Here is an account that tries to unify these associations. I mostly took this away from the post rather than coming in with it, and so I think it’s quite similar to what you are saying but maybe a bit cleaner.
Conversation or deliberation often has the explicit purpose of discovering truth or making a decision. But we also have a bunch of other reasons we care about how conversations or deliberations go. For example:
They take time and attention that we could spend elsewhere.
They can be fun and interesting, or boring and uncomfortable.
If public, listeners will infer something about us from what we say.
Even if private, thinking clearly about a topic can make it harder to maintain a fiction.
They can effect the balance of power in a group or within an individual.
Sometimes we just don’t want to help other people find the truth.
I’m inclined to call a deliberation or conversation sincere to the extent that we are prioritizing mostly the decision-making or truth-seeking function above all that other stuff we care about.
Any of those other considerations can lead to a failure of sincerity: I don’t want to spend the time or attention, I want to take the opportunity say something witty, I don’t want to show my true colors, I want to tell an explicit lie, I want to avoid challenging a convenient self-image, I want to avoid lines of inquiry that might make me feel compelled to do something...
I think that this mostly captures the associations you describe:
“Like truth-seeking” is straightforward.
“Not playing pretend” is straightforward.
“Healthy stapleclippers” becomes a particular failure of sincerity, where deliberation and inquiry are casualties of conflict between conflicting impulses—my sense of sincerity doesn’t require that conflicting impulses get along in a deep sense of finding the best bargain or anything like that, but it does require that they be willing to come to the table and talk it out (or at least not sabotage when talking-it-out is occurring).
“Seriousness” also seems straightforward (and quite close to a synonym). There is a separate kind of seriousness that is more like “appreciate the stakes of the interaction,” e.g. “watch what you say, offending someone could start a war.” But that’s clearly not what we mean, and I think sincerity is close to a synonym for the other sense of seriousness (+ honesty).
This captures the sense of someone being insincere because they are unwilling to pay attention to the importance of what’s happening. It doesn’t really exclude as insincere the person who seriously considers the stakes and concludes that they care more about saving office supplies than saving people, but as you say I think this might just be a desire to lump all good things together and I don’t think that there is any real sense in which the paperclipper is necessarily insincere. This leads us to...
Sincerity will tend to be correlated with “having something to protect.” If you just care about how fun your life is, it’s less likely that it’s worth taking the attention and time to engage in sincere inquiry. If you just care about status, it’s unlikely to be worth ceding ground in a conversation even if it would help you make a better decision. And of course if your preferences have no overlap with your peers’ you are less likely to be honest.
But there’s no fundamental tension to being completely self-interested and completely sincere. And it seems easy and intuitive to imagine sincerity in the service of forward-looking self-interest, e.g. to imagine having a sincere discussion with someone about what kind of life they really want and what path is most likely to get them there. And in fact I think that’s probably one of the most common kinds of sincerity.
Broader or more robust associations with altruism aren’t really included on my account. That said, if sincere inquiry is inquiry that prioritizes figuring out what you should do, and if we imagine hypothetical reasons that would be moving to such inquiry, then I guess sincerity is whatever causes you to be moved by realist-style moral truth (though I’m skeptical of that hypothetical for some of the same kinds of reasons you discuss in against the normative realist wager).
Some other scattered thoughts:
I intuitively care a lot about people having space for sincere conversation and inquiry. It doesn’t seem like something you’d necessarily want to permeate your life, or that is necessarily a particularly satisfying way to be in the moment. It seems reasonable for most moments to not-even-try-to-be-sincere (as contrasted with insincerity which is more like the pretense fo security), as long as there is enough space for sincerity. You touch on this early in the piece but I think that I have a different vibe around it than you do.
Relatedly, I may imagine implementing sincerity in a different way from you, and I’m a bit skeptical about the ability of a human to be sincere by making a move like “just let go of pretense.” It seems like motivated cognition runs deeply in humans, both in practice and in theory, and we shouldn’t expect to have any kind of direct access to whether we are being sincere at any given moment. (Perhaps you can learn to notice, but it seems like cultivating sincerity based on this perception just seems likely to lead to more effective delusion.) For example, in the context of “should I be vegan?” I would be inclined to proceed lightly and with curiosity while exploring what is true, the potential arguments, the philosophical intuitions, what it would actually look like to be vegan in practice, and so on. And then only once all that is in place I might decide to really try to approach the decision itself with an open mind in a more serious and heavy way. But that’s exhausting and has high stakes and involves more material tradeoffs, and it’s not the space you want to be in while figuring out the facts. (I think this makes the inquiry sincere, but with a different mood and vibe.)
