I haven’t thought about this topic much and don’t have a strong opinion here yet, but I wanted to chime in with some personal experience which makes me suspect there might be distinct categories:
I worked in a workplace where lying was commonplace, conscious, and system 2. Clients asking if we could do something were told “yes, we’ve already got that feature (we hadn’t) and we already have several clients successfully using that (we hadn’t).” Others were invited to be part an “existing beta program” alongside others just like them (in fact, they would have been the very first). When I objected, I was told “no one wants to be the first, so you have to say that.” Another time, they denied that they ever lied, but they did, and it was more than motivated cognition. There is a very vast gulf between “we’ve built this feature already” and “we haven’t even asked the engineers what they think” and no amount of motivated cognition bridges it. It’s less work than faking data, but it’s no more subtle.
Motivated cognition is bad, but some people are really very willing to abandon truth for their own benefit in a completely adversarial way. The motivated cognition comes in to justify why what they’re doing is okay, but they have a very clear model of the falsehoods they’re presenting (they must in order to protect them).
I think they lie to themselves that they’re not lying (so that if you search their thoughts, they never think “I’m lying”), but they are consciously aware of the different stories they have told different people, and the ones that actually constrain their expectations. And it’s such a practiced way of being that even involving System 2, it’s fluid. Each context activating which story to tell, etc., in a way that appears natural from the outside. Maybe that’s offline S2, online S1? I’m not sure. I think people who interact like that have a very different relationship with the truth than do most people on LW.
I haven’t thought about this topic much and don’t have a strong opinion here yet, but I wanted to chime in with some personal experience which makes me suspect there might be distinct categories:
I worked in a workplace where lying was commonplace, conscious, and system 2. Clients asking if we could do something were told “yes, we’ve already got that feature (we hadn’t) and we already have several clients successfully using that (we hadn’t).” Others were invited to be part an “existing beta program” alongside others just like them (in fact, they would have been the very first). When I objected, I was told “no one wants to be the first, so you have to say that.” Another time, they denied that they ever lied, but they did, and it was more than motivated cognition. There is a very vast gulf between “we’ve built this feature already” and “we haven’t even asked the engineers what they think” and no amount of motivated cognition bridges it. It’s less work than faking data, but it’s no more subtle.
Motivated cognition is bad, but some people are really very willing to abandon truth for their own benefit in a completely adversarial way. The motivated cognition comes in to justify why what they’re doing is okay, but they have a very clear model of the falsehoods they’re presenting (they must in order to protect them).
I think they lie to themselves that they’re not lying (so that if you search their thoughts, they never think “I’m lying”), but they are consciously aware of the different stories they have told different people, and the ones that actually constrain their expectations. And it’s such a practiced way of being that even involving System 2, it’s fluid. Each context activating which story to tell, etc., in a way that appears natural from the outside. Maybe that’s offline S2, online S1? I’m not sure. I think people who interact like that have a very different relationship with the truth than do most people on LW.