I notice I fail to see a difference between Deep Honesty with Reasonable Caveats, and just ol’ regular Shallow-ish Honesty that allows small bits of Deep Honesty when convenient (which is something all of us do reflexively). If you (reasonably) refrain from being Deeply Honest in all situations where being so would be tactless, cause you harm, harm others, divulge sensitive information that should not be shared, and damage social relationships, you are left with very few options in which to exercise Deep Honesty (which would basically only include conversations with your therapist and writing LW comments).
I have a strong intuition that in order for Deep Honesty to work and not horribly backfire, society would have to be first restructured to make it possible, specifically by making it impossible (or just awkward and ineffective) to punish people for their Deep Honesty and honestly shared views.
Deep honesty does require tradeoffs. It’s a costly signal. Society doesn’t need to restructure. As the post says, you can use it sometimes and not others according to your judgment of the tradeoffs for that situation. I have been doing this for my entire adult life, with apparently pretty good but not great results. Sometimes it backfires, often it works as intended.
I notice I fail to see a difference between Deep Honesty with Reasonable Caveats, and just ol’ regular Shallow-ish Honesty that allows small bits of Deep Honesty when convenient (which is something all of us do reflexively). If you (reasonably) refrain from being Deeply Honest in all situations where being so would be tactless, cause you harm, harm others, divulge sensitive information that should not be shared, and damage social relationships, you are left with very few options in which to exercise Deep Honesty (which would basically only include conversations with your therapist and writing LW comments).
I have a strong intuition that in order for Deep Honesty to work and not horribly backfire, society would have to be first restructured to make it possible, specifically by making it impossible (or just awkward and ineffective) to punish people for their Deep Honesty and honestly shared views.
Deep honesty does require tradeoffs. It’s a costly signal. Society doesn’t need to restructure. As the post says, you can use it sometimes and not others according to your judgment of the tradeoffs for that situation. I have been doing this for my entire adult life, with apparently pretty good but not great results. Sometimes it backfires, often it works as intended.