Suppose I were to say that the American legal system is a criminal organization. The usual response would be that this is a crazy accusation.
Now, suppose I were to point out that it is standard practice for American lawyers to advise their clients to lie under oath in certain circumstances. I expect that this would still generally be perceived as a heterodox, emotionally overwrought, and perhaps hysterical conspiracy theory.
Then, suppose I were to further clarify that people accepting a plea bargain are expected to affirm under oath that no one made threats or promises to induce them to plead guilty, and that the American criminal justice system is heavily reliant on plea bargains. This might be conceded as literally true, but with the proviso that since everyone does it, I shouldn’t use extreme language like “lie” and “fraud.”
This isn’t about lawyers—some cases in other fields:
In American medicine it is routine to officially certify that a standard of care was provided, that cannot possibly have been provided (e.g. some policies as to the timing of medication and tests can’t be carried out given how many patients each nurse has to care for, but it’s less trouble to fudge it as long as something vaguely resembling the officially desired outcome happened). The system relies on widespread willingness to falsify records, and would (temporarily) grind to a halt if people were to simply refuse to lie. But I expect that if I were to straightforwardly summarize this—that the American hospital system is built on lies—I mostly expect this to be evaluated as an attack, rather than a description. But of course if any one person refuses to lie, the proximate consequences may be bad.
Likewise for the psychiatric system.
In Simulacra and Subjectivity, the part that reads “while you cannot acquire a physician’s privileges and social role simply by providing clear evidence of your ability to heal others” was, in an early draft, “physicians are actually nothing but a social class with specific privileges, social roles, and barriers to entry.” These are expressions of the same thought, but the draft version is a direct, simple theoretical assertion, while the latter merely provides evidence for the assertion. I had to be coy on purpose in order to distract the reader from a potential fight.
The End User License Agreements we almost all falsely certify that we’ve read in order to use the updated version of any software we have are of course familiar. And when I worked in the corporate world, I routinely had to affirm in writing that I understood and was following policies that were nowhere in evidence. But of course if I’d personally refused to lie, the proximate consequences would have been counterproductive.
The Silicon Valley startup scene—as attested in Zvi’s post, the show Silicon Valley, the New Yorker profile on Y Combinator (my analysis), and plenty of anecdotal evidence—uses business metrics as a theatrical prop to appeal to investors, not an accounting device to make profitable decisions on the object level.
The general argumentative pattern is:
A: X is a fraudulent enterprise.
B: How can you say that?!
A: X relies on asserting Y when we know Y to be false.
B: But X produces benefit Z, and besides, everyone says Y and the system wouldn’t work without it, so it’s not reasonable to call it fraud.
This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if terms like “fraud”, “lie,” “deception” were unambiguously attack words, with a literal meaning of “ought to be scapegoated as deviant.” The problem is that there’s simultaneously the definition that the dictionaries claim the word has, with a literal meaning independent of any call to action.
There is a clear conflict between the use of language to punish offenders, and the use of language to describe problems, and there is great need for a language that can describe problems.
For instance, if I wanted to understand how to interpret statistics generated by the medical system, I would need a short, simple way to refer to any significant tendency to generate false reports. If the available simple terms were also attack words, the process would become much more complicated.
Related: Model-building and scapegoating, Blame games, Judgment, Punishment, and the Information-Suppression Field, AGAINST LIE INFLATION, Maybe Lying Doesn’t Exist
I think this post was among the more crisp updates that helped me understand Benquo’s worldview, and shifted my own. I think I still disagree with many of Benquo’s next-steps or approach, but I’m actually not sure. Rereading this post is highlighting some areas I notice I’m confused about.
This post clearly articulates a problem with having language both have a function of “communicating about object level facts” and “political coalitions, attacks/defense, etc”. It makes it really difficult to communicate about important true facts without poking at the social fabric, which often results in the social fabric poking back.
I’m still not sure what to to about this – the social fabric matters. But I do think the status quo of how language typically works (even on LW) is pretty bad. It’s particularly relevant among various AI orgs who’s members might have wildly different worldviews or strategies, who may think each other net negative, but who nonetheless (I think) are better of sharing information and collaborating in various ways anyway. (This isn’t exactly about “crimes”, but I think the subject matter of the post transfers to various other domains where stating your beliefs clearly can make people really upset)
Can crimes be discussed literally? makes a short case that when you straightforwardly describe misbehavior and wrongdoing, people commonly criticize the language you use, reading it as an attempt to build a coalition to attack the parties you’re talking about. At the time I didn’t think that this was my experience, and thought the post was probably wrong and confused. I don’t remember when I changed my mind, but nowadays I’m much more aware of requests on me to not talk about what a person or group has done or is doing. I find myself the subject of such requests quite a lot, and I think past versions of myself would have thought these requests reasonable. Anyway, my point is this post was right about something important, so I give is a +4.
(This review is taken from my post Ben Pace’s Controversial Picks for the 2020 Review.)
I’m interested in hearing more about experiences you’ve had (perhaps in vague terms, if need be?). I’m a bit surprised that you didn’t resonate with this when first reading the post.
This review is not very charitable, because I think the meaning of the post is different than how they present it.
The things it describes at the beginning are clearly true, with plea-bargaining being institutionalized lying, but this is, in the end, a poorly written plea to not say so. It’s not that I don’t see a point. It would be nice to be able to simply describe things as they are without it being a fight, but that isn’t how things would work out. Words like ‘lie’ and ‘fraud’ have their extremely negative connotations because they are extremely negative things. Anything that is a synonym for them will pick up the same connotation, because people will still hate them. (I have previously determined that I would not be able to make a plea bargain, because I would not be able to admit I did something that I didn’t. I may, of course, be wrong about that since I haven’t experienced it.)
If it did succeed, that would not be a good thing, and would encourage people to lie more. (Social shame and punishment is what keeps the major offenders from being even worse. We may let far too many get away with deceit, but that is hardly a good reason to make it easier and less punishable.)
I am reminded of something I heard about a simulation of corruption; even in a highly corrupt society, sufficient punishment for caught for corruption can cause the rest of society to stop being corrupt on rare occasions, since people keep their heads down when it seems likely they will get caught if they keep it up, and this makes it easier to find and make examples of the remaining corrupt actors. Once corruption ceases, it may be quite a while before it becomes corrupt again (though it will eventually in the real world.)
This is far from the first post trying to remove the shame from being a known liar, and it is far from the last. I wish it was though.
On a quality of writing note, it seems to end without having made a sufficient point. (Everything is very surface level, hiding the details of how their suggestion would work in practice. I suspect they know that, but it could just be the previously mentioned lack of charitability.)