The version of ‘honest’ that I have would highly rank a cherry-picked or even fabricated narrative optimized specifically for improving the truth of the belief that it creates.
That’s a bit beyond my skill and indeed not something I trifle with for fear of psychic damage (I discovered many many years ago that I’m susceptible to lying addiction, and freeing myself of the addiction was long and difficult), but were I greater than I am, I would endorse strategies like that.
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.
Disagree?
The version of ‘honest’ that I have would highly rank a cherry-picked or even fabricated narrative optimized specifically for improving the truth of the belief that it creates.
That’s a bit beyond my skill and indeed not something I trifle with for fear of psychic damage (I discovered many many years ago that I’m susceptible to lying addiction, and freeing myself of the addiction was long and difficult), but were I greater than I am, I would endorse strategies like that.
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.