Well, setting aside the question of whether it’s possible to escape these dynamics ever, I also made some points addressing the question of whether the anti-hypocrisy norm is useful when such dynamics dominate. What did you think of that part?
Having re-read your comment, I am not actually sure which part of it you’re referring to. Would you mind quoting the relevant bits? (And maybe paraphrasing/summarizing them, also, because the part of your comment that I think you might mean read to me as rather confused—which probably means that I didn’t understand it.)
As to the inferences you list—I wouldn’t endorse any of them either, not because I think they’re wrong per se, but because they miss the point. (#4 comes the closest, perhaps, to being relevant.) Rather, I would say:
6. hypocrisy ⇒ hypocrite is to be treated as a hostile agent for the purpose of evaluating their words in this context
In other words, having uncovered our interlocutor’s hypocrisy, we immediately discard any assumption that the intent behind their words is either (a) as it appears on the surface, or (b) friendly to us. Instead, we now assume that the hypocrite’s words have a purpose that is self-serving (possibly at our expense, though without harming us being the explicit goal), or actively hostile, or both. (Certainly the former is likely to be much more common than the latter, in any but the most toxic and dysfunctional social environments.)
Now, having made this assumption, what can we say about your inferences #1–5?
Are the hypocrite’s claims wrong? Perhaps, perhaps not. What’s important is that the fact that the hypocrite is making said claims cannot be reliable evidence of their truth—as it would have been, under the (now-discarded) assumption that the hypocrite is a friendly agent, who has honest and honorable intentions toward us (and thus would not deliberately lie, and would in fact make an effort to speak truth as he sees it).
This is covered under #1.
Blameworthiness and praiseworthiness are moral judgments, which may be made only relative to some moral framework. Whether your preferred moral framework judges the hypocrite to be blameworthy, or praiseworthy, or neither, is not an inference, but a judgment. Given the facts of the matter, the judgment is up to you (that is, up to each of us, who deals with the hypocrite).
Whether the hypocrite should be viewed with suspicion in general, on the basis of the decision to treat them as a hostile agent in this context, is an interesting question, and not an easy one to answer. Much of what we do is contextual; the fundamental attribution error is, after all, an error. On the other hand, personality traits are fairly stable across contexts. This is a larger question, I think, and goes somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion. (However, I’d be willing to continue discussing it if you think it’s more important than the other aspects of this issue.)
This disjunction seems incoherent, given that one operand is a factual claim and the other is a moral judgment. If I misunderstood your meaning here, please rephrase or clarify.
Finally—
… setting aside the question of whether it’s possible to escape these dynamics ever …
But I don’t think we should set that question aside; it seems to me to be of the greatest importance. For the record, I think that it is possible to escape these dynamics—but it is much more difficult than you appear to believe. It requires a very great degree of “treating the other person’s well-being, success, autonomy, happiness, etc., as tantamount to your own”. That is the kind of thing you find in (functional, well-adjusted, happy) immediately families, or close-knit groups of friends—but not in any wider social context. (No, subscribing to a moral philosophy which claims to consist of treating others’ happiness as equivalent to your own, most emphatically does not suffice to satisfy the criterion.)
But I don’t think we should set that question aside; it seems to me to be of the greatest importance. For the record, I think that it is possible to escape these dynamics—but it is much more difficult than you appear to believe.
I’m not sure about that. You are talking about escaping these dynamics, whereas I am more talking about living with them. You think(?) an anti-hypocrisy norm helps to escape the dynamic, whereas I don’t. It isn’t clear to me who thinks they are easier to escape.
I think the main tools for escaping them are forgiving tit-for-tat and shared goals. “Forgiving tit-for-tat” means extending others slightly more trust than they extend you (to hopefully drag things toward a positive dynamic). Shared goals are a powerful, but also dangerous (can involve cult-like dynamics).
I absolutely don’t think that an anti-hypocrisy norm helps to escape the dynamic. I already said what lets you escape the dynamic—and in such situations as I outlined, one needs no such norms; they are operative, of course, but they’re not really what stops hostile behavior. It’s simply that such behavior generally doesn’t take place, in such contexts.
It seems clear to me that you think these dynamics are easier to escape than I do. “Living with” the described dynamics is precisely what I am talking about. That’s what the anti-hypocrisy norm is for. Neither “forgiving tit-for-tat” nor shared goals help very much, in my view. They are beneficial in their own right, for other reasons, but you absolutely still need the norm against hypocrisy.
Hmmmm. I almost want to agree with you on #6. I wrote up about half of a response based on agreeing about #6. But, I can’t quite agree. I don’t actually infer all that just from a divergence between words and actions, and I think it would be a bad idea to have it on that trigger.
I do agree with something close to #6. I would think of it as “inferring that I’m dealing with face culture”. Inferring that words mean less that they say, that there’s a social ritual going on. Motives and beliefs are being stated according to the rules of the game, not according to truth. My disagreement with #6 is that I don’t trigger it based on a divergence between words and actions. There are other definitions of “hypocrite” which I do trigger it on, like the definition proposed by Lukas_Gloor, or (less certainly) hypocrisy with the added proviso mentioned by Dagon. There are also a lot of other subtle or not-so-subtle hints which trigger this for me.
