(Cross-posted from Facebook.)
0: Tl;dr.
- A problem with the obvious-seeming "wizard's code of honesty" aka "never say things that are false" is that it draws on high verbal intelligence and unusually permissive social embeddings. I.e., you can't always say "Fine" to "How are you?" This has always made me feel very uncomfortable about the privilege implicit in recommending that anyone else be more honest.
- Genuinely consistent Glomarization (i.e., consistently saying "I cannot confirm or deny" whether or not there's anything to conceal) does not work in principle because there are too many counterfactual selves who might want to conceal something.
- Glomarization also doesn't work in practice if the Nazis show up at your door asking if you have fugitive Jews in your attic.
- If you would lie to Nazis about fugitive
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I wish I’d asked more explicitly to previous employers: What regulations do we reinterpret because they’re horrible written and everyone ignores them? What parts of our business do we sugarcoat to customers? To investors? I wish the answer to these questions was “we follow all regulations exactly, and give customers and investors the most accurate possible picture of our business,” and I would love to try to run my own business that way (especially the part about giving customers very honest answers), but this hasn’t empirically been the case anywhere I’ve... (read more)