Defining clarity in terms of what gets understood results in obfuscation winning automatically, by effectively giving veto power to motivated misunderstandings. (As Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,” or as Eliezer Yudkowsky put it more recently, “politically motivated incomprehension makes people dumber than cassette tape recorders.”)
Huh. This just seems obviously the opposite to me – if Alice’s salary depends on not understanding you, you don’t get points for having stated the thing in a way that seemed straightforward to you but that Alice misunderstood (willfully or otherwise). You have a hard problem, and you shouldn’t pretend to have solved it when you haven’t.
It’s a viable strategy to speak in public and hoping someone _other_ than Alice understands you (and maybe a collection of people can convince Alice by adding new incentives to counterbalance her salary-dependency, or maybe you just get enough consensus that it stops mattering whether Alice understands or not). But this strategy still depends on someone having understood you.
Possibly clearer version of what Jessica is saying:
Imagine three levels of explanation: Straightforward to you, straightforward to those without motivated cognition, straightforward even to those with strong motivated cognition.
It is reasonable to say that getting from level 1 to level 2 is often a hard problem, that it is on you to solve that problem.
It is not reasonable, if you want clarity to win, to say that level 2 is insufficient and you must reach level 3. It certainly isn’t reasonable to notice that level 2 has been reached, but level 3 has not, and thus judge the argument insufficient and a failure. It would be reasonable to say that reaching level 3 would be *better* and suggest ways of doing so.
If you don’t want clarity to win, and instead you want to accomplish specific goals that require convincing specific people that have motivated cognition, you’re on a different quest. Obfuscation has already won, because you are being held to higher standards and doing more work, and rewarding those who have no desire to understand for their failure to understand. Maybe you want to pay that price in context, but it’s important to realize what you’ve lost.
I think perhaps it has (ironically, perhaps), unclear to me what this even means. In particular what it means for “clarity to win.” It doesn’t make any sense to me to define clarity as something other than “communicating in such a way that people can understand what you meant.” What else would it mean?
[Recall, as I mentioned elsethread, that the primary thing I’m arguing against in this subthread is using words in nonstandard ways.]
(You said you didn’t want more back-and-forth in the comments, but this is just an attempt to answer your taboo request, not prompt more discussion; no reply is expected.)
We say that clarity wins when contributing to accurate shared models—communicating “clearly”—is a dominant strategy: agents that tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth do better (earn more money, leave more descendants, create more paperclips, &c.) than agents that lie, obfuscate, rationalize, play dumb, report dishonestly, filter evidence, &c.
Creating an environment where “clarity wins” (in this sense) looks like a very hard problem, but it’s not hard to see that some things don’t work. Jessica’s example of a judged debate where points are only awarded for arguments that the opponent acknowledges, is an environment where agents who want to win the debate have an incentive to play dumb—or be dumb—never acknowledging when their opponent made a good argument (even if the opponent in fact made a good argument). In this scenario, being clear (or at least, clear to the “reasonable person”, if not your debate opponent) doesn’t help you win.
I think main thing I want to avoid with the back-and-forth is feeling a sense of urgency to respond (esp. if I’m feeling frustrated about being misunderstood). Gonna try an experiment of “respond to comments here once per day”).
Curious how that experiment ended and think this type of rule is healthy in general (e.g. rate limiting how often one checks and responds) and I’m doing my best to follow a similar one.
It certainly seemed better than rapid-fire commenting.
I don’t know whether it was better than not commenting at all – I spent this thread mostly feeling exasperated that after 20 hours of debate and doublecrux it seemed like the conversation hadn’t really progressed. (Or at least, I was still having to re-explain things that I felt I had covered over and over again)
I do think Zack’s final comment is getting at something fairly important, but which still felt like a significant topic shift to me, and which seemed beyond scope for the current discussion.
Responding in somewhat more depth: this was a helpful crystallization of what you’re going for here.
I’m not 100% sure I agree as stated – “Tell the truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth” doesn’t (as currently stated) have a term in the equation for time-cost.
(i.e. it’s not obvious to me that a good system incentives always telling the whole-truth, because it’s time intensive to do that. Figuring out how to communicate a good ratio of “true, useful information per unit of mutual time/effort” feels like it should be part of the puzzle to me. But I generally agree that it’s good to have a system wherein people are incentivized to share useful, honest information to each other, and do not perform better by withholding information with [conscious or otherwise] intent to deceive)
((but I’m guessing your wording was just convenient shorthand rather than a disagreement with the above))
...
