In a straight-forward sense, they’re lying, but by lying they hope to counter unwarranted assumptions and unjustified biases.
If you don’t count this as lying, the exception will swallow the rule. Everyone who is trying to convince someone of something believes their target has unwarranted assumptions and biases, or at least can convince themselves that the target does.
What if the politician isn’t an atheist, he just wants to implement some unpopular policy? He believes this policy is good, so he lies about his intentions to implement the policy because the general public is unfairly biased against the policy. By your reasoning he isn’t really lying.
My original comment wasn’t about slave owners, female writers, or atheist politicians. I only introduced those (objectively lame) examples because few Americans have sufficient experience living in a very different culture and speaking a very different language to recognize the empirical reality that I was attempting to describe. If I told a person from Monaco that the state of Texas is bigger than France, and they’d never been to Texas but they’d been to Ohio, I might make reference to how big Ohio is—for the purpose of giving them a hint about what I was saying regarding Texas. If they challenge my claim that Ohio isn’t bigger than France, they’re right. But I never intended to claim that Ohio is bigger than France. I was only trying to help them understand just how big Texas is.
Jiro—to answer your question about the example of the atheist politician, I’m not claiming that lying about one’s gender or race or religious beliefs with good intentions is necessarily okay or honest. I’m claiming that IT CAN BE, SOMETIMES, provided that the communicator is trying to communicate as accurately as possible, the biases are unequivocal and clearly-defined, and the person is not simply trying to maneuver around any biases or prejudices that they may perceive. How does the assertion that, “white lies CAN SOMETIMES, IN SOME PARTICULAR INSTANCES improve the accuracy and effectiveness of communication” equal “it’s always okay to lie as long as your intentions are good?” This comment has five overall karma and three agreement karma. On a website that’s all about meticulous logic and rigorous reasoning? I’m not saying this to be critical of the person who wrote the comment. That person is obviously very intelligent, and was thoughtful enough, patient enough, and nice enough to take the time to explain the problems that they saw with my reasoning, some of which were quite valid. No, I’m addressing the site community as a whole.
As lame as the example of female writers using male pen names is, it very clearly conveys a black and white instance of unjustified bias and a lack of moral wiggle room. No problem there, so no one attacks it. Neither does any one address the original cross-cultural example that I gave which inspired my original comment. But the sharks smell blood. Oooooh. I detect a logic flaw in that last example he gave. Swimming past the main point, and the point about the female writers, let’s attack that logic flaw. Mad frenzy, and the water turns red. (I’m not saying this with hostility or animosity. Yes, I’m being critical, but I’m just poking fun, with friendly intention. Please don’t take offense. I mean none.)
I detect two things going on here. One is a direct consequence of English being a low-context language and American culture being a low-context culture. (In contrast, Japanese is a high-context language, and Japan is a high-context culture.) The other is what I can only describe as a logic police thing. We’re all familiar with the fashion police and the grammar police. On LessWrong, I often encounter logic police. Now, don’t get me wrong. Correcting flaws in people’s logic is fine, as long as it’s done politely and with patience. I myself am a grammar policeman. I have to bite my lip sometimes. The problem only occurs when the logic police who speak a low-context language and have been raised in a low-context culture encounter big picture, multilayered, accumulation-based explanatory dialog. If they can’t see the forest for the trees, a sickly tree can seem like a sickly forest.
What do I mean by “high-context” or “low-context” language? High-context language depends on a shared, mutually-known context to work. If I say, “A stitch in time saves nine…” I don’t have to finish the quote in order for you to know what meaning I’m trying to convey because we both know the proverb. That’s high-context communication. The ultimate extreme of low-context language is legal text. In a legal contract every tiny detail is spelled out explicitly to such an extreme extent that it can be almost impossible to read. People who live in low-context cultures can sometimes, occasionally, in some situations, miss the big picture in communication, not seeing the forest for the trees. These criticisms of my comments remind me of coders who are focused on fixing small coding errors in a line of data. Looking only at the code line by line, and not taking it in the context of the whole, integrated program. I will attempt to better explain what I am saying, because I know that it’s not immediately intuitive:
I wrote, “A similar example would be an atheist lying about believing in god in order to get elected.” Taken out of context, the reply, “What if the politician isn’t an atheist, he just wants to implement some unpopular policy? By your reasoning he isn’t really lying.” makes perfect sense. It’s a valid response.
