I agree that the way I phrased that comment was wrong. There’s a fairly narrow concept I was trying to point at, which is easily confused with other concepts.
(this is also a domain that I still feel overall confused about, and my main claim in the current conversational zeitgeist is that “naively pushing the ‘lets use words for their literal meanings without regard for connotation’” is likely to cause unnecessary damage, and that getting to a world where we can rationally talk about many cognitive errors in public requires a solid foundation of game theory, and common knowledge about how to re-implement it)
I edited my original statement to say “epistemically cooperate”, which is what I meant. If I’m working at a marketing firm and people regularly lie to customers and there’s office politics that involve lying to each other all the time, then I probably wouldn’t expect epistemic cooperation at all, but I would expect various other kinds of cooperation.
Also note the asterix after “consciously lies*”. There’s lots of small lies which aren’t primarily about deception so much as social protocol, and well, I actually think everyone DOES know (mostly) that “I can’t make the event, I’m busy” is code for “I can’t make it for a reason that I don’t want to share with you”.
(This does still mean that I can’t epistemically cooperate with people who do that as easily. A thing I like about the Berkeley rationalist community is that it’s more socially acceptable to say “sorry, can’t make it. I’m too depressed” or “too over-socialled”, which in some cases allows for better cooperation on what activities you can do. For example “oh, well how about instead of going to the party we just silently read next to each other”)
But part of what I’m pushing back against with this post (and series of ongoing conversations), of naively using words with heavy connotations, as if they did not have those connotations.
My sense is when [most] people actually use the phrase “Bob lied”, they mean something closer to “Bob had an affair and then lied about it” or “Bob told me the car had 10,000 miles on it but actually it had 100,000 miles on it.”
When Bob says “I can’t make it to the party, I’m sick”, or “this project is going to save the world!”, people instead either don’t say anything about it at all, or call it a “white lie”, or use different words entirely like “Bob exaggerated.”
The point of this post is to serve as a pointer towards ways we can improve clear communication, without trampling over chesterton fences.
[brief note for now: I agree with your point about “if you gain 40 points of self awareness it doesn’t make sense to penalize that.” I have more thoughts about it but will be awhile before writing it up]
I agree that the way I phrased that comment was wrong. There’s a fairly narrow concept I was trying to point at, which is easily confused with other concepts.
(this is also a domain that I still feel overall confused about, and my main claim in the current conversational zeitgeist is that “naively pushing the ‘lets use words for their literal meanings without regard for connotation’” is likely to cause unnecessary damage, and that getting to a world where we can rationally talk about many cognitive errors in public requires a solid foundation of game theory, and common knowledge about how to re-implement it)
I edited my original statement to say “epistemically cooperate”, which is what I meant. If I’m working at a marketing firm and people regularly lie to customers and there’s office politics that involve lying to each other all the time, then I probably wouldn’t expect epistemic cooperation at all, but I would expect various other kinds of cooperation.
Also note the asterix after “consciously lies*”. There’s lots of small lies which aren’t primarily about deception so much as social protocol, and well, I actually think everyone DOES know (mostly) that “I can’t make the event, I’m busy” is code for “I can’t make it for a reason that I don’t want to share with you”.
(This does still mean that I can’t epistemically cooperate with people who do that as easily. A thing I like about the Berkeley rationalist community is that it’s more socially acceptable to say “sorry, can’t make it. I’m too depressed” or “too over-socialled”, which in some cases allows for better cooperation on what activities you can do. For example “oh, well how about instead of going to the party we just silently read next to each other”)
But part of what I’m pushing back against with this post (and series of ongoing conversations), of naively using words with heavy connotations, as if they did not have those connotations.
My sense is when [most] people actually use the phrase “Bob lied”, they mean something closer to “Bob had an affair and then lied about it” or “Bob told me the car had 10,000 miles on it but actually it had 100,000 miles on it.”
When Bob says “I can’t make it to the party, I’m sick”, or “this project is going to save the world!”, people instead either don’t say anything about it at all, or call it a “white lie”, or use different words entirely like “Bob exaggerated.”
The point of this post is to serve as a pointer towards ways we can improve clear communication, without trampling over chesterton fences.
[brief note for now: I agree with your point about “if you gain 40 points of self awareness it doesn’t make sense to penalize that.” I have more thoughts about it but will be awhile before writing it up]