Maybe if there had been a clear argument it would’ve gotten better counter-arguments. I’m not even sure what specific claim you’re identifying as the hypothesis, such that it could be true or false.
To sketch a basic “boo blatant lies” argument: It’s challenging for a group of people to have epistemic standards because of ambiguity, fallibility (which makes it exceedingly rare for anyone to be perfectly honest), and the challenges of people at some distance from a situation correctly identifying what happened in that situation (especially when they may start off more inclined to trust some people than others, or fallible themselves). Blatant lies—the ones that are easily identifiable as intentional lies even from a distance—are ones that the group can most straightforwardly coordinate on recognizing and responding to. Which is a starting point to build from. (And even in a group that only catches the blatant lies, many repeat epistemic offenders will slip up eventually and commit a blatant lie that can be caught, and many of the ones who are careful not to slip up will at least be constrained to meaningful degree by the loose-but-still-present epistemic standards.)
So, why get so indignant about blatant lies? To coordinating against a subset of bad epistemic practices that it’s feasible for us to coordinate against.
And the slogan “blatant lies are the best kind!” seems to be poking against that coordination for epistemic standards. It’s like saying “the best kinds of thieves are the ones who get caught and punished” to interrupt someone in the process of apprehending a thief and ask them why they’re so worked up about it.
Here’s another angle: Donald Trump. He sure does tell a lot of blatant lies. Has that been better for the epistemic environment of US politics than the less direct epistemic shenanigans that other Presidents have pulled? Has it been better for the practice of US politics?
I agree these are some of the standard counterarguments. And as I literally say in the post the title is amazing and the body totally fails to follow up on that.
Maybe you don’t think there are any good arguments on the other side? In that case I think you are wrong and I also feel like you are not using your imagination properly. I don’t know where the balance of arguments lies, but having thought about it for at least many dozen hours, I am quite confident there is no super trivial answer.
Sometimes you do really gotta have more norms and put more effort and stigma in the instances of a crime that tried harder not to be caught. We also have legal precedent for this, so it’s not like it’s a totally galaxy brained take.
You’re writing as if you or Benquo had put forward a clear claim about the world and I’d said that it’s false, and now there are “sides” in that factual dispute.
What I said is that “blatant lies are the best kind” does not make a clear claim about the world; my criticism that it’s terrible is closer to saying that it’s “not even wrong”.
Does the phrase “blatant lies are the best kind” clearly map on to some specific claim about the world which could resolve as “true” or “false”? Does the phrase help people be more epistemically grounded when engaging with the topic, better at tracking what’s actually happening in the world around them and having traction in thinking about it? I say no.
To dig into that particular phrase some more: there is something funny about how it is doing comparisons (or what it’s conditioning on), like there’s some implicit ceteris paribus clause that’s doing a lot of work, or it’s setting up a hypothetical choice and the details in how you define what the options are is doing a lot of work. There’s something interesting going on with the word “blatant”. It’s setting out a very absolutist claim—does it actually mean it? Is there one clear standard of good that “best” is referring to?
It’s definitely memorable and punchy rhetoric. It was built for that rhetorical oomph; how did it get it? It doesn’t look like the rhetorical oomph that comes as the exclamation mark when you’ve nailed it with a scarily precise description of the world. It doesn’t feel like you’ve just put on glasses and are now seeing the world more clearly than you’ve been able to before. It feels more like a cat coupling. There’s a contrarian allure to the way it flips things on their head which is somewhat discombobulating and helps give it a feel of deep wisdom. And the confusions and difficulty of parsing it as a clear claim about the world may be a feature rather than a bug because they help prevent it from turning into something mundane which doesn’t have that feeling of insight.
Is this your attempt to state the core claim: “Sometimes you do really gotta have more norms and put more effort and stigma in the instances of a crime that tried harder not to be caught”? On first glance it seems true, though I’d want to poke at it more to be sure about what exactly it’s claiming. The “Sometimes” alone makes it very different from the post’s titular claim, and also perhaps close to trivial; I suspect that the more interesting & substantive version of the claim would have to get more specific here and that’s where disagreements could emerge.
I can make my own attempt to come at it from what you’re calling the other side: (Generally) Knowledge is good. Knowing about bad things that are happening to you is good. That makes stealthiness (a tendency to go undetected) a pernicious feature for bad things to have. This applies to people trying to deceive you—it’s better if you notice their attempted deception, which means that it’s pernicious if their attempted deception is hard for you to detect. It also applies to lots of other things, e.g. if you have cancer it’s bad for it to be a “stealthy” form of cancer that tends to result in tests that are false negatives.
