I very much like that this topic is being explored, but I fear you’re on the wrong track in thinking that these worlds are distinct. Jessica doesn’t go far enough in the critique that this is assuming uniformity of use and knowledge of such. In fact, all these worlds are simultaneously overlaid on one another, among different people and often among different parts of the same conversation. Sometimes people are aware of the ambiguity or outright misleading use of words, sometimes they’re not, and sometimes they think they are but it still has emotional impact. And we should probably add world 0: brutal honesty where titles are conservative estimates of value rather than broad categories of job, and world −1 where labels don’t exist and people are referred to by the sum total of what they’ve done in their life.
It should be clearer that language is _ALWAYS_ a mix of cooperative and adversarial games. Everyone is trying to put ideas into each other’s heads that benefit the speaker. Some of them also benefit the listener, and that’s great. But it’s impossible to separate from those times when the goals diverge.
On the object level of your example, I do a fair bit of interviewing, and I guarantee you that competent recruiters know what different company’s titles generally mean, and even then take them with a grain of salt. Competent hiring managers focus on impact and capability in interviews, not on titles. Agreed that titles and self-described resume entries carry a lot of weight in getting and framing the interview. But outright lies won’t get you anything, even if a small amount of puffery likely gets you a small improvement in success rate and initial offer.
I think you’re grading what constitutes an “outright lie” on a curve. This is the usual thing to do, but it’s also literally, false, insofar as “lie” has an objective meaning at all.
Important to track both what’s usually done and what’s denotatively true.
For concreteness, can you point to an example of something that you believe is an outright lie, but that Dagon might have been considering not an outright lie?
(ideally something that is as ambiguous as possible according to your-model-of-Dagon’s-schema. “minimum viable lie” might be one way to think about it although I could imagine that in your own schema that might be a disingenuous way of framing. I use it here mostly to gesture at what I’m trying to ask rather than claiming it’s the right way to describe it)
Or, to help a bit with the interpretive labor – Benquo, does this seem like a question that matches your conception of outright right lie, and Dagon, does this match your conception of “not an outright lie”:
“I’m a director at [nonprofit]” (where “director” is a title that the nonprofit gives up somewhat freely to people that it wants to feel more motivated)
or
“I’m the executed director / CEO of [organization]” (where the organization is actually just you in a basement, maybe with one additional employee or a couple contractors)
Thanks for the specificity! These examples (“director” being used for prestige, without any connection to actual effort/impact/power) are good ones to explore how context plays into things.
There exist idiots who will take the introduction at face value. There exist particularly insane organizations who will only accept contracts signed by a director, and for those, one kind of has to play the game. This isn’t universal, or even common—SIMULTANEOUSLY, anyone who talks to or works with these directors will understand something closer to the truth.
These examples are none of the listed worlds—they have superficial elements of world 3 or 4 for the title of “director”, but nobody seriously cares about that. It’s world 1 for the interactions between people, where no single word carries much weight and what matters is how they behave and what they can get done.
The examples are also nowhere near universal (they’re not distinct “worlds”, they’re examples that the world is diverse in use of words). They don’t remove any of the weight from someone saying “I’m the director of a 150-person research group at X fortune-500 company”.
“No single word carries much weight and what matters is how they behave and what they can get done” is really not game-1. Game-1 is all about efficient denotative communication so that you don’t have to personally inspect what’s going on, and can use the map instead of directly inspecting the territory. You’re describing a situation in which people can privately model objective reality, not one in which words help much with this by default. There’s mutual knowledge in some circumstances about how Game-4 is being played with these words, but generally with deniability. The near-universal conflation of Game-1 with many participants not being confused about Game-4 is part of this mechanism.
“I’m the director of a 150-person research group at X fortune-500 company” is a much more specific descriptor of both the size and genre of someone’s territory/fiefdom, but in practice doesn’t strongly indicate that an enterprise of that size has genuine research needs such that a 150-person research group is functionally necessary. So you can’t make strong inferences about competence to coordinate research from that description, only competence at playing the game (assuming it’s not a somewhat more legible lie).
By contrast, you would be able to make those strong inferences about a nonfinancialized enterprise in a tightly competitive field.
“No single word carries much weight and what matters is how they behave and what they can get done” is really not game-1. Game-1 is all about efficient denotative communication so that you don’t have to personally inspect what’s going on, and can use the map instead of directly inspecting the territory.
Wow. I really missed that. I suspect because I I don’t see how anyone can claim that sort of game-1 is possible outside of technical topics (which STILL take many thousands of words to communicate concepts) or very small groups of high-trust shared-context participants (where the thousands of words are implicit). I guess I start in game-2, and I don’t see much difference between games 2-4.
