The problem, as I see it, is that it’s not possible to lie to people and simultaneously act in their interests.
Lying to someone is an inherently hostile act, and indicates that (at least in regard to the matter at hand) you’re enemies. There may be very special cases in which it’s the act of an ally or friend (in the same way that semi-hostile microorganisms may be beneficial to our immune functioning) but they must be quite rare.
Even if some of the consequences of the lie are ‘good’, you’re reinforcing the other person’s tendencies towards irrationality by getting them to believe untruths and profiting by it.
The problem, as I see it, is that it’s not possible to lie to people and simultaneously act in their interests.
What is your reasoning or evidence?
See the radical honesty link below. You can lie to people to avoid hurting their feelings. You can lie to children for their entertainment, their protection, or their cognitive development. (IMHO, speaking from experience, exposure to too many brutal truths of the world at the age of 5 is not a good thing. Also, training very young children to act as self-interested expectation maximizers has bad results.) You can lie to people to protect them from their predictable self-destructive responses (eg., I once told an alcoholic “No, I haven’t got any whiskey in the house.”)
Accepting a lie means accepting an understanding of the world that is less accurate than it could be, and that in turns limits your ability to react appropriately to reality. Any so-called positive consequences of believing the lie could also be produced by choosing a rational strategy in awareness of the truth.
Viewed as an abstract hypothetical, preferring to have believed a comforting lie rather than an unpleasant truth just isn’t compatible with rationality; more importantly, it’s incompatible with the desires that cause people to be rational.
Is it wrong? I happen to believe that irrationality is wrong, not merely a pragmatically poor choice, but the line of reasoning that brought me to that conclusion is a rational one; I recognize the limits to that argument. If you’re a rationalist, or you wish to be, preferring the irrational is the wrong way to get there.
Viewed as an abstract hypothetical, preferring to have believed a comforting lie rather than an unpleasant truth just isn’t compatible with rationality; more importantly, it’s incompatible with the desires that cause people to be rational.
Perhaps, if everyone were perfectly rational, you would be right that lying is inherently hostile.
Only all else being equal is the truth clearly preferable to deceit. If the choice of deceit allows to save the world, it’s inevitable for any notion of human morality to prefer deceit.
It’s not inevitable. Nor is it likely, in balance, that deceit would have such large and positive effects. Far, far more probable is a shallow but wide flood of corrosive harms.
How do you feel about lies of omission? What about other forms of deception (make-up, dress, aires of confidence when really nervous etc.) I’m really sympathetic to you view but I think it profoundly underestimates the amount of deception we routinely engage in for the purposes of avoiding conflict, smoothing things over, maintaining privacy, keeping promises, avoiding delay, and generally not being a jerk. I’m really not sure our society could function in a state of obligatory information symmetry. Deception is so enmeshed in our institutions and conventions that I don’t know if you could eliminate it without destabilizing everything else.
Obviously the solution isn’t going to be “lie away!” but the practice of ‘radical honesty’ is a genuinely revolutionary act and it should be taken with appropriate seriousness and caution.
You’re right that most interpersonal relationships, even (and especially) casual ones, absolutely require deception and silence on certain matters.
But most humans are not rational and don’t desire to be rational. That only harms them, but it can’t be helped. In such situations, probably the best way to salvage things and limit the total amount of harm is to play along and deceive them.
Would it be even better to refuse to play that game, to insist on interacting only upon a rational basis, or even to refuse interaction with people dedicated to being irrational? I don’t know. I can’t even guess. Maybe. But the cost would be terrible.
The problem, as I see it, is that it’s not possible to lie to people and simultaneously act in their interests… There may be very special cases in which it’s the act of an ally or friend...but they must be quite rare.
This would be true if we lived in a world in which there was always plenty of time to communicate before action needed to be taken. But we don’t; occasionally action is urgent and a lie is the only thing that can induce an urgent action in a small number of syllables.
If you yell fire when there is none, and people take your word for it and rationally respond appropriately, then it’s overwhelmingly likely that their reaction would not be what they would perceive to be their optimal or appropriate response to the real situation. You presumably benefit from their reaction, profiting from their inappropriate response.
If there was a real situation where the best response is approximately what the response to a fire would be, there was no pre-awareness of the possibility of this situation, and there wasn’t enough time to explain, yelling “Fire!” might truly be in everyone’s interests. But that would be an exceptional and highly unlikely (a priori) circumstance.
Should I take this to mean that you think the advice to yell “fire” instead of “rape” or something else more accurate than “fire”, when one is assaulted, is ethically misguided and indicates hostility to people who hear the exclamation, or do you just think that it’s an “exceptional and highly unlikely” situation? For example. Not every possible situation is a weird fringe case where you could accurately yell “Godzilla!” but, to avoid people thinking you’re making a joke, you go with “fire”.
