Your feelings about lies depend on the context—for example I assume you’d be willing to play the game “Two Truths and a Lie”, and you would not feel harmed by the certainty that someone is lying to you? In fact people enjoy the game, since seeing through the lie is a fun puzzle. Now outside of games like that, the majority of the time someone lies to you on Earth, it’s to profit at your expense—they want to take your stuff, your vote, etc. So with the exception of games, you’ve quite reasonably developed strong negative emotions about being lied to, and those emotions may transfer even to the rarer cases where the lie isn’t directly hurting you. But dath ilan is extremely high trust and high coordination; from childhood you will experience that the vast majority of the times someone lies to you, it’s clearly-in-retrospect for your own benefit, and the vast majority of the remaining times, it’s solidly for the benefit of Civilization and they’re willing to eventually tell you the truth and pay for your inconvenience. So while you still try to see through lies whenever you can, it’s much more like the Earth game setting: most lies are just harmless puzzles. So you don’t grow up with the same internalized feelings that anyone lying to you is hurting you? (Which also reduces the price they’d have to pay you, since they’re not trying to compensate you for an Earth-level of negative emotions.)
I am fairly confident that I would incredibly strongly dislike being lied to like this even if it were „for my own benefit“. The source of my disgust for nonconsensual lies does not seem to me to stem from a history of such lies hurting me. Rather, they just feel inherently hurtful. That’s on top of the distress I would feel from years of keeping my mouth shut and my head down regarding the fake discrimination while secretly crying about it sometimes.
Also, there‘s still the hours of mortal terror that this scenario entails.
At least in this scenario, I don’t think the lies are for your benefit, they’re for Civilization; and the adults involved do think it’s appropriate to compensate you financially for being put through it, which implies they do believe the costs it imposes on you exceed the benefits to you.
The other scenarios alluded to in Eliezer’s above comment… well, I’d be interested to see how they play out. I could believe that having multiple experiences of “being gaslit and eventually figuring it out” was a good thing on average… but I expect there’d be individual cases where it sucked pretty hard. (If dath ilan was really good at psychology, maybe they could tell who would respond well vs badly beforehand?) Details matter: exactly what is being lied about, how important it is, how long it goes, how pervasive it is (e.g. does the child have any completely trustworthy friends who haven’t been in on any of the scams?), and so on. For example, if it was “Here’s a once-a-year festival at which there will be the following cool physical event”, and the claimed event is physically impossible (say, it violates conservation of momentum) and faked (which the child is hoped to figure out after learning some physics), that seems relatively harmless.
A thing that feels a bit confused in this discussion is… currently the default state is that adults gaslighting kids… just happens all the time? One possible world you could try to engineer is a world where this never happens. Another world is one where it happens deliberately in a controlled fashion that teaches valuable life lessons and leaves children more resilient. The question is whether the former is actually tractable.
and the adults involved do think it’s appropriate to compensate you financially for being put through it, which implies they do believe the costs it imposes on you exceed the benefits to you.
False! It just means that Civilization is benefiting and considers itself obliged to share a fair portion of those gains.
Oh, I see. Perhaps something isomorphic to the following: we suppose Civilization gains $1 billion in value from the results, and we imagine the kids were in a position to negotiate a payment for their services rendered, and we figure they could have gotten $N hundred million, so we decide they deserve that much and divide it among the kids. (Maybe the parents did some actual negotiating, on their own behalves at least.)
All dath ilani kids grow up with enough adult gaslighting that they don’t just grow up to believe anything authority tells them.
This was just the brand on offer in a particular village.
That seems to make it worse, not better?
Your feelings about lies depend on the context—for example I assume you’d be willing to play the game “Two Truths and a Lie”, and you would not feel harmed by the certainty that someone is lying to you? In fact people enjoy the game, since seeing through the lie is a fun puzzle. Now outside of games like that, the majority of the time someone lies to you on Earth, it’s to profit at your expense—they want to take your stuff, your vote, etc. So with the exception of games, you’ve quite reasonably developed strong negative emotions about being lied to, and those emotions may transfer even to the rarer cases where the lie isn’t directly hurting you. But dath ilan is extremely high trust and high coordination; from childhood you will experience that the vast majority of the times someone lies to you, it’s clearly-in-retrospect for your own benefit, and the vast majority of the remaining times, it’s solidly for the benefit of Civilization and they’re willing to eventually tell you the truth and pay for your inconvenience. So while you still try to see through lies whenever you can, it’s much more like the Earth game setting: most lies are just harmless puzzles. So you don’t grow up with the same internalized feelings that anyone lying to you is hurting you? (Which also reduces the price they’d have to pay you, since they’re not trying to compensate you for an Earth-level of negative emotions.)
I am fairly confident that I would incredibly strongly dislike being lied to like this even if it were „for my own benefit“. The source of my disgust for nonconsensual lies does not seem to me to stem from a history of such lies hurting me. Rather, they just feel inherently hurtful. That’s on top of the distress I would feel from years of keeping my mouth shut and my head down regarding the fake discrimination while secretly crying about it sometimes.
Also, there‘s still the hours of mortal terror that this scenario entails.
Given your perspective, you may enjoy: Lies Told To Children: Pinocchio, Which I found posted here.
Personally I think I’d be fine with the bargain, but having read that alternative continuation, I think I better understand how you feel.
At least in this scenario, I don’t think the lies are for your benefit, they’re for Civilization; and the adults involved do think it’s appropriate to compensate you financially for being put through it, which implies they do believe the costs it imposes on you exceed the benefits to you.
The other scenarios alluded to in Eliezer’s above comment… well, I’d be interested to see how they play out. I could believe that having multiple experiences of “being gaslit and eventually figuring it out” was a good thing on average… but I expect there’d be individual cases where it sucked pretty hard. (If dath ilan was really good at psychology, maybe they could tell who would respond well vs badly beforehand?) Details matter: exactly what is being lied about, how important it is, how long it goes, how pervasive it is (e.g. does the child have any completely trustworthy friends who haven’t been in on any of the scams?), and so on. For example, if it was “Here’s a once-a-year festival at which there will be the following cool physical event”, and the claimed event is physically impossible (say, it violates conservation of momentum) and faked (which the child is hoped to figure out after learning some physics), that seems relatively harmless.
A thing that feels a bit confused in this discussion is… currently the default state is that adults gaslighting kids… just happens all the time? One possible world you could try to engineer is a world where this never happens. Another world is one where it happens deliberately in a controlled fashion that teaches valuable life lessons and leaves children more resilient. The question is whether the former is actually tractable.
False! It just means that Civilization is benefiting and considers itself obliged to share a fair portion of those gains.
Oh, I see. Perhaps something isomorphic to the following: we suppose Civilization gains $1 billion in value from the results, and we imagine the kids were in a position to negotiate a payment for their services rendered, and we figure they could have gotten $N hundred million, so we decide they deserve that much and divide it among the kids. (Maybe the parents did some actual negotiating, on their own behalves at least.)