Ray, I have several times seen you trying to defend terms that will not — and in my opinion, should not be expected to — retain the specific meaning that you or the originator hope the term will retain. In particular, I predict that “meta-honesty” will not stably mean the specific thing you are quoting it as being supposed to mean, even amongst the crowd you-specifically are trying to define it to.
The reason is that your linguistic prescriptions are not respecting the compositional structure of language. “Meta” already has a meaning and “honesty” already has a meaning. In the equilibrium of (even LessWrong readers) using the term “meta-honesty”, it will end up meaning something about as general as “meta” and “honesty” suggest, such as a) “honesty about what you’re honest about” or b) “honesty about meta-level questions”, or c) something else I haven’t thought of.
Your quoted definition is a lot like (a), except the quote has these extra details: “Don’t lie when a normal highly honest person wouldn’t”. These details are not carried by the “meta” modifier in any way that seems normal to me. For reference, here is a broadly agreed upon definition of “meta”: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/meta
I’m not sure exactly what “meta-honesty” will settle to meaning amongst your target audience. I’m just predicting it won’t be as specific as the thing you just quoted. You can probably push towards (a) if you like that more than (b) or (c) (as I do). But, you probably can’t get all the way to a situation where “meta-honesty” stably means the full quoted definition. When you push for it to mean the full definition, your readers have to choose between 1) trusting their own internal sense of how to compose concepts clearly and usefully, versus 2) memorizing a particular definition without a cited source and binding the definition to some otherwise-fairly-general-concept-words, … and I think your readers who are best at clear individual thinking will reliably choose (1) over (2).
I.e., many of your readers will trust their own conceptual metacognition more than your assertion that they should be memorizing and awkwardly re-binding their concept-words.
Generally, I think they’re right to do that, in that I think doing (1) more than (2) will improve their general ability to think clearly with themselves and with others.
Not-withstanding these points about how to go about defending terms, I think it’s not unreasonable to want there to be a short term that captures “honesty that is also closed under reflection”, i.e. a high level of honesty that is also fully consistent when making statements about itself e.g. “I am honest/dishonest in situation X”.
Phrases like “I’m honest-under-reflection” or “I’m reflectively-honest” or “I’m meta-consistently honest” seem… more cumbersome and likely-to-cause-confusion to me, than the current attempt of “I’m meta-honest”.
“I claim to have the property ‘meta-honesty’, where I strive to be honest and to be reflectively consistent about it.”
We can’t always get what we want, and English doesn’t allow all important ideas to be said succinctly, but I want to defend the attempt to say important things in short phrases.
Huh, weird. I read Eliezer’s definition of meta-honesty as not the same thing as your definition of «honesty that is closed under reflection». Specifically, in Eliezer-meta-honesty, his honesty at the meta-level is stronger (i.e., zero tolerance for lies) than his honesty at the object level (some tolerance for lies), whereas your notion sounds like it has no such strengthening-as-you-go-up-in-meta pattern to it. Am I misunderstanding you?
No, but I think you’re misunderstanding Eliezer. Let me explain.
When I ask myself “Should I be dishonest at all in a particular situation?” I have pretty similar standards for lots of domains. The primary reason to ask is when there’s genuine questions to ask about whether an extremely powerful force is attempting to extract a specific lie from me, or whether an extremely powerful immoral force is leaving me no control over what it does except via deception. For domains where this is not the case, I want to speak plainly and honestly.
When I list domains and ask how honest one ought to be in them (things like being honest about your work history to the government, honest about your relationship history to prospective partners, honest about your criminal record to anyone, honest about how your work is going to your boss, honest in conversations about your honesty to anyone, and so on), the standard is to be truthful except in a small number of situations where incredibly powerful entities or forces have broken the game board badly enough that the moral thing to do is to lie.
I say this because I don’t think that being honest about your honesty is fundamentally different than being honest about other things, for all of them there’s a standard of no-lying, and an extremely high bar for an powerful entity to be threatening you and everything you care about for you to have to lie.
