Well, all I can tell you is that if we’re casual acquaintances, or coworkers, or similar, and I greet you with “How are you?” and you respond by talking about things that have been going on in your life lately, that will make me quite a bit less likely to want to interact with you at all henceforth. My sense is that this is a very common reaction.
This norm actually prevents me from asking people how they are. I literally can’t ask the question in those words. I can say the words, but they will be parsed as a social nicety, not as a literal question. Instead I have to participate in the expensive dance I described in that old blog post Raemon linked.
… when asking someone something, it is important to consider not just whether you desire some information, but whether they wish for you to have it.
As an n=1 data point that, I suppose, you may feel free to ignore… I can report that—despite myself being on the spectrum, and most of my friends being “nerds” of some description—I really do not have this supposed difficulty of being unable to ask people whom I care about and who I am close enough to that they are willing to share personal details with me questions about how their life is really going.
Consider the possibility that if someone “mistakes” your supposed “question about their life” for a mere greeting, then that is not because these gosh-darn normie norms are getting in the way of Honesty™—but rather, it is because this person is not interested in baring their souls to you, and is using this very convenient and useful conversational norm to deflect your question by treating it as a mere greeting (or similar contentless conversational filler), making use of the plausible deniability the norm provides to avoid any awkwardness and the potential for loss of face on either side.
To be a bit more direct, this seems like it begs the question:
I really do not have this supposed difficulty of being unable to ask people whom I care about and who I am close enough to that they are willing to share personal details with me questions about how their life is really going.
This seems to conflate two different levels of abstraction:
Consider the possibility that if someone “mistakes” your supposed “question about their life” for a mere greeting, then that is not because these gosh-darn normie norms are getting in the way of Honesty™—but rather, it is because this person is not interested in baring their souls to you, and is using this very convenient and useful conversational norm to deflect your question by treating it as a mere greeting (or similar contentless conversational filler), making use of the plausible deniability the norm provides to avoid any awkwardness and the potential for loss of face on either side.
That does in fact seem like a person motivated not to disclose information, lying in a socially approved way in order not to disclose that information. I’m not sure how to characterize that, if not as getting in the way of honesty. Not just honesty between the two of us, but also between other pairs where one or the other party doesn’t know if they’re in the same position or not.
To be a bit more direct, this seems like it begs the question:
[snipped]
Not at all. I know perfectly well who the described people are, and who they are not, on a great deal of evidence other than whether I can ask them how they are and get an answer.
This seems to conflate two different levels of abstraction:
[snipped]
That does in fact seem like a person motivated not to disclose information, lying in a socially approved way in order not to disclose that information. I’m not sure how to characterize that, if not as getting in the way of honesty. Not just honesty between the two of us, but also between other pairs where one or the other party doesn’t know if they’re in the same position or not.
I would not characterize it as “getting in the way of honesty”. I would only make this characterization if both parties were fully willing to be “honest” (i.e., straightforwardly communicate using the literal meaning of words), but were impeded or outright prevented from doing so due to norms like this. Whereas in cases such as I describe, one party has no desire at all to cooperate with the other party (by truthfully answering the asked question); the norm, then, does not “get in the way of honesty”, but rather serves to enable the desired evasion. Once again: a norm (or, indeed, anything else) can only properly be said to be “getting in the way of honesty” if “honesty” is intended, but prevented. Where it is not intended, saying that the norm is “getting in the way” is misleading, at best.
It gets in the way of honesty in something like the way liars get in the way of communication, or spam gets in the way of email. Liars aren’t trying and failing to communicate the truth, but they’re making it harder for truthtellers to be believed. Spam emails aren’t trying to give me important information, but they’re making it more expensive for me to read important emails.
Also, remember that we’re actually still dealing with the aftermath of a minor discourse disaster in which I accidentally cast a scapegoating spell (I really am sorry, Duncan!) against a person when trying to vividly criticize a policy proposal. (You correctly noted that I was using words in a way that were going to predictably generate adverse side effects.) I think the total cost of things like this is way higher than you’re noticing, if you add up the additional interpretive labor burden, foregone discourse, and demon threads.
Not saying there’s an easy solution, or that we’re not getting important nice things from the status quo, but the costs of this situation really are quite high.
