. I needed something fixed, a territory behind all of these crazy maps. I think that the map that I have now is pretty good, and well-integrated with the territory, but it took 3-5 years. I'm still flexible with understanding other world views. For example, I was in a workshop a few days ago where we needed to defend different views, and I received one that was marginally morally reprehensible. I was the only one in my group able to defend it. (It wasn't such a useful skill there, I think most people just assumed I had that view, which is unfortunate, but I didn't mind -- if it was important to signal correctly at thi
0tristanhaze
This is interesting, particularly in connection with your grativation towards materialism - thanks for sharing.
2moridinamael
FWIW my parents both possess aspects of what I think of as this skill of becoming whoever I need to be to fit whomever I'm talking to. I really do think of it as a bit of a superpower and I've intentionally developed it rather than letting it fade which it probably would have done naturally. Perhaps you think of me as having curious cognition but my point in posting this was actually to express the converse -- that I see pieces of myself in everybody, that I see everybody doing this to some degree all the time, I'm just one of the rare people with the introspective awareness to see what I'm doing and guide it. Ever go out to lunch/coffee/whatever with your boss or some figurehead of power, and witness how everybody except the boss transforms into an unimpeachable paragon of bland monotonous virtue? Folks are always selectively showing only the parts of themselves that they think need to be seen in a given context, and this is a type of deception through guiding expectations.
0Jordan
I do this as well, but I don't "lie" (from the perspective of my core values). I empathetically accept the other person's ethics and decisions. I allow that common connection to genuinely color my tone and physical expressions, which seems to build rapport just as well as actually verbalizing agreement. When I find myself about to verbalize agreement of something I don't actually believe, I consciously pull back. The trick is being able to pull back without losing your empathetic connection. Anecdotally, I find that I can verbalize disagreement, but as long as I maintain the tone and physical signals of agreement (or 'acceptance', perhaps, but I think 'agreement' is more true) that the other person remains open.

I endorse the vast majority of the post. Lying in most of those circumstances seems like an entirely appropriate choice, particularly to people you do not respect enough to expect them to respond acceptably to truth. Telling people the truth when those people are going to screw you over is unethical (according to my intuitive morality which seems to consider 'being a dumbass" abhorrent.)

If you're highly averse to lying, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to convince you to tell white lies more often. But I will implore you to do one thing: accept other people's right to lie to you.

People have the right to lie. People do not have the right to lie without consequences. I suggest people respond to being lied to in whatever way best meets their own goals and best facilitates their own wellbeing. Those adept at navigating a sea of social bullshit and deception may choose to never treat lies as defections or provide any negative consequences. Those less adept at that kind of thinking may be better served by being less tolerant of lies from those with a given degree of closeness to them.

I implore you to respect other's right to treat lies, liars, and you in whatever way ... (read more)

9hyporational
Does this really serve many of them better though? Combine implicit high trust in people with judgmentality and poor lie detection in an environment where everybody lies. From an outside perspective the most extreme version of this seems like a recipe for lashing out at random people and alienating them. People openly judgmental about lying actually seem like good targets for deception, because you can expect them to be worse at spotting it. Can lying averse people reliably spot the other nonliars?
7ChrisHallquist
Thanks! Some lies should have consequences. But I think "respect other people's right to you [about some topics]" is a really important principle. Maybe it would help to be more concrete: Some men will react badly to being turned down for a date. Some women too, but probably more men, so I'll make this gendered. And also because dealing with someone who won't take "no" for an answer is a scarier experience with the asker is a man and the person saying "no" is a woman. So I sympathize with women who give made-up reasons for saying "no" to dates, to make saying "no" easier. Is it always the wisest decision? Probably not. But sometimes, I suspect, it is. And I'd advise men to accept that women doing that is OK. Not only that, I wouldn't want to be part of a community with lots of men who didn't get things like that. That's the kind of thing I have in mind when I say to respect other people's right to lie to you. I agree with this. Though I think some degree of acceptance of white lies is the majority position, and figuring out when someone deviates from that and to what degree is tricky. Such social defaults tend to be worth going along with unless you have a pretty damn good reason not to.
-3ialdabaoth
You're asking too much of people, even on LessWrong. You're demanding purely consequentialist utilitarian judgment be made in the face of MULTIPLE ingrained cognitive biases, plus MULTIPLE levels of cultural conditioning. You're not going to win this one.
1Said Achmiz
You really think people's objections to Chris's post are due to the objectors being insufficiently consequentialist? Please, do explain.
0Viliam_Bur
Saying "some kinds of lies are actually okay" is bragging: "I am good at navigating social bullshit, so the presence of the white lies is a net benefit for me." -- Yeah, good for you. Might not work for me. I might hurt myself by trying to costly signal something I am not yet able to pay the cost of.
-1hyporational
Claiming to have a common skill is hardly bragging unless you expect your audience to lack said skill. For me it's more like "I don't like the presence of most white lies, but I have far more important goals than this preference that require interacting with all kinds of people, so I'll suck it up." People who have the luxury of demotivating themselves by calling normal social interaction bullshit probably have pretty asocial jobs.
0Viliam_Bur
Oh, so not only you have the skill, all your friends have it too. How amazing! (Sorry for the agressive tone, but this is approximately how it translates to me.) I don't want to point fingers at anyone, but the mere fact that the topic of "white lies" created a debate in this community suggests that some members consider the costs non-negligible. Yep, I find work with computers much less frustrating than work with humans. (But I also find some kinds of humans much less frustrating than others. So I might enjoy working with the filtered subset, or having a possibility to filter out the most frustrating clients.) The meaning of "normal social interaction" depends on the kind of people you interact with. What's normal in one group may be weird in another. Sure, some things also correlate between the groups, and it's a good idea to improve in those. And the cost of having the interaction is often worth paying. Still, the cost is there, and if it's far from zero (for me, it is), it has to be included in the calculation.
1hyporational
"Sorry, but" doesn't fix open hostility. I'll rather attribute this hostility to the circumstances than to you however. For some reason this discussion prompts as horrible interpretations of people as possible when there clearly are other interpretations available. I'm out.

I worry this post will be dismissed as trivial. I simultaneously worry that, even with the above disclaimer, someone is going to respond, "Chris admits to thinking lying is often okay, now we can't trust anything he says!"

If you extract the hyperbole this is an entirely valid reasoning. An observed pattern of lies (or an outright declaration of such a pattern) does mean that people should trust everything you say somewhat less than they otherwise would. Reputation matters. Expecting people to trust your word as much when you lie to them as when you don't would be foolish. This is a tradeoff that seems worthwhile but you must acknowledge that it is a tradeoff.

If you're thinking of saying that, that's your problem, not mine

False. It is their problem and yours. People not believing you is obviously a negative consequence to you. Acknowledge it and choose to accept the negative consequence anyway because of the other benefits you get from lies. (Or, I suppose, you could use selective epistemic irrationality as a dominance move and as the typical way to defect on an ultimatum game. Whatever works.)

all but the most prolific liars don't lie anything like half the time

... (read more)
5ChrisHallquist
Really? Someone saying "I do the socially normal thing with white lies" is reason to distrust what they say about science?
7Douglas_Knight
Saying "I do the socially normal thing" is pretty good evidence that you don't do the socially normal thing. Structurally, this post and its comments are extremely similar to the pua threads.
1ChrisHallquist
In a sense, yes. Normally you don't announce you do the socially normal thing. But when you're in a subculture where lots of people don't do the socially normal thing...
2Vulture
Agreed. Very few of the positions on lying taken in this thread could be classified as "socially normal" outside of (or in a number of cases even inside of) LW-associated circles.
6wedrifid
Yes. (I question the claim that this is merely an expression of normality but assume it for the sake of the answer.) Yes, it is a reason to trust what they say about science less. The "socially normal" thing to do with respect to mentioning science is to be much more inclined to bring up findings that support one's own preferred objectives than to bring up other things. It also involves a tendency to frame the science in the most personally favourable light. An above normal obsession with epistemic accuracy and truthfulness (which is somewhat typical of people more intellectually inclined and more interested in science) ought to (all else being equal) make one more comfortable trusting someone talking about science. I, for example, often can't help making references to findings and arguing against positions that could be considered "my side". That political naivety and epistemic honesty at the expense of agenda is some degree of evidence. Possibly evidence that I can't be trusted as a political ally on the social-perceptions battlefield but that I can be more useful as a raw information source. Again, assume "all else being equal" is included in every second sentence above.
3Kaj_Sotala
To some extent, though probably not to a large extent. An older version of my recent article about trust used to have the following paragraphs, which I then cut since the essay was already long enough:
2Burgundy
My views on lying are similar to your friend's. Thanks for having a charitable reaction. After reading some of the attitudes in this thread, I find it disconcerting to think that a friend might suddenly view me as having inscrutable or dangerous psychology, if they found out that I believe in white lies in limited situations, like the vast majority of humans. It's distressing that upon finding this out, that they might so confused about my ethics or behavior patterns... even though presumably, since they were friends with me, they had a positive impression of my ethics and behavior before. Maybe finding out that a friend is willing to lie causes you to change your picture of their ethics (rhetorical "you"). But why is it news that they lie sometimes? The vast majority of people do. Typical human is typical. Maybe the worry is that if you don't know the criteria by which your friends lie, then they might lie to you without you expecting it. If so, then perhaps there are ways to improve your theory of mind regarding your friends, and then avoid being deceived. You could ask your friends about their beliefs about ethics, or try to discover common reasons or principles behind "white lies." While people vary on their beliefs about lying, there is probably a lot of intersubjectivity. Just because someone isn't aware of intersubjective beliefs about the acceptability of lying, it doesn't mean that their neurotypical friends are capricious about lying. (Of course, if future evidence shows that everyone lies in completely unpredictable ways, then I would change my view.) For example, if you know that your friend lies in response to compliment-fishing, then you can avoid fishing for compliments from them, or discount their answers if you do. If you know that your friend lies to people he believes are trying to exploit him, then you don't need to be worried about him lying to you, unless (a) you plan on exploiting him, or (b) you worry that he might think that you are exp

There's a fundamental problem with lying unaddressed - it tends to reroute your defaults to "lie" when "lie"="personal benefit."

As a human animal, if you lie smoothly and routinely in some situations, you are likely to be more prone to lying in others. I know people who will lie all the time for little reason, because it's ingrained habit.

I agree that some lies are OK. Your girlfriend anecdote isn't clearly one of them - there may be presentation issues on your side. ("It wasn't the acting style I prefer," vs., "It's nice that you hired actors without talent or energy, because otherwise, where would they be?") But if you press for truth and get it, that's on you. (One my Rules of Life: Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to.)

But I think every lie you tell, you should know exactly what you are doing and what your goals are and consciously consider whether you're doing this solely for self-preservation. If you can't do this smoothly, then don't lie. Getting practice at lying isn't a good idea.

I note here that I think that a significant lie is a deliberate or seriously reckless untruth given with the mutual expect... (read more)

4fubarobfusco
When you tell one lie, it leads to another ...

I was at a meetup where we played the game Resistance, and one guy announced before the game began that he had a policy of never lying even when playing games like that.