But I suspect we have a larger disagreement over some stuff beyond #6. In particular, when applying my version of #6, I basically never call it out. So, we can consider the following:
7. Hypocrisy ⇒ call out hypocrisy
Every time I have applied #6 and then tried to apply #7, things have gone rather poorly for me. This is why I said, of an immune response against hypocrisy:
The way I see things, this is asking for trouble. In high-trust contexts, it’s unnecessary (not because of zero hypocrisy, but because the hypocrisy is all benign). And it’ll harm your ability to tolerate and adapt to low-trust contexts, unless you put on blinders to most of the hypocrisy in those settings. Indeed, that’s what I think many people do: the strong anti-hypocrisy flinch necessitates an inability to see everything that’s going on in social settings.
I was (and still am) interpreting your “immune response” as involving #7. Is that accurate?
I do agree with something close to #6. I would think of it as “inferring that I’m dealing with face culture”.
I don’t agree that this is close to my #6 at all. Again, I think that your attempt to circumscribe what I’m saying, and to claim that it’s an artifact of some specific sort of “culture” that you can name, and set apart from some other contexts with a different culture, is misguided.
As far as “calling out” hypocrisy goes, well, that’s as may be. Your track record with calling out hypocrisy does not seem implausible to me, certainly. But then, I never suggested that calling anything out is strictly necessary. It may be helpful sometimes, but not always, and perhaps not even often. That, however, is different from trying to change the norm against it…
I was (and still am) interpreting your “immune response” as involving #7. Is that accurate?
It is not, as you see. Calling out hypocrisy may be part of the manifestation of the immune response in any given situation, or it may not be. It depends on many things. (For one thing, callouts may take many forms. For example, they make take the form of subtle, and deniable—perhaps even apophatic—implications. If there’s a solidly entrenched, universally shared norm against hypocrisy, then such a gentle approach can serve quite well. In such social contexts, one prefers to avoid the label of hypocrite even if one is able, after all, to defend against the charge; the ideal is not only blamelessness, but manifest, unimpeachable blamelessness. The “appearance of impropriety” parallel may once again be drawn.)
This is why I said, of an immune response against hypocrisy:
The way I see things, this is asking for trouble. In high-trust contexts, it’s unnecessary (not because of zero hypocrisy, but because the hypocrisy is all benign).
I certainly disagree with this. Again, I just don’t buy the “benign hypocrisy” idea. (It is, in any case, socially corrosive even if “true” in any given case. I put “true” in scare quotes, of course, because whether to categorize the behavior as “benign hypocrisy” is precisely at issue; what’s actually true is some empirical facts of the matter.)
And it’ll harm your ability to tolerate and adapt to low-trust contexts, unless you put on blinders to most of the hypocrisy in those settings. Indeed, that’s what I think many people do: the strong anti-hypocrisy flinch necessitates an inability to see everything that’s going on in social settings.
[emphasis mine]
I agree that the bolded part is a danger, but it’s not so great as a danger as you suggest, and not nearly as great a danger as the reverse. Partly this is because I think that you exaggerate, w.r.t. the un-bolded part of the quote. Putting on blinders is not at all the only way to cope!
I certainly disagree with this. Again, I just don’t buy the “benign hypocrisy” idea. (It is, in any case, socially corrosive even if “true” in any given case. I put “true” in scare quotes, of course, because whether to categorize the behavior as “benign hypocrisy” is precisely at issue; what’s actually true is some empirical facts of the matter.)
[how did you get nested quotations to work? I can’t seem to manage that...]
Certainly it’s true that it “isn’t plausible to claim that every divergence between words and actions is due to duplicitous malintent”. But who is claiming otherwise? I am saying that “hypocrisy” refers to—and guards against—a broader spectrum of behaviors than that.
So I think we agree that there are benign divergences of between words and actions.
I don’t know what your definition of hypocrisy is to evaluate whether we disagree beyond that.
[how did you get nested quotations to work? I can’t seem to manage that...]
GreaterWrong uses a raw Markdown editor, where you can do nested quotations in the usual Markdown way. (If you don’t know or recall the format of the quotation markup, you can use the quotation button on the GUIEdit toolbar: select the first level of the quote, click the button; select the quoted text plus the next level, click the button; etc.)
As for the rest of your comment—see my reply in the other thread. I don’t think there is any difference in our definitions of hypocrisy.
Having re-read your comment, I am not actually sure which part of it you’re referring to. Would you mind quoting the relevant bits? (And maybe paraphrasing/summarizing them, also, because the part of your comment that I think you might mean read to me as rather confused—which probably means that I didn’t understand it.)
