Some of it might be actual-obfuscation if there are other people in the room, sure. But equally-intelligent equally-polite people are still expected to dance the dance even if they’re alone.
Your last paragraph gets at what I think is the main thing, which is basically just an attempt at kindness. You find a nicer, subtler way to phrase the truth in order to avoid shocking/triggering the other person. If both people involved were idealised Bayesian agents this would be unnecessary, but idealised Bayesian agents don’t have emotions, or at any rate they don’t have emotions about communication methods. Humans, on the other hand, often do; and it’s often not practical to try and train ourselves out of them completely; and even if it were, I don’t think it’s ultimately desirable. Idiosyncratic, arbitrary preferences are the salt of human nature; we shouldn’t be trying to smooth them out, even if they’re theoretically changeable to something more convenient. That way lies wireheading.
But equally-intelligent equally-polite people are still expected to dance the dance even if they’re alone
I think this could be considered to be a sort of “residue” of the sort of deception Zack is talking about. If you imagine agents with different levels of social savviness, the savviest ones might adopt a deceptively polite phrasing, until the less savvy ones catch on, and so on down the line until everybody can interpret the signal correctly. But now the signaling equilibrium has shifted, so all communication uses the polite phrasing even though no one is fooled. I think this is probably the #2 source of deceptive politeness, with #1 being management of people’s immediate emotional reactions, and #3 ongoing deceptiveness.
Some of it might be actual-obfuscation if there are other people in the room, sure. But equally-intelligent equally-polite people are still expected to dance the dance even if they’re alone.
Your last paragraph gets at what I think is the main thing, which is basically just an attempt at kindness. You find a nicer, subtler way to phrase the truth in order to avoid shocking/triggering the other person. If both people involved were idealised Bayesian agents this would be unnecessary, but idealised Bayesian agents don’t have emotions, or at any rate they don’t have emotions about communication methods. Humans, on the other hand, often do; and it’s often not practical to try and train ourselves out of them completely; and even if it were, I don’t think it’s ultimately desirable. Idiosyncratic, arbitrary preferences are the salt of human nature; we shouldn’t be trying to smooth them out, even if they’re theoretically changeable to something more convenient. That way lies wireheading.
I think this could be considered to be a sort of “residue” of the sort of deception Zack is talking about. If you imagine agents with different levels of social savviness, the savviest ones might adopt a deceptively polite phrasing, until the less savvy ones catch on, and so on down the line until everybody can interpret the signal correctly. But now the signaling equilibrium has shifted, so all communication uses the polite phrasing even though no one is fooled. I think this is probably the #2 source of deceptive politeness, with #1 being management of people’s immediate emotional reactions, and #3 ongoing deceptiveness.