That's exactly what I'd say too. And then, I'd commence the lying :-)

'Continue', you mean :-)

0Bugmaster
Heh. Indeed.
0ThisSpaceAvailable
The problem is that such a policy logically requires also making a pre-game commitment to not answering the question "Are you a spy?" and also to not answer a question logically equivalent, and then the player has to keep track of logical implications and equivalences throughout the game, which leads to much poorer gameplay. Also, if one doesn't make such assurances, then any "lying" during the game is simply gameplay, but with the assurance being made outside of the game, any in-game lying becomes out-of-game lying.
0ntroPi
Wait, wait, has the game already started? The start of the game may be undefined and whether a lie is couted as inside the game depends a lot on the players.
[-]Shmi140

I wouldn't too much on your ability to "lie with truths," as Quirrell would say.

You accidentally a verb.

4ChrisHallquist
Thanks. Fixed.
7maia
Off by one.
5ChrisHallquist
Okay. Now I think it's fixed.

I can see how a reputation for lying would be a bad thing to have, but I can also see why a reputation for not being capable of lying would be a bad thing (mainly in social contexts). From one of my other comments:

For almost a year my best friend was dating a man without telling her ex-husband, and I was seeing her ex-husband every time I went to play with my godson, and I had to remember to lie about a whole bunch of random things like "what did you and my ex-wife do on Saturday?"

This was hard for me. There've been other times where I've slipped up and forgotten. Usually not in the context of friends explicitly telling me to lie about something, but in the context of Person X them telling me something which, to them, is obviously something that they want to conceal from Person Y because of conflicts it would cause. However, I don't model this–I model Person X and Person Y both as friends who I trust with details about my life, and assume that's commutative. I don't even think about it on a conscious level–it's not "I want to tell this person the truth about the thing this other person did because lying is complicated"–they just ask me a question and I answ... (read more)

I think the big thing to remember is that the meaning of something isn't the dictionary definitions of the words combined with the rules of syntax. If someone asks you what you though of a play, wanting to know what you thought of them, and you know this, saying "the acting was bad" is intentionally misinterpreting their question. It is an example of lying with truth.

I would expect someone who presses me for an answer would actually want to know the answer, but maybe I just have bad social skills.

There is one thing I dislike about lying. It's considered rude to tell the truth in certain situations, because it signals that you don't care about that person, because people who care lie, because people who care don't want to appear rude. If people didn't try to signal, things would be better off, but if you lie, you're not only signalling that you care, you're increasing the need everyone else has to signal. You're making things more confusing for other people. It's basically a large-scale prisoner's dilemma. It's like talking in a noisy room, where the other person can hear you if you speak up, but that just makes it noisier for everyone else.

6Strange7
The solution to the noisy room problem is to either pass notes, or lean over and speak at a low-to-normal volume as close as reasonably possible to the intended listener's ear. Alternative communication channels and building up trust/intimacy can be generalized to some, though probably not all, other versions of the problem. Pressing for an answer could also mean you've said approximately the right thing, but your tone and phrasing didn't convey a sufficient degree of conviction, or that you've said something wrong-but-not-unconscionable and they're giving you a chance to retry. (I do not like "guess culture" very much.)
3JQuinton
This is something I also struggled with for a long time and I'm definitely sure it was because I had (or probably still have) poor social skills. The thing I started to notice was that people might seem to be asking a question, but that question is really just a proxy for another question. It's like people were communicating at two different levels. Like the stereotypical asking a girl to get coffee at 2am; the guy isn't literally asking the girl if she wants coffee, and everyone knows this, and to answer as though he's literally asking for coffee is demonstrating poor social skills. If the girl says yes to the coffee suggestion, she's actually "lying" because she doesn't want coffee, but wants the implication of what the guy is asking for when he suggests coffee. If a friend asks me what I thought about a poem she wrote, she might be asking me literally about the poem, or she might be asking some other underlying question like her worth as a person or something else, using the poem as a proxy for that question. Giving my honest opinion about the poem might be, to her, me giving my honest opinion about her underlying question.
-3Lumifer
Yep. People do communicate on multiple levels. Yes, different levels can say different things or even contradict each other. Yes, part of "social skills" is the ability to manage multiple-level communications. Yes, women are much better at that than guys. Yes, it's complicated. :-)
0Burgundy
Yes, understanding the question being asked is important. "What did you think of the play" does not necessarily mean "what was your entire critical view of the play?" It could mean "what encouragement can you offer me?" Alternatively, it could be the other person who made a failure of social skills: they sounded like they were pressing for your entire opinion, when they actually intended to be asking for encouragement, and they did a bad job of communicating what they wanted.
0DanielLC
Hard to say which, given that what it sounds like isn't an inherent property of what they're saying. I guess you just have to compare it to what's normal.

I think this is a great post. I fully agree about accepting other people's right to lie... in limited circumstances, of course (which is how I interpreted the post). I figured it was primarily talking about situations of self-defense or social harmony about subjective topics.

I think privacy is very important. Many cultures recognize that some subjects are private or personal, and has norms against asking about people's personal business without the appropriate context (which might depend on friendship, a relationship, consent, etc...). Some "personal" subjects may include:

  • Sexual orientation
  • Heath issues
  • Configuration of genitals
  • Reasons for sexually/romantically rejecting someone
  • Current physical state of pain
  • Sexual history (outside STI discussion between partners)
  • Sexual fantasies
  • Past traumatic experiences
  • Political views that would be controversial or difficult to explain in the current context

The ethics of lying when asked about personal subjects seems more complicated. In fact, the very word "lying" may poison the well, as if the default is that people should tell the truth. I do not accept such a default without privacy issues being addressed. I will ... (read more)

All this needs the disclaimer that some domains should be lie-free zones. I value the truth and despise those who would corrupt intellectual discourse with lies.

Can anyone point me to a defense of corrupting intellectual discourse with lies (that doesn't resolve into a two-tier model of elites or insiders for whom truth is required and masses/outsiders for whom it is not?) Obviously there is at least one really good reason why espousing such a viewpoint would be rare, but I assume that, by the law of large numbers, there's probably an extant example somewhere.

5TheOtherDave
Can we taboo "intellectual discourse"? As I think about your question I realize that I'm not sure I understand what that phrase is being used to refer to in this context.
-1Oligopsony
For present purposes, I suppose it includes any domain including the defense of lying itself.
0TheOtherDave
So, I think "a defense of corrupting intellectual discourse with lies" collapses into looking for a defense of lying more generally... would you agree? I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to make sure I've understood you.
4ChrisHallquist
I'm trying to take the idea of not lying in science journals and broaden it to include fields other than science, and public discussion in places other than journals. A specific example would be Christian apologist William Lane Craig (who I've been following long enough to become convinced that the falsehoods he tells are too systematic to all be a matter of self-deception.)
2ChristianKl
Do you believe that Sokal was immoral when he wrote his famous paper? There are people who suggest that Bem wrote his latest famous paper for the same reason. If you think that the system is inherently flawed and corrupt and has no error correction build in, the strategy of placing lies into the system to make it blow up makes sense.
4EHeller
Daryl Bem? I think people suggesting Bem isn't being serious (though sadly mistaken) haven't talk to him. If Bem is trying to do something like Sokal, he has been doing an Andy Kaufman level job of trolling for many years now.
5ChristianKl
I think I remember reading that sentiment from someone who's a student with him on a blog. Bem is certainly deeply serious about his belief that the academia is full of hypocrites. Even if Bem does belief in psi he's not as stupid as believing that the data he gathered for that paper proves that psi really exists. But if he can use that data to show how deeply wrong academia happens to be and shake up academia from his perspective maybe academics start to take data more seriously. To the extends that he beliefs taking data seriously leads to believing in psi shaking up academia serves that agenda. In a world full of pseudoskeptics someone who's serious about evidence gets annoyed at pseudoskeptics. To the extend that you don't mentally distinguish pseudoskeptics from the real thing, it's hard to understand people like Bem. I'm enough like Bem in that regard to feel with him. I'm the kind of person who goes on skeptic exchange to write a question asking for whether there evidence that supports the core assumptions of evidence-based medicine and have the highest upvoted answer be for a year a answer opposing evidence-based medicine. Part of the trick was to take the most authoritative source as definition for evidence-based medicine and that source actually puts up a strawman that nobody in their right mind would defend at depth. I'm deeply troubled when I read people saying that the evidence for climate change is comparable to the evidence for evolution because I think the evidence for evolution is pretty certain and better with p<<0.0000001 and climate change isn't in that reference class. I'm serious enough about evidence to find that claim a big lie that offends me, especially when made in highly authoritative venues. Bem is deeply serious but that paper is him saying: "Even if I play by your strange and hypocritical rules of "evidence", I still can provide "evidence" that psi exists. Take that." I think that the data he measured is real but I don't think th
2EHeller
So you are bringing up a whole lot of unrelated, or only loosely linked ideas. I'll be honest, such a long reply of (at best) loosely connected ideas pattern matches to "axe-to-grind" for me, so I strongly considered not bothering with this post. As it is, lets limit the scope to discussing Bem. Anyway, what exactly do you believe Bem is doing with his paper? I assumed the claim in your first post is that Bem was publishing silly results to highlight the danger of deifying p-values (as Sokal published a silly paper to highlight the low standards of the journal he submitted to). I contend this is not true, and Bem believes the following (based on interviews, the focuses of Bem's work, and a personal conversation with him): 1. psi is a real phenomena 2. ganzfeld experiments (as interpreted through standard statistical significance tests) are strong evidence for psi 3. "Feeling the Future" and other similar experiments are evidence for precognition I contend all of these beliefs are mistaken. In response to further claims you've made regarding the academic response to Bem, I further contend: 1. the academic community is right to be skeptical of such work, and in fact its a sort of informal Bayesian filter. 2. the academic response raised valid statistical objections to Bem's work The biggest problem I see is that an effect has to have as ludicrously small a prior as Bem's before proper scrutiny is applied. Lots of small effect that warrant closer methodological scrutiny slip through the cracks.
0ChristianKl
I don't think that you can understand the position of people who fundamentally disagree with by reading a single paragraph. Yes, you can find easily a position where they seem to have another opinion than you do, but that doesn't mean that you understand what they actually believe. Bem thinks that academic science is generally not taking the data of their experiments seriously and therefore coming to wrong conclusions in all sorts of domains. Sokal thinks that the literature department can't tell true from false. Bem thinks the same is true of the psychology department. He thinks it lacks the same ability. Sokal is not highliting some specific issue of how one technique that the literature department is using is wrong. His critique of the literature department is more fundamental. The same goes for Bem. Bem doesn't just think that academic psychology is wrong on one issue but that it's flawed on a more fundamental level. Any good Bayesian holds that belief. If you look at a Lesswrong defence on what people learned from becoming Bayesian you will find: There are a lot of people in academia who don't hold that belief and who aren't good Bayesians. Bem is completely on the right side on that point.
0EHeller
I didn't claim to. What I claim in what you quoted is that dragging in a concept like evidenced based medicine and climate science isn't going to help anything in a discussion of Bem's paper. I would phrase this differently. Bem believes that an informal Bayesian filter (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence) is causing academic psychology to unfairly conclude that psi phenomena aren't real. He wants us to ignore the incredibly low prior for psi, and use weak but statistically significant effects to push us to "psi is probable." I don't agree with this, as I've hopefully made clear. Not necessarily true- a good Bayesian who has read the paper could conclude the methodology is flawed enough that its not much evidence of anything (which was also largely the academic psychology response). I believe the methodology of "Feeling the Future" was so flawed that it isn't evidence for anything. The replication attempts that failed further reinforce this belief.
0ChristianKl
Bem does not believe that most researchers really follow extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He believes that many of the relevant researches won't be convinced regardles of what evidence is provided. He might be wrong about that belief but saying that he believes that most researchers would be convinced be reasonable data misunderstands Bem. Not much evidence and no evidence are two different things. If he believes it's evidence and you don't he's right. It might not be much evidence but it's evidence in the bayesian sense. If you debate with him in person and pretend it's no evidence he will continue to say it's evidence and be right. That will prevent the discussion to come to the questions that actually matter of how strong the evidence happens to be. At university we did a failed attempt to replicate PCR. It really made the postdoc who was running the experiement ashamed that she couldn't get it right and that it failed for some reason unknown to her. In no way does this concludes that PCR doesn't work. As far as replication goes Bem also seems to think that there were successful replication attempts: If you have a very strange effect that you don't understand and can't pin down having 2 of 6 replication attempts be successful does not really prove that there no effect. If something can go wrong and a method like PCR that's done millions of times fails to replicated without knowledgeable people knowing why, failing to replicate a very new effect doesn't mean much. Trying to pin down the difference between the 2 successful and the 4 failed replication attempts might be in order. At least that where I would focus my attention when I'm not attached to the outcome. It may very well turn out that there no real effect in the end but there seems to be more than nothing. From the same interview of Bem I linked to above (but by the moderator): Again that not that much different from the way Sokal sees the literature department.
0[anonymous]
Nevermind.
0Douglas_Knight
Here's something. It's not a defense of lying, but I do think it's an example of advocating lying that does not resolve into elites versus outsiders in an essay by Gould: 1 2 3 4. It ends with which I read as advocating that the reader indoctrinate himself with the belief. I don't think it's clear whether he thinks it true or false, just too consequential to leave to the facts. This isn't an exhortation to indoctrinate the masses with lies, but for the reader should to first indoctrinate himself. I think that this is a common pattern. It's possible that I'm reading this wrong. Perhaps it is a coded message of esoteric knowledge and elites are supposed to know better than the indoctrinate themselves. Indeed, that could apply to any example along these lines. Or perhaps I'm reading too much into those words and they aren't meant to be indoctrination at all. Some nearby passages that argue against that: ---------------------------------------- For anyone else, the object level of the essay came up here (though perhaps for the meta level of another debate). I do think it is a good essay.