I meant for the immediately following part of that comment to serve as a restatement of the bit I was most interested in your response to, IE,
One of the arguments I made was that, in these cases, you have other things you can call people out on that point more directly at the problem, like unfairness or dishonesty. The hypocrisy might be part of your argument that something bad must be going on, as in the example where someone tries to get away with claiming their actions are good and their words true and the two are very different. It just seems like putting negative valence on hypocrisy is too simplistic.
That was intended as an elaboration of the part where I reacted to your examples by (briefly) stating how I thought there were better things to call people out on in each case.
(I’ll try to reply to everything else later, thanks for continuing the discussion!)
So, the problem with that line of reasoning is that it would work if hypocrisy were sometimes a co-occurrence of a bad thing, but sometimes of a good or neutral thing. But it does not seem that way to me—not to any degree that matters, anyway. I do not take seriously the “akrasia” argument.
Let’s consider a scenario or two:
Scenario 1a
A: Everyone ought to do X.
B: Do you do X?
A: Oh, no, I don’t do X, but really I should. Akrasia, you know.
Scenario 1b
A: Everyone ought to do X. I don’t do X myself, but I really ought to. I’m trying, but failing. Akrasia, you know.
Scenarios 1a and 1b are slightly different. In scenario 1a, A could’ve gotten away with advocating X without his hypocrisy being revealed. That is strictly more blameworthy than scenario 1b, where A admits the disconnect between his words and his actions, but insists that it’s a failure of willpower (or whatever it is that “akrasia” in fact maps to).
Notice what is happening: A is introducing (or seeking to introduce) a new norm of behavior. Should this norm be accepted, conforming to the norm will be socially rewarded, and deviation from the norm will be socially punished. Of course, conforming to the norm is costly (which is a large part of why it’s socially rewarded).
Now, suppose the norm is accepted. Should A be socially punished for deviating from it? If not, why not? Well, in practice, what often happens in such a case is that A might be socially punished a little, but not a lot. You see, A believes that this norm should exist, and he advocates the norm, and he even admits that he is flawed in his deviation from it—these are praiseworthy behaviors, aren’t they?
But in this case A has gotten something for nothing. Talk is cheap; what does it cost A to speak as he does? And he gets praise for it! Everyone else, of course, must choose between conforming to the norm (which is costly in resources) and deviation (which is costly in social status). Unless, of course, they also advocate the norm, while admitting their own akrasia…
This is a bad outcome. It most rewards people whose words do not match their actions, and punishes those who honestly try to conform to all endorsed norms, and to advocate only that which they themselves do; it punishes integrity.
Of course, it is likely that in some cases, a person might believe that something is genuinely a good idea, which thing they genuinely would like to do themselves, and are trying, but failing, to do (for any of the reasons we might be tempted to fold into the umbrella of “akrasia”). It would be foolish to deny that this ever happens. Should they, then, be socially punished for advocating that thing?
Yes, of course they should. Not harshly, mind you! Just a little. Enough to serve as a small but noticeable cost; enough to discourage doing this often, doing this all the time, for many things; enough to prevent anyone from gaining a great deal of social approval costlessly; enough to ensure that people advocate—of those things which they themselves fail to do—only those few which they really believe in—enough to take the status hit for the minor hypocrisy. This is the good outcome.
That is one sort of hypocrisy scenario. Of course there are many other kinds. Similar logic applies, I think, to almost all, if not indeed all, of them.
The thing to understand is that the exact way in which hostile-agenthood translates into relative benefit and relative harm, is often very subtle; and it is often very difficult to sort out directly. Furthermore, it is often not only difficult, but socially unacceptable, to question, to attempt to discover, to take certain actions aimed at ascertaining, whether any such thing is taking place. The hypocrisy norm sidesteps this. It is a generalized defense. It is, computationally (so to speak) as well as socially, tremendously cheaper than the alternative. It is also flexible: it can be varied in strength, in accordance with the degree of judged hypocrisy (it does come in degrees, you know).
(A parallel may be drawn with “appearance of impropriety” norms—which, I have noticed, seem also to be in disfavor in rationalist communities; and more’s the pity. Rejecting such norms drastically lowers resistance to certain classes of exploits—exploits which, indeed, seem to be more common in “our sorts” of communities than elsewhere.)
To what extent do you think there is still a disagreement between us, if I’m in agreement about the rule
8. “If it’s a conversation about norms, and the hypocrite is making an implicit status claim with their words, noticing the hypocrisy should counter-indicate the norm fairly strongly and also detract from the status of the hypocrite.”
I know we have pending points unrelated to that (IE, the status of #6), but it seems like bringing out the distinction of #8 may change the conversation. Certainly I was ignoring that distinction before. So, does your position on the disagreement about #6 change, with that in mind?
If not, my response to the scenarios which you mention above is that (unless I’m mistaken) they fall under #8, so it seems like I don’t need anything like #6 to get them right.
