JAKE: You were outside, I was inside, you were s’posed to keep in touch with the band. I kept asking you if we were gonna play again.
ELWOOD: Well, what was I gonna do? Take away your only hope? Take away the very thing that kept you going in there? I took the liberty of bullshitting you, okay?
JAKE: You lied to me.
ELWOOD: It wasn’t lies, it was just… bullshit.
-- The Blues Brothers (1980)
Bullshit is the bane of my existence. Particularly the part of my existence involving professional interviews and meetings, but also in general.
Let me define some terms, though. Not as universal meanings,[1] but as the ways I’ll use them here. There’s a lot of things going on, in ways people can deceive, distort or ignore the truth,
Lies: Anything done to deliberately mislead someone. Can include truth, falsehoods, and statements which aren’t even truth-apt but sound like they might be. The If By Whiskey speech is probably an example of the latter.
Falsehoods: Saying things which you believe to not be true. Including an atheist saying “God bless you” to a sneeze, “Nice to meet you” when you’d rather be hiding in your room, and similar things which are not intended to deceive (and so aren’t strictly lies). Does not include deceptive technical truths. If this is also a lie it can be called an outright lie.
Deceptive Truth: Saying things that are technically entirely true but which you know will be interpreted to make the listener believe something false. Selective emphasis and filtered evidence. Arguably also includes lies of omission. Technical truth is a synonym.
Bullshit: Saying things that are mostly true, selectively emphasized and/or exaggerated. Being dishonest, but only partially dishonest, with substantial elements of truth and honesty.
Dissembling: Saying things that aren’t trying to be true or false, ignoring truth entirely.
Ones I won’t fully define: half-truth, half-lie, honesty, accuracy. ‘Perfect honesty‘ is avoiding lies and falsehoods; honesty is less strict.
I prefer to be honest. I’m not very good at lies in general, whether it’s deceptive truth, falsehoods, or bullshit. But I find it vastly easier, personally, to lie with falsehoods rather than bullshit. To abandon the truth entirely and tell someone what they want to hear.[2] I am sure this varies from person to person, so this post may not have broad applicability, but I am going to outline how I think about it and let others decide whether it’s useful to them, either by matching their intuitions or by contrasting with them.
So, what are the pros and cons of these types of lie?
Deceptive Truths: I agree with most of what Eliezer wrote in Meta-Honesty. Both that never literally saying something false, no matter what, is a fairly indefensible position (hiding Jews from Nazis etc.), and that trying to do it anyway, most of the time, is good for you. Following the oath of Bene Gesserit Truthsayers won’t get you lie-detection powers, but it will probably help you at detecting your own internal lies. If you must be dishonest, there’s virtue in sticking to the code anyway.
On the other hand, it’s the least flexible. If someone knows you stick to it, it’s exploitable to force you to reveal things you don’t want to say, and even if you’re adept at deflection, easy to push you into revealing that secrets exist. Glomarization to a sufficient degree is basically impossible. Also, you’ve probably already broken this code. I have. Odds are good you broke it today; that wasn’t true for me today, the day I wrote this, but I think it was true yesterday. Is it nearly as helpful to try to stick to it when you know you won’t entirely succeed, because you already haven’t? My experience is that it’s not entirely unhelpful, but it’s not a huge help either.
Falsehoods: If you must lie, lie. Don’t pretend to yourself you’re doing anything else. Say that which is not, with a clean break with the truth, and even if you fool others, you may be less fooled yourself. This doesn’t have nearly the same strength of benefits as strict technical honesty, but it does have some. If you keep clearly labeled in your head the things said because they are true, and those which are said because you want someone to think they are true, you can keep a closer eye on which lies are hiding in your own head. And you can do this along with technical truths and get much more flexibility.
But there are still limits, and even telling outright falsehoods can’t actually get you out of many of the polite fictions that normal life requires like “It’s nice to meet you.” What are you going to do, only say that when it’s either definitively true or definitively false? Hesitate before you speak, to determine if it’s allowed? That violates the ritual in itself. This gets you out of Simulacrum Level 1 but not to Level 4, and a fair amount of the necessary, or at least customary, oil of society requires pieces of Level 4.
Dissembling: In favor: Can put people at ease, can handle high simulacrum levels flexibly, nearly mandatory for most phatic communication. Against: Can’t do anything else, easily caught unless you’re very charismatic or your target doesn’t really want to notice the lies. Actively dissembling to deceive is something most people have experience with in telling ‘white lies,’ though this doesn’t usually extend well to more complicated lying unless the target will benefit from continuing to believe the false thing, or at least you genuinely believe they will.
So, then: Bullshit: Bullshit is maximally flexible. Take some things that are true, and some that aren’t, some that, on second thought, stretch and mix and blur, and you can say whatever’s necessary. How much truth and falsehood are included are limited only by the consequences of being caught in a lie. If you’re in a context (like interviews) where you want to convey the truth, but anything you say truthfully will be assumed to be exaggerated or warped in your favor, you can simply warp it in your favor and then allow them to adjust back down to something approximating a correct belief. Bullshit can be pure Simulacrum Level 2 or 3 if you want it to be, and Level 4 generally works. And for most people, it’s easier to put conviction and confidence in your voice with bullshit than it is for falsehoods or deceptive truths, because it’s got enough truth in it that you can feel confident.