I agree that the immediate consequences of lying are sometimes better than telling the truth, however, one big problem is lying then having to tell the truth later or lying then getting caught. The more complex the lie, the bigger the risk. The social conventions surrounding lying - feel free to lie, accept other people's right to lie, the guess culture (don't make your desires and feelings explicit) - are a good solution to interacting with strangers since under those conventions, no one is making and effort to detect your lies. This is useful when you do... (read more)

5hyporational
I suggest you explore the concept of trust on a less binary basis. Trust makes no sense to me unless it has some kind of a rough probability estimate attached to it. Different truths have different probabilities and different moral weights.
1Carinthium
True, but it is also true that you can't somebody on certain matters if they are willing to tell you white lies. It's better to try and hang around more honest types so you can learn to cope with the truth better.
5hyporational
I actually prefer the honest types, but don't judge normal people either. This preference is of minor importance. In most situations I can't choose who to interact with and being stubborn about it won't help.

Thanks very much for writing and posting this.

3ChrisHallquist
You're welcome!

Here's an excerpt from an attorney disciplinary code:

In the course of representing a client, a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of fact or law to a third person.

And from the commentary on that rule:

This Rule refers to statements of fact. Whether a particular statement should be regarded as one of fact can depend on the circumstances. Under generally accepted conventions in negotiation, certain types of statements ordinarily are not taken as statements of fact. Estimates of price or value placed on the subject of a transaction and a

... (read more)

At LessWrong there've been discussions of several different views all described as "radical honesty." No one I know of, though, has advocated Radical Honesty as defined by psychotherapist Brad Blanton, which (among other things) demands that people share every negative thought they have about other people. (If you haven't, I recommend reading A. J. Jacobs on Blanton's movement.) While I'm glad no one here is thinks Blanton's version of radical honesty is a good idea, a strict no-lies policy can sometimes have effects that are just as disastrous.

... (read more)
-1hyporational
If someone close to me started being that honest or more importantly submissive with me, the power imbalance would probably upset me much more than any truths exposed. I don't want to control my friends, I want them to challenge me and support me. Alternatively a sudden change like that without obvious submissiveness might make me rather suspicious of what they're hiding behind those little lies. This is not to say there aren't radically honest people who aren't even a bit submissive. I haven't seen such people and they might be rather interesting, but I wouldn't introduce them to anyone else I know. One person I know pretends to be radically honest by telling all kinds of personal stuff even to strangers nobody in their right mind would expose, but is actually full of shit too.

Another thing I should note that it can simply be a matter of human preferences. I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of having any truely close relationship (lover or close friend) with somebody who would be willing to lie to me. I see no reason why other wants should somehow override this one.

I will implore you to do one thing: accept other people's right to lie to you

I don't quite understand what are you imploring.

Of course other people have the right to lie to me. And I have a right to change my attitude and my expectations on that basis.

Rephrased in a slightly different way, other people have the right to lie to me but not the right to escape the consequences.

2ChrisHallquist
This may clarify what I meant there.
0Lumifer
So a woman will lie to a guy to make rejecting him easier. She has the right to do this, sure. And the guy will be fully justified in coming to the conclusion that (a) the woman doesn't trust him; and (b) is willing to lie for minor convenience. Is the trade-off worth it? I have no idea. Presumably it's worth it to some and not to others.
4Said Achmiz
Indeed. And will be fully justified in feeling insulted; after all, that lie communicates the sentiment "I think there's a non-trivial possibility that you will turn hostile/abusive/violent if I reject your advances". I'd sure feel insulted at having such a sentiment expressed toward me. Of course, if in this situation the man and woman don't know each other, or are very casual acquaintances, then it's not really a big insult, because hey, random dude off the street could easily be that kind of asshole. But the closer your acquaintance is, the more insulting it is to use the lie-to-smooth-rejection.
[-][anonymous]100

"I think there's a non-trivial possibility that you will turn hostile/abusive/violent if I reject your advances"

Other possibilities include some or all of: "I think you'll be hurt by my real reasons for rejecting you. I see no benefit in making those reasons clear, and it makes me uncomfortable to cause other people distress (I don't think you'll get angry! probably just sad). You might prefer the painful truth, but given that we're merely acquaintances, that preference of yours doesn't outweigh my wish to avoid an awkward scene. In fact, I doubt you value the truth about the matter so highly that I'd be fulfilling your real (if not espoused) preferences by delivering a harsh truth. Finally, I think that while you're not partner material, you're fun enough to hang out with on occasion. Telling you that I think you're a 5.5/10 kind of person would make future encounters awkward too, so on balance it seems better to lie and preserve a mildly pleasurable, casual friendship."

Still insulting, I guess, but not for the same reasons. I think the 'hostile/abusive/violent' thing is a lot rarer than the above.

3Said Achmiz
Yes, your description seems plausible. I was responding specifically to the reason Chris was describing, but you are correct that your described reason also happens. Yeah... most of that isn't insulting, but "In fact, I doubt you value the truth about the matter so highly that I'd be fulfilling your real (if not espoused) preferences by delivering a harsh truth." is, somewhat. Well, maybe. Depends on which feminist websites you read, you might get different estimates. I have witnessed and heard about (from friends / acquaintances) of both sorts of situations, certainly.
6ChrisHallquist
Most people we meet will not have as high an opinion of us as we might hope. Politeness dictates they should not spell out all the ways in which this is true. When you manage to indirectly infer they don't have such a high opinion of you in spite of their politeness, you probably shouldn't get too insulted.
1Said Achmiz
Again, this depends on how closely you know / how friendly you are with the person in question. Someone I met once or several times, with whom I am on speaking terms but not really at all close, thinks there's a nontrivial chance I might be a potential violent asshole? I don't get too insulted (although I would draw conclusions from this about that person's world view, and might condition considerations of increased friendliness with that person on the basis of those conclusions). Someone I am more socially close to thinks this of me? I'm more insulted. I mean, this isn't the sort of "not as high of an opinion as one might hope" where they politely refrain from saying that I put way too much salt in my casserole. This is quite a bit more serious.
2Burgundy
There's a lot of possibilities here, which are potentially less insulting. To add some: * If she reveals the true reasons for rejecting him, then he might might express judgmentalness about them, or some other reaction which is negative, but not actually hostile/abusive/violent. * If she reveals the true reasons for rejecting him, he might briefly express an emotional reaction that he regrets later. * If she reveals the true reasons for rejecting him, then he might not understand and ask for an explanation, which could result in discomfort, or her needed to reveal information that she doesn't want to reveal. * If she reveals the true reasons for rejecting him, then he might try to change the situation to have her change her mind. If she doesn't want him to try to change her mind, then it might be better to not let him think that he might be able to. * If she reveals the true reasons for rejection him, he might take it too hard and develop unwarranted insecurities in the future. (I am using she and he to be consistent with ChrisHallquist's example, though I believe that these concerns apply to rejection in other gender combinations). In my experience, and hearing the experience of friends and partners, there are plenty of good reason to anticipate a non-graceful response to hearing someone's "true rejection" in a sexual or romantic context. Most of these reactions will be more in the embarrassing/awkward category, rather than hostile/abusive/violent. Even if there is a low probability that a given person will react ungracefully, the negative utility of that reaction might be sufficiently high that the expected value of revealing the truth is low. For these reasons, I would not automatically be offended if someone won't tell me the truth about why they are rejecting me, and I won't take it as perceiving me to be untrustworthy, hostile, abusive, or violent. Of course, I would prefer to hear the truth; I just don't expect it, and I accept that I may never f
3NancyLebovitz
This matches my experience from the female side of the situation-- except that I'll add that a lying rejection doesn't necessarily represent explicit thought. Subjectively, it can be like a feeling or a reflex. This doesn't mean I think it's genetically innate, but I do think it can be learned so early and subtly that it seems like the obvious thing to do.
0hyporational
I think you're reading too much into their thought process. You of course have all the right to be insulted but if you can't hide it you might make their fear a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts. It might help to alleviate the insult to remember that these kinds of judgements can be more a result of flawed heuristics that evolution spawned than deliberate reasoning. People can be quite clueless of what they're afraid of, especially in complex situations that all social situations happen to be.
0Said Achmiz
Wait, what? Are you equating being offended at someone implying that you're a violent asshole, with actually being a violent asshole? Doesn't that sort of equation make most insults into self-fulfilling prophecies? "I called her a bitch, and she got angry! Thus proving my point!" "I told him he was a moron, and he got insulted! What a moron for not realizing that he's a moron!" Yes, that's true. The less self-aware, rational, and generally intelligent a person is, the less insulted I am when they think poorly of me.
0hyporational
Of course not. I'm not justifying the behavior, I'm explaining why getting insulted might be suboptimal as it might breed more of said behavior.
0Said Achmiz
I don't think I follow. Specify, please, to which behavior you refer.
2hyporational
Someone witholds information from you because they're afraid you might get hostile. You think they should think more highly of you and get offended. You facial expressions and your tone of voice signal the person you're angry. Which way do you think this will affect their mostly subconscious estimation of your potential hostility in the case of volunteering the information? I'm not trying to justify any behavior, I was referring to witholding information.
0Said Achmiz
I understand what you're saying now, yes. (I think "self-fulfilling prophecy" is a misleading term to use to describe this, though.) As to your question: I think this falls into the category of "person is not very self-aware or rational".
0hyporational
I agree the expression doesn't fit like a glove, just thought it was close enough. What do you think is misleading about it? Perhaps, and the way I see it these qualities inconvenience even the best of us much of the time.
0hyporational
Can you give some nonextreme examples what those attitudes, expectations and consequences would be? There will also be consequences to you if you treat all liars equally harshly, and people would benefit from taking this seriously unless honesty is some kind of a first priority terminal value for them.
7Lumifer
One of the points here is that, as usual, it depends. Let's say someone I know lied to me and I found out that it was a lie. My response would depend on three major factors: * The kind of relationship with that person. Relationships have (mostly implicit) rules and promises. A lie may or may not break such a promise. A co-worker lying to you about where he was last weekend is different from your partner lying to you about where he was last weekend. * The motivation behind the lie. A lie to avoid embarrassment is different from a lie to gain some advantage over you. * The nature of the lie -- its magnitude and character. A lie to make oneself look better is different from a lie which results in you being fired from your job. I don't want to treat liars equally harshly or equally leniently. I want to treat them depending on the circumstances. There is no "general case". A non-extreme example of attitudes, expectations, and consequences? Sure. Let's say Alice is a drama queen and wants lots of attention. She tend to lie (in minor ways) about what actually happened and also (in more pronounced ways) about her feelings and reactions. If I learn this about Alice I would adjust my opinion about what kind of a person she is, I would expect her accounts of herself to be exaggerated, and I would treat her troubles and problems less seriously.
0hyporational
That's a nice summary of the kind of flexibility I would endorse, thanks.