Maybe if there had been a clear argument it would’ve gotten better counter-arguments. I’m not even sure what specific claim you’re identifying as the hypothesis, such that it could be true or false.
To sketch a basic “boo blatant lies” argument: It’s challenging for a group of people to have epistemic standards because of ambiguity, fallibility (which makes it exceedingly rare for anyone to be perfectly honest), and the challenges of people at some distance from a situation correctly identifying what happened in that situation (especially when they may start off more inclined to trust some people than others, or fallible themselves). Blatant lies—the ones that are easily identifiable as intentional lies even from a distance—are ones that the group can most straightforwardly coordinate on recognizing and responding to. Which is a starting point to build from. (And even in a group that only catches the blatant lies, many repeat epistemic offenders will slip up eventually and commit a blatant lie that can be caught, and many of the ones who are careful not to slip up will at least be constrained to meaningful degree by the loose-but-still-present epistemic standards.)
So, why get so indignant about blatant lies? To coordinating against a subset of bad epistemic practices that it’s feasible for us to coordinate against.
And the slogan “blatant lies are the best kind!” seems to be poking against that coordination for epistemic standards. It’s like saying “the best kinds of thieves are the ones who get caught and punished” to interrupt someone in the process of apprehending a thief and ask them why they’re so worked up about it.
Here’s another angle: Donald Trump. He sure does tell a lot of blatant lies. Has that been better for the epistemic environment of US politics than the less direct epistemic shenanigans that other Presidents have pulled? Has it been better for the practice of US politics?
I agree these are some of the standard counterarguments. And as I literally say in the post the title is amazing and the body totally fails to follow up on that.
Maybe you don’t think there are any good arguments on the other side? In that case I think you are wrong and I also feel like you are not using your imagination properly. I don’t know where the balance of arguments lies, but having thought about it for at least many dozen hours, I am quite confident there is no super trivial answer.
Sometimes you do really gotta have more norms and put more effort and stigma in the instances of a crime that tried harder not to be caught. We also have legal precedent for this, so it’s not like it’s a totally galaxy brained take.
You’re writing as if you or Benquo had put forward a clear claim about the world and I’d said that it’s false, and now there are “sides” in that factual dispute.
What I said is that “blatant lies are the best kind” does not make a clear claim about the world; my criticism that it’s terrible is closer to saying that it’s “not even wrong”.
Does the phrase “blatant lies are the best kind” clearly map on to some specific claim about the world which could resolve as “true” or “false”? Does the phrase help people be more epistemically grounded when engaging with the topic, better at tracking what’s actually happening in the world around them and having traction in thinking about it? I say no.
To dig into that particular phrase some more: there is something funny about how it is doing comparisons (or what it’s conditioning on), like there’s some implicit ceteris paribus clause that’s doing a lot of work, or it’s setting up a hypothetical choice and the details in how you define what the options are is doing a lot of work. There’s something interesting going on with the word “blatant”. It’s setting out a very absolutist claim—does it actually mean it? Is there one clear standard of good that “best” is referring to?
It’s definitely memorable and punchy rhetoric. It was built for that rhetorical oomph; how did it get it? It doesn’t look like the rhetorical oomph that comes as the exclamation mark when you’ve nailed it with a scarily precise description of the world. It doesn’t feel like you’ve just put on glasses and are now seeing the world more clearly than you’ve been able to before. It feels more like a cat coupling. There’s a contrarian allure to the way it flips things on their head which is somewhat discombobulating and helps give it a feel of deep wisdom. And the confusions and difficulty of parsing it as a clear claim about the world may be a feature rather than a bug because they help prevent it from turning into something mundane which doesn’t have that feeling of insight.
Is this your attempt to state the core claim: “Sometimes you do really gotta have more norms and put more effort and stigma in the instances of a crime that tried harder not to be caught”? On first glance it seems true, though I’d want to poke at it more to be sure about what exactly it’s claiming. The “Sometimes” alone makes it very different from the post’s titular claim, and also perhaps close to trivial; I suspect that the more interesting & substantive version of the claim would have to get more specific here and that’s where disagreements could emerge.
I can make my own attempt to come at it from what you’re calling the other side: (Generally) Knowledge is good. Knowing about bad things that are happening to you is good. That makes stealthiness (a tendency to go undetected) a pernicious feature for bad things to have. This applies to people trying to deceive you—it’s better if you notice their attempted deception, which means that it’s pernicious if their attempted deception is hard for you to detect. It also applies to lots of other things, e.g. if you have cancer it’s bad for it to be a “stealthy” form of cancer that tends to result in tests that are false negatives.