I have a small theory—“enhancing reality” is normal part of human social interactions, we are designed to lie exactly for this reason, and not doing it properly hurts your signaling skills and lowers your ability to achieve your social goals (including getting mates and so on).
So based on the premise that rationality is about success, rationalists should have no qualms about lying when situation is right. I’m quite good at lying, and also I’m pretty sure I’m extremely honest with myself.
In particular, those who can tell an entertaining anecdote are widely praised, and I’ve been told by such people that my anecdotes suffer because I adhere too closely to the truth.
That’s amusing, I always enhance my anecdotes, at least by dropping the irrelevant parts.
Now that will sound funny but I think posting on 4chan helped me quite a lot with learning this. In real life (or online where you have long term identity you care about) it’s difficult to train enhancing the truth, because failure makes you a known liar, and has negative consequences. On 4chan on the other hand—just go for it—nobody really cares.
When it comes to good storytelling, using emotive language, suspense, good timing, exaggerated facial expressions, etc., are much more important than embellishing the truth.
I have a small theory—“enhancing reality” is normal part of human social interactions, we are designed to lie exactly for this reason, and not doing it properly hurts your signaling skills and lowers your ability to achieve your social goals (including getting mates and so on).
So based on the premise that rationality is about success, rationalists should have no qualms about lying when situation is right. I’m quite good at lying, and also I’m pretty sure I’m extremely honest with myself.
In particular, those who can tell an entertaining anecdote are widely praised, and I’ve been told by such people that my anecdotes suffer because I adhere too closely to the truth.
That’s amusing, I always enhance my anecdotes, at least by dropping the irrelevant parts.
Now that will sound funny but I think posting on 4chan helped me quite a lot with learning this. In real life (or online where you have long term identity you care about) it’s difficult to train enhancing the truth, because failure makes you a known liar, and has negative consequences. On 4chan on the other hand—just go for it—nobody really cares.
When it comes to good storytelling, using emotive language, suspense, good timing, exaggerated facial expressions, etc., are much more important than embellishing the truth.