I agree that in any one case it doesn’t cost much—when you think of it—to actually ask the question. But the need to do that means that costs of really asking “how are you?” scale linearly with number of such interactions, and there’s a strong affordance for asking the question the generally-recognized-as-fake way. This means that parts of your brain that attend to verbal narratives are getting trained on a bunch of experiences where you ask people how they are and they tell you they’re fine (and vice versa). This plausibly leads to some systematic errors.
These analogies, however, can hardly be apt, given that the one who asks “How are you?” does so knowingly (he can simply say something else, or nothing at all!), and also does not expect a truthful answer to the (literally-interpreted) question. What are the analogous aspects of the “liars” or “spam” scenarios?
Someone with an email account generally knows they will receive some spam. (You could instead refuse to look at your email, and then you’d never read spam!) Someone who lets people tell them things generally knows they will be lied to from time to time.
This is not analogous, because whereas spam is not the desired and expected sort of received email, and a lie is not the desired and expected sort of received utterance, “Fine” (or similar phatic speech act) is precisely the expected response to “How are you?”. In other words, an (untruthful) answer of “Fine” (or similar) is not—unlike spam, or lies—a bad and wrong thing, that you nonetheless tacitly accept as an occasional cost-of-doing-business (much as you might accept that some apples you purchase may occasionally be bruised—regrettable, but that’s life). Rather, it is simply how the interaction is supposed to go.
I am perplexed by your persistent inability to grasp this point.
Once again: if we’re casual acquaintances, I greet you with an ordinary “How are you?”, and you respond by telling me about your life for five minutes, I will consider this to be defection on your part.
You’re right that it’s not a perfect analogy. However, to a spammer, sending a spam email and occasionally getting a response from a naive or gullible person is definitely how the process is supposed to go. They have a different agenda than I, a normal reader of emails, do, and theirs interferes with mine.
Likewise, people who lie about how they are or punish others for not lying have one agenda, and I have another, and theirs interferes with mine.
A more precise analogy would be VCs who won’t fund startups that won’t exaggerate their prospects or performance in standard ways. People working on a Y-Combinator startup actually told me this, I’m not just guessing here, they didn’t initially think of it as lying but confirmed that a third party who took their representations literally would definitely be systematically misled into overvaluing the company. Cf. Ben Kuhn’s post here.
You’re right that it’s not a perfect analogy. However, to a spammer, sending a spam email and occasionally getting a response from a naive or gullible person is definitely how the process is supposed to go. They have a different agenda than I, a normal reader of emails, do, and theirs interferes with mine.
No, this is still not analogous. It would only be analogous if the receiver of the spam email also viewed receiving spam as “how the process is supposed to go”.
… people who lie about how they are or punish others for not lying …
Let us distinguish two cases.
In the first case, “How are you?” is a greeting, and “Fine” is a reply. The former is not a question, and the latter is not an answer, and consequently it is not, and cannot be, a lie.
In the second case, the asker really does intend to ask how the other person is; but the target has no desire to answer. In that case, “Fine” is, indeed, a lie. It is, however, a lie which the target has every right to tell (and any norm which condemns such lies is a bad one, and should be opposed).
We can indeed analogize the second scenario to the “spam email” case. But it’s the asker who is the spammer in the analogy, not the target! That is: the asker is attempting to have an interaction which their target has no desire to have. The target, meanwhile, is acting in a way which is entirely right and proper, a way in which they have every right to act.
(No comment on the startups thing; I have insufficient knowledge of the startup world to have serious opinions about how things go there.)
I suppose another way of thinking about this might be that in contexts where there is a sufficiently strong expectation that one will say certain words as part of a social ritual, with implications that are at best very indirectly related to the literal meaning of those words, “lie” is a type error. On this model, we could just say that “How are you?” handshakes are using actor norms rather than scribe norms.
What I’m saying is that it’s not at all just a chance coincidence that the actor norms happen to use words that sound like they mean something specific in scribe dialect. The scribe-dialect meaning functions as a sort of jumping-off point for the formation of a customary social action. This has the important side effect of preventing people from unambiguously using those words in scribe-dialect. The accumulated effect of all such transformations is a huge drag on efficiency of communication about anything there’s not already an established custom for.
What I’m saying is that it’s not at all just a chance coincidence that the actor norms happen to use words that sound like they mean something specific in scribe dialect.
Indeed, it certainly is not a chance coincidence; as I explained elsethread, that the handshake sounds like a question allows it to serve the additional, and highly useful, function of granting someone plausible deniability for deflecting actual prying/questioning with non-answers in a socially acceptable way. (My comments about “power relations” say more on this.)