But on the main topic:
Jessica’s Judge example still feels like a nonsequitor that doesn’t have much to do with what I was talking about. Telling the truth/whole-truth/nothing-but still only seems useful insofar as it generates clear understanding in other people. As I said, even if the Judge example, Carol has to understand Alice’s claims.
I don’t know what it’d mean to care about truth-telling, without having that caring be grounded out in other people understanding things. And “hypothetical reasonable person” doesn’t seem that useful a referent to me.
What matters is whatever people in the system you’re trying to communicate with. If they’re reasonable, great, the problem you’re trying to solve is easier. If they’re so motivatedly-unreasonable that they won’t listen at all, the problem may be so hard that maybe you should go to some other place where more reasonable people live and try there instead. (Or, if you’re Eliezer in 2009, maybe you recurse a bit and write the Sequences for 2 years so that you gain access to more reasonable people).
(Part of the reason I’m currently very interesting in Double Crux is that having it be the default frame seems much more resistant to motivated reasoning. People can fake/obfuscate their way through a doublecrux, but my current experience is that it’s much harder to do so convincingly than during debate)
but I’m guessing your wording was just convenient shorthand rather than a disagreement with the above
Yes.
As I said, even if the Judge example, Carol has to understand Alice’s claims.
Yes, trivially; Jessica and I both agree with this.
Jessica’s Judge example still feels like a nonsequitor [sic] that doesn’t have much to do with what I was talking about.
Indeed, it may not have been relevant to the specific thing you were trying to say. However, being that as it may, I claim that the judge example is relevant to one of the broader topics of conversation: specifically, “what norms and/or principles should Less Wrong aspire to.” The Less Wrong karma and curation systems are functionally a kind of Judge, insofar as ideas that get upvoted and curated “win” (get more attention, praise, general acceptance in the rationalist community, &c.).
If Alice’s tendency to lie, obfuscate, rationalize, play dumb, report dishonestly, filter evidence, &c. isn’t an immutable feature of her character, but depends on what the Judge’s behavior incentivizes (at least to some degree), then it really matters what kind of Judge you have.
We want Less Wrong specifically, and the rationalist community more generally, to be a place where clarity wins, guided by the beauty of our weapons. If we don’t have that—if we live in a world where lies and bullshit outcompete truth, not just in the broader Society, but even in the rationalist community—then we’re dead. (Because you can’t solve AI alignment with lies and bullshit.)
As a moderator and high-karma user of lesswrong.com, you, Raymond Arnold, are a Judge. Your strong-upvote is worth 10 karma; you have the power to Curate a post; you have the power to have the power to tell Alice to shape up or ship out. You arethe incentives. This is a huge and important responsibility, your Honor—one that has the potential to influence 10¹⁴ lives per second. It’s true that truthtelling is only useful insofar as it generates understanding in other people. But that observation, in itself, doesn’t tell you how to exercise your huge and important responsibility.
If Jessica says, “Proponents of short AI timelines are lying, but not necessarily consciously lying; I mostly mean covert deception hidden from conscious attention,” and Alice says, “Huh? I can’t understand you if you’re going to use words in nonstandard ways,” then you have choices to make, and your choices have causal effects.
If you downvote Alice for pretending to be stupid when Jessica explicitly explained what she meant by the word “lying” in this context, then that has causal effects, too: maybe Alice will try harder to understand what Jessica meant, or maybe Alice will quit the site in disgust.
I can’t tell you how to wield your power, your Honor. (I mean, I can, but no one listens to me, because I don’t have power.) But I want you to notice that you have it.
If they’re so motivatedly-unreasonable that they won’t listen at all, the problem may be so hard that maybe you should go to some other place where more reasonable people live and try there instead. (Or, if you’re Eliezer in 2009, maybe you recurse a bit and write the Sequences for 2 years so that you gain access to more reasonable people).
I agree that “retreat” and “exert an extraordinary level of interpretive labor” are two possible strategies for dealing with unreasonable people. (Personally, I’m a huge fan of the “exert arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor” strategy, even though Ben has (correctly) observed that it leaves me incredibly vulnerable to certain forms of trolling.)
The question is, are there any other strategies?
The reason “retreat” isn’t sufficient, is because sometimes you might be competing with unreasonable people for resources (e.g., money, land, status, control of the “rationalist” and Less Wrong brand names, &c.). Is there some way to make the unreasonable people have to retreat, rather than the reasonable people?
I don’t have an answer to this. But it seems like an important thing to develop vocabulary for thinking about, even if that means playing inhard mode.
