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 that a lie?” I would answer “No.” Because although I might be saying something that isn’t in line with that “I” (whatever that is) don’t really “believe” (whatever that means) it doesn’t in that moment feel like a lie, it actually feels really good and pure and warm because I’m connecting with somebody over their pain.
Now, there are some people in this discussion thread who I feel like would think I am some kind of monster. And I think my brain probably works very, very differently than theirs, or at least the social circuitry is wired differently. But just bear in mind that people like me exist and we can’t really help the way we are … or if I could help it, I should say, it would basically cripple me.
Now, there are some people in this discussion thread who I feel like would think I am some kind of monster. And I think my brain probably works very, very differently than theirs, or at least the social circuitry is wired differently. But just bear in mind that people like me exist and we can’t really help the way we are … or if I could help it, I should say, it would basically cripple me.
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:
I literally come to believe whatever I need to believe in order to facilitate rapport with whomever I’m talking with.
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.)
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.
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:
When [other people] talk to their friends, they do so not in order to Bayes-adjust their beliefs, but in order to reinforce their feeling that they valued, needed, and cared about. … truth-seeking is not the reason why they engage in conversations.
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 when I figured it out) is that such people still do care very much about the truth; i.e., whether you liked the play or not. However, unlike us, they do not believe that any reliable evidence for or against the proposition can be gathered from verbal conversation. Instead, they look for non-verbal cues, as well as other behaviors (f.ex., whether you’d recommend the play to others, or attend future plays, etc.).
So, as I said above, the two types of people view the very purpose of everyday conversation very differently; and hence tend to evaluate its content quite differently, as well.
You make good points, and your assessment seems entirely correct.
However, unlike us, they do not believe that any reliable evidence for or against the proposition can be gathered from verbal conversation. Instead, they look for non-verbal cues, as well as other behaviors (f.ex., whether you’d recommend the play to others, or attend future plays, etc.).
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...
Strangely, I remember reading/learning/realizing this before, but I seem to have forgotten it.
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...
I am unsure how to apply all of this to the moral status of behaving the way moridinamael describes...
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...
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.
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.
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 valued, needed, and cared about.
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.
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.
Why? Beanbag chairs can be useful, so long as you remember not to build your entire house out of them.
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”?
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.
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?
It is in principle possible to find someone who holds the ideally matched set of opinions persistently
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.
Is my reasoning flawed, or is this a matter of you experiencing the latter effect (suspension of disbelief) more strongly?
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:
If brutal honesty satisfied all human emotional needs the world would look very different than it does.
Who said honesty has to be brutal? The truth may be, but its telling may not. And I am not comforted by lies.
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.
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. :(
Also, you seem to have missed the distinction between in-principle independently-verifiable fact and self-reported preference.
“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.
Er, what? What are you talking about? This doesn’t happen.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 this workshop I would have lied and said I couldn’t relate.)
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.
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 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 that a lie?” I would answer “No.” Because although I might be saying something that isn’t in line with that “I” (whatever that is) don’t really “believe” (whatever that means) it doesn’t in that moment feel like a lie, it actually feels really good and pure and warm because I’m connecting with somebody over their pain.
Now, there are some people in this discussion thread who I feel like would think I am some kind of monster. And I think my brain probably works very, very differently than theirs, or at least the social circuitry is wired differently. But just bear in mind that people like me exist and we can’t really help the way we are … or if I could help it, I should say, it would basically cripple me.
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.)
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.
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.
Yes, good point.
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 when I figured it out) is that such people still do care very much about the truth; i.e., whether you liked the play or not. However, unlike us, they do not believe that any reliable evidence for or against the proposition can be gathered from verbal conversation. Instead, they look for non-verbal cues, as well as other behaviors (f.ex., whether you’d recommend the play to others, or attend future plays, etc.).
So, as I said above, the two types of people view the very purpose of everyday conversation very differently; and hence tend to evaluate its content quite differently, as well.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
Why? Beanbag chairs can be useful, so long as you remember not to build your entire house out of them.
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.
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.
Oh, and:
To the “straight-talkers”, of course. Can you find comfort only in lies?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Well, ok. Let’s posit that this is a thing that happens. What are the countermeasures?
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.”
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.
Personally, I find people who lie aren’t fun to be around.
I suspect it happens to celebrities and very rich people all the time.
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.
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.
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 this workshop I would have lied and said I couldn’t relate.)
This is interesting, particularly in connection with your grativation towards materialism—thanks for sharing.
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.
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.