For me, one of the key insights for thinking about this kind of situation was reading David Chapman’s In the Cells of the Eggplant. In short, even with common knowledge that a group of people believe that Truth and Honesty are important, there will still be (usually less severe) problems of accurate communication (especially of estimations and intentions and memories and beliefs) that at least rhyme with the problems Quakers have in dealing with Actors. Commitment to truth is not always sufficient even for the literal minded.
The nurse/shot example is an interesting one. In an ideal world the thing the nurse would communicate is, “There will be a little bit of pain, but you need to hold still anyway, because that little bit of pain is not important compared to getting the shot, plus you need to get used to little bits of inescapable pain in life, and my time is more valuable than yours.” This...is not actually something you can convey to a little kid, at least not quickly, nor would most generally react well if you did. It would plausibly be a disaster for the pediatric offices everywhere if you tried. Some kids can learn to hold still while knowing a shot hurts when they’re still very young, while some grown adults still can’t, so it’s not like there’s an age when a nurse who barely knows you can reliably change their approach.
English words (or words in any natural language) genuinely don’t have precise enough meanings for use as Parseltongue-analogs. This is tied into A Human’s Guide to Words, and also into what Terry Pratchett was pointing at in The Hogfather.
You could try to create artificial languages that do, and speak only in them when aiming for truth. Math and code are real-world examples, but there are useful concepts we don’t know how to express with them (yet?). Historically every advance in the range of things we can express in math has been very powerful. Raikoth’s Kadhamic is a fictional one that would be incredibly useful if it existed.
For me, one of the key insights for thinking about this kind of situation was reading David Chapman’s In the Cells of the Eggplant. In short, even with common knowledge that a group of people believe that Truth and Honesty are important, there will still be (usually less severe) problems of accurate communication (especially of estimations and intentions and memories and beliefs) that at least rhyme with the problems Quakers have in dealing with Actors. Commitment to truth is not always sufficient even for the literal minded.
The nurse/shot example is an interesting one. In an ideal world the thing the nurse would communicate is, “There will be a little bit of pain, but you need to hold still anyway, because that little bit of pain is not important compared to getting the shot, plus you need to get used to little bits of inescapable pain in life, and my time is more valuable than yours.” This...is not actually something you can convey to a little kid, at least not quickly, nor would most generally react well if you did. It would plausibly be a disaster for the pediatric offices everywhere if you tried. Some kids can learn to hold still while knowing a shot hurts when they’re still very young, while some grown adults still can’t, so it’s not like there’s an age when a nurse who barely knows you can reliably change their approach.
English words (or words in any natural language) genuinely don’t have precise enough meanings for use as Parseltongue-analogs. This is tied into A Human’s Guide to Words, and also into what Terry Pratchett was pointing at in The Hogfather.
You could try to create artificial languages that do, and speak only in them when aiming for truth. Math and code are real-world examples, but there are useful concepts we don’t know how to express with them (yet?). Historically every advance in the range of things we can express in math has been very powerful. Raikoth’s Kadhamic is a fictional one that would be incredibly useful if it existed.