I don’t think it’s an honor or trust thing, but simply a communication ease. The “infection” is memetic, at a world-view level. People who believe they’re doing the right thing (or at least the universal thing) by pursuing shorter-term visible successes at the potential expense of longer term positive impact find they’re in disagreement in ways they don’t understand with those who are sacrificing short-term gains for uncertain long-term goals.
It’s not a matter of pathologically dishonest (well, any more than any other value system or religion is dishonest), it’s a matter of misalignment in beliefs about what’s important, and different judgement about tradeoffs in measurable vs unmeasurable goods.
I think “close but not quite right” is likely to be a ceiling for map coverage when talking about complicated individuals in more complicated group activities. The world-modeling and goal-seeking divergence between the infected (including myself, on some topics) and the enlightened (I’ll ignore the bystanders for now) is pretty significant.
And, of course, it’s a continuum, which shifts across contexts and across time even for an individual, so any generalization will be wrong sometimes. That’s true of the actor/scribe dimension as well—I generally think of myself as a scribe in my internal narrative, and in select individual and very-small-group conversations, but an actor in most work and larger social contexts.
LessWrong is an interesting case. Posts and comments are definitely acts, but the goal of the act is improved truth-knowing (and -telling), which is a fun hybrid of the two styles.
I don’t think it’s an honor or trust thing, but simply a communication ease. The “infection” is memetic, at a world-view level. People who believe they’re doing the right thing (or at least the universal thing) by pursuing shorter-term visible successes at the potential expense of longer term positive impact find they’re in disagreement in ways they don’t understand with those who are sacrificing short-term gains for uncertain long-term goals.
It’s not a matter of pathologically dishonest (well, any more than any other value system or religion is dishonest), it’s a matter of misalignment in beliefs about what’s important, and different judgement about tradeoffs in measurable vs unmeasurable goods.
This seems close but not quite right—Moral Mazes describes actors, who really do have a very different relationship to truth from scribes.
I think “close but not quite right” is likely to be a ceiling for map coverage when talking about complicated individuals in more complicated group activities. The world-modeling and goal-seeking divergence between the infected (including myself, on some topics) and the enlightened (I’ll ignore the bystanders for now) is pretty significant.
And, of course, it’s a continuum, which shifts across contexts and across time even for an individual, so any generalization will be wrong sometimes. That’s true of the actor/scribe dimension as well—I generally think of myself as a scribe in my internal narrative, and in select individual and very-small-group conversations, but an actor in most work and larger social contexts.
LessWrong is an interesting case. Posts and comments are definitely acts, but the goal of the act is improved truth-knowing (and -telling), which is a fun hybrid of the two styles.