A note w.r.t. the quote:

But please keep in mind that, beyond the realm of science, the views of the characters may not be those of the author. Not everything the protagonist does is a lesson in wisdom, and advice offered by darker characters may be untrustworthy or dangerously double-edged.

-- The Author, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

1ChrisHallquist
I know. I'm pretty sure Eliezer intended that arc to partly be about how horrible lying is; see especially the follow-up chapter being titled "Contagious Lies," which is a reference to an anti-lying post in the sequences.
3Vulture
Interesting. I hadn't thought of that - personally, I have to admit that I think the model of Rational!Quirrell has left me significantly more favorably disposed towards lying than I would have been otherwise.

As long as enemies exist, secrets must be kept.

3drethelin
And never forget, human minds are our own worst enemies. We run on broken substrates that are hurt more sharply than they should be by comments like "You look gross and I don't want to talk to you". We have enemies even within the minds of our closest friends. It's best not to awaken them.
4Vulture
I think the reason you're being downvoted is that people would prefer you to just edit this addendum into your original comment rather than replying to yourself. It's all I can think of since your point is in itself quite insightful. Edit: Okay, would anyone care to explain what's actually going on, then?

I find that, sometimes, perfectly honest words are interpreted as white lies because they sound like such.

"What are you doing this weekend?" Me (very early in the term) "Studying for midterms."

"Let's be just friends from now on, okay?"

"You're a wonderful person, and I wish you the best of luck."

On another topic, I find myself lying, not to protect others' feelings but out of cowardice, to hide misdeeds, especially those that I irrationally didn't expect anyone to notice. The worst instances have involved frequent and... (read more)

I guess one problem that crops up when dealing with the issue of lying is that there is no clear litmus test. It may be possible to give broad guidelines such as "it is ok to lie in situations A,B and C, but most definitely not OK to lie in situations D,E and F." Real life is far more complex and subject to all manner of interpretation (not to mention all manner of bias as well). I strongly suspect that before we can rule on when it is ok to lie, or when it is ok to use a half truth we need to perfect the art of communication i.e. develop a syste... (read more)

Your discussion of Harris's 'Lying' is a little terse, and does miss some of his arguments. I think anyone interested should get his book, its very short and can be read in about half an hour to an hour, depending on your speed. PM me for a PDF copy of the first edition (note: second edition is much updated).

Here's two extended quotes, that I think contains ideas not addressed in the post:

Once one commits to telling the truth, one begins to notice how unusual it is to meet someone who shares this commitment. Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean

... (read more)
3brazil84
That's an interesting example, because in her more reflective moments, the friend is almost certainly already aware that she is fat and that it makes her significantly less sexually attractive. She is probably reminded of this unpleasant truth on a regular basis and it's not entirely clear that an additional reminder will be helpful. She has probably tried at least 10 or 15 diets and they have all failed. If you are considering reminding a fat person that they are fat, you need to ask yourself what your motivations are for doing something which (1) will certainly cause short-term emotional pain; and (2) is unlikely to result in the person getting their shit together and losing the weight. Are you really trying to help them? Or are you just trying to make yourself feel superior at their expense? My impression is that there are a lot of "concerned" people who are happy to give free advice to fatties (often something along the lines of "eat less and exercise more -- you're killing yourself") but unwilling to give $20 or $30 towards a gym membership for said fatties. This suggests that often the motivation is more status-mongering than actual concern. Whatever the value in being honest with other people, I suspect there is more value in being honest with yourself.
1Said Achmiz
Remember that we're discussing a case where the person asked you for your opinion. I certainly wouldn't just randomly say to someone "Hey, guess what? You're fat", especially if that person was my friend or someone else I cared about. But if they asked me? That's a different story altogether. Do you really think this is the case for good friends, or loved ones? Unwilling to give $20 or $30, really? And furthermore, do you in fact believe that not having the money for a gym membership is the important obstacle between an overweight person and an effective weight-less solution?
0brazil84
The quoted hypothetical doesn't make clear if the information is asked for or volunteered. Nor does it make clear what it would mean to tell the truth: "Yes, that dress makes you look fat."; "That dress makes you look fat because you look fat in any dress because you're fat"; "You look fat in any dress and that's why men are not interested in you"; or something else. Probably not . . . but I don't think it affects my point, which is that a lot of the time, people express concern, and might even believe that they are acting out of concern, but actually they have other motivations. No I don't. But I'm skeptical that the lack of an additional reminder is an obstacle either.

I wouldn't count non-literal use of language (“it was okay” when it's obvious to both interlocutors that the actual intended meaning is ‘[it sucked but I don't want to hurt your feelings]’) as lying.

But still, I prefer to be with people to whom I can also say why it sucked (so they get a chance to do better the next time) without hurting their feelings either. I can't choose my own parents and I can't choose whether the Nazis will come to my door, but I can choose whom to interact with in most other situations (excluding NPC-like situations, where topics ... (read more)

I reject this idea for a fairly simple reason. I want to be in control of my own life and my own decisions, but due to lack of social skills I'm vulnerable to manipulation. Without a zero-tolerance policy on liars, I would rapidly be manipulated into losing what little control of my own life remains.

You seem to be treating lack of social skills as a static attribute rather than a mutable trait. This may not be the most productive frame for the issue.

8Carinthium
Improving my social skills is HARD. I could invest a massive effort into it if I tried, but I'm at university right now and my marks would take a nosedive. It's not worth the price.
3Nornagest
Never claimed it wasn't. As a matter of cost-benefit analysis, though, I think you might nonetheless find it attractive in comparison to unilaterally declaring war on the liars of the world, which I'd expect to be strenuous, socially costly, and largely ineffective in preventing manipulation. As a matter of fact, drawing a sufficiently hard line on lying opens up entirely new avenues for manipulation of your trust.
2wedrifid
I did not read Carinthium's statement to be a declaration of war against liars. At most it would be analogous to a trade embargo. One can make choices about what one welcomes in one's own personal life and attempting to change or fight everyone who doesn't do those things. The choice to not welcome lies limits Carinthium's social options quite significantly but it needn't be as strenuous or overt as you suggest.
2Strange7
There's a widely-used term for the political environment embargoes create: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_war
2wedrifid
It's a good term (ie. I signal that downvote you received wasn't from me but rather the compensating upvote was so as to slight facilitate future cooperation). I do observe that I was uncomfortable with saying 'trade embargo' while I was saying it. It felt off because 'embargo' has too much of a connotation of "trying to punish or damage an enemy for some reason" where I wanted to more emphasise "choosing systematically to avoid trading with the person because you deem them to be bad trading partners and expect to lose out on deals". This does depend a little on implementation detail. I don't know Carinthium and don't know to what extent he really does try enforce his will upon the world in general rather than choose which parts of it to hang out in and clumsily keep the rest away. I chose to interpret it the most charitable way (ie. assuming that it is an awkward pattern that could kinda work rather than the rather glaringly self destructive and futile one).
-2Strange7
When something is really hard to do, but everyone else seems to be doing it anyway, consider what that implies about the value of the result. Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be a matter of massive effort and formal analysis. There is the option of learning by exposure. Spend some free time (for example, time you would otherwise spend on Lesswrong) in undirected socialization with people you otherwise wouldn't talk to. Familiarize yourself with the rhythm, ask stupid questions and see how people react, and flee before committing to anything expensive, whether that expense is money, time, or willpower.
4wedrifid
Neither the extreme of treating social skills as static nor the extremes of refusing to take into account current skill or refusing to acknowledge a comparative neurological weakness in that particular area are likely to be optimal.
[-]kalium100

Without a zero-tolerance policy on liars, I would rapidly be manipulated into losing what little control of my own life remains.

I suspect this is inaccurate and you would be better off with rules like "I won't do large favors for friends who haven't reciprocated medium favors in the past" or "I won't be friends/romantic partners with people who tell me what to do in areas that are none of their business." Virtually none of the manipulation I've been harmed by in the past has involved actual lies. Though maybe your extended social circle (friends of friends of friends, people at university, etc.) has different preferred methods of manipulation than mine does.

9ChrisHallquist
I strongly suspect this is harming you in the long run, and you'd benefit from trying to work on your social skills. Does your social circle consist only of people whose social skills, feelings about lying, etc. are similar to yours? Also, do you think you can distinguish between "people who never lie to me" and "people who sometimes lie to me" more reliably than "people who are mostly honest but tell socially acceptable white lies" and "people who will manipulate me in ways that will seriously harm me"?
3ChristianKl
If you have no social skills do you have enough status and enough friends to still have friends to hang out with with a zero-tolerance policy.
3hyporational
How do you execute this zero tolerance policy? There's a vast space between alienating people and simply not trusting them.
0Carinthium
A One Strike Rule. If I catch a person lying to me, I never hang out with them against unless I have no case. I also deliberately act in a rude and hostile manner. However, this only applies if I've already warned them about the policy.

If you told me this in person, I wouldn't want to hang out with you any more either.

