1. Blatant Lies damage the intellectual social fabric less
Blatant Lies are, in some ways at least, less damaging than more confusing/confused lies (esp. lies that involve some mixture of motivated cognition, or which use bad reasoning to argue their point)
The reason for this is that blatant lies preserve the ability of the nearby social network to distinguish good and bad reasoning. If someone makes says something that is untrue, or makes a bad argument, but the untruth/bad-argument isn’t readily apparent, this can shift the overall discussion framework in a direction that normalizes bad reasoning.
This problem builds on itself over time. Once certain kinds of bad reasoning are normalized, they provide a framework that enables some kinds of “even worse” and eventually “not even wrong” reasoning.
2. Certain patterns of indignation are evidence about how trustworthy and cooperative a person is.
I think this quote mostly stands alone:
If you want to understand whether someone’s trying to deceive you, one thing to look for is how indignant they get when their honor is questioned. If they get angry instead of curious, that’s a bad sign. If they get angrier the more someone tries to explain—at least, if it’s an honest explanation—that’s a very bad sign.
On the other hand, if they try hard to be pinned down, to expose potential flaws in their position—if they actually change their behavior when called out, and try to reward their critics—that’s golden. Though of course there are fake versions of all of these.
There’s some nuances that this summary glosses over, which depend a bit on both simulacrum framework and some other background assumptions that I wasn’t sure I understood. But it looked like these are the two main points. Benquo does that all sound right?
(I think I agree with these two points, although I also think there are important facets of the territory that the characters don’t really address which changes some of the subtext).
An interesting thing about this post is that you have three characters, each of which has a subtly different frame and/or epistemic position, and each of who’s epistemic position seems (probably?) different from mine. The fact there are three subtly different frames is simultaneously pretty confusing but also helps illuminate some of the underlying frame differences.
(I think “how to communicate across very different frames” is a key group rationality question. So I think this was at least a good exercise, although probably not the best pedagogical technique to use all the time)
I started by attempting to just summarize the key points of the article, then found that I had track what each character knew or believed on every given sentence. I then switched to just separating the dialog into block quotes with a blow-by-blow about what I inferred each person believed.
I got around 1⁄3 of the way through before the branching tree of beliefs got too convoluted to track, but by that point I also felt roughly oriented around the overall point that was being made. I’m including the notes that I did take for posterity.
Starting in media res makes it a bit more confusing (I think the post would be better if it gave some context of what Mala, Noa and Olga were talking about at the beginning). But here is my attempt to fill in some of the gaps here.
...
Mala: But then why do people get so indignant about blatant lies?
Noa: You mean, indignant when others call out blatant lies? I see more of that, though they often accuse the person calling out the lie of being unduly harsh.
Mala: Sure, but you can’t deny—you’ve seen yourself—that people actually do get more indignant when they say that, than when they’re pointing out a subtle pattern of motivated reasoning. How do you explain that, if “blatant lie” isn’t a stronger accusation?
[From the bolded part, I assume Noa does not believe “blatant lie is a stronger accusation”, at least in some sense?]
At this moment I am unsure who is supposed to be getting indignant (the liar, the person accusing someone of lying, or the person hearing the accusation, or all three – each seems plausible to me, for different reasons)
Noa: I think I see the problem. A stronger accusation can mean an accusation of greater wrongdoing, or it can mean a better-founded accusation. Blatant lying is … well … blatant! If someone pretends not to see that, that’s terrible news about their ability or willingness to help detect deception.
From this, I infer:
Noa’s assumption is that if someone does not see something blatant, a likely explanation (most likely?) is that they are pretending not to see it. [or is possibly defining ‘pretending’ differently than I would].
(which is, in turn, evidence that they are either unable or unwilling to help detect deception)
I’m still slightly confused here, but my best guess is that Noa considers an accusation of blatant lying to not (necessarily?) be an accusation of greater wrongdoing, but to be a better founded accusation (since it should be clearer to more people that it was a lie)
Mala: But then the indignation is misplaced. Suppose Jer is talking with Horaha, trying to persuade him that their mutual acquaintance Narmer is behaving deceptively. Jer indignantly points out a blatant lie Narmer told. The proper target of the extra indignation due to blatancy is Horaha, not Narmer.