Eliezer writes this reasoning about honesty:
And I think it’s reasonable to expect that over the course of a human lifetime you will literally never end up in a situation where a Gestapo officer who has read this essay is pointing a gun at you and asking overly-object-level-probing meta-honesty questions, and will shoot you if you try to glomarize but will believe you if you lie outright, given that we all know that everyone, innocent or guilty, is supposed to glomarize in situations like that. Up until today I don’t think I’ve ever seen any questions like this being asked in real life at all, even hanging out with a number of people who are heavily into recursion.
So if one is declaring the meta-honesty code at all, then one shouldn’t meta-lie, period; I think the rules have been set up to allow that to be absolute.
I don’t believe that Eliezer applies different standards of honesty to normal situations and to meta-sentences about honesty. I think he applies the same standards, and finds that you are more under threat on the object level than you are on the (explicitly-discussed) meta level.
Eliezer is very explicit and repeats many times in that essay, including in the very segment you quote, that his code of meta-honesty does in fact compel you to never lie in a meta-honesty discussion. The first 4 paragraphs of your comment are not elaborating with what Eliezer really meant, they are disagreeing with him. Reasonable disagreements too, in my opinion, but conflating them with Eliezer’s proposal is corrosive to the norms that allows people to propose and test new norms.
Re-reading the post, I see I was mistaken. Eliezer is undeniably proposing an absolute rule on the meta-level, not one where dishonesty should be “held to an extremely high bar” as I discussed.
I’ll try to compress the difference between our proposals: I was proposing “Be highly honest, and be consistent when you talk about it on the meta-level”, whereas Eliezer is proposing “Be highly honest, and be absolutely honest when you talk about it on the meta-level”. The part I quoted was his consequentialist argument that the absolute rule would not be that costly, not a consequentialist account of when to be honest on the meta-level.
Nod. I do generally agree with this (fyi I think I more frequently complain to jargon-coiners that they are trying to coin jargon that won’t actually survive memetic drift, than I complain to people about using words wrong).
And reflecting on both this most recent example, and on Pivotal Acts Means Something Specific, (not sure if you had a third example in mind), I also think the way I went about arguing the case wasn’t that great (I was doing it in a way that sounded like “speak authoritatively about what the term means” as opposed to a clarifying “so-and-so defined the word this way, for these reasons.”)
I’ve updated my previous comment here to say “Eliezer defines it such-and-such way (not sure if you mean to be it as Eliezer defines it)”, and made a similar update to the pivotal act post.
I have more thoughts about meta-honesty and how it should be defined but it’s probably getting off topic.
The reason I made a big deal about these particular jargon-terms, was that they were both places where Eliezer noted “this is a concept that there will be a lot of pressure to distort or drift the term, and this concept is really important, so I’m going to add BIG PROMINENT WARNINGS about how important it is not to distort the concept.” (AFAICT he’s only done this twice, for metahonesty and pivotal acts)
I think I agree with you in both cases that Eliezer didn’t actually name the concept very well, but I think it was true that the concepts were important, and likely to get distorted, and probably still would have gotten distorted even if he had named them better. So I endorse people having the move available of “put a giant warning that attempts to fight against linguistic entropy, when you have a technical term you think is important to preserve its meaning, which the surrounding intellectual community helps reinforce.”
In this case I think there were some competing principles (protect technical terms, vs avoid cluttering the nomenclature-commons with bad terms). I was trying to do the former. My main update here is that I can do the former without imposing as much costs from the latter, and think more about the tradeoffs.
Here are some possible solutions to this problem that I think will work better than trying to get people to bind “meta-honesty” to the full definition:
- You could use a name that references the source, like “meta-honesty in the sense of [source]” or “[source-name]-meta-honesty”.
- You could use a longer name that captures more of the nuances you bolded, like “meta-honesty with object-level normalcy”, or something else that resonates better for you.