Language, and especially common short words and phrases, just doesn’t carry that kind of precision. More generally, language is just as subject to Goodhart’s Law as any other knowledge proxy.
To some extent “technical” might be the word for a domain where Game-1 is stably dominant. There are technical subjects, political subjects, and subjects somewhere in between. If so, then “this is only possible in technical domains” is a truism, and the question is whether we can make other important domains technical. Economics was in a sense an attempt to make politics, or a large part of politics technical. Philosophy was an attempt to make a different part of politics that touched civic religion and origin myths into a technical subject.
I think that armies under severe short-term performance pressure can use Game-1 within their domains, even though there’s a lot of managing humans involved. Preserving Game-1 under conditions of local abundance is harder. It was known to be a major unsolved problem as early as the writing of Plato’s Republic.
I think I’d filter my “technical” requirement a bit further. Not “only possible in technical domains”, but “only possible for those parts of technical domains for which jargon and terms of art have been developed and accepted”. Technical domains that are changing or being explored require a lot of words and interactive probing before any sort of terse communication is possible.
Even armies and trained emergency workers are very limited in the types of information they can transfer quickly and correctly, and that’s AFTER a whole lot of training and preparation so that most commands are subroutine triggers, not idea transfers.
I sympathize with the desire to “make important domains technical”, but I suspect it’s a mix of levels that is ultimately incoherent. In domains where there is a natural feedback loop to precision, it’ll happen by itself. In domains where the feedback loops _don’t_ favor precision and territory-matching, it won’t and can’t. One could claim that is the difference between an “important” domain and one that isn’t, but one would be falling for the very same problem we’re discussing: the word “important” doesn’t mean the same thing to each of us.
Note that small groups of shared-context individuals _CAN_ have technical discussions on topics that are otherwise imprecise and socially constructed. It’s just impossible for larger or more heterogeneous groups to do so.
Speaking for myself now: I think the overall dynamic you’re pointing at makes sense, and I’d classify the process by which these words get distorted as ‘deceptive’, but whether I think it makes sense to call the use of director ‘lying’ depends on context.
The way you’re framing lies/not-lies feels… too prescriptivist to feel like a robust foundation to me. (I generally do not think language prescriptivism makes sense)
Words change over time. Sometimes they change as part of a deceptive game, sometimes just because a new concept came up and someone grabbed an existing word that was close. Sometimes two languages smash into each other because of trade or conquest.
What counts as lying, and what counts as just using the new definition of a word?
I’d count the first several decades of people misusing ‘literally’ to mean ‘a lot’ as ‘lying, but not deceptive’ (assuming they didn’t expect their listeners to believe them, and understand it as an exaggeration).
I’d count people who literally (lolsad) don’t know what the word ‘literally’ means and start using it to mean “hyperbolic figuratively’ because they’ve only heard the misused version… to not be lying, just using a different word. Which may or may not be bad.
For words like ‘manager’, whose primary role is to describe a social relationship that only really has meaning insofar as we agree on social reality, it feels even less clear cut than literally.
If you begin in world 1, I might describe the first few people to start calling themselves or their employees ‘manager’ as lying. By the time there’s common knowledge that we’re in world 3 I’m not sure that makes sense, if there’s a widely agreed upon new definition of manager that includes ‘promoted person at a particular point in the hierarchy.’ I’m not sure about world 2.
It’s possible, admittedly I don’t expect this to be the case, for the word to have transformed without a lie_raemon ever being told. I think words are almost always pointing to a cluster rather than a concrete thing, even in most technical domains (where the clusters are tighter but rarely perfect).
[edit: I’m not that confident about percentage of techical jargon that is perfectly precise].
So, it seems most useful to me to define lying as ’saying a thing that is outside the current cluster of the word might reasonably mean.
If manager initially means ‘manage a team of people’ and then later means ‘manage some people + get some perks’ and then means ‘only sorta-kinda-manage those people while getting some perks’ and eventually just means ‘get the perks’...
...I think it’s fair to say something distorted and deceptive has happened, but I’m not sure it makes sense to classify any given instance as a lie.
There are “Vice Presidents” of things who don’t preside or directly assist in presiding over any assembly of people. There are “Managers” who don’t manage anyone, “Chief X officer” where there is no other officer for X, or anyone else doing X. Etc. Many of these terms are formed from words originally denoting a specific function, or explicitly making a comparison with other people, not just indicating a “level” of status, trust, bigshotness, etc.