I care about having space for sincerity largely because it facilitates a certain flavor of important engagement. If someone makes space to engage sincerely then we can negotiate and trade, we can try to persuade each other, or we can collaboratively seek truth. Even if I imagine a sadist whose preferences are nearly the opposite of mine, if they are willing to have a sincere conversation then we can at least search for common ground, we can appreciate together the tragedy of our situation, we can identify topics where truth would help us both and seek it together. On the flip side there can be people whose values are almost the same as mine but who would not engage sincerely with argument or negotiation. And for that purpose I just wonder whether someone will have a conversation actually oriented around its nominal purpose, or whether (often legitimate!) considerations would make that impossible.
I think the cost-benefit analysis for sincere inquiry is a little bit more loaded and unclear than this post makes it out to be. (This was also a major objection I had to The Scout Mindset.) I think that even thoughts in the privacy of your own head have significant impacts on how you relate to the world and what you do, and it’s a substantive claim that either those costs are manageable or that the benefits of sincere inquiry are large enough to offset them. My own inclination is that it’s worth it to have significant space for sincere inquiry and at least some (and perhaps many) people with whom you regularly have sincere discussion, but I don’t think it’s completely obvious and I would probably approach it with a bit more trepidation than you would.
I think the account you offer here is a plausible tack re: unification — I’ve added a link to it in the “empirical approaches” section.
“Facilitates a certain flavor of important engagement in the vicinity of persuasion, negotiation and trade” is a helpful handle, and another strong sincerity association for me (cf “a space that feels ready to collaborate, negotiate, figure stuff out, make stuff happen”).
I agree that it’s not necessarily desirable for sincerity (especially in your account’s sense) to permeate your whole life (though on my intuitive notion, it’s possible for some underlying sincerity to co-exist with things like play, joking around, etc), and that you can’t necessarily get to sincerity by some simple move like “just letting go of pretense.”
This stuff about encouraging more effective delusion by probing for sincerity via introspection is interesting, as are these questions about whether I’m underestimating the costs of sincerity. In this latter respect, maybe worth distinguishing the stakes of “thoughts in the privacy of your own head” (e.g., questions about the value of self-deception, non-attention to certain things, etc) from more mundane costs re: e.g., sincerity takes effort, it’s not always the most fun thing, and so on. Sounds like you’ve got the former especially in mind, and they seem like the most salient source of possible disagreement. I agree it’s a substantive question how the trade-offs here shake out, and at some point would be curious to hear more about your take.
Here is an account that tries to unify these associations. I mostly took this away from the post rather than coming in with it, and so I think it’s quite similar to what you are saying but maybe a bit cleaner.
Conversation or deliberation often has the explicit purpose of discovering truth or making a decision. But we also have a bunch of other reasons we care about how conversations or deliberations go. For example:
They take time and attention that we could spend elsewhere.
They can be fun and interesting, or boring and uncomfortable.
If public, listeners will infer something about us from what we say.
Even if private, thinking clearly about a topic can make it harder to maintain a fiction.
They can effect the balance of power in a group or within an individual.
Sometimes we just don’t want to help other people find the truth.
I’m inclined to call a deliberation or conversation sincere to the extent that we are prioritizing mostly the decision-making or truth-seeking function above all that other stuff we care about.
Any of those other considerations can lead to a failure of sincerity: I don’t want to spend the time or attention, I want to take the opportunity say something witty, I don’t want to show my true colors, I want to tell an explicit lie, I want to avoid challenging a convenient self-image, I want to avoid lines of inquiry that might make me feel compelled to do something...
I think that this mostly captures the associations you describe:
“Like truth-seeking” is straightforward.
“Not playing pretend” is straightforward.
“Healthy stapleclippers” becomes a particular failure of sincerity, where deliberation and inquiry are casualties of conflict between conflicting impulses—my sense of sincerity doesn’t require that conflicting impulses get along in a deep sense of finding the best bargain or anything like that, but it does require that they be willing to come to the table and talk it out (or at least not sabotage when talking-it-out is occurring).
“Seriousness” also seems straightforward (and quite close to a synonym). There is a separate kind of seriousness that is more like “appreciate the stakes of the interaction,” e.g. “watch what you say, offending someone could start a war.” But that’s clearly not what we mean, and I think sincerity is close to a synonym for the other sense of seriousness (+ honesty).
This captures the sense of someone being insincere because they are unwilling to pay attention to the importance of what’s happening. It doesn’t really exclude as insincere the person who seriously considers the stakes and concludes that they care more about saving office supplies than saving people, but as you say I think this might just be a desire to lump all good things together and I don’t think that there is any real sense in which the paperclipper is necessarily insincere. This leads us to...
Sincerity will tend to be correlated with “having something to protect.” If you just care about how fun your life is, it’s less likely that it’s worth taking the attention and time to engage in sincere inquiry. If you just care about status, it’s unlikely to be worth ceding ground in a conversation even if it would help you make a better decision. And of course if your preferences have no overlap with your peers’ you are less likely to be honest.