P.S. (to sister comment), I’m going to be traveling through the 25th and probably won’t check this website, in case that information helps us break out of this loop of saying “Let’s stop the implicitly-emotionally-charged back-and-forth in the comments here,” and then continuing to do so anyway. (I didn’t get anything done at my dayjob today, which is an indicator of me also suffering from the “Highly tense conversations are super stressful and expensive” problem.)
Put another way: my current sense is that the reason truth-telling-is-good is basically “increased understanding”, “increased ability to coordinate” and “increase ability to build things/impact reality”. (where the latter two is largely caused by the first).
I’m not confident that list is exhaustive, and if you have other reasons in mind that truth-telling is good that you think I’m missing I’m interested in hearing about that.
It sounds something like you think I’m saying ‘clarity is about increasing understanding, and therefore we should optimizing naively for understanding in a goodharty way’, which isn’t what I mean to be saying.
In some sense that list is rather exhaustive because it includes “know anything” and “do anything” as goals that are helped, and that pretty much includes everything. But in that sense, the list is not useful. In the sense that the list is useful, it seems woefully incomplete. And it’s tricky to know what level to respond on. Most centrally, this seems like an example of the utilitarian failure mode of reducing the impact of a policy to the measured, proven direct impact of that policy, as a default (while still getting a result that is close to equal to ‘helps with everything, everywhere, that matters at all’).
“Increased ability to think” would be one potential fourth category. If truth is not being told because it’s not in one’s interest to do so, there is strong incentive to destroy one’s own ability to think. If one was looking to essentially accept the error of ‘only point to the measurable/observable directly caused effects.’
Part of me is screaming “do we really need a post explaining why it is good when people say that which is, when they believe that would be relevant or useful, and bad when they fail to do so, or say that which is not?”
Suppose Carol is judging a debate between Alice and Bob. Alice says “X, because Y”. Bob acknowledges the point, but argues “actually, a stronger reason for believing not-X is Z”. Alice acts like she doesn’t understand the point. Bob tries explaining in other words, without success.
Carol, following your advice, says: “Alice made a clear point in favor of X. Bob failed to make a clear point against X.” Therefore, she judges the debate outcome to be in favor of X.
However, this is Carol abdicating her responsibility to use her own judgment of how clear Bob’s point was. Maybe it is really clear to Carol, and to a hypothetical “reasonable person” (significantly less smart than Carol), that Z is a good reason to believe not-X. Perhaps Z is actually a very simple logical argument. And so, the debate outcome is misleading.
The thing is that in any judgment of clarity, one of the people involved is the person making that judgment; and, they are obligated to use their own reasoning, not only to see whether the point was understood by others. You can’t define clarity by whether someone else understood the point, you have to judge it for yourself as well. (Of course, after making your own judgment about how clear the point was, you can define the statement’s clarity as whether you judged it to be clear, but this is tautological)
But in this scenario, understanding still lives inside Carol’s head, not Alice’s.
I wasn’t suggesting that someone like Carol abdicate responsibility in this sort of situation. The point is that it’s still on Alice to get someone to understand her. Who needs to understand her depends on the situation. Clarity without understanding seems meaningless to me. (Perhaps see reply to Zvi: can we taboo ‘clarity?’)
Note that a lot of my motivation here was to address Jessicata using words in non-standard ways (i.e lie/fraud/outlaw/scam).
In this case the issue isn’t that anyone is willfully misunderstanding anyone – if you’re using a word with a different definition than people are used to, it’s a fairly straightforward outcome for people to not understand you.
That makes sense. I, personally, am interested in developing new terminology for talking about not-necessarily-conscious-and-yet-systematically-deceptive cognitive algorithms, where Ben and Jessica think that “lie”/”fraud”/&c. are fine and correct.
I see great need for some way to indicate “not-an-accident but also not necessarily conscious or endorsed.” And ideally the term doesn’t have a judgmental or accusatory connotation.
This seems pretty hard to do actually. Maybe an acronym?
For ‘things that aren’t an accident but aren’t necessarily conscious or endorsed’, another option might be to use language like ‘decision’, ‘action’, ‘choice’, etc. but flagged in a way that makes it clear you’re not assuming full consciousness. Like ‘quasi-decision’, ‘quasi-action’, ‘quasi-conscious’… Applied to Zack’s case, that might suggest a term like ‘quasi-dissembling’ or ‘quasi-misleading’. ‘Dissonant communication’ comes to mind as another idea.
