Mike’s argument applies fairly independently of one’s tastes. The premise is just that what yourself motivated to say differs, in some instances or others, from what the evidence best suggests is true. Your non-truth-based speech motive could be to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, or to assert that that clever heresy you were advocating is indeed a good line of thought, or … any of the other reasonable or unreasonable pulls that cause us humans to want to say some things and avoid others.
OK, so I guess I should have said “applies a lot less to some people”. Also, this seems like one of those cases where one bias might cancel out another; fighting bias with bias means I’m in murky waters, but in the context of this thread we might already be in those murky waters.
ETA: From a cached selves point of view, it seems like building emotional comfort with lying might completely obviate the effect where false statements cause later beliefs that are consistent with those statements (and therefore false), or it might not (e.g., because you don’t perfectly remember what was a lie and what was honest). If not then that seems like a serious problem with lying. Lying while in denial of one’s capacity to lie is even worse, but the bad effect from more lying might outweigh the good effect from more comfortable lying.
Mike’s argument applies fairly independently of one’s tastes. The premise is just that what yourself motivated to say differs, in some instances or others, from what the evidence best suggests is true. Your non-truth-based speech motive could be to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, or to assert that that clever heresy you were advocating is indeed a good line of thought, or … any of the other reasonable or unreasonable pulls that cause us humans to want to say some things and avoid others.
OK, so I guess I should have said “applies a lot less to some people”. Also, this seems like one of those cases where one bias might cancel out another; fighting bias with bias means I’m in murky waters, but in the context of this thread we might already be in those murky waters.
ETA: From a cached selves point of view, it seems like building emotional comfort with lying might completely obviate the effect where false statements cause later beliefs that are consistent with those statements (and therefore false), or it might not (e.g., because you don’t perfectly remember what was a lie and what was honest). If not then that seems like a serious problem with lying. Lying while in denial of one’s capacity to lie is even worse, but the bad effect from more lying might outweigh the good effect from more comfortable lying.