I very much like that this topic is being explored, but I fear you’re on the wrong track in thinking that these worlds are distinct. Jessica doesn’t go far enough in the critique that this is assuming uniformity of use and knowledge of such. In fact, all these worlds are simultaneously overlaid on one another, among different people and often among different parts of the same conversation. Sometimes people are aware of the ambiguity or outright misleading use of words, sometimes they’re not, and sometimes they think they are but it still has emotional impact. And we should probably add world 0: brutal honesty where titles are conservative estimates of value rather than broad categories of job, and world −1 where labels don’t exist and people are referred to by the sum total of what they’ve done in their life.
It should be clearer that language is _ALWAYS_ a mix of cooperative and adversarial games. Everyone is trying to put ideas into each other’s heads that benefit the speaker. Some of them also benefit the listener, and that’s great. But it’s impossible to separate from those times when the goals diverge.
On the object level of your example, I do a fair bit of interviewing, and I guarantee you that competent recruiters know what different company’s titles generally mean, and even then take them with a grain of salt. Competent hiring managers focus on impact and capability in interviews, not on titles. Agreed that titles and self-described resume entries carry a lot of weight in getting and framing the interview. But outright lies won’t get you anything, even if a small amount of puffery likely gets you a small improvement in success rate and initial offer.
I think you’re grading what constitutes an “outright lie” on a curve. This is the usual thing to do, but it’s also literally, false, insofar as “lie” has an objective meaning at all.
Important to track both what’s usually done and what’s denotatively true.
For concreteness, can you point to an example of something that you believe is an outright lie, but that Dagon might have been considering not an outright lie?
(ideally something that is as ambiguous as possible according to your-model-of-Dagon’s-schema. “minimum viable lie” might be one way to think about it although I could imagine that in your own schema that might be a disingenuous way of framing. I use it here mostly to gesture at what I’m trying to ask rather than claiming it’s the right way to describe it)
Or, to help a bit with the interpretive labor – Benquo, does this seem like a question that matches your conception of outright right lie, and Dagon, does this match your conception of “not an outright lie”:
“I’m a director at [nonprofit]” (where “director” is a title that the nonprofit gives up somewhat freely to people that it wants to feel more motivated)
or
“I’m the executed director / CEO of [organization]” (where the organization is actually just you in a basement, maybe with one additional employee or a couple contractors)
Yes, especially the second one. It’s the kind of lie that I would recommend that a friend tell if they were in that situation, but it is a lie.
Thanks for the specificity! These examples (“director” being used for prestige, without any connection to actual effort/impact/power) are good ones to explore how context plays into things.
There exist idiots who will take the introduction at face value. There exist particularly insane organizations who will only accept contracts signed by a director, and for those, one kind of has to play the game. This isn’t universal, or even common—SIMULTANEOUSLY, anyone who talks to or works with these directors will understand something closer to the truth.
These examples are none of the listed worlds—they have superficial elements of world 3 or 4 for the title of “director”, but nobody seriously cares about that. It’s world 1 for the interactions between people, where no single word carries much weight and what matters is how they behave and what they can get done.
The examples are also nowhere near universal (they’re not distinct “worlds”, they’re examples that the world is diverse in use of words). They don’t remove any of the weight from someone saying “I’m the director of a 150-person research group at X fortune-500 company”.
“No single word carries much weight and what matters is how they behave and what they can get done” is really not game-1. Game-1 is all about efficient denotative communication so that you don’t have to personally inspect what’s going on, and can use the map instead of directly inspecting the territory. You’re describing a situation in which people can privately model objective reality, not one in which words help much with this by default. There’s mutual knowledge in some circumstances about how Game-4 is being played with these words, but generally with deniability. The near-universal conflation of Game-1 with many participants not being confused about Game-4 is part of this mechanism.
“I’m the director of a 150-person research group at X fortune-500 company” is a much more specific descriptor of both the size and genre of someone’s territory/fiefdom, but in practice doesn’t strongly indicate that an enterprise of that size has genuine research needs such that a 150-person research group is functionally necessary. So you can’t make strong inferences about competence to coordinate research from that description, only competence at playing the game (assuming it’s not a somewhat more legible lie).
By contrast, you would be able to make those strong inferences about a nonfinancialized enterprise in a tightly competitive field.
Wow. I really missed that. I suspect because I I don’t see how anyone can claim that sort of game-1 is possible outside of technical topics (which STILL take many thousands of words to communicate concepts) or very small groups of high-trust shared-context participants (where the thousands of words are implicit). I guess I start in game-2, and I don’t see much difference between games 2-4.