When I want to emphasize that there’s optimization going on but it’s not necessarily conscious, I sometimes speak impersonally of “Bob’s brain is doing X”, or “a Bob-part/agent/subagent is doing X”.
Huh. This just seems obviously the opposite to me – if Alice’s salary depends on not understanding you, you don’t get points for having stated the thing in a way that seemed straightforward to you but that Alice misunderstood (willfully or otherwise). You have a hard problem, and you shouldn’t pretend to have solved it when you haven’t.
It’s a viable strategy to speak in public and hoping someone _other_ than Alice understands you (and maybe a collection of people can convince Alice by adding new incentives to counterbalance her salary-dependency, or maybe you just get enough consensus that it stops mattering whether Alice understands or not). But this strategy still depends on someone having understood you.
Possibly clearer version of what Jessica is saying:
Imagine three levels of explanation: Straightforward to you, straightforward to those without motivated cognition, straightforward even to those with strong motivated cognition.
It is reasonable to say that getting from level 1 to level 2 is often a hard problem, that it is on you to solve that problem.
It is not reasonable, if you want clarity to win, to say that level 2 is insufficient and you must reach level 3. It certainly isn’t reasonable to notice that level 2 has been reached, but level 3 has not, and thus judge the argument insufficient and a failure. It would be reasonable to say that reaching level 3 would be *better* and suggest ways of doing so.
If you don’t want clarity to win, and instead you want to accomplish specific goals that require convincing specific people that have motivated cognition, you’re on a different quest. Obfuscation has already won, because you are being held to higher standards and doing more work, and rewarding those who have no desire to understand for their failure to understand. Maybe you want to pay that price in context, but it’s important to realize what you’ve lost.
Can you taboo “clarity”?
I think perhaps it has (ironically, perhaps), unclear to me what this even means. In particular what it means for “clarity to win.” It doesn’t make any sense to me to define clarity as something other than “communicating in such a way that people can understand what you meant.” What else would it mean?
[Recall, as I mentioned elsethread, that the primary thing I’m arguing against in this subthread is using words in nonstandard ways.]
(You said you didn’t want more back-and-forth in the comments, but this is just an attempt to answer your taboo request, not prompt more discussion; no reply is expected.)
We say that clarity wins when contributing to accurate shared models—communicating “clearly”—is a dominant strategy: agents that tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth do better (earn more money, leave more descendants, create more paperclips, &c.) than agents that lie, obfuscate, rationalize, play dumb, report dishonestly, filter evidence, &c.
Creating an environment where “clarity wins” (in this sense) looks like a very hard problem, but it’s not hard to see that some things don’t work. Jessica’s example of a judged debate where points are only awarded for arguments that the opponent acknowledges, is an environment where agents who want to win the debate have an incentive to play dumb—or be dumb—never acknowledging when their opponent made a good argument (even if the opponent in fact made a good argument). In this scenario, being clear (or at least, clear to the “reasonable person”, if not your debate opponent) doesn’t help you win.
Appreciate it. That does help.
I think main thing I want to avoid with the back-and-forth is feeling a sense of urgency to respond (esp. if I’m feeling frustrated about being misunderstood). Gonna try an experiment of “respond to comments here once per day”).
Will probably respond tomorrow.
Curious how that experiment ended and think this type of rule is healthy in general (e.g. rate limiting how often one checks and responds) and I’m doing my best to follow a similar one.
It certainly seemed better than rapid-fire commenting.
I don’t know whether it was better than not commenting at all – I spent this thread mostly feeling exasperated that after 20 hours of debate and doublecrux it seemed like the conversation hadn’t really progressed. (Or at least, I was still having to re-explain things that I felt I had covered over and over again)
I do think Zack’s final comment is getting at something fairly important, but which still felt like a significant topic shift to me, and which seemed beyond scope for the current discussion.
Responding in somewhat more depth: this was a helpful crystallization of what you’re going for here.
I’m not 100% sure I agree as stated – “Tell the truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth” doesn’t (as currently stated) have a term in the equation for time-cost.
(i.e. it’s not obvious to me that a good system incentives always telling the whole-truth, because it’s time intensive to do that. Figuring out how to communicate a good ratio of “true, useful information per unit of mutual time/effort” feels like it should be part of the puzzle to me. But I generally agree that it’s good to have a system wherein people are incentivized to share useful, honest information to each other, and do not perform better by withholding information with [conscious or otherwise] intent to deceive)
((but I’m guessing your wording was just convenient shorthand rather than a disagreement with the above))
...