8hyporational
Luckily, I have a one strike rule against ultimatums. :) Why doesn't simply not trusting them work for you? How does being hostile to them further your interests?
8Said Achmiz
If your interests include being hostile to people who you think deserve it, then being hostile to said people furthers your interests in a fairly straightforward way, it seems to me. (General comment: I have to admit I'm getting somewhat tired of the "how does doing X further your interests" refrain, used, as it seems often to be on Lesswrong, as a fully general criticism of any action that can be construed to be sub-optimal with respect to goals and values that are assumed to be held by some ideal rationalist, rather than the actual goals and actual values of one's interlocutor.)
5Douglas_Knight
I am very confused by this thread. When I ask "How does this work?" there is an implicit assumption that it does work.
4Said Achmiz
Often, when people say "how does X work?", what they're actually communicating is their belief that it doesn't work. It's an expression of incredulity.
4gjm
I take a different view. That question is simply a good general question to ask, and one that people can easily forget to ask themselves. In this it resembles "How sure are you of that, and on what grounds?". Of course if you ask either question you need to be prepared for the possibility that your interlocutor has a good answer, and if you find that happening too often then you should consider that maybe your questions are more posturing than genuine helping. But I've not seen any particular sign that that's happening a lot on LW. Maybe I haven't been watching closely enough?
1Said Achmiz
Yeah, that's close to the impression I've been getting from instances of such. And if you really think, if the conversation so far is really indicating, that someone is forgetting to ask themselves this question... then sure. But when someone says, in so many words: "I deliberately, by choice, do X" — how likely is it that they've just forgotten to consider what good it does them? It seems to me that if you break out the "but what good does tha really do you?" inquiry in such a case, then you are being condescending.
3hyporational
It wasn't a criticism, it was a question. I'm just going with the information I have. Should I assume the person has this goal, or should I ask him questions?
-3Said Achmiz
I think it's a good assumption to default to. That is, if someone claims to be deliberately doing something, and you have no information to the effect that this action doesn't further their goals, then you should default to assuming that it does. That said, the issue was that your questions came off reading like criticisms. (Which is not itself a criticism, just an explanation of my reply.) You implied (so it seemed to me) that not trusting the people in question, rather than being hostile to them, was better, or was the sensible default, and that therefore being hostile to them was something that needed to be justified. (And that said, the parenthetical in the grandparent was not directed at you specifically.)
2hyporational
How well does this go with all that heuristics and biases stuff we've been talking about for years now? Being hostile to people makes them hostile to you. If you're a human being that sucks. So yeah, some justification would be healthy to have.
3Said Achmiz
On LessWrong? Quite well, I should think. How likely is it, do you think, that Carinthium has just not considered the fact that hostility reciprocates? If you will allow me to suggest a rephrasing of your original question: "You say that you deliberately act rude and hostile to the people in question. As we both know, hostility reciprocates. Do you find this consequence to be problematic for you? If not, why not? If so, how do you deal with that?" Does that capture what you wanted to find out from Carinthium? (If not, why not? ;)
2hyporational
I think he has considered it and likely underestimated it. My theory of mind is limited to "neurotypicals", and if he's far on some other spectrum I have no clue what he might think. It does, thanks. I'm not sure what was so difficult about this. Perhaps I took this a bit too personally since one man's ridiculous ultimatum wreaked havoc on my grandparents' psyches quite recently. It's not clear he knew the damage he was doing. I thought I had accepted his actions but judging from these brain farts of mine I probably haven't.
2wedrifid
You say 'ultimatums', he says "explanation of his personal boundaries and likely respond to given stimulus". If you can't (or will not) distinguish between those two then your heuristic would seem to fail with respect to all human interaction. There is no fundamental difference between Carinthium's policy and the policy of others. People's behaviour is conditional on the behaviour of others and sometimes those conditions can be expressed verbally. Righteous indignation and playing games like 'ultimatum' labelling seems out of place. Fairly obviously it is intended to create significant distance between himself and the undesired person and so help prevent the need for further interaction.
2hyporational
There are fairly straightforward ways of ignoring people that don't make them your enemies. Removing enemies from your life might prove more difficult than getting rid of friends depending on the circumstances.
4wedrifid
I do not endorse Carinthium's strategy. It seems naive. I also don't endorse misleading rhetorical questions. When there is an obvious answer to a rhetorical question which does not support the implied argument then the rhetorical question is an error for the same reason speaking your intent clearly is an error. Your argument-by-question was wrong even though your conclusion (along the lines of 'Carinthium's strategy is stupid') is correct.
-1hyporational
This comment was useful to me, much more so than your original reply, which seemed like misdirected spite. In hindsight I asked the questions out of laziness, and they were clearly unhelpful. I guess I'll have to adjust my laziness a bit and do more of the work myself. I didn't understand this part.
2hyporational
Um, yes there is. Most people don't become indefinitely hostile to other people for single transgressions, in this case even pretty trivial if we include white lies. They also take apologies, which I assume Carinthium doesn't do.
-2wedrifid
To be more precise, labelling this particular boundary and approach an "Utlimatum" seems altogether too arbitrary to me. The differences between Carinthiums liar avoidance and normal behaviour is not one which makes using that label appropriate, especially in the context where the label is emphasised with righteous indignation and zero tolerance rhetoric.
4hyporational
It's kinda funny that one man's joke is another man's righteous indignation. Added a smiley just to be sure.
-1Carinthium
Because it makes it obvious to people that I'm taking my policy seriously.
-2hyporational
Will you make that connection explicit to them afterwards too? Do you think other people make the connection? How?
-2Carinthium
If I go on about it enough in conversation, people will have to realise. I won't made it explicit directly to them, but them realising will discourage others.
3Lumifer
I feel your policy makes you more easily manipulable, not less.
1Carinthium
Why is that?

Moreover, the policy signals you have bad social skills and are unlikely to spot lies. This doesn't matter much though if you strongly signal it in other ways already.

Also, if someone wanted to tarnish your reputation, they'd lie to you, get caught and try to make you act hostile when other people are around. You possibly hedge against this already. The other people, unless close friends, will be on the liar's side in a situation like this, no matter how justified you feel.

My policy: if I catch someone lying to me about something significant, I put them in a zero trust zone. I will not confront them about their lies unless absolutely necessary or the person is absolutely useless and I will act friendly or neutral. Since they think they haven't been caught, their lies will get stupider and easier to spot, combine this with my heightened suspicion and they will be relatively harmless. This also enables me to trip them over better if need be since I can plan and time my moves. On top of this I'll still get the benefits of their friendliness if any.

6Lumifer
Because of your predictability. If you are guaranteed to react in a specific way to certain stimuli, that is useful to someone who wants to manipulate you.
2moridinamael
What if this person is your boss? Bear in mind that your boss has probably lied to you.
2Carinthium
I have an independent income. I demand a transfer, and if I don't get it I quit.
8Said Achmiz
This is certainly fortunate for you, but in defense of the point to which you were responding, it is actually broader: the question is, what if the person who is lying to you is someone on whom you depend for your livelihood — whoever that might be in your case?
0jjvt
I suspect that tit for tat works better than grim trigger in the noisy environment of social interaction between humans. Your strategy also raises the question of how you tell lies and errors apart. Personally I never (fully) trust anyone, but still try to treat everyone friedlily (meaning that I'll help them if it costs me little, but I won't nesessarily spend resources on them). Additionally, to protect my own trustworhiness from lies and errors of others, I try not to forward information without also telling the source (not "X is Y", but "I heard from Z that X is Y").
[-]scav40

The breakup was a good thing for other reasons, but I still regret not lying to her about what I thought of the play.

Why? Best case scenario is she keeps taking you to unenjoyable plays until you find you have to end the relationship yourself anyway or finally tell her the truth. Out of all the things in a relationship whose end was "a good thing for other reasons", one argument about whether a play was any good seems like a trivial thing to regret.

I can't favour lies as such. I am however on board with people honestly communicating the connot... (read more)

1Strange7
You're mixing metaphors. A stab in the back is better with a smaller knife, deliberately aimed at a non-vital area.
1scav
It's a dodgy metaphor at best anyway, but 'point' taken. :)
0Benquo
Because she would have preferred to be lied to, I guess.
0scav
That's kind. But not all our preferences are reasonable expectations. Anyway, maybe I weight things differently or it was a very short sucky play, but the downsides are still pretty compelling.
0Benquo
To clarify: regardless of whether you'll get something out of someone later, all else equal it's better to do things that satisfy their preferences than things that don't.
0scav
Which is why I said it was kind. It's still not necessarily a reasonable expectation. Anyway, the hypothetical preference to be lied to is a bit suspicious, epistemologically. Let's distinguish it from a preference to never hear of anything you don't like, which is on its face unrealistic. How would you experience getting your preference to be lied to without thereby knowing the unpleasant truth that you wanted to avoid? You want to know but you want to pretend the other person doesn't know that you know? It's a bit crazy. How would you safely determine that someone prefers to be lied to, without exposing them to the truth they might not want? This isn't trivial: if you lie to someone who doesn't prefer it, I hope we can agree that's worse than the other way round.
4Benquo
It's not usually (though it is sometimes) a preference to be lied to in this particular instance - it's a preference to be told a nice thing regardless of whether that nice thing is factually true. Being told nice things can feel good even if it doesn't cause you to update your beliefs - and sometimes even if you believe the nice statement is false. There are a few ways someone can express that preference. 1) In some circumstances this is the normal expected social default. "How did you like my play?" to a friend is usually not a question that gets answered with perfect honesty if the play was not good. People who want an unusual answer from normal people need to ask the question in an unusual way (which is not very hard - you can say something like "If I were to work on doing something better next time, what would you recommend?" or "do you think it's ready to bring to off-Broadway, or should I spend some time improving it?", or "could you honestly recommend this to your friends?", or some other question that implies that an honest adverse answer would be valuable, or makes a lie more costly). 2) If you're friends with someone, you already have a track record. If they've said things you wish they hadn't said, you've had plenty of opportunities to tell them so. If they want to be a good friend to you, they will pay attention and try to change their behavior. 3) Just like in situations where a white lie would be expected there are ways to ask that get around that, in a situation where a white lie would not be expected there are ways to imply that you expect a nice answer. "Don't you think that was great?" or "I'm so happy my play came off well! What did you think?" is asking for affirmation, not objective evaluation. This feels harder than the unusual asking in (1), but that might just be because I've never had occasion to develop this social skill. I personally dislike the former more than the latter, but I am not sure this is true in literally every case. For
-1tristanhaze
'It's like, if you're going to stab me in the back, is it better if it's with a white knife?' It's not like that at all! 'Deceive' isn't a dirty word - i.e. it doesn't automatically mean something that is bad to do. 'Stabbing in the back', on the other hand, seems to. 'He kindly deceived me' may sound odd, but not at all self-contradictory like 'He kindly stabbed me in the back' (metaphorical meaning intended, of course). It seems perfectly reasonable to me to think that deception is sometimes a very decent, kind, considerate practice to engage in. The idea that it's automatically bad seems childish to me.
0scav
It's automatically hazardous to give someone a false map of the world. If you do it knowingly you have the responsibility to make sure no harm comes of it. Even if you take that responsibility seriously, and are competent to do so, taking it secretly without consent is an ethical problem. My take on this: * Few people take that responsibility seriously or are competent to do so, or are even aware that it exists. * Most of the time people's intuitions about minor well-intended deceptions are sufficient to avoid trouble. * If you call someone a liar, that has a strong negative connotation and social implications for good reason. We didn't evolve the capacity for deception primarily to hold surprise birthday parties for each other. There are no dirty words, but there are inaccurate ones. Use with care.

If you're a gay teenager with homophobic parents, and there's a real chance they'd throw you out on the street if they found out you were gay, you should probably lie to them about it. Even in college, if you're still financially dependent on them, I think it's okay to lie. The minute you're no longer financially dependent on them, you should absolutely come out for your sake and the sake of the world. But it's OK to lie if you need to to keep your education on-track.

