Adam Zerner
Very good point. I mistakenly assumed that the only goal is to communicate one’s ideas, but in retrospect it is obvious that things like—I’m not sure how to describe this. Aesthetics? Artfulness? How well it flows? -- matter as well, and that such things are a big part of what you were going for in this post. Therefore I take back what I said and think it makes a lot of sense to use colorful, non-simple words.
I’m glad I learned this. I’m going to keep it in mind when I read things and hopefully incorporate it into my own writing as well.
I am not a lawyer and don’t know (much) more about how this stuff works than the average person. From my perspective, there are pros and cons to a defendant lying to a public defender.
Pros:
Assuming your lie is successful and it earns you sympathy, the public defender might:
Work harder.
Spend some political capital they have access to on your case.
Avoid working against you. Maybe if you don’t explicitly earn their sympathy they’ll be “in bed with the prosecutors” and share what you tell them in confidence with the prosectors in an attempt to get you convicted.
Cons:
Assuming your lie is successful:
The prosecution might realize the truth, and your lawyer will be unprepared to defend you against their arguments.
Assuming your lie is unsuccessful:
The inverse of the “Pros” section, pretty much.
It doesn’t seem to me like “be completely honest with your lawyer” is always the right approach to take. It seems likely that how sympathetic they are to you is very important and I can imagine realistic situations where there are lies you can tell that a) are unlikely to be figured out and b) earn you a lot of sympathy in such a way that the pros probably outweigh the cons.
Separately, there is the question of what is reasonable for the average defendant to expect. Maybe I am wrong, but if I am, it doesn’t seem to me that the average defendant has access to enough information to justifiably expect this. I think they’d need to know much more about a) how court cases work and b) the culture that public defenders are a part of.
There is also the point that being under so much stress, the defendants are probably cognitively impaired in some meaningful way, and so expectations of their ability to reason and make good decisions should be correspondingly lower.
But at the same time… yes, I’m sure that a lot of defendants lie in situations where they are pretty likely to get caught, and where it is pretty clearly a bad idea to do so. My guess is that some form of wishful thinking is what explains this. (“I really, really, really don’t want anyone to know that I touched that gun! Maybe I can just tell the lawyer that I didn’t touch it and no one will ever figure it out.”).
If so, I’d imagine that a big part of the job of a defense attorney would be something along the lines of what therapists do: building rapport, earning trust, developing a “therapeutic alliance”.
Nit: I found myself not knowing what various words in the post mean (marionette, chicanery) and not being super comfortable with others (surreptitiously). I strongly suspect that a non-trivial proportion of other readers are in the same boat and that using simpler words would be an improvement (see Write Simply by Paul Graham).
That’s great to hear!
Good point. Makes sense that it’d be important for such people.
Laptop chargers are also an object for which it’s trivial to own multiple, at a low cost and high (potential) advantage.
I don’t see why there is a high potential advantage here. I’d expect:
Most people to be able to find a friend or a nice person at a coffee shop with a charger they can borrow.
Most people to be able to get a new charger within a day or so (in person store or online + pay for faster shipping).
Going a day or so without a laptop not to sacrifice much in terms of fun. I actually expect it to be a net positive there since it’d force you to do something like go for a walk or read a book. It also has the benefit of exercising your “boredom muscles”.
Going a day or so without a laptop not to sacrifice much in terms of your career. Maybe your boss is frustrated with you in the short term, but I don’t expect that to lead to any actual consequences like being meaningfully more likely to get fired or not get a promotion.
I really enjoyed this exercise. I had to think a bunch about it, and I’m not even sure how good my response is. After all, the responses that people contributed in the comments are all pretty varied IMO. I think this points towards it being a good exercise. I’d love to see more exercises like this.
Student: That sounds like a bunch of BS. Like we said, you can’t go back after the fact and adjust the theories predictions.
Student: Ok. I tried that and none of my models are very successful. So my current position is that the Newtonian model is suspect, my other models are likely wrong, there is some accurate model out there but I haven’t found it yet. After all, the space of possible models is large and as a mere student I’m having trouble pruning this space.
I have a feeling that there is something deep here that is going over my head. If so, would you mind elaborating (with the elaboration wrapped in a spoiler so it doesn’t ruin the fun for others)?
I’d have two main things to say.
The first is something along the lines of an inadequacy analysis (a la Inadequate Equilibria). Given the incentives people face, if Newtonian mechanics was this flawed, would we expect it to have been exposed?
I think we can agree that the answer is an extremely confident “yes”. There is a lot of prestige to be gained, prestige is something people want, and there aren’t high barriers to doing the experiment and subsequent writeup. So then, I have a correspondingly extremely strong prior that Newtonian mechanics is not that flawed. Strong enough where even this experimental result isn’t enough to move me much.