Thinking a bit more, I think meta-honesty is most useful if it means “honest about when you’re honest” (“honest about meta-level questions” doesn’t actually seem that important a concept at first glance, although open to counterarguments)
I think the thing Eliezer was aiming at in Meta Honesty should probably just be called “Eliezer’s code of honesty” or something (which features meta-honesty as one of it’s building blocks). I agree “meta honest” doesn’t sound like a term meaning the thing Eliezer was aiming at (which was more of a code to follow, than a property of a type of statement)
Ray, I have several times seen you trying to defend terms that will not — and in my opinion, should not be expected to — retain the specific meaning that you or the originator hope the term will retain. In particular, I predict that “meta-honesty” will not stably mean the specific thing you are quoting it as being supposed to mean, even amongst the crowd you-specifically are trying to define it to.
The reason is that your linguistic prescriptions are not respecting the compositional structure of language. “Meta” already has a meaning and “honesty” already has a meaning. In the equilibrium of (even LessWrong readers) using the term “meta-honesty”, it will end up meaning something about as general as “meta” and “honesty” suggest, such as
a) “honesty about what you’re honest about” or
b) “honesty about meta-level questions”, or
c) something else I haven’t thought of.
Your quoted definition is a lot like (a), except the quote has these extra details: “Don’t lie when a normal highly honest person wouldn’t”. These details are not carried by the “meta” modifier in any way that seems normal to me. For reference, here is a broadly agreed upon definition of “meta”:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/meta
I’m not sure exactly what “meta-honesty” will settle to meaning amongst your target audience. I’m just predicting it won’t be as specific as the thing you just quoted. You can probably push towards (a) if you like that more than (b) or (c) (as I do). But, you probably can’t get all the way to a situation where “meta-honesty” stably means the full quoted definition. When you push for it to mean the full definition, your readers have to choose between
1) trusting their own internal sense of how to compose concepts clearly and usefully, versus
2) memorizing a particular definition without a cited source and binding the definition to some otherwise-fairly-general-concept-words,
… and I think your readers who are best at clear individual thinking will reliably choose (1) over (2).
I.e., many of your readers will trust their own conceptual metacognition more than your assertion that they should be memorizing and awkwardly re-binding their concept-words.
Generally, I think they’re right to do that, in that I think doing (1) more than (2) will improve their general ability to think clearly with themselves and with others.
Not-withstanding these points about how to go about defending terms, I think it’s not unreasonable to want there to be a short term that captures “honesty that is also closed under reflection”, i.e. a high level of honesty that is also fully consistent when making statements about itself e.g. “I am honest/dishonest in situation X”.
Phrases like “I’m honest-under-reflection” or “I’m reflectively-honest” or “I’m meta-consistently honest” seem… more cumbersome and likely-to-cause-confusion to me, than the current attempt of “I’m meta-honest”.
“I claim to have the property ‘meta-honesty’, where I strive to be honest and to be reflectively consistent about it.”
We can’t always get what we want, and English doesn’t allow all important ideas to be said succinctly, but I want to defend the attempt to say important things in short phrases.
Huh, weird. I read Eliezer’s definition of meta-honesty as not the same thing as your definition of «honesty that is closed under reflection». Specifically, in Eliezer-meta-honesty, his honesty at the meta-level is stronger (i.e., zero tolerance for lies) than his honesty at the object level (some tolerance for lies), whereas your notion sounds like it has no such strengthening-as-you-go-up-in-meta pattern to it. Am I misunderstanding you?
No, but I think you’re misunderstanding Eliezer. Let me explain.
When I ask myself “Should I be dishonest at all in a particular situation?” I have pretty similar standards for lots of domains. The primary reason to ask is when there’s genuine questions to ask about whether an extremely powerful force is attempting to extract a specific lie from me, or whether an extremely powerful immoral force is leaving me no control over what it does except via deception. For domains where this is not the case, I want to speak plainly and honestly.
When I list domains and ask how honest one ought to be in them (things like being honest about your work history to the government, honest about your relationship history to prospective partners, honest about your criminal record to anyone, honest about how your work is going to your boss, honest in conversations about your honesty to anyone, and so on), the standard is to be truthful except in a small number of situations where incredibly powerful entities or forces have broken the game board badly enough that the moral thing to do is to lie.
