I think your version of honesty is bad for reasons you seem to already have experience with: it’s easy to come up with elaborate justifications for why manipulating people’s beliefs will lead to good outcomes and might actually lead them to the truth.
I also struggle with habitually lying: specifically, I hide things about myself that other people would dislike. I found it easy to justify through reasoning like “they’ll think I’m bad or stupid if they know this, but that’s not true, so if I hide this from them they’ll have a more accurate view of me”. Now I realize that strategy requires lots of lying to maintain and distorts their view of me in all kinds of ways.
I think your version of honesty is bad for reasons you seem to already have experience with: it’s easy to come up with elaborate justifications for why manipulating people’s beliefs will lead to good outcomes and might actually lead them to the truth.
I also struggle with habitually lying: specifically, I hide things about myself that other people would dislike. I found it easy to justify through reasoning like “they’ll think I’m bad or stupid if they know this, but that’s not true, so if I hide this from them they’ll have a more accurate view of me”. Now I realize that strategy requires lots of lying to maintain and distorts their view of me in all kinds of ways.