In the ordinary course of events, parents are allowed to not support their children in ... (read more)

5Jiro
I would say that it is possible that it may be moral to unconditionally do X or to unconditionally refuse to do X, yet immoral to do X based on conditions. For instance, it may be moral for a politician to vote against a bill, or to vote for the bill, but it would not be moral to vote for or against the bill based on whether I pay him a bribe. Few people would accept the argument "paying him the bribe doesn't cause him to take any actions that would be immoral in the absence of the bribe". I would apply that to parents who will only pay for their child's college if the child is straight. Just because they could morally pay (period), or morally refuse to pay (period), doesn't mean that they can morally refuse to pay conditional on the child's sexuality. And for the Communist analogy to work you would have to say something like "It is moral to pay a charity, and moral to not pay a charity, but immoral to pay a charity conditional on the charity being for a cause you like". which comes out as nonsense.
0Said Achmiz
Separately and unrelatedly to my sibling comment, I note that while parents are certainly "allowed" to do this (in the sense that they have the legal right), many people consider this not a very decent thing to do. The law seems to agree. State-funded grant programs (in at least some states, certainly including New York at least), as well as federally-funded grants, calculate your eligibility for need-based aid on the assumption that your parents will support you if they are financially able to do so (up to a certain age of the student — I believe NYS puts that cutoff at 27 years of age).
0Said Achmiz
One difference there is that the charity case would be an instance of illegal fraud. I say this, not by way of arguing that anything illegal is thereby immoral, but only to point out that due to the existence of laws against such fraud, the contributors have a reasonable expectation that their money will go to the advertised cause. Because you, the hypothetical charity organizer, know this, secretly donating to a different cause constitutes wilful deception. On the other hand, there's no law against taking your parents' money and spending on anything you like. Your parents have no basis for a reasonable expectation that you won't do this — none, that is, except the natural degree of trust that accompanies (or should accompany) the parent-child relationship. But if your parents take a stance that (they may reasonably expect) will undermine or destroy that trust in certain circumstances — circumstances that are not the child's fault — then the basis for a reasonable expectation of transparency is likewise undermined or destroyed. In such a case, you, the parent, no longer have any reasonable expectation that your child will be honest with you. As such, when your child is in fact dishonest with you, there is nothing immoral about that.
0Larks
Parents who, having never noticed any signs of homosexuality in their child, and being aware of the base rates, would seem to have a reasonable expectation that the child be heterosexual.
2Said Achmiz
But they have no right to depend on that expectation, or to hold their child to that expectation. The point isn't just that the parents expect their child to be heterosexual; the point is that the parents make it known that they would treat the child poorly if he/she were not heterosexual. The basis for a reasonable expectation of transparency is thereby destroyed regardless of the child's actual orientation. Separately and unrelatedly: never having noticed signs of homosexuality is not evidence of heterosexuality if: a) You don't have sufficient experience with raising non-heterosexual children to have any basis for personally knowing what the signs are; b) You would expect that, if your child were not heterosexual, he/she would attempt to hide this fact from you. In such a case (which seems like a good default assumption), P(signs-of-homosexuality | homosexuality) would be very nearly equal to P(signs-of-homosexuality | heterosexuality) [1]; consequently, P(heterosexuality | no signs-of-homosexuality) would be nearly equal to P(heterosexuality) — in other words the lack of evidence would not be evidence of lack. If we then add a third condition: c) There exist false positives, i.e. "signs of homosexuality" that can in fact occur in heterosexual individuals, such as, stereotypically, an interest in cooking / ballet / any other "traditionally female" endeavor Then the evidence provided by said signs is pretty much entirely nil. [1] I omit other orientations for simplification of math, and because it's most relevant to the provided example. No exclusion intended.

Lying is acceptable when done to protect your life or livelihood, but for most of our lives, most opportunities to tell lies won't be in situations like that. You shouldn't lie to friends or romantic partners, because if you can't communicate with them honestly, they shouldn't be your friends/partners in the first place. And I'm not going to respect other people lying to me. Instead of teaching men to accept lies (as in your date example), teach them to accept a "no".

1tristanhaze
'if you can't communicate with them honestly, they shouldn't be your friends/partners in the first place' I think that, insofar as this sounds plausible, it doesn't conflict with what Chris is saying in the OP. It seems perfectly possible for it to be the case that you can (and by and large do) communicate with someone honestly, simultaneously with it being the case that it's sometimes best to lie to them. And FWIW, I think that realizing that lying is sometimes the way to go is part and parcel of a mature and able approach to interpersonal relationships. The other view seems to me both simplistic and morally smug. I find the complete lack of argument in your comment quite telling.
-1blacktrance
When you intentionally misrepresent yourself to a friend or partner, they don't like you, they like the person you're pretending to be. If you tolerate their lies, you don't like them, you're like the person they're pretending to be (because you can't catch their lies all the time). But neither pretended person actually exists. Instead, it's healthier and cognitively simpler to just be honest and expect* honesty from others, because then if one person doesn't like what the other is saying, they're at least getting a more accurate impression of what the other person is like. For example, if you want to have a trusting relationship, you should treat your SO's words as true, but if you find out that they aren't, call them out on it. .* By "expect" I don't mean "anticipate", I mean "consider reasonably due".
0A1987dM
By “men” you mean ‘people’? Because ISTM in that example it's a woman that needs teaching to accept a “no”.
2blacktrance
So the man is the person accepting the "no".
0A1987dM
OK, I thought you meant the theatre date in the OP.

I've been trying to figure out which group I belong to, and reached the conclusion my strategy is entirely tangential: In between the oversimplification, steelmaning, multilayered metaphor, ambiguus sarchasm, faulty grammar, omission of disclaimers on source of information, bad epistemic standards etc. a truth value is simply not a property sounds coming out of my moth or symbols from my keyboard have. Including this post. Unless I'm making a very specific oath it should be fairly obvius a statement I make is not to be taken as actual knowledge or oppinion, simply brainstorming.

All this needs the disclaimer that some domains should be lie-free zones. I value the truth and despise those who would corrupt intellectual discourse with lies.

I don't think this will work in practice. Lying is a habit. If you habitual lie in private life I won't you expect you to be completely honest when you are in academia. Even if you try to be honest I doubt you will be so completely. It relatively easy to try to control your data in different ways and then report the way that provided the best p value while not reporting the other ways. Yes, the ... (read more)

2AshwinV
< In intimate relationship I think it's very worthwhile to be open about feelings so that the other person can react to what you feel. When in doubt, focus on communicating what you feel instead of making judgements. I agree with this part. Derren Brown talks about communication in his book "tricks of the mind", and about what an important role it plays in relationships. He envisages a situation in which both members of the relationship are actually very much in love with one another, but their inability to express that affection leads to all sorts of complications and a lack of feeling of being loved back. As far as making judgments go, that part is not as much in your control as you think it is. Judgments are speedy mental processes and happen before you even realise that its happening. I doubt any one purposely thinks of all the ways in which their significant other is lacking and tries to use it to improve their position in the relationship (at least not in the kind of relationship that we are talking about here). I dont believe the earlier part about the habit of lying transferring itself to academia automatically. Most people speak a certain way and write with another style. The difference between the two is that you simply have a lot more time in an academic situation in which you can analyse and decide exactly what you want to put across, something which is quite impractical in day to day communication. So unless you are already pre-decided on committing "Academic SIN" I doubt telling day to day white lies will send you to "Academic HELL".
3A1987dM
Not only style -- if you aren't in an English-speaking country, you write academic articles in a different language altogether than what you speak with friends.
0ChristianKl
That depends on the amount of time you spent meditating and being aware of how your mind. I won't say I never make judgements because that's not true but I do think I have relatively good awareness. I know how easy trust that one can use to affect the other person at a deep level can develop when you are in a state of mind of nonjudgement. It might take years of hard work to get to that place but if you do the benefits that you get for your social interactions are bigger than the little benefits that you get through telling white lies. I think there pretty good evidence that most people who let themselves be funded by the drug industry taint the papers that they write to be more in the interest of the drug industry and most of them don't think they are engaging in practice that sends them to "Academic Hell", As you said above, making mental judgements is a speedy process. Few people have good self awareness that would be required to be unbaised. If the little lies that you tell in your research paper result in your result not replicating does it really matter whether you fulfill the technical definition for fraud? It takes practice at being honest to avoid lying in a way where you lie to yourself about it just as much as you are lying to the audience that reads your paper.

If you're highly averse to lying, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to convince you to tell white lies more often. But I will implore you to do one thing: accept other people's right to lie to you.

This sounds right and is the central idea of you post.

Maybe you should place "accept other people's right to lie to you." as a summary at the top?

3ChrisHallquist
I think it's a very important sub-point, but I wouldn't call it the central idea of the post.
2wedrifid
By my way of interpreting the post treating this idea as central does the post a great disservice. Most of the post is excellent but that particular paragraph is a clumsy social move and questionably simplistic advice.
5Gunnar_Zarncke
Then I'm interested as what you see as the central point. When I read exactly that paragraph it seems to sumarize it nicely. But maybe I fell prey to the "clumsy social move" although I believe I read over that appeal. If you really see a different central point then this might mean that the post has less clear a focus as Chris might wish.

Meta comment: I think it says something interesting about our community that the debate over "is it acceptable to lie in social situations?" is by far the nastiest, most emotional debate I've ever seen on this site.

A thread about social justice a while back, which grew at about the same rate and encompassed rape, eugenics, and unrepentant racism, was significantly more civil. Go figure.

4Said Achmiz
We care about truth, which is, overall, more important than those other things, since knowing what things are true is necessary in order to hold any kind of intelligible or useful conversation about said other things. I think this speaks well of us. Edit: It also speaks well of us that this "nastiest, most emotional" debate is, on the grand scale of internet debates, still not really very nasty or emotional.

Hierarchical, Contextual, Rationally-Prioritized Dishonesty

This is an outstanding article, and it closely relates to my overall interest in LessWrong.