Not at all. But that’s just another example of other people’s interests not being compatible with your own, and choosing to trick them into actions that they wouldn’t take if they knew the truth.
In that situation, you are their enemy, and vice versa.
Actually, what yelling “fire” in that situation does most effectively is get the attention of a group. Fire individually endangers every passerby, so they’re motivated to assess the situation and call the fire department. Whereas in a moderately well-traveled area, the bystander effect can yield tragedy.
It’s (probably) not against a passerby’s interest to join a dozen other people in calling the fire department and/or serving to scare off a would-be attacker with excess attention, unless the passerby is a sociopath (or unless the passerby is never going to find out about the assault and you agree with pjeby on preferences being about the map only). It’s only against their interests to stop and see what’s going on and try to help if, in so doing, they put themselves in danger, and they don’t care about the victim in particular. Yelling “fire” gets the attention of multiple people and reduces the danger.
So every helpful passerby gets to think, “Well, I am certainly a good person and would have helped even if she had yelled “rape”, but it’s a good thing she yelled “fire”, because if she hadn’t, these other self-interested jerks would have just walked right by and then I would have been in trouble and so would she.” No enmity is required, just psychological facts.
Or people want to avoid the personal risk without gain of confronting a potentially violent rapist, and would choose to not become involved if they knew the reality of the situation.
I’m sure few people want to consider the possibility that such considerations motivate them, and I’m equally sure that many people are in actuality motivated by them.
But we don’t; occasionally action is urgent and a lie is the only thing that can induce an urgent action in a small number of syllables.
The ends justify the means—how delightfully consequentialist!
Further, of course, sometimes, the situation is severe enough that the business end of a weapon is the only thing that can effectively induce action. The heart of the question is how to choose the least bad approach that is sufficient to attain the necessary results when you may not even have enough time to follow Yudkowsky’s exhortation to “shut up and multiply”.
It seems to be a questionable assumption that other people’s interests are best served by
my subjective evaluation of what is true
the communication of this in full, regardless of circumstance
I am reminded of the Buddhist terms upaya and prajna which I believe are commonly translated as “insight” and “means” respectively, but which I first encountered as “truth” and “utility”. The principle, as I understood it when studying the subject, was that while one may feel in possession of a truth, it is not always useful to simply communicate that truth directly. I have personally taken true/useful as dual criteria for my own interpersonal (though not intrapersonal) communication.
I’ll leave the ends-justifies-the-means implication of such a truth/utility formulation for a separate time and place.
The problem, as I see it, is that it’s not possible to lie to people and simultaneously act in their interests.
Lying to someone is an inherently hostile act, and indicates that (at least in regard to the matter at hand) you’re enemies. There may be very special cases in which it’s the act of an ally or friend (in the same way that semi-hostile microorganisms may be beneficial to our immune functioning) but they must be quite rare.
Even if some of the consequences of the lie are ‘good’, you’re reinforcing the other person’s tendencies towards irrationality by getting them to believe untruths and profiting by it.
What is your reasoning or evidence?
See the radical honesty link below. You can lie to people to avoid hurting their feelings. You can lie to children for their entertainment, their protection, or their cognitive development. (IMHO, speaking from experience, exposure to too many brutal truths of the world at the age of 5 is not a good thing. Also, training very young children to act as self-interested expectation maximizers has bad results.) You can lie to people to protect them from their predictable self-destructive responses (eg., I once told an alcoholic “No, I haven’t got any whiskey in the house.”)
Accepting a lie means accepting an understanding of the world that is less accurate than it could be, and that in turns limits your ability to react appropriately to reality. Any so-called positive consequences of believing the lie could also be produced by choosing a rational strategy in awareness of the truth.
Viewed as an abstract hypothetical, preferring to have believed a comforting lie rather than an unpleasant truth just isn’t compatible with rationality; more importantly, it’s incompatible with the desires that cause people to be rational.
Is it wrong? I happen to believe that irrationality is wrong, not merely a pragmatically poor choice, but the line of reasoning that brought me to that conclusion is a rational one; I recognize the limits to that argument. If you’re a rationalist, or you wish to be, preferring the irrational is the wrong way to get there.
Perhaps, if everyone were perfectly rational, you would be right that lying is inherently hostile.
Only all else being equal is the truth clearly preferable to deceit. If the choice of deceit allows to save the world, it’s inevitable for any notion of human morality to prefer deceit.
It’s not inevitable. Nor is it likely, in balance, that deceit would have such large and positive effects. Far, far more probable is a shallow but wide flood of corrosive harms.