But there’s no fundamental tension to being completely self-interested and completely sincere. And it seems easy and intuitive to imagine sincerity in the service of forward-looking self-interest, e.g. to imagine having a sincere discussion with someone about what kind of life they really want and what path is most likely to get them there. And in fact I think that’s probably one of the most common kinds of sincerity.
Broader or more robust associations with altruism aren’t really included on my account. That said, if sincere inquiry is inquiry that prioritizes figuring out what you should do, and if we imagine hypothetical reasons that would be moving to such inquiry, then I guess sincerity is whatever causes you to be moved by realist-style moral truth (though I’m skeptical of that hypothetical for some of the same kinds of reasons you discuss in against the normative realist wager).
Some other scattered thoughts:
I intuitively care a lot about people having space for sincere conversation and inquiry. It doesn’t seem like something you’d necessarily want to permeate your life, or that is necessarily a particularly satisfying way to be in the moment. It seems reasonable for most moments to not-even-try-to-be-sincere (as contrasted with insincerity which is more like the pretense fo security), as long as there is enough space for sincerity. You touch on this early in the piece but I think that I have a different vibe around it than you do.
Relatedly, I may imagine implementing sincerity in a different way from you, and I’m a bit skeptical about the ability of a human to be sincere by making a move like “just let go of pretense.” It seems like motivated cognition runs deeply in humans, both in practice and in theory, and we shouldn’t expect to have any kind of direct access to whether we are being sincere at any given moment. (Perhaps you can learn to notice, but it seems like cultivating sincerity based on this perception just seems likely to lead to more effective delusion.) For example, in the context of “should I be vegan?” I would be inclined to proceed lightly and with curiosity while exploring what is true, the potential arguments, the philosophical intuitions, what it would actually look like to be vegan in practice, and so on. And then only once all that is in place I might decide to really try to approach the decision itself with an open mind in a more serious and heavy way. But that’s exhausting and has high stakes and involves more material tradeoffs, and it’s not the space you want to be in while figuring out the facts. (I think this makes the inquiry sincere, but with a different mood and vibe.)
I care about having space for sincerity largely because it facilitates a certain flavor of important engagement. If someone makes space to engage sincerely then we can negotiate and trade, we can try to persuade each other, or we can collaboratively seek truth. Even if I imagine a sadist whose preferences are nearly the opposite of mine, if they are willing to have a sincere conversation then we can at least search for common ground, we can appreciate together the tragedy of our situation, we can identify topics where truth would help us both and seek it together. On the flip side there can be people whose values are almost the same as mine but who would not engage sincerely with argument or negotiation. And for that purpose I just wonder whether someone will have a conversation actually oriented around its nominal purpose, or whether (often legitimate!) considerations would make that impossible.
I think the cost-benefit analysis for sincere inquiry is a little bit more loaded and unclear than this post makes it out to be. (This was also a major objection I had to The Scout Mindset.) I think that even thoughts in the privacy of your own head have significant impacts on how you relate to the world and what you do, and it’s a substantive claim that either those costs are manageable or that the benefits of sincere inquiry are large enough to offset them. My own inclination is that it’s worth it to have significant space for sincere inquiry and at least some (and perhaps many) people with whom you regularly have sincere discussion, but I don’t think it’s completely obvious and I would probably approach it with a bit more trepidation than you would.
Thanks for these thoughtful comments, Paul.
I think the account you offer here is a plausible tack re: unification — I’ve added a link to it in the “empirical approaches” section.
“Facilitates a certain flavor of important engagement in the vicinity of persuasion, negotiation and trade” is a helpful handle, and another strong sincerity association for me (cf “a space that feels ready to collaborate, negotiate, figure stuff out, make stuff happen”).
I agree that it’s not necessarily desirable for sincerity (especially in your account’s sense) to permeate your whole life (though on my intuitive notion, it’s possible for some underlying sincerity to co-exist with things like play, joking around, etc), and that you can’t necessarily get to sincerity by some simple move like “just letting go of pretense.”
This stuff about encouraging more effective delusion by probing for sincerity via introspection is interesting, as are these questions about whether I’m underestimating the costs of sincerity. In this latter respect, maybe worth distinguishing the stakes of “thoughts in the privacy of your own head” (e.g., questions about the value of self-deception, non-attention to certain things, etc) from more mundane costs re: e.g., sincerity takes effort, it’s not always the most fun thing, and so on. Sounds like you’ve got the former especially in mind, and they seem like the most salient source of possible disagreement. I agree it’s a substantive question how the trade-offs here shake out, and at some point would be curious to hear more about your take.
Thanks for this comment, I found it useful.
What did you want to write at the end of the penultimate paragraph?
Thanks for pointing that out (I cut the hanging sentence)