Figuring out the edge cases about honesty and truth seem important to me, both as a matter of personal aesthetics and as a matter for LessWrong to pay attention to. One of the things people have used to describe what makes LessWrong special is that it’s a community focused on truth-seeking, which makes “what is truth anyway and how do we talk about it” a worthwhile topic of conversation. This article talks about it, in a way that’s clear. (The positive example negative example pattern is a good approach to a topic that can really suffer from illusion of transparency.)
Like Eliezer’s Meta-Honesty post, the approach suggested does rely on some fast verbal footwork, though the footwork need not be as fast as Meta-Honesty. Passing the Onion Test consistently requires the same kind of comparison to alternate worlds as glomarization, which is a bit of a strike against it but that’s hardly unique to the Onion Test.
I don’t know if people still wind up feeling mislead? For instance, I can imagine someone saying “I usually keep my financial state private” and having their conversation partners walk away with wildly different ideas of how they’re doing. Is it so bad they don’t want to talk about it? Is it so good they don’t want to brag? If I thought it was the former and offered to cover their share of dinner repeatedly, I might be annoyed if it turns out to be the latter.
I don’t particularly hold myself to the Onion Test, but it did provide another angle on the subject that I appreciated. Nobody has yet used it this way around me, but I could also see Onion Test declared in a similar manner to Crocker’s Rules, an opt-in social norm that might be recognized by others if it got popular enough. I’m not sure it’s worth the limited conceptual slots a community can have for those, but I wouldn’t feel the slot was wasted if Onion Tests made it that far.
This might be weird, but I really appreciate people having the conversations about what they think is honest and in what ways they think we should be honest out loud on the internet where I can read them. One can’t assume that everyone has read your article on how you use truth and is thus fairly warned, but it is at least a start. Good social thing to do, A+. I don’t know if more people thinking about this means we’d actually find a real consensus solution and it’s probably not actually the priority, but I would like a real consensus solution and at some previous point someone’s going to have to write down the prototype that leads to it.
Ultimately I don’t actually want this in the Best of 2022, not because it isn’t good, but because I’d worry a little about someone reading through the Best Of collections and thinking this was more settled or established than it is. The crux here is that I don’t think it’s settled, established, or widely read enough that people will know what you mean if you declare Onion Test. If I knew everyone on LessWrong would read everything in the Best Of 2022, then I’d change my mind and want this included so as to add the Test to our collective lexicon.
Figuring out the edge cases about honesty and truth seem important to me, both as a matter of personal aesthetics and as a matter for LessWrong to pay attention to. One of the things people have used to describe what makes LessWrong special is that it’s a community focused on truth-seeking, which makes “what is truth anyway and how do we talk about it” a worthwhile topic of conversation. This article talks about it, in a way that’s clear. (The positive example negative example pattern is a good approach to a topic that can really suffer from illusion of transparency.)
Like Eliezer’s Meta-Honesty post, the approach suggested does rely on some fast verbal footwork, though the footwork need not be as fast as Meta-Honesty. Passing the Onion Test consistently requires the same kind of comparison to alternate worlds as glomarization, which is a bit of a strike against it but that’s hardly unique to the Onion Test.
I don’t know if people still wind up feeling mislead? For instance, I can imagine someone saying “I usually keep my financial state private” and having their conversation partners walk away with wildly different ideas of how they’re doing. Is it so bad they don’t want to talk about it? Is it so good they don’t want to brag? If I thought it was the former and offered to cover their share of dinner repeatedly, I might be annoyed if it turns out to be the latter.
I don’t particularly hold myself to the Onion Test, but it did provide another angle on the subject that I appreciated. Nobody has yet used it this way around me, but I could also see Onion Test declared in a similar manner to Crocker’s Rules, an opt-in social norm that might be recognized by others if it got popular enough. I’m not sure it’s worth the limited conceptual slots a community can have for those, but I wouldn’t feel the slot was wasted if Onion Tests made it that far.
This might be weird, but I really appreciate people having the conversations about what they think is honest and in what ways they think we should be honest out loud on the internet where I can read them. One can’t assume that everyone has read your article on how you use truth and is thus fairly warned, but it is at least a start. Good social thing to do, A+. I don’t know if more people thinking about this means we’d actually find a real consensus solution and it’s probably not actually the priority, but I would like a real consensus solution and at some previous point someone’s going to have to write down the prototype that leads to it.
Ultimately I don’t actually want this in the Best of 2022, not because it isn’t good, but because I’d worry a little about someone reading through the Best Of collections and thinking this was more settled or established than it is. The crux here is that I don’t think it’s settled, established, or widely read enough that people will know what you mean if you declare Onion Test. If I knew everyone on LessWrong would read everything in the Best Of 2022, then I’d change my mind and want this included so as to add the Test to our collective lexicon.