What is the rationalist position towards lying? Is it uniformly wrong and reprehensible? Lying can sometimes be a good way to optimize efficiency in achieving morally commendable, broadly altruistic goals. Not all people are necessarily equipped to handle the truth properly, in the best collective interest, or even in their own best interest.
[Question] Rationalist position towards lying?
There’s no “rationalist position” on questions like this. With some searching, you can find previous discussions about honesty and about “dark arts” of manipulation. There’s no consensus on whether nor when it’s justified.
There’s some agreement (or at least some speculation and not much objection) that most humans are best off with an honesty bias—both believing themselves to be and encouraging others to think them scrupulously honest. And that it’s much more effective and less costly (cognitively and emotionally) to align your behaviors and your identity than to try to separate them.
Some (including myself) think that the efficiency of good outcomes through lies is is easy to overestimate, and very often is easier or slightly less risky to the speaker while being actually worse for long-term outcomes. Not always, of course—that’s the impossibility of consequentialist morals—it’s just not possible for humans to calculate the probability distribution of effects beyond the trivial short-term ones. Leading to most humans strongly over-weighting short-term outcomes in their decisions.
Rationality isn’t the sort of thing that can take positions on things. But many prominent rationalist writers have discussed the subject, and in general, they take a very dim view of lying, in the usual meaning of the term. The relevant aphorism, originally from Steven Kaas and quoted in the sequences here:
There are corner cases; the classic thought experiment in philosophy is, if you were hiding Jews in your attic during WW2, and the Nazis came and asked if you were, you wouldn’t tell them about it (and wouldn’t glomarize). These are discussed here.
Rationalists also tend to generalize that to many cases which ordinary people wouldn’t consider to be lying, where self-awareness strips away excuses and offers a higher standard to aspire to. In particular, most people by default people follow a strategy where they deceive themselves, without knowing it, so they can pass those deceptive beliefs on to others (see: The Elephant in the Brain). We also hold a dimmer-than-usual view of statements that don’t try to refer to concrete facts at all, but serve other purposes; see posts on Simulacrum Levels for discussion of how that works and why it’s bad.
Since there is no consensus definition of rationality, there cannot be definitive answers to this type of question.
If you take rationality to be maximising utility, you’re still left with questions. Is it individual utility or collective utility? If it’s collective utility, what is the scope of the collective: the nation or the globe?
In my opinion, for each of these types of rationality, there are marginal circumstances where lying would be the most rational course of action. It’s hard to avoid this fact if you’re a consequentialist, and most modern rationalists are.
To take a trivial example, lying could prevent a global catastrophe that would wipe out the human race. Of course, if you take a broader scoped morality, there are likely to be less circumstances in which lying is the rational approach than if you are maximising individual utility, but such circumstances do exist.
If you wanted to go more deeply into it, you would have to consider the fact that individual utility and collective utility are not entirely separate.