Noa: Who said otherwise?
Mala: Come on, you know that people get extra-indignant at the liar about blatant lies, despite your so far unsubstantiated claim that they are the best kind.
Ah. Now it looks like the title, “Blatant lies are the best kind!” was a statement uttered by Noa, presumably just before Mala’s opening line.
Ah, sorry, I thought that inference would be obvious by the time the reader started the second line of dialogue. Thanks for letting me know it wasn’t! I feel stuck between repeating the line with Noa’s name attached (which feels clunky to me), using a worse title, and the current situation.
Nod. A possible solution (slightly clunky but I think the sacrifice of poetry is well worth the clarity) is to begin with 1-2 sentences of scene-setting:
“A fictional dialog:Noa, Olga and Mala are discussion [social games and lying], when Noa makes the claim: ‘Blatant lies are the best kind.’”
An issue I run into with dialogs is keeping track of which character is saying what, especially when I don’t have a strong sense of who they are.
I ran into when *I* was recently constructing an anonymized (nonfictional) dialog. Someone suggested naming them after Game of Thrones characters who represented the sort of viewpoints they were expressing. That still felt too confusing. I later tried naming them “Frustratio” (who’s main characteristic was that he was frustrated) and “Mistakio” (who’s main characteristic is that Frustratio thought Mistakio made a mistake).
This wouldn’t work here, since the characters don’t especially have different main characteristics, just slightly different beliefs. But the status quo was a bit hard to follow.
I’m curious if it’s meant to be ambiguous who is indignant about what? I had to read it several times to figure that out (and then I didn’t write it down, and forgot it)
Those feel like important surface-level points, though I’d phrase the second one a bit differently. But the underlying models used to generate those claims are more of what I wanted to get across. Here are a couple pointers to the kinds of things I think are core content I was trying to work through an example of:
A clearer idea of how the different kinds of simulacrum relate to each other, and how some bring others into existence.
The interaction between speech’s denotative meaning, direct effects as an act, and indirect effects as a way of negotiating norms. (E.g. The way we argue for a point isn’t just about whether a claim is true or false, but also about how reasoning works. Expressing anger that someone’s violated a norm isn’t just a statement about the act, but about the norm, and about the knowability of the relation between the two.)
There are kinds of motivated distortions of thinking that are bad, not because there is or might be a direct victim of harm, but because they change what we’re doing when we’re talking, in a way that makes some kinds of important coordination much harder.
My attempted summary:
1. Blatant Lies damage the intellectual social fabric less
Blatant Lies are, in some ways at least, less damaging than more confusing/confused lies (esp. lies that involve some mixture of motivated cognition, or which use bad reasoning to argue their point)
The reason for this is that blatant lies preserve the ability of the nearby social network to distinguish good and bad reasoning. If someone makes says something that is untrue, or makes a bad argument, but the untruth/bad-argument isn’t readily apparent, this can shift the overall discussion framework in a direction that normalizes bad reasoning.
This problem builds on itself over time. Once certain kinds of bad reasoning are normalized, they provide a framework that enables some kinds of “even worse” and eventually “not even wrong” reasoning.
2. Certain patterns of indignation are evidence about how trustworthy and cooperative a person is.
I think this quote mostly stands alone:
There’s some nuances that this summary glosses over, which depend a bit on both simulacrum framework and some other background assumptions that I wasn’t sure I understood. But it looked like these are the two main points. Benquo does that all sound right?
(I think I agree with these two points, although I also think there are important facets of the territory that the characters don’t really address which changes some of the subtext).
Notes from my initial attempt at distillation:
An interesting thing about this post is that you have three characters, each of which has a subtly different frame and/or epistemic position, and each of who’s epistemic position seems (probably?) different from mine. The fact there are three subtly different frames is simultaneously pretty confusing but also helps illuminate some of the underlying frame differences.
