I am verbally intelligent enough to spin up true-but-socially-plausible accounts of my thoughts unless I am pressed. It is easy to have cached a charming-but-honest way to respond to various adversarial or socially normative questions; it is difficult to come up with them in real time. Usually when I fail at this it’s because I was visibly thinking, from which the interlocutor discerned that I wanted to say something unflattering.
I do not think I am verbally intelligent enough to pick, practice, and retain a subtle meta-honesty policy. It would increase the thinking time too much.
I also do not like making decisions that constrain large numbers of my counterfactual selves. This is a decision-theoretic matter about which I Might Be Objectively Wrong Somehow due to ignorance of the math. Good thing I’m not updateless, and therefore can resolve uncertainty as logical. See first sentence.
I am capable of recursion and meta, and can even consider things that are meta-meta, but at three layers of recursion I usually lose track of what’s going on. I expect I could learn to do this given fifty heterogenous recursion practice exercises but do not have such a list.
Note: The following is not a policy. It is a description of my existing behavior.
I sort people into basically three buckets: People, Instruments, and Dogs. I don’t lie to People, because I don’t like lying to people. I don’t lie to Instruments except on very specific topics on which they want me to lie. Then I sometimes lie. I try to minimize the number of people I treat as Instruments because they’re cognitively expensive. I interact with them “instrumentally.” I lie to Dogs, because they want me to lie.
As a general rule, it’s easy to tell if someone’s a Person or a Dog, because the Dogs will tell you. If you treat someone like a Person and they don’t respond like a Dog, even if they’re not a Person they’re usually safe to treat as one. Then I do so, because lying is wrong unless you’re really sure the person wants to be lied to. Again, they usually make this obvious.
There’s also a useful trick where many socially-enforced lies are local.
E.g. “How are you doing?” “I’m fine.”
If you’re not fine, you can self-modify to feel fine for five seconds while still not lying.
“That’s rules-lawyering, and not in the spirit of literal truth.”
I disagree. “Literal” is a complicated thing which only seems simple. The correspondence between words and reality is subtle. It is easier to count than it is define bijection: it general it is easier to be right than to understand the underlying correspondences behind an existing instance of correctness. Does “fine” mean “not unhappy?” Or does it mean “unharmed?” Can I say “I’m fine” if I’m safe but unhappy when I’m speaking to a person too victim-brained to conflate unhappiness with someone hurting me? To me there isn’t an “obvious literal interpretation” at all. In the context of this social interaction, it barely even has a meaning and is basically a ritual object.
Occasionally me and another actual honest person have disagreed about the literal meaning of a question in real-life information exchanges; I thought he had an invalid theory of “deception” but in reality he had different desiderata asking the question than I thought, so his different demarcation of a dishonest answer was natural.
However, I recognize that the above logic can turn you evil, so in general I don’t use it when interacting with People, although I will still occasionally use the self-modification trick.
As a child I did not lie and was subtly punished for it. As an adult I started lying and it’s pretty cool and useful, although it’s quite skill-intensive. I might experiment with lying more because it seems very powerful. I do not think lying is like cigarettes.
I’m giving a detailed answer that goes into how I lie, but to be clear I’m exceptionally scrupulous about honesty and expect I lie extremely rarely by “normal standards.” Even now I want to edit that “extremely” to a “very” or “quite” because it’s not possible that regular people lie that often… right? I confidently expect that in the future people who are curious or curious-but-flinching can ask me about a topic and receive a true answer, unless we reach a level of normalized social violence which will make it obvious-to-both-of-us that truth is extremely rare.
I am verbally intelligent enough to spin up true-but-socially-plausible accounts of my thoughts unless I am pressed. It is easy to have cached a charming-but-honest way to respond to various adversarial or socially normative questions; it is difficult to come up with them in real time. Usually when I fail at this it’s because I was visibly thinking, from which the interlocutor discerned that I wanted to say something unflattering.
I do not think I am verbally intelligent enough to pick, practice, and retain a subtle meta-honesty policy. It would increase the thinking time too much.
I also do not like making decisions that constrain large numbers of my counterfactual selves. This is a decision-theoretic matter about which I Might Be Objectively Wrong Somehow due to ignorance of the math. Good thing I’m not updateless, and therefore can resolve uncertainty as logical. See first sentence.
I am capable of recursion and meta, and can even consider things that are meta-meta, but at three layers of recursion I usually lose track of what’s going on. I expect I could learn to do this given fifty heterogenous recursion practice exercises but do not have such a list.
Note: The following is not a policy. It is a description of my existing behavior.
I sort people into basically three buckets: People, Instruments, and Dogs.
I don’t lie to People, because I don’t like lying to people.
I don’t lie to Instruments except on very specific topics on which they want me to lie. Then I sometimes lie. I try to minimize the number of people I treat as Instruments because they’re cognitively expensive. I interact with them “instrumentally.”
I lie to Dogs, because they want me to lie.
As a general rule, it’s easy to tell if someone’s a Person or a Dog, because the Dogs will tell you. If you treat someone like a Person and they don’t respond like a Dog, even if they’re not a Person they’re usually safe to treat as one. Then I do so, because lying is wrong unless you’re really sure the person wants to be lied to. Again, they usually make this obvious.
There’s also a useful trick where many socially-enforced lies are local.
E.g. “How are you doing?” “I’m fine.”
If you’re not fine, you can self-modify to feel fine for five seconds while still not lying.
“That’s rules-lawyering, and not in the spirit of literal truth.”
I disagree. “Literal” is a complicated thing which only seems simple. The correspondence between words and reality is subtle. It is easier to count than it is define bijection: it general it is easier to be right than to understand the underlying correspondences behind an existing instance of correctness. Does “fine” mean “not unhappy?” Or does it mean “unharmed?” Can I say “I’m fine” if I’m safe but unhappy when I’m speaking to a person too victim-brained to conflate unhappiness with someone hurting me? To me there isn’t an “obvious literal interpretation” at all. In the context of this social interaction, it barely even has a meaning and is basically a ritual object.
Occasionally me and another actual honest person have disagreed about the literal meaning of a question in real-life information exchanges; I thought he had an invalid theory of “deception” but in reality he had different desiderata asking the question than I thought, so his different demarcation of a dishonest answer was natural.
However, I recognize that the above logic can turn you evil, so in general I don’t use it when interacting with People, although I will still occasionally use the self-modification trick.
As a child I did not lie and was subtly punished for it. As an adult I started lying and it’s pretty cool and useful, although it’s quite skill-intensive. I might experiment with lying more because it seems very powerful. I do not think lying is like cigarettes.
I’m giving a detailed answer that goes into how I lie, but to be clear I’m exceptionally scrupulous about honesty and expect I lie extremely rarely by “normal standards.” Even now I want to edit that “extremely” to a “very” or “quite” because it’s not possible that regular people lie that often… right? I confidently expect that in the future people who are curious or curious-but-flinching can ask me about a topic and receive a true answer, unless we reach a level of normalized social violence which will make it obvious-to-both-of-us that truth is extremely rare.