The problem with your #8 is that it’s too specific. What you seem to be doing here is taking a fairly general analytical framework, extracting two specific conclusions from it, and then replacing the framework with the conclusions. This is, of course, problematic for several reasons:
The conclusions in question won’t always hold. Note that inserting qualifiers like “fairly strongly” (and otherwise making explicit the idea that the conclusions are not an in-all-cases thing) doesn’t fix the problem, because without the framework, you don’t have a way of re-generating the conclusions, nor of determing whether they hold in any given case.
There could be (indeed, are likely to be) other conclusions which one may draw from said analytical framework, beyond the ones you’ve enumerated. (Turning an algorithm or heuristic into a lookup table is always problematic for this reason—how sure are you that you’ve enumerated all the input-output pairings?)
Because the analytic framework is itself only a heuristic (as we have discussed elsethread), it’s dangerous to elevate any particular conclusions it generates to the status of independent rules (or even heuristics); it obscures the heuristic nature of the generating framework. In this case, the specific problem is that #6 is highly amenable to having its output affected by other things that we know about the agent in question (i.e., the alleged hypocrite), in various fairly straightforward ways; whereas with your #8, it’s not really clear how to apply case-specific knowledge to modify the given conclusions (and so, if we do so at all, we’re likely to do it in an ad-hoc and imprecise manner—some sort of crude “social status override”, perhaps).
Of course, your #8 is certainly a good distillation of a particular sort of quite common hypocrisy-related issue. But beware of attempting to replace the generalized anti-hypocrisy norm with it, for the reasons I’ve given.
One thing that I’d like to mention here, that may help clarify some of our disagreement, is the following (which, perhaps, would better fit a different subthread of this conversation, but I’m not quite up to the task of finding the perfect place for it, at the moment)…
You’ve mentioned “high-trust spaces” (or similar language) several times now, and my response has been, essentially, that (to a first approximation), such things do not exist. Let me expand on that a bit.
If you define a “high-trust space” as a social context which does not require an anti-hypocrisy norm in order to function well—i.e., have mostly honest, mostly cooperative, mostly effective, positive-sum interactions between its members—then, indeed, I maintain that such things don’t exist (excluding close-knit family/friends groups, as I’ve noted).
However, what I think absolutely does exist is “high-trust spaces” in a different sense: social contexts which function well (in the sense just given) because they have a strong anti-hypocrisy norm (plus other reasons, of course).
Given this, I view the generalized anti-hypocrisy norm as a sort of “locks keep honest people honest” mechanism. A high-trust space remains high-trust by virtue of such mechanisms, which allow it to attract and retain people of high integrity, and repel and expel people of low integrity. Thus, observing that a social context exhibits high trust, and deciding that therefore no anti-hypocrisy norm is needed there, is a drastic misunderstanding of the direction of causation—and is likely to have unfortunate consequences for that social context, going forward.
What you seem to be doing here is taking a fairly general analytical framework, extracting two specific conclusions from it, and then replacing the framework with the conclusions.
I agree with your remarks about this general pattern, but the mitigating factor here is that when a powerful heuristic generates conclusions in specific cases which are clearly very wrong, it is useful to refine the framework. That’s what I’m trying to do here. Your objection is that my refinement throws the baby out with the bathwater. Fine—then where’s the baby? I currently see cause for #8, but you see #8 as neglecting a bunch of other useful stuff which comes from the general anti-hypocrisy norm. Can you point to some other useful things which don’t come from #8 alone?
But, perhaps it is premature to have a “where’s the baby?” conversation, because you are still saying “where’s the bathwater?” IE, you don’t see need to throw anything out at all.
Because the analytic framework is itself only a heuristic (as we have discussed elsethread), it’s dangerous to elevate any particular conclusions it generates to the status of independent rules (or even heuristics); it obscures the heuristic nature of the generating framework.
Maybe it’s not very cruxy, but this part didn’t make sense to me. If it’s dangerous to elevate #8 to the status of a heuristic because it might be taken as a rigid rule, isn’t it similarly dangerous to elevate general anti-hypocrisy to the level of heuristic for fear of it becoming rigid? That’s basically my whole schtick here—that the general norm seems to create a lot of specific behaviors which are silly upon closer inspection. Your argument in the above paragraph seems to be begging some kind of assumption which gives the general norm a radically different status than any more specific variations we are discussing. Maybe it does require a radically different status, but, that seems like the subject under debate rather than something to be assumed.
If you define a “high-trust space” as a social context which does not require an anti-hypocrisy norm in order to function well—i.e., have mostly honest, mostly cooperative, mostly effective, positive-sum interactions between its members—then, indeed, I maintain that such things don’t exist (excluding close-knit family/friends groups, as I’ve noted).
However, what I think absolutely does exist is “high-trust spaces” in a different sense: social contexts which function well (in the sense just given) because they have a strong anti-hypocrisy norm (plus other reasons, of course).
Given this, I view the generalized anti-hypocrisy norm as a sort of “locks keep honest people honest” mechanism.
My argument was an either-or, stating why I didn’t see the norm as useful in high-trust or low-trust situations. But I agree that I have to address the case where the norm is useful precisely because its existence prevents the sort of cases where it would be needed.