But if we pull back a bit, and look at the larger conversation, the full comment was: “A similar example would be an atheist lying about believing in god in order to get elected… By lying, they hope to present themselves more accurately and in a less distorted manner.” [YES, THIS IS NUANCED, BUT PRESENTING ONESELF MORE ACCURATELY AND IN A LESS DISTORTED MANNER ISN’T QUITE THE SAME AS MANEUVERING AROUND PEOPLE’S BIASES. BUT, GIVEN THE NUANCE, WE NEED TO PULL BACK FURTHER.]
If we pull back further, a paragraph before I said, “These women used male pen names in order to overcome the cultural biases of their day and be taken seriously as writers…. I present this as an empirical example of deceptive honesty.” [NO FUZZINESS OR MORAL WIGGLE ROOM IN THIS EXAMPLE. NO LATITUDE FOR ETHICAL ABUSE. PRETTY BLACK AND WHITE.]
And if we pull back even further and look at my earlier comments on this topic, I said: “I was trying to present an easily comprehensible example of a situation in which cultural bias or ignorance COULD present such a barrier to communication and that intentional distortion of the facts as one sees them MIGHT be necessary for maximally accurate and honest communication.” [MY META-MESSAGE ISN’T THAT ALL CASES OF LYING WITH GOOD INTENTION ARE NECESSARILY ACCEPTABLE, BUT ONLY SOME PARTICULAR OCCASIONAL CASES. THE POINT IS THAT DECEPTIVE HONESTY EXISTS, NOT THAT ALL LYING WITH GOOD INTENTION CONSTITUTES DECEPTIVE HONESTY.]
To really understand the relevance of the quote above, we must necessarily pull back farther still: “To the average Japanese person, American individualistic behavior generally comes across—not so much as annoying, obnoxious, or rude but as IMMATURE and CHILDISH. That is how it is most often perceived and categorized. Furthermore, what most U.S. Americans would consider to be “assertiveness” the average Japanese would define to be “aggressiveness.” What the average American would consider to be “frank,” the average Japanese would consider to be “rude.” … Therefore, in a conversation between Americans and Japanese people, particularly when language translation is involved, the term “individualism” is likely to be interpreted as “childishness,” and “assertive individualist” is likely to be filtered by the Japanese people’s minds into “aggressive childish person.” This is just one example of many, many terms, concepts, and paradigms which cannot be accurately conveyed without, essentially, lying.” [FIRST OF ALL, THIS WAS MY ACTUAL POINT. THE OTHER EXAMPLES WERE ATTEMPTS TO FIND EMPIRICAL SITUATIONS THAT THE READER MIGHT BE MORE FAMILIAR WITH IN ORDER TO CLARIFY WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT IN THE ORIGINAL EXAMPLE— MY ACTUAL ASSERTION. SECONDLY, THIS, LIKE THE EXAMPLE OF THE MALE PEN NAMES, HAS VERY LITTLE WIGGLE ROOM, THOUGH ONE WOULD HAVE TO BE FLUENT IN JAPANESE LANGUAGE AND KNOLEDGABLE OF JAPANESE CULTURE TO KNOW THAT. THERE’S NO FUZZY MORAL WIGGLE ROOM; THIS IS HOW PEOPLE WHO SPEAK JAPANESE THINK. EVEN I LEARNED TO THINK THIS WAY BECAUSE, IF I DIDN’T, I WASN’T LINGUISTICALLY AND CULTURALLY IN SINK WITH THE PEOPLE AROUND ME. NO MORAL WIGGLE ROOM AT ALL.]
It’s black and white. Don’t take my word for it, ask an interpreter or translator. One that regularly bridges very different languages and cultures. If you do, first ask them if there are things that cannot be translated in real time. Then ask them how creative they have to be as an interpreter or translator. How much is it science, and how much is it art? Finally, broach this idea of deceptive honesty— essentially, bending the facts as you yourself see them in order to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of cross-cultural communication. Not simply for the purpose of coping with bias or prejudice, but towards the focused goal of communicating the message with maximum functional accuracy and delivering a translation that most closely approximates the communicative intent embodied in the original language. “Honesty” here means finding a translation that most effectively matches the communicative intent of the speaker.
