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?”
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?”