But, to this I’d currently reply that I don’t see what’s captured by the general norm and not by #8. So the baby/bathwater discussion seems most useful at the moment:
(if we can think of ways forward) re-starting the conversation on #6, which gets at some of the cases where I think anti-hypocrisy yields conclusions that are wrong and harmful. Specifically, I claim that in many cases in my recent experience, people discounted their own advice due to anti-hypocrisy heuristic; I noticed this; I noticed that I myself had updated against their advice; and, none of this really seemed to make any sense in context. Sometimes advice is really straightforward, has obvious and verifiable reasons for being good advice, is easy for the listener to follow, and is hypocritical.
Or, otherwise, can you illustrate positive use-cases which fall outside of #8?
I note that your response is not what I expected—I would have sooner expected you to defend the position that #8 implies the entire norm because all discussions are actually veiled discussions about norms (IE, you can’t really separate advice from status games, good ideas always have “should”-nature, etc).
Also, I want to call out progress which has occurred in this discussion, lest it seem like an interminable argument:
We have done a lot of refinement of what could be meant by anti-hypocrisy norms (or their negation).
I now understand that you don’t mean that we should always call out hypocrisy, which was at one point the main thing I was arguing against.
We agree on how these cases should be handled, if not on the underlying heuristics at play.
I think I might just agree with the status version of “flinching away from hypocrisy”. IE, if it’s a conversation about norms, and the hypocrite is making an implicit status claim with their words, noticing the hypocrisy should counter-indicate the norm fairly strongly and also detract from the status of the hypocrite.
(I’ll think about it more, and probably put an addendum at the end of the post calling out this and other distinctions which have been raised.)
Having re-read your comment, I am not actually sure which part of it you’re referring to. Would you mind quoting the relevant bits? (And maybe paraphrasing/summarizing them, also, because the part of your comment that I think you might mean read to me as rather confused—which probably means that I didn’t understand it.)
As to the inferences you list—I wouldn’t endorse any of them either, not because I think they’re wrong per se, but because they miss the point. (#4 comes the closest, perhaps, to being relevant.) Rather, I would say:
6. hypocrisy ⇒ hypocrite is to be treated as a hostile agent for the purpose of evaluating their words in this context
In other words, having uncovered our interlocutor’s hypocrisy, we immediately discard any assumption that the intent behind their words is either (a) as it appears on the surface, or (b) friendly to us. Instead, we now assume that the hypocrite’s words have a purpose that is self-serving (possibly at our expense, though without harming us being the explicit goal), or actively hostile, or both. (Certainly the former is likely to be much more common than the latter, in any but the most toxic and dysfunctional social environments.)
Now, having made this assumption, what can we say about your inferences #1–5?
Are the hypocrite’s claims wrong? Perhaps, perhaps not. What’s important is that the fact that the hypocrite is making said claims cannot be reliable evidence of their truth—as it would have been, under the (now-discarded) assumption that the hypocrite is a friendly agent, who has honest and honorable intentions toward us (and thus would not deliberately lie, and would in fact make an effort to speak truth as he sees it).
This is covered under #1.
Blameworthiness and praiseworthiness are moral judgments, which may be made only relative to some moral framework. Whether your preferred moral framework judges the hypocrite to be blameworthy, or praiseworthy, or neither, is not an inference, but a judgment. Given the facts of the matter, the judgment is up to you (that is, up to each of us, who deals with the hypocrite).
Whether the hypocrite should be viewed with suspicion in general, on the basis of the decision to treat them as a hostile agent in this context, is an interesting question, and not an easy one to answer. Much of what we do is contextual; the fundamental attribution error is, after all, an error. On the other hand, personality traits are fairly stable across contexts. This is a larger question, I think, and goes somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion. (However, I’d be willing to continue discussing it if you think it’s more important than the other aspects of this issue.)
This disjunction seems incoherent, given that one operand is a factual claim and the other is a moral judgment. If I misunderstood your meaning here, please rephrase or clarify.
Finally—
But I don’t think we should set that question aside; it seems to me to be of the greatest importance. For the record, I think that it is possible to escape these dynamics—but it is much more difficult than you appear to believe. It requires a very great degree of “treating the other person’s well-being, success, autonomy, happiness, etc., as tantamount to your own”. That is the kind of thing you find in (functional, well-adjusted, happy) immediately families, or close-knit groups of friends—but not in any wider social context. (No, subscribing to a moral philosophy which claims to consist of treating others’ happiness as equivalent to your own, most emphatically does not suffice to satisfy the criterion.)
I’m not sure about that. You are talking about escaping these dynamics, whereas I am more talking about living with them. You think(?) an anti-hypocrisy norm helps to escape the dynamic, whereas I don’t. It isn’t clear to me who thinks they are easier to escape.