So what’s my point? What am I talking about here with this low-context, high-context stuff? Attacking minor logical errors in the code is fine—perfectly fine— as long as this is done with an awareness of what the entirety of the program is doing, and how this section of the line of code fits into the program in its entirety. Only looking at the code, and any flaws in it, line by line by line, misses the message. Why? There are multiple reasons, but one of the biggest is that the author of the original comment is trying to convey something that the reader is expected to not only be unfamiliar with, but also unable to process conceptually without some help. It’s unfamiliar, counter-intuitive, and deeply ironic—given that the assertion that’s being made is that deception or lying can, in some very particular and occasional instances, be done with the goal of maximizing accuracy and minimizing distortion in communication.
Explaining water to a fish can’t be done in a sound bite; explaining cultural differences to someone who has never been outside their own country can’t be done in one or two sentences; conveying the empirical reality that many Japanese values are the exact opposite of American values can’t be done in just a paragraph or two. When a concept is this unfamiliar, counter-intuitive, and seemingly oxymoronic, explaining it is often a gradual, integrative, process requiring many, many passes. Each of those passes contributes to the entirety of the explanation. Each line of code fits into the whole, and can only be meaningfully interpreted in the context of the entire message. I’m not bitching about the logic police; I’m trying to explain that every line of code fits into the full program, and can only be meaningfully evaluated in the context of the full program.
Additionally, a bad example doesn’t devalue an argument. A sickly tree is not a sickly forest. Yes, it’s possible for an example to be used as a logical building block for an argument. However, examples can also be used as teaching tools. Not all arguments are logical piles of Jenga blocks. The assertion that the Earth goes around the Sun is a statement of empirical fact. However, it’s not obvious or intuitively apparent that the Earth goes around the Sun, even though it is an empirical fact. If the communication and teaching strategies that I use to elicit a paradigm shift in the mind of the person that I’m communicating with are imperfect, that doesn’t mean that the empirical fact that the Earth goes around the Sun isn’t true. It just means that the example I used wasn’t effective for communicating the counter-intuitive concept. An empirically-based assertion isn’t a logical pile of Jenga blocks which can be toppled by removing one block.
Finally, we must address the difference between a white lie and what I’ve termed deceptive honesty. The nuanced distinction between these two things may not be clear. Deceptive honesty is a special case of a white lie, just as a white lie is a special case of lying in general. A politician who lies about his or her intentions to implement an unpopular policy which they believe serves the greater good is telling a white lie, but this is not an example of deceptive honesty. Not all white lies are deceptive honesty. On the other hand, even though it is a lame example, an atheist who, when asked if he or she believes in god, lies— for the purpose of not being misperceived as a intrinsically immoral person and remaining in the running— is doing something more than just telling a white lie. This politician is seeking to be seen and evaluated for what he or she actually is, rather than being misperceived and misunderstood. The focus is on presenting themselves as ACCURATELY as possible. The bias that he or she faces is obvious and clearly-defined, just like the bias that female writer’s faced a century ago. The atheist politician is a bad example, yes, and I regret using it. The example of the female writers using male pen names is better, but still inadequate. I regret using that example, too, because it wasn’t taken in the context of my original comment about cross-cultural differences and became a distraction. If there is going to be a logic police feeding frenzy, it should be focused on the original comment regarding communication across profound cultural and linguistic differences. I invite you to respond to the original comment.
A politician who lies about his or her intentions to implement an unpopular policy which they believe serves the greater good is telling a white lie, but this is not an example of deceptive honesty. … On the other hand, even though it is a lame example, an atheist who, when asked if he or she believes in god, lies— for the purpose of not being misperceived as a intrinsically immoral person and remaining in the running— is doing something more than just telling a white lie. This politician is seeking to be seen and evaluated for what he or she actually is, rather than being misperceived and misunderstood.
How are those different, though?
