Going back to your plain English definition of deception:
intentionally causing someone to have a false belief
notice that it is the liar’s intention for the victim to have a false belief. That requires the liar to know the victim’s map!
So I would distinguish between intentionally lying and intentionlessly misleading.
P. redator is merely intentionlessly misleading P. rey. The decision to mislead P. rey was made by evolution, not by P. redator. On the other hand, if I were hungry and wanted to eat a P. rey, and made mating sounds, I would be intentionally lying. My map contains a map of P. rey’s map, and it is my decision, not evolution’s, to exploit the signal.
causing the receiver to update its probability distribution to be less accurate
This is an undesired consequence of deception (undesired by the liar, that is), so it seems strange to use it as part of the definition of deception. An ideal deceiver leaves its victim’s map intact, so that it can exploit it again in the future.
This is an undesired consequence of deception (undesired by the liar, that is), so it seems strange to use it as part of the definition of deception. An ideal deceiver leaves its victim’s map intact, so that it can exploit it again in the future.
Yes. But I think the question in this post is trying to pose is “can lying actually exist, in practice, in equilibrium?” or something similar. (I’m guessing the goal here is for Zack to wrap his brain around those executives who say “everyone knows we’re lying so we’re not lying” and have a crisp understanding of what’s going on).
Some things that sticks out with the Plausibly Deniable Executives is that they are creating noise where there previously wasn’t, where they are probably “actually lying” about at least some things (i.e CEO Alice.says words that customer Bob definitely interpret in a way that leaves Bob mislead) but it’s harder to call them on in because Alice says so many god damn things with varying degrees of plausible deniability that it’s hard to notice and reason about.
Alice might be less like P. Redator and more like a squid clouding the waters with an inkjet.
Going back to your plain English definition of deception:
notice that it is the liar’s intention for the victim to have a false belief. That requires the liar to know the victim’s map!
So I would distinguish between intentionally lying and intentionlessly misleading.
P. redator is merely intentionlessly misleading P. rey. The decision to mislead P. rey was made by evolution, not by P. redator. On the other hand, if I were hungry and wanted to eat a P. rey, and made mating sounds, I would be intentionally lying. My map contains a map of P. rey’s map, and it is my decision, not evolution’s, to exploit the signal.
This is an undesired consequence of deception (undesired by the liar, that is), so it seems strange to use it as part of the definition of deception. An ideal deceiver leaves its victim’s map intact, so that it can exploit it again in the future.
Yes. But I think the question in this post is trying to pose is “can lying actually exist, in practice, in equilibrium?” or something similar. (I’m guessing the goal here is for Zack to wrap his brain around those executives who say “everyone knows we’re lying so we’re not lying” and have a crisp understanding of what’s going on).
Some things that sticks out with the Plausibly Deniable Executives is that they are creating noise where there previously wasn’t, where they are probably “actually lying” about at least some things (i.e CEO Alice.says words that customer Bob definitely interpret in a way that leaves Bob mislead) but it’s harder to call them on in because Alice says so many god damn things with varying degrees of plausible deniability that it’s hard to notice and reason about.
Alice might be less like P. Redator and more like a squid clouding the waters with an inkjet.