I say this because I don’t think that being honest about your honesty is fundamentally different than being honest about other things, for all of them there’s a standard of no-lying, and an extremely high bar for an powerful entity to be threatening you and everything you care about for you to have to lie.
Eliezer writes this reasoning about honesty:
I don’t believe that Eliezer applies different standards of honesty to normal situations and to meta-sentences about honesty. I think he applies the same standards, and finds that you are more under threat on the object level than you are on the (explicitly-discussed) meta level.
Eliezer is very explicit and repeats many times in that essay, including in the very segment you quote, that his code of meta-honesty does in fact compel you to never lie in a meta-honesty discussion. The first 4 paragraphs of your comment are not elaborating with what Eliezer really meant, they are disagreeing with him. Reasonable disagreements too, in my opinion, but conflating them with Eliezer’s proposal is corrosive to the norms that allows people to propose and test new norms.
Re-reading the post, I see I was mistaken. Eliezer is undeniably proposing an absolute rule on the meta-level, not one where dishonesty should be “held to an extremely high bar” as I discussed.
I’ll try to compress the difference between our proposals: I was proposing “Be highly honest, and be consistent when you talk about it on the meta-level”, whereas Eliezer is proposing “Be highly honest, and be absolutely honest when you talk about it on the meta-level”. The part I quoted was his consequentialist argument that the absolute rule would not be that costly, not a consequentialist account of when to be honest on the meta-level.
Nod. I do generally agree with this (fyi I think I more frequently complain to jargon-coiners that they are trying to coin jargon that won’t actually survive memetic drift, than I complain to people about using words wrong).
And reflecting on both this most recent example, and on Pivotal Acts Means Something Specific, (not sure if you had a third example in mind), I also think the way I went about arguing the case wasn’t that great (I was doing it in a way that sounded like “speak authoritatively about what the term means” as opposed to a clarifying “so-and-so defined the word this way, for these reasons.”)
I’ve updated my previous comment here to say “Eliezer defines it such-and-such way (not sure if you mean to be it as Eliezer defines it)”, and made a similar update to the pivotal act post.
I have more thoughts about meta-honesty and how it should be defined but it’s probably getting off topic.
Cool! This was very much in line with the kind of update I was aiming for here, cheers :)
I maybe want to add:
The reason I made a big deal about these particular jargon-terms, was that they were both places where Eliezer noted “this is a concept that there will be a lot of pressure to distort or drift the term, and this concept is really important, so I’m going to add BIG PROMINENT WARNINGS about how important it is not to distort the concept.” (AFAICT he’s only done this twice, for metahonesty and pivotal acts)
I think I agree with you in both cases that Eliezer didn’t actually name the concept very well, but I think it was true that the concepts were important, and likely to get distorted, and probably still would have gotten distorted even if he had named them better. So I endorse people having the move available of “put a giant warning that attempts to fight against linguistic entropy, when you have a technical term you think is important to preserve its meaning, which the surrounding intellectual community helps reinforce.”
In this case I think there were some competing principles (protect technical terms, vs avoid cluttering the nomenclature-commons with bad terms). I was trying to do the former. My main update here is that I can do the former without imposing as much costs from the latter, and think more about the tradeoffs.
Here are some possible solutions to this problem that I think will work better than trying to get people to bind “meta-honesty” to the full definition:
- You could use a name that references the source, like “meta-honesty in the sense of [source]” or “[source-name]-meta-honesty”.
- You could use a longer name that captures more of the nuances you bolded, like “meta-honesty with object-level normalcy”, or something else that resonates better for you.
Thinking a bit more, I think meta-honesty is most useful if it means “honest about when you’re honest” (“honest about meta-level questions” doesn’t actually seem that important a concept at first glance, although open to counterarguments)
I think the thing Eliezer was aiming at in Meta Honesty should probably just be called “Eliezer’s code of honesty” or something (which features meta-honesty as one of it’s building blocks). I agree “meta honest” doesn’t sound like a term meaning the thing Eliezer was aiming at (which was more of a code to follow, than a property of a type of statement)
Yep I agree with this whole-sale.