You think the atheist is different because he wants to be evaluated for what he “actually is”, but that’s a matter of definition. He actually is an atheist, but he isn’t actually an evil person. Whether the lie makes people know more about what he actually is or less about what he actually is depends on which part you’re counting.
Needless to say, I could say the same thing about the policy guy. The lie makes people know less about one thing (what his position really is) but more about another thing (that he has good policies).
If you don’t count this as lying, the exception will swallow the rule. Everyone who is trying to convince someone of something believes their target has unwarranted assumptions and biases, or at least can convince themselves that the target does.
What if the politician isn’t an atheist, he just wants to implement some unpopular policy? He believes this policy is good, so he lies about his intentions to implement the policy because the general public is unfairly biased against the policy. By your reasoning he isn’t really lying.
My original comment wasn’t about slave owners, female writers, or atheist politicians. I only introduced those (objectively lame) examples because few Americans have sufficient experience living in a very different culture and speaking a very different language to recognize the empirical reality that I was attempting to describe. If I told a person from Monaco that the state of Texas is bigger than France, and they’d never been to Texas but they’d been to Ohio, I might make reference to how big Ohio is—for the purpose of giving them a hint about what I was saying regarding Texas. If they challenge my claim that Ohio isn’t bigger than France, they’re right. But I never intended to claim that Ohio is bigger than France. I was only trying to help them understand just how big Texas is.
Jiro—to answer your question about the example of the atheist politician, I’m not claiming that lying about one’s gender or race or religious beliefs with good intentions is necessarily okay or honest. I’m claiming that IT CAN BE, SOMETIMES, provided that the communicator is trying to communicate as accurately as possible, the biases are unequivocal and clearly-defined, and the person is not simply trying to maneuver around any biases or prejudices that they may perceive. How does the assertion that, “white lies CAN SOMETIMES, IN SOME PARTICULAR INSTANCES improve the accuracy and effectiveness of communication” equal “it’s always okay to lie as long as your intentions are good?” This comment has five overall karma and three agreement karma. On a website that’s all about meticulous logic and rigorous reasoning? I’m not saying this to be critical of the person who wrote the comment. That person is obviously very intelligent, and was thoughtful enough, patient enough, and nice enough to take the time to explain the problems that they saw with my reasoning, some of which were quite valid. No, I’m addressing the site community as a whole.
As lame as the example of female writers using male pen names is, it very clearly conveys a black and white instance of unjustified bias and a lack of moral wiggle room. No problem there, so no one attacks it. Neither does any one address the original cross-cultural example that I gave which inspired my original comment. But the sharks smell blood. Oooooh. I detect a logic flaw in that last example he gave. Swimming past the main point, and the point about the female writers, let’s attack that logic flaw. Mad frenzy, and the water turns red. (I’m not saying this with hostility or animosity. Yes, I’m being critical, but I’m just poking fun, with friendly intention. Please don’t take offense. I mean none.)
I detect two things going on here. One is a direct consequence of English being a low-context language and American culture being a low-context culture. (In contrast, Japanese is a high-context language, and Japan is a high-context culture.) The other is what I can only describe as a logic police thing. We’re all familiar with the fashion police and the grammar police. On LessWrong, I often encounter logic police. Now, don’t get me wrong. Correcting flaws in people’s logic is fine, as long as it’s done politely and with patience. I myself am a grammar policeman. I have to bite my lip sometimes. The problem only occurs when the logic police who speak a low-context language and have been raised in a low-context culture encounter big picture, multilayered, accumulation-based explanatory dialog. If they can’t see the forest for the trees, a sickly tree can seem like a sickly forest.
What do I mean by “high-context” or “low-context” language? High-context language depends on a shared, mutually-known context to work. If I say, “A stitch in time saves nine…” I don’t have to finish the quote in order for you to know what meaning I’m trying to convey because we both know the proverb. That’s high-context communication. The ultimate extreme of low-context language is legal text. In a legal contract every tiny detail is spelled out explicitly to such an extreme extent that it can be almost impossible to read. People who live in low-context cultures can sometimes, occasionally, in some situations, miss the big picture in communication, not seeing the forest for the trees. These criticisms of my comments remind me of coders who are focused on fixing small coding errors in a line of data. Looking only at the code line by line, and not taking it in the context of the whole, integrated program. I will attempt to better explain what I am saying, because I know that it’s not immediately intuitive:
I wrote, “A similar example would be an atheist lying about believing in god in order to get elected.” Taken out of context, the reply, “What if the politician isn’t an atheist, he just wants to implement some unpopular policy? By your reasoning he isn’t really lying.” makes perfect sense. It’s a valid response.