The second is surrounding things that I think you can assume are implied in a stated theory. In this pendulum example, I think it’s implied that the prediction is contingent on there not being a huge gust of wind that knocks the stand over, for example. I think it’s reasonable to assume that such things are implied when one states their theory.
And so, I don’t see anything wrong with going back and revising the theory to something like “this is what we’d predict if the stand remains in place”. This sort of thing can be dangerous if eg. the person theorizing is proposing a crackpot medical treatment, keeps coming up with excuses when the treatment doesn’t work, and says “see it works!” when positive results are observed. But in the pendulum example it seems fine.
(I’d also teach them about the midwit meme and valleys of bad rationality.)
I’m in the process of being evaluated for ADHD. I was diagnosed with it as a kid, but that was over 20 years ago and the psychiatrist wanted me to be re-evaluated. It’s taken a very long time to get an appointment and then go through the process, but hopefully I’m only a few weeks away now and will try to remember to report back!
Project idea: an iterated prisoner’s dilemma competition/game
I am seeing new a new “Quick Takes” feature on LessWrong. However, I can’t find any announcement or documentation for the feature. I tried searching for “quick takes” and looking on the FAQ. Can someone describe “Quick Takes”?
I’m remembering the following excerpt from The Scout Mindset. I think it’s similar to what I say above.
My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn’t the cure-all I thought it was.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn’t automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that’s since been corroborated by researchers, as we’ll see in this book: our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.
Yeah. This matches my (limited) experience chatting with investors. They’re a lot less smart than I was anticipating.
I’m reminded of something I recall Paul Graham saying (and I think I also remember hearing others saying the same thing): that you can think of investors as being like an iceberg where the tip that is above water provide a real value-add with their wisdom and guidance in addition to the money you received from them, and the bulk of the iceberg that is underwater are investors who you should just treat as providing you with no value-add on top of the money you’re receiving from them.
Surprise 1: People are profoundly non-numerate.
I wonder whether Humans are not automatically strategic is the deeper issue here.
It’s one thing if you intend to be strategic about things and fail to do so in part due to lack of numeracy. It’s another if you aren’t even trying to be strategic in the first place. I suspect that a large majority of the time the issue is not being strategic.
Furthermore, I suspect that most people aren’t strategic because they find being strategic distasteful in some way. I’ve experienced this a lot in my life.
I’ll want to skim through Yelp for 10 minutes before choosing a restaurant to eat at.
Or spend 20 minutes watching trailers and googling around before picking a movie to watch.
Or spend 30 minutes on The Wirecutter before making a purchase for a few hundred dollars.
Or spend however many dozens of hours researching all sorts of stuff about different cities before moving to one.
I’ve found that various people see these sorts of things as being, depending on what type of mood they’re in, “overly analytical” or “Adam being Adam”.
On the other hand, I think there is a smaller but not super small subset of people who don’t find it particularly distasteful and would be pretty receptive to a proposal of “you’re currently not being strategic about lots of things in your life, being strategic about them would benefit you greatly, and so you should start being strategic about them”.
I think that it is important to identify what the real blocker or blockers are here. If there are, for example, multiple blockers and you solve one of them, then you end up in a situation where progress is merely latent. It doesn’t really lead to observable results. For example, if someone is both 1) innumerate and 2) not motivated to be strategic, if you teach them to be numerate, (2) will still be a blocker and the person will not achieve better outcomes.
If your personality type is “writing doesn’t work for me”, one of your biggest bottlenecks is to make writing work for you.
Thanks for the reminder here. I’ve thought a lot in the past about the value of writing in past but for whatever reason I feel like I’ve drifted away from writing. I think I should spend more time writing and am feeling motivated to start doing so now.
Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives.
- Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch
It sounds like with “factual lies” you’re saying that certain lies are about something that can easily be verified, and thus you’re unlikely to convince other people that you’re being truthful. Is that accurate? If so, that definitely makes sense. It seems like it’s almost always a bad idea to lie in such situations.
Why do you say that sympathy lies are not very consequential (assuming they are successful)? My model is that defendants have a pretty large range for how hard they could work on the case, working harder increases the odds of of winning by a good amount, and how hard they work depends a good amount on how sympathetic they are towards the defendant.
Gotcha. Makes sense. It’s interesting how frequently a job that is on it’s surface about X is largely, even mainly about Y. With X being “legal stuff” and Y being “emotional stuff” here (I’m being very hand-wavy).
Another example: I’m a programmer and I think that for programming, X is “writing code” and Y is “empathizing with users and working backwards from their most pressing needs”. In theory there is a division of labor and the product manager deals with the Y, but in practice I’ve found that even in companies that try to do this heavily (smaller, more startup-y companies don’t aim to divide the labor as much), Y is still incredibly important. Probably even more important than X.