The target, meanwhile, is acting in a way which is entirely right and proper, a way in which they have every right to act.
I haven’t said they’re acting wrongly; I’ve said that they’re lying in a socially sanctioned way. If you don’t think these are distinct claims, why not?
I wonder how much of the problem is exactly this. Claiming someone is lying is by default, claiming that someone is doing something wrong. So if something isn’t wrong, it must not be lying—thus saying things ‘aren’t really lying’ rather than biting the bullet and saying that lying is OK in a situation.
This does seem to break down in sufficiently clear circumstances (e.g. the Gestapo searching for Jews in the attic) but even then I think there’s a strong instinctual sense in which people doing this don’t consider it lying.
Also, it seems to me as though when people evaluate the “Jews in the attic” hypothetical, “Gestapo” isn’t being mapped onto the actual historical institution, but to a vague sense of who’s a sufficiently hated adversary that it’s widely considered legitimate to slash their tires.
In Nazi Germany, this actually maps onto Jews, not the Gestapo. It maps onto the Gestapo for post-WWII Americans considering a weird hypothetical.
To do the work of causing this to reliably map onto the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, you have to talk about the situation in which almost everyone around you seems to agree that the Gestapo might be a little harsh but the Jews are a dangerous, deceptive adversary and need to be rooted out. Otherwise you just get illusion of transparency.
Related: arguments ostensibly for a policy of universal “honesty” or “integrity,” on the basis of “adopt the policy you’d be rewarded for if people could inspect the policy directly,” tend to conflate lying with saying socially disapproved-of things. In fact people will punish you for lying when you’re supposed to tell the truth, and for telling the truth when you’re supposed to lie, and largely reward you for conforming with shared fictions.
But in any case: what is there here to be worth lying about? Avoiding being slightly awkward? I have often answered this question [i.e., “How are you?” —SA.] by actually talking about things that have been going on in my life lately, and that pretty much always goes well.
Is your quibble that this does not literally specify a duration of exactly five minutes? How long do you think it takes to “actually [talk] about things that have been going on in [one’s] life lately”? Is it four minutes? Three minutes? Is five right out? Might it, in fact, sometimes take six minutes, or even seven?
I’m actually just saying this norm imposes substantial costs by impeding communication.
You indicated that you would punish people for answering the literal question honestly:
all I can tell you is that if we’re casual acquaintances, or coworkers, or similar, and I greet you with “How are you?” and you respond by talking about thing that have been going on in your life lately, that will make me quite a bit less likely to want to interact with you at all henceforth.
I’m pointing out that a norm of punishing such behavior prevents me from actually asking the question in the most straightforward terms available. This substantially increases the cost of this sort of communication.
It seems like you’re assuming a follow-up argument along the lines of: therefore, it doesn’t make sense that someone might locally want to follow the norm or be protected by it. But I’m actually not saying that. I’m just saying that punishing people for taking “how are you?” literally prevents some communication.
Yes. I understand what you’re saying. What I would like you to either acknowledge as correct, or clearly state your disagreement with, is the proposition that this result you describe constitutes the said social norm working as intended.
This norm actually prevents me from asking people how they are. I literally can’t ask the question in those words. I can say the words, but they will be parsed as a social nicety, not as a literal question. Instead I have to participate in the expensive dance I described in that old blog post Raemon linked.
To reiterate:
As an n=1 data point that, I suppose, you may feel free to ignore… I can report that—despite myself being on the spectrum, and most of my friends being “nerds” of some description—I really do not have this supposed difficulty of being unable to ask people whom I care about and who I am close enough to that they are willing to share personal details with me questions about how their life is really going.
Consider the possibility that if someone “mistakes” your supposed “question about their life” for a mere greeting, then that is not because these gosh-darn normie norms are getting in the way of Honesty™—but rather, it is because this person is not interested in baring their souls to you, and is using this very convenient and useful conversational norm to deflect your question by treating it as a mere greeting (or similar contentless conversational filler), making use of the plausible deniability the norm provides to avoid any awkwardness and the potential for loss of face on either side.
This doesn’t seem like a response to what I actually said. If you took me to be implying something else, maybe you can explain what that is?
Eh? I just reread your comment, three times. I don’t understand your objection. I seem to be responding directly to what you said.