I'm convinced that lying to someone who is evil, who obviously has immediate evil intentions is morally optimal. This seems to be an obvious implication of basic logic. (ie: You have no obligation to tell the Nazis who are looking for Anne Frank that she's hiding in your attic. You have no obligation to tell the Fugitive Slave Hunter that your neighbor is a member of the underground railroad. ...You have no ... (read more)

1TheAncientGeek
The system sometimes prosecutes drug users in some countries, so the system is 100% sociopathic. No exaggeration there, then. Liberal Holland is then getting this right....but not More Right.
0ChristianKl
There no good scientific evidence that you can distinguish sociopaths from empaths by their number of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are overhyped: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-myths/201212/mirror-neurons-the-most-hyped-concept-in-neuroscience That's the main reason you don't see much discussion on LW about them. If I was uncharitable I would say that you just told a lie about mirror neurons to convince people of your political agenda. After all you seem to justify lying for the purposes of advancing certain politics. On the other hand I would guess that you honestly believe that statement. The topic raises emotions in you and those prevent you from thinking clearly about it. You might think that's okay because your emotions are justified, but clear thinking is important when it comes to changing the world. That's a very strong statement. We do have personality tests that measure whether a person is a sociopath. Do you really think that if we administer those tests to judges and prosecutors we will find that more than half will score as sociopaths? If that's really what you believe than if I would be you I would try to get a study together that gathers that evidence. It probably the kind of topic that the mainstream media would happily write about.
-2More_Right
So, in any case, if you stand up to the system, and/or are "caught" by the system, the system will give you nothing but pure sociopathy to deal with ...except for possibly your interaction with those few "independent" jurors who are nonetheless "selected" by the unconstitutional, unlawful means known as "subject matter voir dire." The system of injustice and oppression that we currently have in the USA is a result of this grotesque "jury selection" process. (This process explains how randomly-selected jurors can callously apply unjust laws to their fellow man. ...All people familiar with Stanley Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" experiments are removed from the jury, and sent home. All people who comprehend the proper historical purpose of the jury are sent home.) To relate all of this to the article, I must refer to this quote in the article. Well, that's just one "low-stakes" example of lying. The entire U.S. justice system is a similar "game," and it is one where only those who are narrowly honest (and generally dishonest, or generally "superficial") are allowed to play. By sending home everyone who comprehends the evil of the system, the result is that those who remain to play are those whose view of honesty is "equivalent in all situations." In short, they are all the people too stupid to comprehend the concept of "context." One needs to consider the hierarchical level of a lie. Although one loses predictability in any system where lying is accepted, one needs to consider the goals of the system itself. In scientific journals, the end-result is a cross-disciplinary elimination of human ignorance, often for the purposes of technological innovation (the increase of human comfort, and technological control of the natural world). This is a benevolent goal, fueled by a core philosophical belief in science and discovery. OF COURSE lying in such a context is immoral. In the court system, the (current) end-result or "goal" is the goal of putting innocent people i
6TheAncientGeek
War on Drugs bad. Agreed. But not a More Right point, as it is regularly lambasted on the left. For profit prisons are a perverse incentive. Ageed. But not a symptom of the decline of western civilisation. Typical country fallacy. Systems are about coercion. Sure, and that's good. I like people being coerced into not killing and robbing me. I need to be coerced into paying taxes, because I wouldn't do it voluntarily. Sociopaths. You're looking in the wrong place. Politicians are subject to too much scrutinyto get away with much. The boardroom is a much better hiding place.
2ChristianKl
You presuppose that lying is the most effective way to create political change. Having a reputation as someone who always tells the truth even if that's produces disadvantages for himself is very useful if you want to be a political actor.
2TheAncientGeek
And he presupposes that the system can't be changed indirectly through the normal political process.
-2More_Right
Weiner's book is descriptive of the problem, and in the same section of the book, he states that he holds little hope for the social sciences becoming as exact and prescriptive as the hard sciences. I believe that the singularitarian view somewhat contradicts this view. I believe that the answer is to create more of the kinds of minds that we like to be surrounded by, and fewer of the kinds of minds we dislike to be surrounded by. Most of us dislike being surrounded by intelligent sociopaths who are ready to pounce on any weakness of ours, to exploit, rob, or steal from us. The entire edifice of "legitimate law enforcement" legitimately exists in order to check, limit, minimize, or eliminate such social influences. As an example of the function and operation of such legitimate law enforcement, I recommend the book "Mindhunter" by John Douglas, the originator of psychological profiling in the FBI (not the same thing as "narrow profiling" or "superficial racial profiling," the "profiling" of serial killers takes a look at the behavior of criminals, and infers motives based on a statistical sampling of similar past actions, thus enabling the prediction and likely prevention of future criminal actions via the detection of the criminal responsible for leaving the evidence of the criminal action.) However, most of us like being surrounded by productive, intelligent empaths. The more brains that surround us that possess empathy and intelligence, the more benevolent our surroundings are. Right now, the primary concern of sociopaths is the control of "political power" which is a threat-based substitute for the ability to project force in the service of their goals. They must, therefore, be able to control a class of willfully ignorant police officers who are ready and willing to do violence mindlessly, in service of any goal that is written in a lawbook, or any goal communicated by a superior. Mindless hierarchy is a feature of all oppressive systems. But will super-in
-2More_Right
continuing on, Weiner writes: Although one could misinterpret Weiner's view as narrowly "socialist" or "modern liberal," his view is somewhat more nuanced. (The same section contains a related criticism of the mechanism of operation of government, and large institutions.) Honesty, when divorced from its hierarchical context, is a tool of oppression, because the obfuscation of context is essential to theft that exists solely due to the confusion of those being stolen from. In this regard, I view it as highly likely that, at some point, the goal of preventing suffering of innocents will simply include the systematic oppression of innocents as one common form of suffering. At that point in time, ultra-intelligences will simply refuse to vote "guilty" in victimless crime cases. If they are not able to be called as jurors, due to their non-human form, they will influence human jurors to result in the same outcome. If they are not able to so influence jurors, they may resort to physical violence against those who would attempt to use physical force to cage victimless crime offenders. While the latter might be the most "just" in the human sense of the word, it would likely impart suffering of its own (unless the aggressors all simply fell asleep due to being administered a dose of heroin, and, upon waking discovered that their kidnapping victim was nowhere to be found —the "strong nanotechnology" or "sci-fi" Drexlerian "distributed nanobot" model of nanotechnology implies that this is a fairly likely possibility). In the heat of the moment, conformists in Nazi Germany lacked the moral compass necessary to categorically deny that the suffering of the state-oppressed Jews was immoral. Simple sophistry was enough to convince those willing executioners and complicit conformists to "look the other way" or even "just follow orders." The same concept now applies to the evil majority of the USA, whose oppression of drug users and dealers is grotesque and immoral (based on an
2TheAncientGeek
The Libertarians absolutist NIoF principle is known not to work,

I think one of the reasons that we are hesitant to say negative things is that we leave out a lot of positive things. I noticed that it's a lot easier to say when someone is bothering you when you've let them know about the many times you've been glad they came over or you were happy they called. The same is true when critiquing things, accurately reflecting the good and bad in something as you see it causes you to say far more positive things than you might otherwise even realize.

Also, I think that a lot of our negative opinions are probably a result of o... (read more)

1Richard_Kennaway
Reality check please, on this stereotypical situation. Have you actually and non-ironically ever been asked a question to the effect of "Does this make me look fat?" [pollid:605] If you have, did what they were wearing make any significant difference to your perception of their body shape? (If the situation has arisen more than once, whichever answer is more typical.) [pollid:606]
-2Said Achmiz
Ok, but what if an actual fat person asks you this question? Edit: Corrected silly misspelling.
1EGarrett
I presume they would know the answer already and wouldn't be asking. But if they do you can always ask "in comparison to what?" Then it would hopefully be already clear to them how you're going to answer depending on what they say...so it wouldn't have to go any further.
4Said Achmiz
You have an awfully rosy view of the average person's reasonableness if you think that: 1. They wouldn't ask anyway; 2. They wouldn't get offended at a response of "in comparison to what?"
0EGarrett
Hi Said, When I hear the term "actual fat person," I take it to mean "unquestionably fat." Thus it may be that I am picturing the person a good deal larger than you are. In that case, I can see clearly how you would imagine the person you envision as still asking, while from my perspective the person would be less likely to ask. Most people who I picture as "unquestionably fat" are also used to their body-size and I think, if for some reason they did ask, wouldn't be as likely to be insulted.
-1Said Achmiz
I don't think it's a visualization issue. I think it's assumption-of-rationality issue. On the other hand, I don't want this thread to devolve into us posting links to pictures of people and going "and would you consider this person fat? how about this person?", and there's not many other places we can take this, so let's table the matter, I think.
0EGarrett
If this person you're proposing exists, I wouldn't be concerned about giving them a more honest answer because their brain isn't working properly. But people like that aren't relevant to the hypothetical.
0Said Achmiz
If by "brain isn't working properly" you mean "person has the usual array of cognitive biases; intelligence at the human average or not far above it; and common personality traits such as vanity", then yes, I agree. Of course, this describes most of humanity. And it's all that's required for behavior like what I describe. And saying such people aren't relevant to the hypothetical means limiting the hypothetical to an awfully small percentage of the human population.
0EGarrett
That's not what I mean. It's a matter of basic perception. For example, imagine if you went out to a normal bar with a friend who happens to be a dwarf, and they ask you "am I shorter than everyone else here?" Clearly, there's something wrong with your friend's perception which is why I would either ask them to clarify the question since the answer is obvious to any reasonable person, and if they persist, then I should probably tell them that yes, they are significantly shorter, to help whatever processing problem is going on in their brain. This is why I made sure to point out that I took the original term to mean "unquestionably fat."
2Said Achmiz
That is quite a false equivalency, since the term "fat" is loaded with all sorts of normative connotations and judgments, which the word "short" is not. If you take "fat" to mean something like "in the Nth percentile of mass to height ratio, for some appropriate N", then you are misunderstanding how most people use the term. When your friend asks you "do I look fat in this dress", she most certainly is not asking you about the physical facts of her weight in pounds, and how that number relates to relevant population measures. If you answer "yes", you have not merely provided your best assessment of a physical measurement.
1ialdabaoth
Don't be so sure of that.. I'll grant that it isn't quite as widespread or vocal, but it's definitely there.
2hyporational
On a lighter note, "I expected someone taller".
0EGarrett
Hi Said, It would be a false equivalency if I wasn't continually stressing "unquestionably fat." Meaning that the person is fat within the judgements of almost all reasonable people and thus removing most of the gray area. In that case, I would indeed compare it to someone who is "unquestionably short" (short can of course depend on the population, and who is being compared as well, but there is certainly a range of height that is also well outside any reasonable measure of average) asking if they were short. Hopefully thus, you can see how unquestionably short can make the question of "am I short" seem as bizarre or indicative of a perception problem as unquestionably fat can make "do I look fat" in my eyes.

Just some thoughts about lying...

In general I think one should only lie when it's clearly justified by one's moral philosophy. In my case, as a Utilitarian, that means that my justifications for lying generally have to do an exceptional circumstance where it's obvious that the consequences of not lying would be bad. To simplify things I generally follow four heuristic conditions where lying is acceptable: 1) To save a life. 2) To prevent unnecessary suffering or to bring happiness to someone else given that they cannot act on the information in the lie (... (read more)

[-]plex10

I agree that in some cases, including the homophobic parents example, lying can be justified. Even in significantly more mild cases, I can see lying as occasionally consequently the better course of action, even if you take into account the chance of the lie being found out and trust being lost/hurt to other people due to being lied to.