But if we pull back a bit, and look at the larger conversation, the full comment was: “A similar example would be an atheist lying about believing in god in order to get elected… By lying, they hope to present themselves more accurately and in a less distorted manner.” [YES, THIS IS NUANCED, BUT PRESENTING ONESELF MORE ACCURATELY AND IN A LESS DISTORTED MANNER ISN’T QUITE THE SAME AS MANEUVERING AROUND PEOPLE’S BIASES. BUT, GIVEN THE NUANCE, WE NEED TO PULL BACK FURTHER.]
If we pull back further, a paragraph before I said, “These women used male pen names in order to overcome the cultural biases of their day and be taken seriously as writers…. I present this as an empirical example of deceptive honesty.” [NO FUZZINESS OR MORAL WIGGLE ROOM IN THIS EXAMPLE. NO LATITUDE FOR ETHICAL ABUSE. PRETTY BLACK AND WHITE.]
And if we pull back even further and look at my earlier comments on this topic, I said: “I was trying to present an easily comprehensible example of a situation in which cultural bias or ignorance COULD present such a barrier to communication and that intentional distortion of the facts as one sees them MIGHT be necessary for maximally accurate and honest communication.” [MY META-MESSAGE ISN’T THAT ALL CASES OF LYING WITH GOOD INTENTION ARE NECESSARILY ACCEPTABLE, BUT ONLY SOME PARTICULAR OCCASIONAL CASES. THE POINT IS THAT DECEPTIVE HONESTY EXISTS, NOT THAT ALL LYING WITH GOOD INTENTION CONSTITUTES DECEPTIVE HONESTY.]
To really understand the relevance of the quote above, we must necessarily pull back farther still: “To the average Japanese person, American individualistic behavior generally comes across—not so much as annoying, obnoxious, or rude but as IMMATURE and CHILDISH. That is how it is most often perceived and categorized. Furthermore, what most U.S. Americans would consider to be “assertiveness” the average Japanese would define to be “aggressiveness.” What the average American would consider to be “frank,” the average Japanese would consider to be “rude.” … Therefore, in a conversation between Americans and Japanese people, particularly when language translation is involved, the term “individualism” is likely to be interpreted as “childishness,” and “assertive individualist” is likely to be filtered by the Japanese people’s minds into “aggressive childish person.” This is just one example of many, many terms, concepts, and paradigms which cannot be accurately conveyed without, essentially, lying.” [FIRST OF ALL, THIS WAS MY ACTUAL POINT. THE OTHER EXAMPLES WERE ATTEMPTS TO FIND EMPIRICAL SITUATIONS THAT THE READER MIGHT BE MORE FAMILIAR WITH IN ORDER TO CLARIFY WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT IN THE ORIGINAL EXAMPLE— MY ACTUAL ASSERTION. SECONDLY, THIS, LIKE THE EXAMPLE OF THE MALE PEN NAMES, HAS VERY LITTLE WIGGLE ROOM, THOUGH ONE WOULD HAVE TO BE FLUENT IN JAPANESE LANGUAGE AND KNOLEDGABLE OF JAPANESE CULTURE TO KNOW THAT. THERE’S NO FUZZY MORAL WIGGLE ROOM; THIS IS HOW PEOPLE WHO SPEAK JAPANESE THINK. EVEN I LEARNED TO THINK THIS WAY BECAUSE, IF I DIDN’T, I WASN’T LINGUISTICALLY AND CULTURALLY IN SINK WITH THE PEOPLE AROUND ME. NO MORAL WIGGLE ROOM AT ALL.]