To be a bit more direct, this seems like it begs the question:
This seems to conflate two different levels of abstraction:
That does in fact seem like a person motivated not to disclose information, lying in a socially approved way in order not to disclose that information. I’m not sure how to characterize that, if not as getting in the way of honesty. Not just honesty between the two of us, but also between other pairs where one or the other party doesn’t know if they’re in the same position or not.
Not at all. I know perfectly well who the described people are, and who they are not, on a great deal of evidence other than whether I can ask them how they are and get an answer.
I would not characterize it as “getting in the way of honesty”. I would only make this characterization if both parties were fully willing to be “honest” (i.e., straightforwardly communicate using the literal meaning of words), but were impeded or outright prevented from doing so due to norms like this. Whereas in cases such as I describe, one party has no desire at all to cooperate with the other party (by truthfully answering the asked question); the norm, then, does not “get in the way of honesty”, but rather serves to enable the desired evasion. Once again: a norm (or, indeed, anything else) can only properly be said to be “getting in the way of honesty” if “honesty” is intended, but prevented. Where it is not intended, saying that the norm is “getting in the way” is misleading, at best.
It gets in the way of honesty in something like the way liars get in the way of communication, or spam gets in the way of email. Liars aren’t trying and failing to communicate the truth, but they’re making it harder for truthtellers to be believed. Spam emails aren’t trying to give me important information, but they’re making it more expensive for me to read important emails.
Ah, this finally clarified the discussion for me.
I still don’t think the problem is that bad, because it’s fairly easy for me to say ‘how are you actually?’ and it pretty much seems to work.
Also, remember that we’re actually still dealing with the aftermath of a minor discourse disaster in which I accidentally cast a scapegoating spell (I really am sorry, Duncan!) against a person when trying to vividly criticize a policy proposal. (You correctly noted that I was using words in a way that were going to predictably generate adverse side effects.) I think the total cost of things like this is way higher than you’re noticing, if you add up the additional interpretive labor burden, foregone discourse, and demon threads.
Not saying there’s an easy solution, or that we’re not getting important nice things from the status quo, but the costs of this situation really are quite high.
I agree that in any one case it doesn’t cost much—when you think of it—to actually ask the question. But the need to do that means that costs of really asking “how are you?” scale linearly with number of such interactions, and there’s a strong affordance for asking the question the generally-recognized-as-fake way. This means that parts of your brain that attend to verbal narratives are getting trained on a bunch of experiences where you ask people how they are and they tell you they’re fine (and vice versa). This plausibly leads to some systematic errors.
These analogies, however, can hardly be apt, given that the one who asks “How are you?” does so knowingly (he can simply say something else, or nothing at all!), and also does not expect a truthful answer to the (literally-interpreted) question. What are the analogous aspects of the “liars” or “spam” scenarios?
Someone with an email account generally knows they will receive some spam. (You could instead refuse to look at your email, and then you’d never read spam!) Someone who lets people tell them things generally knows they will be lied to from time to time.
This is not analogous, because whereas spam is not the desired and expected sort of received email, and a lie is not the desired and expected sort of received utterance, “Fine” (or similar phatic speech act) is precisely the expected response to “How are you?”. In other words, an (untruthful) answer of “Fine” (or similar) is not—unlike spam, or lies—a bad and wrong thing, that you nonetheless tacitly accept as an occasional cost-of-doing-business (much as you might accept that some apples you purchase may occasionally be bruised—regrettable, but that’s life). Rather, it is simply how the interaction is supposed to go.
I am perplexed by your persistent inability to grasp this point.
Once again: if we’re casual acquaintances, I greet you with an ordinary “How are you?”, and you respond by telling me about your life for five minutes, I will consider this to be defection on your part.
You’re right that it’s not a perfect analogy. However, to a spammer, sending a spam email and occasionally getting a response from a naive or gullible person is definitely how the process is supposed to go. They have a different agenda than I, a normal reader of emails, do, and theirs interferes with mine.
Likewise, people who lie about how they are or punish others for not lying have one agenda, and I have another, and theirs interferes with mine.
A more precise analogy would be VCs who won’t fund startups that won’t exaggerate their prospects or performance in standard ways. People working on a Y-Combinator startup actually told me this, I’m not just guessing here, they didn’t initially think of it as lying but confirmed that a third party who took their representations literally would definitely be systematically misled into overvaluing the company. Cf. Ben Kuhn’s post here.
No, this is still not analogous. It would only be analogous if the receiver of the spam email also viewed receiving spam as “how the process is supposed to go”.
