Eliezer is very explicit and repeats many times in that essay, including in the very segment you quote, that his code of meta-honesty does in fact compel you to never lie in a meta-honesty discussion. The first 4 paragraphs of your comment are not elaborating with what Eliezer really meant, they are disagreeing with him. Reasonable disagreements too, in my opinion, but conflating them with Eliezer’s proposal is corrosive to the norms that allows people to propose and test new norms.
Re-reading the post, I see I was mistaken. Eliezer is undeniably proposing an absolute rule on the meta-level, not one where dishonesty should be “held to an extremely high bar” as I discussed.
I’ll try to compress the difference between our proposals: I was proposing “Be highly honest, and be consistent when you talk about it on the meta-level”, whereas Eliezer is proposing “Be highly honest, and be absolutely honest when you talk about it on the meta-level”. The part I quoted was his consequentialist argument that the absolute rule would not be that costly, not a consequentialist account of when to be honest on the meta-level.
Eliezer is very explicit and repeats many times in that essay, including in the very segment you quote, that his code of meta-honesty does in fact compel you to never lie in a meta-honesty discussion. The first 4 paragraphs of your comment are not elaborating with what Eliezer really meant, they are disagreeing with him. Reasonable disagreements too, in my opinion, but conflating them with Eliezer’s proposal is corrosive to the norms that allows people to propose and test new norms.
Re-reading the post, I see I was mistaken. Eliezer is undeniably proposing an absolute rule on the meta-level, not one where dishonesty should be “held to an extremely high bar” as I discussed.
I’ll try to compress the difference between our proposals: I was proposing “Be highly honest, and be consistent when you talk about it on the meta-level”, whereas Eliezer is proposing “Be highly honest, and be absolutely honest when you talk about it on the meta-level”. The part I quoted was his consequentialist argument that the absolute rule would not be that costly, not a consequentialist account of when to be honest on the meta-level.