I think the main tools for escaping them are forgiving tit-for-tat and shared goals. “Forgiving tit-for-tat” means extending others slightly more trust than they extend you (to hopefully drag things toward a positive dynamic). Shared goals are a powerful, but also dangerous (can involve cult-like dynamics).
I absolutely don’t think that an anti-hypocrisy norm helps to escape the dynamic. I already said what lets you escape the dynamic—and in such situations as I outlined, one needs no such norms; they are operative, of course, but they’re not really what stops hostile behavior. It’s simply that such behavior generally doesn’t take place, in such contexts.
It seems clear to me that you think these dynamics are easier to escape than I do. “Living with” the described dynamics is precisely what I am talking about. That’s what the anti-hypocrisy norm is for. Neither “forgiving tit-for-tat” nor shared goals help very much, in my view. They are beneficial in their own right, for other reasons, but you absolutely still need the norm against hypocrisy.
Hmmmm. I almost want to agree with you on #6. I wrote up about half of a response based on agreeing about #6. But, I can’t quite agree. I don’t actually infer all that just from a divergence between words and actions, and I think it would be a bad idea to have it on that trigger.
I do agree with something close to #6. I would think of it as “inferring that I’m dealing with face culture”. Inferring that words mean less that they say, that there’s a social ritual going on. Motives and beliefs are being stated according to the rules of the game, not according to truth. My disagreement with #6 is that I don’t trigger it based on a divergence between words and actions. There are other definitions of “hypocrite” which I do trigger it on, like the definition proposed by Lukas_Gloor, or (less certainly) hypocrisy with the added proviso mentioned by Dagon. There are also a lot of other subtle or not-so-subtle hints which trigger this for me.
But I suspect we have a larger disagreement over some stuff beyond #6. In particular, when applying my version of #6, I basically never call it out. So, we can consider the following:
7. Hypocrisy ⇒ call out hypocrisy
Every time I have applied #6 and then tried to apply #7, things have gone rather poorly for me. This is why I said, of an immune response against hypocrisy:
I was (and still am) interpreting your “immune response” as involving #7. Is that accurate?
I don’t agree that this is close to my #6 at all. Again, I think that your attempt to circumscribe what I’m saying, and to claim that it’s an artifact of some specific sort of “culture” that you can name, and set apart from some other contexts with a different culture, is misguided.
As far as “calling out” hypocrisy goes, well, that’s as may be. Your track record with calling out hypocrisy does not seem implausible to me, certainly. But then, I never suggested that calling anything out is strictly necessary. It may be helpful sometimes, but not always, and perhaps not even often. That, however, is different from trying to change the norm against it…
It is not, as you see. Calling out hypocrisy may be part of the manifestation of the immune response in any given situation, or it may not be. It depends on many things. (For one thing, callouts may take many forms. For example, they make take the form of subtle, and deniable—perhaps even apophatic—implications. If there’s a solidly entrenched, universally shared norm against hypocrisy, then such a gentle approach can serve quite well. In such social contexts, one prefers to avoid the label of hypocrite even if one is able, after all, to defend against the charge; the ideal is not only blamelessness, but manifest, unimpeachable blamelessness. The “appearance of impropriety” parallel may once again be drawn.)
I certainly disagree with this. Again, I just don’t buy the “benign hypocrisy” idea. (It is, in any case, socially corrosive even if “true” in any given case. I put “true” in scare quotes, of course, because whether to categorize the behavior as “benign hypocrisy” is precisely at issue; what’s actually true is some empirical facts of the matter.)
[emphasis mine]
I agree that the bolded part is a danger, but it’s not so great as a danger as you suggest, and not nearly as great a danger as the reverse. Partly this is because I think that you exaggerate, w.r.t. the un-bolded part of the quote. Putting on blinders is not at all the only way to cope!
[how did you get nested quotations to work? I can’t seem to manage that...]
I think this disagreement probably was an illusion generated by our differing definitions of hypocrisy:
So I think we agree that there are benign divergences of between words and actions.
I don’t know what your definition of hypocrisy is to evaluate whether we disagree beyond that.
GreaterWrong uses a raw Markdown editor, where you can do nested quotations in the usual Markdown way. (If you don’t know or recall the format of the quotation markup, you can use the quotation button on the GUIEdit toolbar: select the first level of the quote, click the button; select the quoted text plus the next level, click the button; etc.)
As for the rest of your comment—see my reply in the other thread. I don’t think there is any difference in our definitions of hypocrisy.
I meant for the immediately following part of that comment to serve as a restatement of the bit I was most interested in your response to, IE,
That was intended as an elaboration of the part where I reacted to your examples by (briefly) stating how I thought there were better things to call people out on in each case.
(I’ll try to reply to everything else later, thanks for continuing the discussion!)
I see, thanks.
So, the problem with that line of reasoning is that it would work if hypocrisy were sometimes a co-occurrence of a bad thing, but sometimes of a good or neutral thing. But it does not seem that way to me—not to any degree that matters, anyway. I do not take seriously the “akrasia” argument.