But on the main topic:
Jessica’s Judge example still feels like a nonsequitor that doesn’t have much to do with what I was talking about. Telling the truth/whole-truth/nothing-but still only seems useful insofar as it generates clear understanding in other people. As I said, even if the Judge example, Carol has to understand Alice’s claims.
I don’t know what it’d mean to care about truth-telling, without having that caring be grounded out in other people understanding things. And “hypothetical reasonable person” doesn’t seem that useful a referent to me.
What matters is whatever people in the system you’re trying to communicate with. If they’re reasonable, great, the problem you’re trying to solve is easier. If they’re so motivatedly-unreasonable that they won’t listen at all, the problem may be so hard that maybe you should go to some other place where more reasonable people live and try there instead. (Or, if you’re Eliezer in 2009, maybe you recurse a bit and write the Sequences for 2 years so that you gain access to more reasonable people).
(Part of the reason I’m currently very interesting in Double Crux is that having it be the default frame seems much more resistant to motivated reasoning. People can fake/obfuscate their way through a doublecrux, but my current experience is that it’s much harder to do so convincingly than during debate)
Yes.
Yes, trivially; Jessica and I both agree with this.
Indeed, it may not have been relevant to the specific thing you were trying to say. However, being that as it may, I claim that the judge example is relevant to one of the broader topics of conversation: specifically, “what norms and/or principles should Less Wrong aspire to.” The Less Wrong karma and curation systems are functionally a kind of Judge, insofar as ideas that get upvoted and curated “win” (get more attention, praise, general acceptance in the rationalist community, &c.).
If Alice’s tendency to lie, obfuscate, rationalize, play dumb, report dishonestly, filter evidence, &c. isn’t an immutable feature of her character, but depends on what the Judge’s behavior incentivizes (at least to some degree), then it really matters what kind of Judge you have.
We want Less Wrong specifically, and the rationalist community more generally, to be a place where clarity wins, guided by the beauty of our weapons. If we don’t have that—if we live in a world where lies and bullshit outcompete truth, not just in the broader Society, but even in the rationalist community—then we’re dead. (Because you can’t solve AI alignment with lies and bullshit.)
As a moderator and high-karma user of lesswrong.com, you, Raymond Arnold, are a Judge. Your strong-upvote is worth 10 karma; you have the power to Curate a post; you have the power to have the power to tell Alice to shape up or ship out. You are the incentives. This is a huge and important responsibility, your Honor—one that has the potential to influence 10¹⁴ lives per second. It’s true that truthtelling is only useful insofar as it generates understanding in other people. But that observation, in itself, doesn’t tell you how to exercise your huge and important responsibility.
If Jessica says, “Proponents of short AI timelines are lying, but not necessarily consciously lying; I mostly mean covert deception hidden from conscious attention,” and Alice says, “Huh? I can’t understand you if you’re going to use words in nonstandard ways,” then you have choices to make, and your choices have causal effects.
If you downvote Jessica because you think she’s drawing the category boundaries of “lying” too widely in a way that makes the word less useful, that has causal effects: fewer people will read Jessica’s post; maybe Jessica will decide to change her rhetorical strategy, or maybe she’ll quit the site in disgust.
If you downvote Alice for pretending to be stupid when Jessica explicitly explained what she meant by the word “lying” in this context, then that has causal effects, too: maybe Alice will try harder to understand what Jessica meant, or maybe Alice will quit the site in disgust.
I can’t tell you how to wield your power, your Honor. (I mean, I can, but no one listens to me, because I don’t have power.) But I want you to notice that you have it.
I agree that “retreat” and “exert an extraordinary level of interpretive labor” are two possible strategies for dealing with unreasonable people. (Personally, I’m a huge fan of the “exert arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor” strategy, even though Ben has (correctly) observed that it leaves me incredibly vulnerable to certain forms of trolling.)
The question is, are there any other strategies?
The reason “retreat” isn’t sufficient, is because sometimes you might be competing with unreasonable people for resources (e.g., money, land, status, control of the “rationalist” and Less Wrong brand names, &c.). Is there some way to make the unreasonable people have to retreat, rather than the reasonable people?
I don’t have an answer to this. But it seems like an important thing to develop vocabulary for thinking about, even if that means playing in hard mode.
P.S. (to sister comment), I’m going to be traveling through the 25th and probably won’t check this website, in case that information helps us break out of this loop of saying “Let’s stop the implicitly-emotionally-charged back-and-forth in the comments here,” and then continuing to do so anyway. (I didn’t get anything done at my dayjob today, which is an indicator of me also suffering from the “Highly tense conversations are super stressful and expensive” problem.)