Language, and especially common short words and phrases, just doesn’t carry that kind of precision. More generally, language is just as subject to Goodhart’s Law as any other knowledge proxy.
To some extent “technical” might be the word for a domain where Game-1 is stably dominant. There are technical subjects, political subjects, and subjects somewhere in between. If so, then “this is only possible in technical domains” is a truism, and the question is whether we can make other important domains technical. Economics was in a sense an attempt to make politics, or a large part of politics technical. Philosophy was an attempt to make a different part of politics that touched civic religion and origin myths into a technical subject.
I think that armies under severe short-term performance pressure can use Game-1 within their domains, even though there’s a lot of managing humans involved. Preserving Game-1 under conditions of local abundance is harder. It was known to be a major unsolved problem as early as the writing of Plato’s Republic.
I think I’d filter my “technical” requirement a bit further. Not “only possible in technical domains”, but “only possible for those parts of technical domains for which jargon and terms of art have been developed and accepted”. Technical domains that are changing or being explored require a lot of words and interactive probing before any sort of terse communication is possible.
Even armies and trained emergency workers are very limited in the types of information they can transfer quickly and correctly, and that’s AFTER a whole lot of training and preparation so that most commands are subroutine triggers, not idea transfers.
I sympathize with the desire to “make important domains technical”, but I suspect it’s a mix of levels that is ultimately incoherent. In domains where there is a natural feedback loop to precision, it’ll happen by itself. In domains where the feedback loops _don’t_ favor precision and territory-matching, it won’t and can’t. One could claim that is the difference between an “important” domain and one that isn’t, but one would be falling for the very same problem we’re discussing: the word “important” doesn’t mean the same thing to each of us.
Note that small groups of shared-context individuals _CAN_ have technical discussions on topics that are otherwise imprecise and socially constructed. It’s just impossible for larger or more heterogeneous groups to do so.
Nod.
Speaking for myself now: I think the overall dynamic you’re pointing at makes sense, and I’d classify the process by which these words get distorted as ‘deceptive’, but whether I think it makes sense to call the use of director ‘lying’ depends on context.
The way you’re framing lies/not-lies feels… too prescriptivist to feel like a robust foundation to me. (I generally do not think language prescriptivism makes sense)
Words change over time. Sometimes they change as part of a deceptive game, sometimes just because a new concept came up and someone grabbed an existing word that was close. Sometimes two languages smash into each other because of trade or conquest.
What counts as lying, and what counts as just using the new definition of a word?
I’d count the first several decades of people misusing ‘literally’ to mean ‘a lot’ as ‘lying, but not deceptive’ (assuming they didn’t expect their listeners to believe them, and understand it as an exaggeration).
I’d count people who literally (lolsad) don’t know what the word ‘literally’ means and start using it to mean “hyperbolic figuratively’ because they’ve only heard the misused version… to not be lying, just using a different word. Which may or may not be bad.
For words like ‘manager’, whose primary role is to describe a social relationship that only really has meaning insofar as we agree on social reality, it feels even less clear cut than literally.
If you begin in world 1, I might describe the first few people to start calling themselves or their employees ‘manager’ as lying. By the time there’s common knowledge that we’re in world 3 I’m not sure that makes sense, if there’s a widely agreed upon new definition of manager that includes ‘promoted person at a particular point in the hierarchy.’ I’m not sure about world 2.
It’s possible, admittedly I don’t expect this to be the case, for the word to have transformed without a lie_raemon ever being told. I think words are almost always pointing to a cluster rather than a concrete thing, even in most technical domains (where the clusters are tighter but rarely perfect).
[edit: I’m not that confident about percentage of techical jargon that is perfectly precise].
So, it seems most useful to me to define lying as ’saying a thing that is outside the current cluster of the word might reasonably mean.
If manager initially means ‘manage a team of people’ and then later means ‘manage some people + get some perks’ and then means ‘only sorta-kinda-manage those people while getting some perks’ and eventually just means ‘get the perks’...
...I think it’s fair to say something distorted and deceptive has happened, but I’m not sure it makes sense to classify any given instance as a lie.
There are “Vice Presidents” of things who don’t preside or directly assist in presiding over any assembly of people. There are “Managers” who don’t manage anyone, “Chief X officer” where there is no other officer for X, or anyone else doing X. Etc. Many of these terms are formed from words originally denoting a specific function, or explicitly making a comparison with other people, not just indicating a “level” of status, trust, bigshotness, etc.