Let’s consider a scenario or two:
Scenario 1a
A: Everyone ought to do X.
B: Do you do X?
A: Oh, no, I don’t do X, but really I should. Akrasia, you know.
Scenario 1b
A: Everyone ought to do X. I don’t do X myself, but I really ought to. I’m trying, but failing. Akrasia, you know.
Scenarios 1a and 1b are slightly different. In scenario 1a, A could’ve gotten away with advocating X without his hypocrisy being revealed. That is strictly more blameworthy than scenario 1b, where A admits the disconnect between his words and his actions, but insists that it’s a failure of willpower (or whatever it is that “akrasia” in fact maps to).
Notice what is happening: A is introducing (or seeking to introduce) a new norm of behavior. Should this norm be accepted, conforming to the norm will be socially rewarded, and deviation from the norm will be socially punished. Of course, conforming to the norm is costly (which is a large part of why it’s socially rewarded).
Now, suppose the norm is accepted. Should A be socially punished for deviating from it? If not, why not? Well, in practice, what often happens in such a case is that A might be socially punished a little, but not a lot. You see, A believes that this norm should exist, and he advocates the norm, and he even admits that he is flawed in his deviation from it—these are praiseworthy behaviors, aren’t they?
But in this case A has gotten something for nothing. Talk is cheap; what does it cost A to speak as he does? And he gets praise for it! Everyone else, of course, must choose between conforming to the norm (which is costly in resources) and deviation (which is costly in social status). Unless, of course, they also advocate the norm, while admitting their own akrasia…
This is a bad outcome. It most rewards people whose words do not match their actions, and punishes those who honestly try to conform to all endorsed norms, and to advocate only that which they themselves do; it punishes integrity.
Of course, it is likely that in some cases, a person might believe that something is genuinely a good idea, which thing they genuinely would like to do themselves, and are trying, but failing, to do (for any of the reasons we might be tempted to fold into the umbrella of “akrasia”). It would be foolish to deny that this ever happens. Should they, then, be socially punished for advocating that thing?
Yes, of course they should. Not harshly, mind you! Just a little. Enough to serve as a small but noticeable cost; enough to discourage doing this often, doing this all the time, for many things; enough to prevent anyone from gaining a great deal of social approval costlessly; enough to ensure that people advocate—of those things which they themselves fail to do—only those few which they really believe in—enough to take the status hit for the minor hypocrisy. This is the good outcome.
That is one sort of hypocrisy scenario. Of course there are many other kinds. Similar logic applies, I think, to almost all, if not indeed all, of them.
The thing to understand is that the exact way in which hostile-agenthood translates into relative benefit and relative harm, is often very subtle; and it is often very difficult to sort out directly. Furthermore, it is often not only difficult, but socially unacceptable, to question, to attempt to discover, to take certain actions aimed at ascertaining, whether any such thing is taking place. The hypocrisy norm sidesteps this. It is a generalized defense. It is, computationally (so to speak) as well as socially, tremendously cheaper than the alternative. It is also flexible: it can be varied in strength, in accordance with the degree of judged hypocrisy (it does come in degrees, you know).
(A parallel may be drawn with “appearance of impropriety” norms—which, I have noticed, seem also to be in disfavor in rationalist communities; and more’s the pity. Rejecting such norms drastically lowers resistance to certain classes of exploits—exploits which, indeed, seem to be more common in “our sorts” of communities than elsewhere.)
To what extent do you think there is still a disagreement between us, if I’m in agreement about the rule
8. “If it’s a conversation about norms, and the hypocrite is making an implicit status claim with their words, noticing the hypocrisy should counter-indicate the norm fairly strongly and also detract from the status of the hypocrite.”
I know we have pending points unrelated to that (IE, the status of #6), but it seems like bringing out the distinction of #8 may change the conversation. Certainly I was ignoring that distinction before. So, does your position on the disagreement about #6 change, with that in mind?
If not, my response to the scenarios which you mention above is that (unless I’m mistaken) they fall under #8, so it seems like I don’t need anything like #6 to get them right.
The problem with your #8 is that it’s too specific. What you seem to be doing here is taking a fairly general analytical framework, extracting two specific conclusions from it, and then replacing the framework with the conclusions. This is, of course, problematic for several reasons:
The conclusions in question won’t always hold. Note that inserting qualifiers like “fairly strongly” (and otherwise making explicit the idea that the conclusions are not an in-all-cases thing) doesn’t fix the problem, because without the framework, you don’t have a way of re-generating the conclusions, nor of determing whether they hold in any given case.
There could be (indeed, are likely to be) other conclusions which one may draw from said analytical framework, beyond the ones you’ve enumerated. (Turning an algorithm or heuristic into a lookup table is always problematic for this reason—how sure are you that you’ve enumerated all the input-output pairings?)