It’s black and white. Don’t take my word for it, ask an interpreter or translator. One that regularly bridges very different languages and cultures. If you do, first ask them if there are things that cannot be translated in real time. Then ask them how creative they have to be as an interpreter or translator. How much is it science, and how much is it art? Finally, broach this idea of deceptive honesty— essentially, bending the facts as you yourself see them in order to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of cross-cultural communication. Not simply for the purpose of coping with bias or prejudice, but towards the focused goal of communicating the message with maximum functional accuracy and delivering a translation that most closely approximates the communicative intent embodied in the original language. “Honesty” here means finding a translation that most effectively matches the communicative intent of the speaker.
So what’s my point? What am I talking about here with this low-context, high-context stuff? Attacking minor logical errors in the code is fine—perfectly fine— as long as this is done with an awareness of what the entirety of the program is doing, and how this section of the line of code fits into the program in its entirety. Only looking at the code, and any flaws in it, line by line by line, misses the message. Why? There are multiple reasons, but one of the biggest is that the author of the original comment is trying to convey something that the reader is expected to not only be unfamiliar with, but also unable to process conceptually without some help. It’s unfamiliar, counter-intuitive, and deeply ironic—given that the assertion that’s being made is that deception or lying can, in some very particular and occasional instances, be done with the goal of maximizing accuracy and minimizing distortion in communication.
Explaining water to a fish can’t be done in a sound bite; explaining cultural differences to someone who has never been outside their own country can’t be done in one or two sentences; conveying the empirical reality that many Japanese values are the exact opposite of American values can’t be done in just a paragraph or two. When a concept is this unfamiliar, counter-intuitive, and seemingly oxymoronic, explaining it is often a gradual, integrative, process requiring many, many passes. Each of those passes contributes to the entirety of the explanation. Each line of code fits into the whole, and can only be meaningfully interpreted in the context of the entire message. I’m not bitching about the logic police; I’m trying to explain that every line of code fits into the full program, and can only be meaningfully evaluated in the context of the full program.
Additionally, a bad example doesn’t devalue an argument. A sickly tree is not a sickly forest. Yes, it’s possible for an example to be used as a logical building block for an argument. However, examples can also be used as teaching tools. Not all arguments are logical piles of Jenga blocks. The assertion that the Earth goes around the Sun is a statement of empirical fact. However, it’s not obvious or intuitively apparent that the Earth goes around the Sun, even though it is an empirical fact. If the communication and teaching strategies that I use to elicit a paradigm shift in the mind of the person that I’m communicating with are imperfect, that doesn’t mean that the empirical fact that the Earth goes around the Sun isn’t true. It just means that the example I used wasn’t effective for communicating the counter-intuitive concept. An empirically-based assertion isn’t a logical pile of Jenga blocks which can be toppled by removing one block.
Finally, we must address the difference between a white lie and what I’ve termed deceptive honesty. The nuanced distinction between these two things may not be clear. Deceptive honesty is a special case of a white lie, just as a white lie is a special case of lying in general. A politician who lies about his or her intentions to implement an unpopular policy which they believe serves the greater good is telling a white lie, but this is not an example of deceptive honesty. Not all white lies are deceptive honesty. On the other hand, even though it is a lame example, an atheist who, when asked if he or she believes in god, lies— for the purpose of not being misperceived as a intrinsically immoral person and remaining in the running— is doing something more than just telling a white lie. This politician is seeking to be seen and evaluated for what he or she actually is, rather than being misperceived and misunderstood. The focus is on presenting themselves as ACCURATELY as possible. The bias that he or she faces is obvious and clearly-defined, just like the bias that female writer’s faced a century ago. The atheist politician is a bad example, yes, and I regret using it. The example of the female writers using male pen names is better, but still inadequate. I regret using that example, too, because it wasn’t taken in the context of my original comment about cross-cultural differences and became a distraction. If there is going to be a logic police feeding frenzy, it should be focused on the original comment regarding communication across profound cultural and linguistic differences. I invite you to respond to the original comment.
How are those different, though?
You think the atheist is different because he wants to be evaluated for what he “actually is”, but that’s a matter of definition. He actually is an atheist, but he isn’t actually an evil person. Whether the lie makes people know more about what he actually is or less about what he actually is depends on which part you’re counting.
Needless to say, I could say the same thing about the policy guy. The lie makes people know less about one thing (what his position really is) but more about another thing (that he has good policies).