Thanks for writing this post! I think it’s insightful, and agree about technical truthtelling being annoying. After I thought about it though, I come down on the side of disagreeing with your post, largely on practical grounds.
A few thoughts:
You propose: Lie by default whenever you think it passes an Expected Value Calculation to do so, just as for any other action. This is fine, but the rest of the section doesn’t make it clear that by default there are very few circumstances where it seems theoretically positive EV to lie (I think this situation happens once or twice a year for me at most, certainly not enough for there to be good feedback loops.) Lies are annoying to keep track of, they bite you in the ass often, and even if you’re fine with lying, most people are bad at it. This means that the average liar will develop a reputation for dishonesty over time, which people generally won’t tell you about, but will tell other people in your social network so they know to watch out. More explicitly, I disagree with the idea that since each person is on average not paying attention, lying is easy. This is because people love to gossip about other people in their social circle who are acting weird, and being noticed by any person means that the information will propagate across the group.
You propose: Practice lying. Same as Tangled, this only works if you start very young. If you do this after high school, you will permanently burn social capital! In the case of you doing so with non-consensual subjects, you will be caught because you are bad at it, and people will think that you are deceptive or weird. In the case where you find parties who can actively help you become a more dishonest person, those people will reasonably trust you less, and also it seems generally unwise to trust such parties.
Re: developing the skill of detecting the relative honesty of other people: I agree that this is a good skill to have, and that “people will lie to you” is a good hypothesis to entertain on a regular basis. However this is a separate skill tree, and also one where facts and logic™ can thankfully save you. I’m not terrible at assessing vibes, decent at thinking about if stories check out, and I also can tap into the network of mutual acquaintances if something seems subtly off or weird about a person. This has not made me any less terrible at lying.
Advocating for more lying seems like especially bad advice to give to people with poor social skills, because they lack the skills to detect if they’re succeeding at learning how to lie or if they’re just burning what little social capital they have for no gain. For people with poor social skills, I recommend, like, reading books about improving your social skills or discussing their confusions with friends who are more clued in, and for autistic people I recommend developing a better model of how neurotypicals think. I have disagreements with some of the proposed models in the book, but I think A Field Guide to Earthlings by Ian Ford is a good place to start.
The flip side to the average person not being totally honest, is that if you can credibly signal that you are unusually honest using expensive signals, there actually are many niches for you in the world, and people pay attention to that too. I touch on this in a previous post of mine on unusually scrupulous non-EA charities. While it’s true that a few folks on the website can stand to become a little savvier socially[1], I think in general it would be better if they chose to play to their advantage. This seems like the higher EV route to me. And this is actually one of the reasons that I’m annoyed about technical truth telling—people who practice it are technically honest but they’re not even getting any good reputation for it because they’re functionally deceiving people, badly.
All of the best things in my life came from moments where it felt very scary to tell the truth, and then I was brave and did so anyways.
Advocating for more lying seems like especially bad advice to give to people with poor social skills, because they lack the skills to detect if they’re succeeding at learning how to lie or if they’re just burning what little social capital they have for no gain.
I think the advice works better as “if it’s a social situation, and the situation calls for what you consider to be a lie, don’t let that stop you.” You do not have to tell someone that you’re not feeling fine when they ask how you’re doing. You do not need to tell them that actually the color they painted their house in is really ugly. And you certainly shouldn’t go to a job interview, get asked for your biggest weakness, and actually state your biggest weakness.
If someone reads the advice and thinks “Lying, that’s an idea! I’ll use it every time I can” they’ve overcorrected by far too much.
Thanks for writing this post! I think it’s insightful, and agree about technical truthtelling being annoying. After I thought about it though, I come down on the side of disagreeing with your post, largely on practical grounds.
A few thoughts:
You propose: Lie by default whenever you think it passes an Expected Value Calculation to do so, just as for any other action. This is fine, but the rest of the section doesn’t make it clear that by default there are very few circumstances where it seems theoretically positive EV to lie (I think this situation happens once or twice a year for me at most, certainly not enough for there to be good feedback loops.) Lies are annoying to keep track of, they bite you in the ass often, and even if you’re fine with lying, most people are bad at it. This means that the average liar will develop a reputation for dishonesty over time, which people generally won’t tell you about, but will tell other people in your social network so they know to watch out. More explicitly, I disagree with the idea that since each person is on average not paying attention, lying is easy. This is because people love to gossip about other people in their social circle who are acting weird, and being noticed by any person means that the information will propagate across the group.
You propose: Practice lying. Same as Tangled, this only works if you start very young. If you do this after high school, you will permanently burn social capital! In the case of you doing so with non-consensual subjects, you will be caught because you are bad at it, and people will think that you are deceptive or weird. In the case where you find parties who can actively help you become a more dishonest person, those people will reasonably trust you less, and also it seems generally unwise to trust such parties.
Re: developing the skill of detecting the relative honesty of other people: I agree that this is a good skill to have, and that “people will lie to you” is a good hypothesis to entertain on a regular basis. However this is a separate skill tree, and also one where facts and logic™ can thankfully save you. I’m not terrible at assessing vibes, decent at thinking about if stories check out, and I also can tap into the network of mutual acquaintances if something seems subtly off or weird about a person. This has not made me any less terrible at lying.
Advocating for more lying seems like especially bad advice to give to people with poor social skills, because they lack the skills to detect if they’re succeeding at learning how to lie or if they’re just burning what little social capital they have for no gain. For people with poor social skills, I recommend, like, reading books about improving your social skills or discussing their confusions with friends who are more clued in, and for autistic people I recommend developing a better model of how neurotypicals think. I have disagreements with some of the proposed models in the book, but I think A Field Guide to Earthlings by Ian Ford is a good place to start.
The flip side to the average person not being totally honest, is that if you can credibly signal that you are unusually honest using expensive signals, there actually are many niches for you in the world, and people pay attention to that too. I touch on this in a previous post of mine on unusually scrupulous non-EA charities. While it’s true that a few folks on the website can stand to become a little savvier socially[1], I think in general it would be better if they chose to play to their advantage. This seems like the higher EV route to me. And this is actually one of the reasons that I’m annoyed about technical truth telling—people who practice it are technically honest but they’re not even getting any good reputation for it because they’re functionally deceiving people, badly.
All of the best things in my life came from moments where it felt very scary to tell the truth, and then I was brave and did so anyways.
i think this case is generally overstated, btw. its true that some lw people are bad at social skills but i think the median user is probably fine.
I think the advice works better as “if it’s a social situation, and the situation calls for what you consider to be a lie, don’t let that stop you.” You do not have to tell someone that you’re not feeling fine when they ask how you’re doing. You do not need to tell them that actually the color they painted their house in is really ugly. And you certainly shouldn’t go to a job interview, get asked for your biggest weakness, and actually state your biggest weakness.
If someone reads the advice and thinks “Lying, that’s an idea! I’ll use it every time I can” they’ve overcorrected by far too much.