Put another way: my current sense is that the reason truth-telling-is-good is basically “increased understanding”, “increased ability to coordinate” and “increase ability to build things/impact reality”. (where the latter two is largely caused by the first).
I’m not confident that list is exhaustive, and if you have other reasons in mind that truth-telling is good that you think I’m missing I’m interested in hearing about that.
It sounds something like you think I’m saying ‘clarity is about increasing understanding, and therefore we should optimizing naively for understanding in a goodharty way’, which isn’t what I mean to be saying.
In some sense that list is rather exhaustive because it includes “know anything” and “do anything” as goals that are helped, and that pretty much includes everything. But in that sense, the list is not useful. In the sense that the list is useful, it seems woefully incomplete. And it’s tricky to know what level to respond on. Most centrally, this seems like an example of the utilitarian failure mode of reducing the impact of a policy to the measured, proven direct impact of that policy, as a default (while still getting a result that is close to equal to ‘helps with everything, everywhere, that matters at all’).
“Increased ability to think” would be one potential fourth category. If truth is not being told because it’s not in one’s interest to do so, there is strong incentive to destroy one’s own ability to think. If one was looking to essentially accept the error of ‘only point to the measurable/observable directly caused effects.’
Part of me is screaming “do we really need a post explaining why it is good when people say that which is, when they believe that would be relevant or useful, and bad when they fail to do so, or say that which is not?”
Suppose Carol is judging a debate between Alice and Bob. Alice says “X, because Y”. Bob acknowledges the point, but argues “actually, a stronger reason for believing not-X is Z”. Alice acts like she doesn’t understand the point. Bob tries explaining in other words, without success.
Carol, following your advice, says: “Alice made a clear point in favor of X. Bob failed to make a clear point against X.” Therefore, she judges the debate outcome to be in favor of X.
However, this is Carol abdicating her responsibility to use her own judgment of how clear Bob’s point was. Maybe it is really clear to Carol, and to a hypothetical “reasonable person” (significantly less smart than Carol), that Z is a good reason to believe not-X. Perhaps Z is actually a very simple logical argument. And so, the debate outcome is misleading.
The thing is that in any judgment of clarity, one of the people involved is the person making that judgment; and, they are obligated to use their own reasoning, not only to see whether the point was understood by others. You can’t define clarity by whether someone else understood the point, you have to judge it for yourself as well. (Of course, after making your own judgment about how clear the point was, you can define the statement’s clarity as whether you judged it to be clear, but this is tautological)
But in this scenario, understanding still lives inside Carol’s head, not Alice’s.
I wasn’t suggesting that someone like Carol abdicate responsibility in this sort of situation. The point is that it’s still on Alice to get someone to understand her. Who needs to understand her depends on the situation. Clarity without understanding seems meaningless to me. (Perhaps see reply to Zvi: can we taboo ‘clarity?’)
Note that a lot of my motivation here was to address Jessicata using words in non-standard ways (i.e lie/fraud/outlaw/scam).
In this case the issue isn’t that anyone is willfully misunderstanding anyone – if you’re using a word with a different definition than people are used to, it’s a fairly straightforward outcome for people to not understand you.
That makes sense. I, personally, am interested in developing new terminology for talking about not-necessarily-conscious-and-yet-systematically-deceptive cognitive algorithms, where Ben and Jessica think that “lie”/”fraud”/&c. are fine and correct.
I see great need for some way to indicate “not-an-accident but also not necessarily conscious or endorsed.” And ideally the term doesn’t have a judgmental or accusatory connotation.
This seems pretty hard to do actually. Maybe an acronym?
Alice lied (NIANOA) to Bob about X.
Not Intentionally And Not On Accident
For ‘things that aren’t an accident but aren’t necessarily conscious or endorsed’, another option might be to use language like ‘decision’, ‘action’, ‘choice’, etc. but flagged in a way that makes it clear you’re not assuming full consciousness. Like ‘quasi-decision’, ‘quasi-action’, ‘quasi-conscious’… Applied to Zack’s case, that might suggest a term like ‘quasi-dissembling’ or ‘quasi-misleading’. ‘Dissonant communication’ comes to mind as another idea.
When I want to emphasize that there’s optimization going on but it’s not necessarily conscious, I sometimes speak impersonally of “Bob’s brain is doing X”, or “a Bob-part/agent/subagent is doing X”.