Because the analytic framework is itself only a heuristic (as we have discussed elsethread), it’s dangerous to elevate any particular conclusions it generates to the status of independent rules (or even heuristics); it obscures the heuristic nature of the generating framework. In this case, the specific problem is that #6 is highly amenable to having its output affected by other things that we know about the agent in question (i.e., the alleged hypocrite), in various fairly straightforward ways; whereas with your #8, it’s not really clear how to apply case-specific knowledge to modify the given conclusions (and so, if we do so at all, we’re likely to do it in an ad-hoc and imprecise manner—some sort of crude “social status override”, perhaps).
Of course, your #8 is certainly a good distillation of a particular sort of quite common hypocrisy-related issue. But beware of attempting to replace the generalized anti-hypocrisy norm with it, for the reasons I’ve given.
One thing that I’d like to mention here, that may help clarify some of our disagreement, is the following (which, perhaps, would better fit a different subthread of this conversation, but I’m not quite up to the task of finding the perfect place for it, at the moment)…
You’ve mentioned “high-trust spaces” (or similar language) several times now, and my response has been, essentially, that (to a first approximation), such things do not exist. Let me expand on that a bit.
If you define a “high-trust space” as a social context which does not require an anti-hypocrisy norm in order to function well—i.e., have mostly honest, mostly cooperative, mostly effective, positive-sum interactions between its members—then, indeed, I maintain that such things don’t exist (excluding close-knit family/friends groups, as I’ve noted).
However, what I think absolutely does exist is “high-trust spaces” in a different sense: social contexts which function well (in the sense just given) because they have a strong anti-hypocrisy norm (plus other reasons, of course).
Given this, I view the generalized anti-hypocrisy norm as a sort of “locks keep honest people honest” mechanism. A high-trust space remains high-trust by virtue of such mechanisms, which allow it to attract and retain people of high integrity, and repel and expel people of low integrity. Thus, observing that a social context exhibits high trust, and deciding that therefore no anti-hypocrisy norm is needed there, is a drastic misunderstanding of the direction of causation—and is likely to have unfortunate consequences for that social context, going forward.
I agree with your remarks about this general pattern, but the mitigating factor here is that when a powerful heuristic generates conclusions in specific cases which are clearly very wrong, it is useful to refine the framework. That’s what I’m trying to do here. Your objection is that my refinement throws the baby out with the bathwater. Fine—then where’s the baby? I currently see cause for #8, but you see #8 as neglecting a bunch of other useful stuff which comes from the general anti-hypocrisy norm. Can you point to some other useful things which don’t come from #8 alone?
But, perhaps it is premature to have a “where’s the baby?” conversation, because you are still saying “where’s the bathwater?” IE, you don’t see need to throw anything out at all.
Maybe it’s not very cruxy, but this part didn’t make sense to me. If it’s dangerous to elevate #8 to the status of a heuristic because it might be taken as a rigid rule, isn’t it similarly dangerous to elevate general anti-hypocrisy to the level of heuristic for fear of it becoming rigid? That’s basically my whole schtick here—that the general norm seems to create a lot of specific behaviors which are silly upon closer inspection. Your argument in the above paragraph seems to be begging some kind of assumption which gives the general norm a radically different status than any more specific variations we are discussing. Maybe it does require a radically different status, but, that seems like the subject under debate rather than something to be assumed.
My argument was an either-or, stating why I didn’t see the norm as useful in high-trust or low-trust situations. But I agree that I have to address the case where the norm is useful precisely because its existence prevents the sort of cases where it would be needed.
But, to this I’d currently reply that I don’t see what’s captured by the general norm and not by #8. So the baby/bathwater discussion seems most useful at the moment:
(if we can think of ways forward) re-starting the conversation on #6, which gets at some of the cases where I think anti-hypocrisy yields conclusions that are wrong and harmful. Specifically, I claim that in many cases in my recent experience, people discounted their own advice due to anti-hypocrisy heuristic; I noticed this; I noticed that I myself had updated against their advice; and, none of this really seemed to make any sense in context. Sometimes advice is really straightforward, has obvious and verifiable reasons for being good advice, is easy for the listener to follow, and is hypocritical.
Or, otherwise, can you illustrate positive use-cases which fall outside of #8?
I note that your response is not what I expected—I would have sooner expected you to defend the position that #8 implies the entire norm because all discussions are actually veiled discussions about norms (IE, you can’t really separate advice from status games, good ideas always have “should”-nature, etc).
Also, I want to call out progress which has occurred in this discussion, lest it seem like an interminable argument:
We have done a lot of refinement of what could be meant by anti-hypocrisy norms (or their negation).
I now understand that you don’t mean that we should always call out hypocrisy, which was at one point the main thing I was arguing against.
We agree on how these cases should be handled, if not on the underlying heuristics at play.
I think I might just agree with the status version of “flinching away from hypocrisy”. IE, if it’s a conversation about norms, and the hypocrite is making an implicit status claim with their words, noticing the hypocrisy should counter-indicate the norm fairly strongly and also detract from the status of the hypocrite.
(I’ll think about it more, and probably put an addendum at the end of the post calling out this and other distinctions which have been raised.)