There are a few legible categories in which secrecy serves a clear purpose, such as trade secrets. In those contexts, secrecy is fine. There are a few categories that have been societally and legally carved out as special cases where confidentiality is enforced—lawyers, priests, and therapists—because some people would only consult them if they could do so with the benefit confidentiality, and there being deterred from consulting them would have negative externalities.
Outside of these categories, secrecy is generally bad and transparency is generally good. A group of people in which everyone practices their secret-keeping and talks a lot about how to keeps secrets effectively is *suspicious*. This is particularly true if the example secrets are social and not technological. Being good at this sort of secret keeping makes it easier to shield bad actors and to get away with transgressions, and AFAICT doesn’t do much else. That makes it a signal of wanting to be able to do those things. This is true even if the secrets aren’t specifically about transgressions in particular, because all sorts of things can turn out to be clues later for reasons that weren’t easy to foresee.
A lot of people in the rationality community are trying to cosplay as therapists, and part of the cosplay is to import the confidentiality rules. This is done without an understanding of why those rules are there, and what other rules are there to mitigate the problems that confidentiality creates.
(An additional important caveat: A disclosure motivated by a desire to harm is bad, independent of whether the thing disclosed counts as a legitimate secret or not. Many things are bad to disclose if you’re socially attacking someone, but fine to disclose if you’re doing so because they were incidentally informative about something else.)
Suppose Alice has a crush on Bob and wants to sort out her feelings with Carol’s help. Is it bad for Alice to inform Carol about the crush on condition of confidentiality?
In the most common branch of this conversation, Alice is predictably going to tell Bob about it soon, and is speaking to Carol first in order to sort out details and gain courage. If Carol went and preemptively informed Bob, before Alice talked to Bob herself, this would be analogous to sharing an unfinished draft. This would be bad, but the badness really isn’t about secrecy.
The contents of an unfinished draft headed for publication aren’t secret, except in a narrow and time-limited sense. The problem is that the sharing undermines the impact of the later publication, causes people to associate the author with a lower quality product, and potentially misleads people about the author’s beliefs. Similarly, if Carol goes and preemptively tells Bob about Alice’s crush, then this is likely to give Bob a misleading negative impression of Alice.
It’s reasonable for Alice to ask Carol not to do that, and it’s okay for them to not have a detailed model of all of the above. But if Alice never tells Bob, and five years later Bob and Carol are looking back on the preceding years and asking if they could have gone differently? In that case, I think discarding the information seems like a pure harm.
Ok, I think in the OP you were using the word “secrecy” to refer to a narrower concept than I realized. If I understand correctly, if Alice tells Bob “please don’t tell Bob”, and then five years later when Alice is dead or definitely no longer interested or it’s otherwise clear that there won’t be negative consequences, Carol tells Bob, and Alice finds out and doesn’t feel betrayed — then you wouldn’t call that a “secret”. I guess for it to be a “secret” Carol would have to promise to carry it to her grave, even if circumstances changed, or something.
In that case I don’t have strong opinions about the OP.
There are a few legible categories in which secrecy serves a clear purpose, such as trade secrets. In those contexts, secrecy is fine. There are a few categories that have been societally and legally carved out as special cases where confidentiality is enforced—lawyers, priests, and therapists—because some people would only consult them if they could do so with the benefit confidentiality, and there being deterred from consulting them would have negative externalities.
Outside of these categories, secrecy is generally bad and transparency is generally good. A group of people in which everyone practices their secret-keeping and talks a lot about how to keeps secrets effectively is *suspicious*. This is particularly true if the example secrets are social and not technological. Being good at this sort of secret keeping makes it easier to shield bad actors and to get away with transgressions, and AFAICT doesn’t do much else. That makes it a signal of wanting to be able to do those things. This is true even if the secrets aren’t specifically about transgressions in particular, because all sorts of things can turn out to be clues later for reasons that weren’t easy to foresee.
A lot of people in the rationality community are trying to cosplay as therapists, and part of the cosplay is to import the confidentiality rules. This is done without an understanding of why those rules are there, and what other rules are there to mitigate the problems that confidentiality creates.
(An additional important caveat: A disclosure motivated by a desire to harm is bad, independent of whether the thing disclosed counts as a legitimate secret or not. Many things are bad to disclose if you’re socially attacking someone, but fine to disclose if you’re doing so because they were incidentally informative about something else.)
Suppose Alice has a crush on Bob and wants to sort out her feelings with Carol’s help. Is it bad for Alice to inform Carol about the crush on condition of confidentiality?
In the most common branch of this conversation, Alice is predictably going to tell Bob about it soon, and is speaking to Carol first in order to sort out details and gain courage. If Carol went and preemptively informed Bob, before Alice talked to Bob herself, this would be analogous to sharing an unfinished draft. This would be bad, but the badness really isn’t about secrecy.
The contents of an unfinished draft headed for publication aren’t secret, except in a narrow and time-limited sense. The problem is that the sharing undermines the impact of the later publication, causes people to associate the author with a lower quality product, and potentially misleads people about the author’s beliefs. Similarly, if Carol goes and preemptively tells Bob about Alice’s crush, then this is likely to give Bob a misleading negative impression of Alice.
It’s reasonable for Alice to ask Carol not to do that, and it’s okay for them to not have a detailed model of all of the above. But if Alice never tells Bob, and five years later Bob and Carol are looking back on the preceding years and asking if they could have gone differently? In that case, I think discarding the information seems like a pure harm.
Ok, I think in the OP you were using the word “secrecy” to refer to a narrower concept than I realized. If I understand correctly, if Alice tells Bob “please don’t tell Bob”, and then five years later when Alice is dead or definitely no longer interested or it’s otherwise clear that there won’t be negative consequences, Carol tells Bob, and Alice finds out and doesn’t feel betrayed — then you wouldn’t call that a “secret”. I guess for it to be a “secret” Carol would have to promise to carry it to her grave, even if circumstances changed, or something.
In that case I don’t have strong opinions about the OP.