Strong downvote. The post looks loosy. The relation between social grace, honesty and truth seeking is complicated and multidimentional. You didn’t engaged with this complexity. You didn’t properly argued your point. You made a statement then vaguely gestured in the direction of two examples.
The first example is not only fictional, but isn’t even really relevant. The world without lies is in a way nicer to live in because people reveal more information to you. It doesn’t make you a supperior truth seeker. Now, would I prefer to live in such world? Sure, me and every other autistic person. But this is axiological issue not epistemological one.
The second example is more on point. It shows that it is epistemically useful to be able to talk to someone ignoring status concerns, especially when people need it. This is the point I completely agree with. However it doesn’t generalises to “It’s always epistemically better to lack any social grace”. Because 1) the same tool isn’t the best for every job 2) social grace isn’t just about status concerns.
There is a potential interisting conversation with lots of nuance to be had here which a supperior version of this post would have tried to have. For instance, while sometimes politeness is about concealing and obfuscating information it’s often the case that more polite/political correct terms are strictly more accurate. Consider:
“You are ugly”
“You are not conventionally attractive”
The 1st statement is implicitly commiting the mind projecting fallacy where ugliness is considered to be the property of a person. The second doesn’t, as it explicitly mentions that attractiveness depends not only on your qualities but also on their relation to the convention.
Here is a different angle. Consider:
A person unaware of social conventions just doing object-level reasoning about X
A person that used to be unaware of social conventions, learned some and while doing the same object-level reasoning about X, then presents the finding in a nice way
A person unable to disentangle their reasoning from status concerns just saying nice platitudes about X
A person unable to disentangle their reasoning from status concerns intentionally being rude about X because they believe that it gives them the appeal of truthseeker and the hight status corresponding to it.
Your model distincts neither between 1 and 4, nor between 2 and 3. Which is bad, because as long as epistemic virtue goes we would like to be either 1 or 2 and not 3 or 4.
Strong downvote. The post looks loosy. The relation between social grace, honesty and truth seeking is complicated and multidimentional. You didn’t engaged with this complexity. You didn’t properly argued your point. You made a statement then vaguely gestured in the direction of two examples.
The first example is not only fictional, but isn’t even really relevant. The world without lies is in a way nicer to live in because people reveal more information to you. It doesn’t make you a supperior truth seeker. Now, would I prefer to live in such world? Sure, me and every other autistic person. But this is axiological issue not epistemological one.
The second example is more on point. It shows that it is epistemically useful to be able to talk to someone ignoring status concerns, especially when people need it. This is the point I completely agree with. However it doesn’t generalises to “It’s always epistemically better to lack any social grace”. Because 1) the same tool isn’t the best for every job 2) social grace isn’t just about status concerns.
There is a potential interisting conversation with lots of nuance to be had here which a supperior version of this post would have tried to have. For instance, while sometimes politeness is about concealing and obfuscating information it’s often the case that more polite/political correct terms are strictly more accurate. Consider:
“You are ugly”
“You are not conventionally attractive”
The 1st statement is implicitly commiting the mind projecting fallacy where ugliness is considered to be the property of a person. The second doesn’t, as it explicitly mentions that attractiveness depends not only on your qualities but also on their relation to the convention.
Here is a different angle. Consider:
A person unaware of social conventions just doing object-level reasoning about X
A person that used to be unaware of social conventions, learned some and while doing the same object-level reasoning about X, then presents the finding in a nice way
A person unable to disentangle their reasoning from status concerns just saying nice platitudes about X
A person unable to disentangle their reasoning from status concerns intentionally being rude about X because they believe that it gives them the appeal of truthseeker and the hight status corresponding to it.
Your model distincts neither between 1 and 4, nor between 2 and 3. Which is bad, because as long as epistemic virtue goes we would like to be either 1 or 2 and not 3 or 4.