I like a lot of the people in this space, have seen several of them hurt themselves by doing not this, would prefer they stopped, and nobody else seems to have written this post for me somewhere I can link to.
I’ve had similar experiences. For me personally, in cases where:
The Technical Truth is not my business: go ahead and lie to me and/or omit sensitive details if possible.
— is a much more complex thing that I likely don’t have the foundational understanding to grasp: tell me a portion and then check for comprehension, if I fail that just say some vague ‘it’s complicated’ and give me some ideas of what to study if I really want to know.
— would probably be disturbing for me to know and I am not likely to be negatively affected by not knowing: You can lie to me or omit some details. Alternatively, ask me what reference classes of things I would want to not be informed about.
— would be likely to cause significant harm in my hands or the hands of those I would likely tell it to: obviously lie or omit.
After reflection, the situations where I would mind being lied to are when my future actions are contaminated by reliance on incorrect data. If the lie will not meaningfully affect my future actions I probably don’t care. Although obviously not feasible to accurately predict all possible future actions I might take and why, giving it your best guess is usually sufficient since most conversations are trivial and irrelevant, particularly small talk. As topic of conversation becomes more consequential, the importance of accuracy also increases.
I do have examples that motivated me to write this, but they’re all examples where people are still strongly disagreeing about the object level of what happened, or possibly lying about how they disagree on the object level and pretending they’re committed to honesty. I thought about putting them in the essay but decided it wouldn’t be fair and I didn’t want to distract my actual thesis into a case analysis of how maybe all my examples have a problem other than over-adherence to bad honesty norms. Should I put them in a comment? I’m genuinely unsure. I could probably DM you them if you really want?
EDIT: okay fine you win. The public examples with nice writeups that I am most willing to cite are: Eneasz Brodski, Zack M Davis, Scott Alexander. There are other posts related to some of those but I don’t want to exhaustively link everything anyone’s said about it in this comment. I claim there are other people making in my opinion similar mistakes but I’m either unable or unwilling to provide evidence so you shouldn’t believe me. I would prefer to leave as an exercise for the reader what any of those things have to do with my position because this whole line of inquiry seems incredibly cursed.
I do think it’d be useful for the rest of us if you put them in a comment. :)
(FWIW I resonated with your motivation, but also think your suggestions fail on the practical grounds jenn mentioned, and would hence on net harm the people you intend to help.)
Update: I read your examples and I honestly don’t see how any of these 3 people would be better off by their own idea of what better off means, if they were less open or less truthful.
P.S. discussing anonymously is easier if you’re not confident you can handle the social repercussions of discussing it under your real name. I agree that morality is social dark matter and it’s difficult to argue in favour of positions that are pro-violence pro-deception etc under your real name.
If you can’t provide a few unambiguous examples of the dilemma in the post that actually happened in the real world, I’m less likely to take your post seriously.
Might be worth thinking more and then coming up with examples.
If you believed this, why would you write this post?
I like a lot of the people in this space, have seen several of them hurt themselves by doing not this, would prefer they stopped, and nobody else seems to have written this post for me somewhere I can link to.
I’ve had similar experiences.
For me personally, in cases where:
The Technical Truth is not my business: go ahead and lie to me and/or omit sensitive details if possible.
— is a much more complex thing that I likely don’t have the foundational understanding to grasp: tell me a portion and then check for comprehension, if I fail that just say some vague ‘it’s complicated’ and give me some ideas of what to study if I really want to know.
— would probably be disturbing for me to know and I am not likely to be negatively affected by not knowing: You can lie to me or omit some details. Alternatively, ask me what reference classes of things I would want to not be informed about.
— would be likely to cause significant harm in my hands or the hands of those I would likely tell it to: obviously lie or omit.
After reflection, the situations where I would mind being lied to are when my future actions are contaminated by reliance on incorrect data. If the lie will not meaningfully affect my future actions I probably don’t care. Although obviously not feasible to accurately predict all possible future actions I might take and why, giving it your best guess is usually sufficient since most conversations are trivial and irrelevant, particularly small talk.
As topic of conversation becomes more consequential, the importance of accuracy also increases.
Do you have examples?
I do have examples that motivated me to write this, but they’re all examples where people are still strongly disagreeing about the object level of what happened, or possibly lying about how they disagree on the object level and pretending they’re committed to honesty. I thought about putting them in the essay but decided it wouldn’t be fair and I didn’t want to distract my actual thesis into a case analysis of how maybe all my examples have a problem other than over-adherence to bad honesty norms. Should I put them in a comment? I’m genuinely unsure. I could probably DM you them if you really want?
EDIT: okay fine you win. The public examples with nice writeups that I am most willing to cite are: Eneasz Brodski, Zack M Davis, Scott Alexander. There are other posts related to some of those but I don’t want to exhaustively link everything anyone’s said about it in this comment. I claim there are other people making in my opinion similar mistakes but I’m either unable or unwilling to provide evidence so you shouldn’t believe me. I would prefer to leave as an exercise for the reader what any of those things have to do with my position because this whole line of inquiry seems incredibly cursed.
I do think it’d be useful for the rest of us if you put them in a comment. :)
(FWIW I resonated with your motivation, but also think your suggestions fail on the practical grounds jenn mentioned, and would hence on net harm the people you intend to help.)
This is the kind of comment that becomes harder to take at face value (from you) after reading your dissent on honesty.
Update: I read your examples and I honestly don’t see how any of these 3 people would be better off by their own idea of what better off means, if they were less open or less truthful.
P.S. discussing anonymously is easier if you’re not confident you can handle the social repercussions of discussing it under your real name. I agree that morality is social dark matter and it’s difficult to argue in favour of positions that are pro-violence pro-deception etc under your real name.
If you can’t provide a few unambiguous examples of the dilemma in the post that actually happened in the real world, I’m less likely to take your post seriously.
Might be worth thinking more and then coming up with examples.