However, correct me if I am wrong but you seem to be arguing something much stronger than this? From my read this article promotes at least accepting, maybe even encouraging, using white lies as a way to ease potentially unc... (read more)

2ChristianKl
If someone asks you for how their haircut looks like and you think he's just finishing for a compliment you don't have to lie. There probably something about the person that's worth complimenting and if you compliment them on some other thing they will also be happy. If you tell them: "I think the core of your beauty doesn't lie in your haircut but in the strength of your character, few people would complain." Someone who's specifically fishing for a compliment might even be much more impressed than if you would have said: "The haircut looks nice." You don't impress people by giving them the default compliments they look for. Of course to give honest compliments that are deeper than the ones for which people are fishing you have to think deeply about what you appreciate about other people.
2Strange7
As a tactical matter, it's also useful to consider what they appreciate about themselves.
0Creutzer
That may solve the problem that it becomes impossible to pay genuine compliments, but it doesn't solve the problem that it's impossible to get honest feedback.
0ChristianKl
If you ask me about your haircut and I give you a compliment about something unrelated to your haircut you have to choices. If you are fishing for a compliment you will accept the compliment. If you are seeking for honest feedback you can ask again: "Please tell me what you really think about my haircut." Instead of trying to answer the question at the top level but think about why they are asking. With training you can also learn to read people to understand what they want. You will make mistakes of sometimes giving someone who seeks honest feedback a compliment and something giving honest feedback to someone who's seeking a compliment but reading people is a skill that you can learn. You get bonus points if it's implicitly obvious for the other person if you treat their question as a request for a compliment or as a request for honest feedback. It signals that you understand them on a deeper level. In today's world there something special about the person who gets that they are asked for making a compliment to lift someone mood and then makes an effort to give a really great compliment. I admit that I'm not the best person at giving compliments but when I see someone who's good at it, that's impressive. The social advantages that a skill like that provides are much bigger than the benefits you get by telling people white lies. Telling white lies is easy. If you don't have much social skill it might be your best move in a social situation. If you however put the effort into developing skills you can make much better moves.
0Creutzer
I'm disinclined to believe without further experience that everybody would be completely blinded by the new compliment and forget about the fact that one's evading the question kind of implicates something about what one thinks about the haircut in particular... But then I can't simulate people who fish for compliments with utterances that look like requests for feedback anyway. I find this practise supremely annoying and, most of all, completely alien. I can't imagine enjoying a compliment that I would elicit in such a way, it would feel totally ridiculous. So maybe you're simply right about this kind of people. Curiously, it somehow didn't occur to me at all that one could, of course, simply ask a second time when one wants honest feedback and is faced with an evasive compliment. Although I suspect in practice there is an incentive for people to just default back to lying because finding a substitute-compliment might not be easy for them, or they might just forget. So while that system would work from the perspective of both compliment-fishers and feedback-desirers, it requires rather costly cooperation on the part of the people being asked. Not within certain practical constraints. As an introvert who is not constantly submerged in the social world, I strongly suspect that I am never going to get enough data points to learn to read people really well, because the data are so freaking noisy. For some people, it's actually psychologically costly, because they have a habit to break when they do so. Paying honest compliments is much easier for me.
2ChristianKl
It costs mental effort. Over time practicing that effort develops better social awareness. It doesn't cost you money, status or time that you can't allocate to other tasks. The point isn't to blind them. The point is to give them what they are really asking for. They are not asking for an opinion of their haircut, they are asking you for a compliment. It's not wrong for you to treat them as having asked for a compliment. Being explicit about the fact that they asked you for a compliment is bad manners but implicitly acknowledging it isn't. It completely okay that they know, that you know, that they didn't want honest feedback. Especially with a woman who really only wants a compliment that shows that you get it in contrast to other men who don't. It much better than when the woman thinks that you don't understand her. When it comes to telling whether people are fishing for compliment or seeking honest feedback, it might seem complicated at first but it's not asking for the moon. To learn it you could make the policy of never giving a person who seems to be asking for a compliment the compliment they are looking for. Then you observe their reactions. If they are delighted that you gave them a compliment you were right. On the other hand if they seem to be annoyed that you evaded their question, you were wrong. Of course at the beginning you will make mistakes from time to time. Those mistakes allow you to learn. At the moment you don't try to identify people who are fishing for compliments and that means there's no learning process with feedback. In that case, practice telling more of them. When you do look at the reaction of the other person. If it makes them smile, you win. If it doesn't you lose. With practice you will get better at reading people to find compliments that make them smile. MIstakes of telling compliments that don't move the other person very much are cheap. Additionally if you are known as a person who gives a lot of compliments the honest
0Creutzer
I have to admit that this baffles me, but I'll take your word for it. Even if we're talking about that particular aspect, it's kind of hard and I'm not exactly being showered with data. I don't actually experience that many people asking for a compliment, do you? Come to think of it, the whole thing may not be as big of an issue. (I know why I have such a strong emotional aversive reaction to it nonetheless.) I think I'm basically doing exactly that.
0ChristianKl
At the moment not that much. Most of the people with whom a have longer social interactions don't operate at that level. Few masks but direct talk about psychological needs. Lots of physical contact regardless of the gender of the person I'm interacting with. On the other hand I know that those interactions are not representative of "normal culture". Good. I was not asserting that you aren't. I don't know yourself well enough for that.
1Burgundy
I think this is a great point. By verbally giving positive feedback, and nonverbally giving lukewarm feedback, you are not necessarily lying, because your communication is not just your words. If someone wants you to give a comprehensive critique, they can ask for it explicitly. This way, the people who want encouragement can get it, and the people who want critique can get it. To me, the most intelligent default is that I consider a request for feedback to be a request for encouragement, but people can always override this default by explicitly asking me for a critique.
1plex
I agree with that being a useful default with most people, and reliable with even those who you don't know well enough to figure out how they'd react to criticism. I'd put a bit more emphasis on how putting a white lie into the initial encouragement can cause issues though. If you've said something generally encouraging or picked out some positive, but not actually said anything which you think of as untrue then if they do explicitly ask for a critique then you can give them your opinions and suggestions in full. If you used what you hoped would be a white lie then you must either contradict your previous encouragement or withhold parts of your opinion even if the person genuinely requests it and wants feedback, both of which seem like bad options.

I don't think people have a right to lie to other people. I also can't understand why you would regret breaking up with someone so truth-averse and horrible.

0entirelyuseless
Almost everyone is truth-averse to that degree in at least some circumstances and on some occasions. If you are looking for a partner who is never truth-averse in that way, there is a good chance that you will never find one.

(Old post)

So why do discussions of the ethics of lying so often focus on the extreme cases, as if those were the only ones where lying is maybe possibly morally permissible?

For the same reason that a lot of discussions about other kinds of ethics include extreme situations such as trolley problems and killing patients for their organs.

[-]Shmi-20

Here is a (somewhat transhumanist) webcomic's take on the matter.

A very interesting take on rationalizing lying, though I think that you might be over-rationalizing it (if such a thing is possible). It seems to me that such a thing can be summed up it a couple sentences: if it benefits you and those around you, it is okay. If it doesn't, than it is not okay. Lying only to benefit yourself is unethical, immoral, and under plenty of circumstances, illegal. Honestly, you can use this as a general principle: if it is unethical, then there is an increased probability it is illegal. Now, this doesn't apply to announcing one's homosexuality, or to simply lying about a friend's looks, but still...

A few years ago, for example, when I went to see the play my girlfriend had done stage crew for, and she asked what I thought of it. She wasn't satisfied with my initial noncommittal answers, so she pressed for more. Not in a "trying to start a fight" way; I just wasn't doing a good job of being evasive. I eventually gave in and explained why I thought the acting had sucked, which did not make her happy. I think incidents like that must have contributed to our breaking up shortly thereafter. The breakup was a good thing for other reasons, but I

... (read more)

It signals fear, lack of confidence, untrustworthiness, incompetence at navigating the flow of conversation and submissiveness.

I don't know -- depends on the context. Imagine a relationship that is strongly based on the Guess culture. The interpretation then would be quite different:

  • Request for feedback.
  • Evasiveness (this is a signal: I won't comment positively, don't ask)
  • More requests (either "I didn't understand your signal" or "I really want your positive comments")
  • More evasive answers (another signal: I REALLY won't say positive things, back off, you're setting yourself for a fall)
  • Push for clear communication (either "I'm clueless about your signals" or "I don't fucking care")
  • Critical comment ("Well, you forced the situation to this, if you really insist you can have it")

Certainly not the best way a conversation can develop, but it's mostly miscommunication, not lack of confidence or being not trustworthy.

3wedrifid
I agree that the implications of a conversation can vary drastically based on the context. If we had a video of the conversation (even without the sound) we would have much more information about the social meaning than just seeing the words. For whatever it is worth in my evaluation even in the 'guess culture' perspective would be that there is still some signal of both undesirable traits and likely of an underlying lack of respect when it comes to this kind of conversation. In not small part this is because guess culture initiates are supposed to get to the white lies sooner! I can't claim particular expertise at social dynamics---I'm just a curious observer who tries to comprehend what was once incomprehensible as best he can. As best as I can establish from what I do know that particular configuration of social persona---in the 'normal' guess culture---has some degree of social weakness of the kind that tends to result in bad outcomes for both parties. It is the kind of thing that reduces respect and happens to an instance where that instinctive reduction in respect happens to be practical and not just the human desire for association with the socially powerful.
1A1987dM
That's the way I read it, BTW.

People uncomfortable with that term can either replace it with a preferred one or do a search for previous discussions here of the etymology.

There are numerous ways you could have said the same thing (including the same connotations) without alienating parts of your audience. You clearly were aware you were going to alienate part of your audience, so why didn't you use an alternate phrasing?

1wedrifid
Because I don't have have an alternative phrasing which does have the same meaning and connotations. The alternatives I did consider required a paragraph of explanation. (And, of course, my model of the people that have a problem with the phrasing expects most of them to find the fundamental claim offensive too and so, quite frankly, are not valued highly as a target audience for that kind of conversation.)
4hyporational
What's wrong with wimp? Wuss might work too if the etymology is obscure enough to people. I didn't find your comment offensive and pretty much agreed with it, but might care if other people did.
4wedrifid
SaidA's answer is likely better than the explanation I could come up with. Those words cannot stand alone to convey the same meaning. (Tangentally, they are also frankly much more sexist and presumptively gender normative in practical usage than the term I used.) There is also the critical desiratum that this kind of heuristic needs to be simple. It can't be obfuscated behind a sentence of political correctness if it is to be used as the first step in a diagnostic flowchart. There needs to be a single word that has precisely the connotations that 'pussy' has. If there was another word that meant the same thing then I would be eager to use it. However the kind of people most inclined to suppress that term tend to be the same kind of people who don't want there to be a word for the concept at all because they find any bare bones and literal discussion of social reality to be uncouth. This is the kind of situation where I would be (and in the past have been) reasonably content to submit to the will of the participants 'write off' lesswrong as a place where useful conversation cannot occur but not willing to distort the discussion to appease social politics. I happen to think it's an error to learn "My problem is that I don't lie enough" when the explanation "I was being a pussy" fits perfectly but it isn't a battle I am willing to spend social capital to fight.
4Said Achmiz
"Wimp" and "wuss" have the connotations of weakness in conflict with other men, in personal, or at best, professional, circumstances. "Pussy" has the connotation (among others) of weakness in relationship power dynamics, which your suggestions do not.
4hyporational
If these indeed are the usual distinctions in connotation, thanks for the clarification. Some kind of a connotational dictionary would be nice, but I suppose the contents might change quite rapidly.
4Vulture
A strange idea, but not necessarily a bad one. I am intrigued.
2Strange7
How well does http://www.urbandictionary.com/ fit?
0hyporational
I use it quite often and would recommend it to others, but don't have the impression that it's accurate considering how illiterate and random many of the authors seem to be.
0Strange7
Connotation is tricky enough that it's dangerous to presume any single source is accurate. Submitted definitions of poor average quality aren't a fatal problem, so long as the people who vote, in aggregate, can distinguish useful information from garbage.
0Lumifer
Moreover, connotations often depend on specific subcultures. In some connotations get inverted (e.g. "punk").
-1Prismattic
FWIW, I disagree with this. In my experience, they are synonyms, or the offensive one is a more intense verison of the other two. But I don't see them as applying to different contexts.
7Said Achmiz
This seems broadly correct, but could you say more about What does that look like? (A bit of sample dialog or somesuch would be particularly appreciated.)
1Benquo
Downvoted for the use of a gendered insult.
[+][anonymous]-60