But of all these methods of lying, I consider bullshit the most toxic.
Unless you’re extremely politician-brained, even dissembling is easier to catch yourself at. The art of bullshit is to blur the lines between the true things you mix into your words and the falsehoods and dissembling you pad them out with to get a better reception. But it’s extremely difficult to do that routinely and keep track of which things are true within your own mind. The confidence and conviction you get come from largely convincing yourself. Temporarily, at least, but corrupted hardware is a bitch and it’s not always good at going back to the intended state of self-honesty when you want it to; correcting for the error you’ve temporarily introduced has an unstable baseline reading problem.
This is most visibly acute to me when involved in technical interviews. You can’t bullshit reality, and when you are asked to fix some software or critique a research plan or create a wooden cabinet, you cannot mess around with half-truths and expect that to go better than falsehoods.[3] And yet if you engage in the same ‘no lies, the territory is watching’ strategy in the rest of the same interview, you have to lie, and usually to bullshit. (I’ve tried to stick to deceptive truths. If it can work, it’s at a level of technique that is beyond me. I’m skeptical.) Bouncing yourself back and forth between dealing with ground truth and having to answer at a technical level that can’t meaningfully be faked, and questions where you must carefully calibrate your faking to convey the amount of confidence you actually intend, is jarring and IME makes both mindsets less effective. Keeping track of what you believe gets very muddy.
And so I hate bullshit. Lie to me, if you must, with falsehoods, or technical truths, or dissembling, or if-by-whiskey nonsense, but even if you do need to, please, not bullshit. Better a whole truth or none, than a half-truth. Lie outright and I can’t trust you now, but if you take honesty seriously later, and promise the truth, maybe I will be able to. Bullshit—half-lie—and I can’t ever trust you, because I can’t trust you to know you’re telling the truth.
And if you catch me at it, interrupt me. I know I do it, probably regularly, because I sometimes catch it in retrospect. I hate it in myself, too. Partially for the purity of good epistemics.
But partially instrumentally. Because it’s possible to aspire to honesty and rationality and make this mistake frequently; as I said, I do it myself. But I *don’t* think it’s possible to make this mistake and not have that make you less honest, a worse rationalist, worse at believing and saying true things rather than false ones even when you mean to. And the more it’s a habit, the more so.
So please, don’t.
- ^
To discuss this topic, we need clear distinctions, but I do not typically make those sharp, neither in my speech nor my thinking, between deception, lies, and falsehoods. Dissembling I unreliably keep separate, not usually by that name, but sometimes blur it with lies, or less often with bullshit. As you may have gathered, bullshit stands out clearly from other lies.
- ^
This is unpleasant and more difficult to do when the person to be deceived is someone I consider worthy of respect. I’ll admit this is a little perverse, for someone who would like to deal fairly with people, but it seems to be true.
- ^
Yet. Claude Code and friends are getting there, and other domains may fall very soon, even short of AGI that can just do it honestly.
FWIW I do get a lot of mileage out of noticing when someone says something that, in their shoes, I could never imagine myself saying. In the act of trying to say it, I stop myself, for it trips over heuristics I have of “How could I even know that if it were true?” or “I feel like I’m slipping something past someone here.”
I don’t think I find most people to think like me enough for that to work. Even other rationalists.
That’s really interesting. I’m the exact opposite. Growing up, I really hated the idea of lying, so much that I resolved to never do it. What happened? I became great at deceptive half-truths and selective exaggerations and omissions. I don’t still hold that pledge to never lie (I think I told my first at around age 12), but to this day I’m a crummy, crummy liar. I think basically anyone could catch me in a lie, so I almost never do it. My guess is that’s because I had ~no experience practicing my lying in childhood when the consequences were mild.
I’m not sure if this made me better at keeping a story straight through a bunch of deceptive, selective half-truths than I would otherwise be. Fortunately these days staying honest is almost always the best policy.
As I allude to in the footnote, I find this easier in significant part because it is easier to put someone in the category “does not deserve the truth” (sometimes merely temporarily) than to concoct a mixture of half-truths I can believe enough to say them.
An example I sometimes relate, is an essay I was supposed to write for my high school vice-principal. He had instituted a weekly charitable service requirement, and we had to write five hundred words, weekly, about our experiences. I mostly did Habitat, because at least I could be sure I did something useful for someone, which was not common among my classmates, and the writing was harder than the labor, because… it wasn’t making me a better person. I tried to find some lesson that I could plausibly pretend mattered, and that was enormously difficult.
And then for the last one, I wrote about a thousand words on my reflection of the whole program, and whether it was achieving its goals, and precisely why I thought it had completely failed, both for me and all my classmates. Politely, but honestly.
He flipped his shit. Called me into his office, called my parents, I forget the rest.
So that night I wrote another essay, telling him exactly what he wanted to hear. My dad asked why I didn’t write that the first time. I replied that there wasn’t a single word in it I believed. And that was because, in that day, my vice principal had left the category of ‘people to be reasoned with’ and entered the category ‘idiot to be routed around.’ I was not dealing with this man like an equal[1], but an inferior.
This remains a much easier mental motion than bullshitting. This says good things about my honesty and, I expect, bad things about the rest of my moral character.
Let alone superior. I’m not sure I’ve ever related to anyone like a superior in my life, and it sure wasn’t in high school if I did. That got me into considerably more trouble than this bit did.