(I think “how to communicate across very different frames” is a key group rationality question. So I think this was at least a good exercise, although probably not the best pedagogical technique to use all the time)
I started by attempting to just summarize the key points of the article, then found that I had track what each character knew or believed on every given sentence. I then switched to just separating the dialog into block quotes with a blow-by-blow about what I inferred each person believed.
I got around 1⁄3 of the way through before the branching tree of beliefs got too convoluted to track, but by that point I also felt roughly oriented around the overall point that was being made. I’m including the notes that I did take for posterity.
Starting in media res makes it a bit more confusing (I think the post would be better if it gave some context of what Mala, Noa and Olga were talking about at the beginning). But here is my attempt to fill in some of the gaps here.
...
[From the bolded part, I assume Noa does not believe “blatant lie is a stronger accusation”, at least in some sense?]
At this moment I am unsure who is supposed to be getting indignant (the liar, the person accusing someone of lying, or the person hearing the accusation, or all three – each seems plausible to me, for different reasons)
From this, I infer:
Noa’s assumption is that if someone does not see something blatant, a likely explanation (most likely?) is that they are pretending not to see it. [or is possibly defining ‘pretending’ differently than I would].
(which is, in turn, evidence that they are either unable or unwilling to help detect deception)
I’m still slightly confused here, but my best guess is that Noa considers an accusation of blatant lying to not (necessarily?) be an accusation of greater wrongdoing, but to be a better founded accusation (since it should be clearer to more people that it was a lie)
Ah. Now it looks like the title, “Blatant lies are the best kind!” was a statement uttered by Noa, presumably just before Mala’s opening line.
Ah, sorry, I thought that inference would be obvious by the time the reader started the second line of dialogue. Thanks for letting me know it wasn’t! I feel stuck between repeating the line with Noa’s name attached (which feels clunky to me), using a worse title, and the current situation.
You could have someone respond to the statement, and include the name of the person they’re addressing.
Nod. A possible solution (slightly clunky but I think the sacrifice of poetry is well worth the clarity) is to begin with 1-2 sentences of scene-setting:
“A fictional dialog: Noa, Olga and Mala are discussion [social games and lying], when Noa makes the claim: ‘Blatant lies are the best kind.’”
An issue I run into with dialogs is keeping track of which character is saying what, especially when I don’t have a strong sense of who they are.
I ran into when *I* was recently constructing an anonymized (nonfictional) dialog. Someone suggested naming them after Game of Thrones characters who represented the sort of viewpoints they were expressing. That still felt too confusing. I later tried naming them “Frustratio” (who’s main characteristic was that he was frustrated) and “Mistakio” (who’s main characteristic is that Frustratio thought Mistakio made a mistake).
This wouldn’t work here, since the characters don’t especially have different main characteristics, just slightly different beliefs. But the status quo was a bit hard to follow.
I’m curious if it’s meant to be ambiguous who is indignant about what? I had to read it several times to figure that out (and then I didn’t write it down, and forgot it)
No, I meant it to be straightforward. Oops!
Those feel like important surface-level points, though I’d phrase the second one a bit differently. But the underlying models used to generate those claims are more of what I wanted to get across. Here are a couple pointers to the kinds of things I think are core content I was trying to work through an example of:
A clearer idea of how the different kinds of simulacrum relate to each other, and how some bring others into existence.
The interaction between speech’s denotative meaning, direct effects as an act, and indirect effects as a way of negotiating norms. (E.g. The way we argue for a point isn’t just about whether a claim is true or false, but also about how reasoning works. Expressing anger that someone’s violated a norm isn’t just a statement about the act, but about the norm, and about the knowability of the relation between the two.)
There are kinds of motivated distortions of thinking that are bad, not because there is or might be a direct victim of harm, but because they change what we’re doing when we’re talking, in a way that makes some kinds of important coordination much harder.
Nod. I think I had (mostly) successfully heard those points, although not so cleanly that I could have described them easily.
Communicating underlying models is hard, and I appreciate the techniques employed here to aim at getting that across.