How do you feel about lies of omission? What about other forms of deception (make-up, dress, aires of confidence when really nervous etc.) I’m really sympathetic to you view but I think it profoundly underestimates the amount of deception we routinely engage in for the purposes of avoiding conflict, smoothing things over, maintaining privacy, keeping promises, avoiding delay, and generally not being a jerk. I’m really not sure our society could function in a state of obligatory information symmetry. Deception is so enmeshed in our institutions and conventions that I don’t know if you could eliminate it without destabilizing everything else.
Obviously the solution isn’t going to be “lie away!” but the practice of ‘radical honesty’ is a genuinely revolutionary act and it should be taken with appropriate seriousness and caution.
You’re right that most interpersonal relationships, even (and especially) casual ones, absolutely require deception and silence on certain matters.
But most humans are not rational and don’t desire to be rational. That only harms them, but it can’t be helped. In such situations, probably the best way to salvage things and limit the total amount of harm is to play along and deceive them.
Would it be even better to refuse to play that game, to insist on interacting only upon a rational basis, or even to refuse interaction with people dedicated to being irrational? I don’t know. I can’t even guess. Maybe. But the cost would be terrible.
This would be true if we lived in a world in which there was always plenty of time to communicate before action needed to be taken. But we don’t; occasionally action is urgent and a lie is the only thing that can induce an urgent action in a small number of syllables.
If you yell fire when there is none, and people take your word for it and rationally respond appropriately, then it’s overwhelmingly likely that their reaction would not be what they would perceive to be their optimal or appropriate response to the real situation. You presumably benefit from their reaction, profiting from their inappropriate response.
If there was a real situation where the best response is approximately what the response to a fire would be, there was no pre-awareness of the possibility of this situation, and there wasn’t enough time to explain, yelling “Fire!” might truly be in everyone’s interests. But that would be an exceptional and highly unlikely (a priori) circumstance.
Should I take this to mean that you think the advice to yell “fire” instead of “rape” or something else more accurate than “fire”, when one is assaulted, is ethically misguided and indicates hostility to people who hear the exclamation, or do you just think that it’s an “exceptional and highly unlikely” situation? For example. Not every possible situation is a weird fringe case where you could accurately yell “Godzilla!” but, to avoid people thinking you’re making a joke, you go with “fire”.
Not at all. But that’s just another example of other people’s interests not being compatible with your own, and choosing to trick them into actions that they wouldn’t take if they knew the truth.
In that situation, you are their enemy, and vice versa.
Actually, what yelling “fire” in that situation does most effectively is get the attention of a group. Fire individually endangers every passerby, so they’re motivated to assess the situation and call the fire department. Whereas in a moderately well-traveled area, the bystander effect can yield tragedy.
It’s (probably) not against a passerby’s interest to join a dozen other people in calling the fire department and/or serving to scare off a would-be attacker with excess attention, unless the passerby is a sociopath (or unless the passerby is never going to find out about the assault and you agree with pjeby on preferences being about the map only). It’s only against their interests to stop and see what’s going on and try to help if, in so doing, they put themselves in danger, and they don’t care about the victim in particular. Yelling “fire” gets the attention of multiple people and reduces the danger.
So every helpful passerby gets to think, “Well, I am certainly a good person and would have helped even if she had yelled “rape”, but it’s a good thing she yelled “fire”, because if she hadn’t, these other self-interested jerks would have just walked right by and then I would have been in trouble and so would she.” No enmity is required, just psychological facts.
Or people want to avoid the personal risk without gain of confronting a potentially violent rapist, and would choose to not become involved if they knew the reality of the situation.
I’m sure few people want to consider the possibility that such considerations motivate them, and I’m equally sure that many people are in actuality motivated by them.
The ends justify the means—how delightfully consequentialist!
Further, of course, sometimes, the situation is severe enough that the business end of a weapon is the only thing that can effectively induce action. The heart of the question is how to choose the least bad approach that is sufficient to attain the necessary results when you may not even have enough time to follow Yudkowsky’s exhortation to “shut up and multiply”.
Ethics is difficult.
It seems to be a questionable assumption that other people’s interests are best served by
my subjective evaluation of what is true
the communication of this in full, regardless of circumstance
I am reminded of the Buddhist terms upaya and prajna which I believe are commonly translated as “insight” and “means” respectively, but which I first encountered as “truth” and “utility”. The principle, as I understood it when studying the subject, was that while one may feel in possession of a truth, it is not always useful to simply communicate that truth directly. I have personally taken true/useful as dual criteria for my own interpersonal (though not intrapersonal) communication.
I’ll leave the ends-justifies-the-means implication of such a truth/utility formulation for a separate time and place.