Let us distinguish two cases.
In the first case, “How are you?” is a greeting, and “Fine” is a reply. The former is not a question, and the latter is not an answer, and consequently it is not, and cannot be, a lie.
In the second case, the asker really does intend to ask how the other person is; but the target has no desire to answer. In that case, “Fine” is, indeed, a lie. It is, however, a lie which the target has every right to tell (and any norm which condemns such lies is a bad one, and should be opposed).
We can indeed analogize the second scenario to the “spam email” case. But it’s the asker who is the spammer in the analogy, not the target! That is: the asker is attempting to have an interaction which their target has no desire to have. The target, meanwhile, is acting in a way which is entirely right and proper, a way in which they have every right to act.
(No comment on the startups thing; I have insufficient knowledge of the startup world to have serious opinions about how things go there.)
I suppose another way of thinking about this might be that in contexts where there is a sufficiently strong expectation that one will say certain words as part of a social ritual, with implications that are at best very indirectly related to the literal meaning of those words, “lie” is a type error. On this model, we could just say that “How are you?” handshakes are using actor norms rather than scribe norms.
What I’m saying is that it’s not at all just a chance coincidence that the actor norms happen to use words that sound like they mean something specific in scribe dialect. The scribe-dialect meaning functions as a sort of jumping-off point for the formation of a customary social action. This has the important side effect of preventing people from unambiguously using those words in scribe-dialect. The accumulated effect of all such transformations is a huge drag on efficiency of communication about anything there’s not already an established custom for.
Indeed, it certainly is not a chance coincidence; as I explained elsethread, that the handshake sounds like a question allows it to serve the additional, and highly useful, function of granting someone plausible deniability for deflecting actual prying/questioning with non-answers in a socially acceptable way. (My comments about “power relations” say more on this.)
I haven’t said they’re acting wrongly; I’ve said that they’re lying in a socially sanctioned way. If you don’t think these are distinct claims, why not?
I wonder how much of the problem is exactly this. Claiming someone is lying is by default, claiming that someone is doing something wrong. So if something isn’t wrong, it must not be lying—thus saying things ‘aren’t really lying’ rather than biting the bullet and saying that lying is OK in a situation.
This does seem to break down in sufficiently clear circumstances (e.g. the Gestapo searching for Jews in the attic) but even then I think there’s a strong instinctual sense in which people doing this don’t consider it lying.
Also, it seems to me as though when people evaluate the “Jews in the attic” hypothetical, “Gestapo” isn’t being mapped onto the actual historical institution, but to a vague sense of who’s a sufficiently hated adversary that it’s widely considered legitimate to slash their tires.
In Nazi Germany, this actually maps onto Jews, not the Gestapo. It maps onto the Gestapo for post-WWII Americans considering a weird hypothetical.
To do the work of causing this to reliably map onto the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, you have to talk about the situation in which almost everyone around you seems to agree that the Gestapo might be a little harsh but the Jews are a dangerous, deceptive adversary and need to be rooted out. Otherwise you just get illusion of transparency.
Related: arguments ostensibly for a policy of universal “honesty” or “integrity,” on the basis of “adopt the policy you’d be rewarded for if people could inspect the policy directly,” tend to conflate lying with saying socially disapproved-of things. In fact people will punish you for lying when you’re supposed to tell the truth, and for telling the truth when you’re supposed to lie, and largely reward you for conforming with shared fictions.
Note this comment, where I clearly distinguish between the case of “not actually lying” and “lying, but lying is perfectly OK in this circumstance”.
Weakman. What about simply “Horrible!”?
Hardly.
Same.
Where did Jessica propose an unencouraged five-minute monologue? “Horribly!” usually takes far less time to pronounce.
In the linked comment.
I can’t find anything in the linked comment that says that.
Is your quibble that this does not literally specify a duration of exactly five minutes? How long do you think it takes to “actually [talk] about things that have been going on in [one’s] life lately”? Is it four minutes? Three minutes? Is five right out? Might it, in fact, sometimes take six minutes, or even seven?
To be clear, I usually just talk about one thing, and then that jumps off into some other discussion. Sorry for the confusing wording.
Maybe we’re talking past each other. What do you think my position is, and what about it seems like it reflects a failure to grasp that point?
I’m actually just saying this norm imposes substantial costs by impeding communication.
You indicated that you would punish people for answering the literal question honestly:
I’m pointing out that a norm of punishing such behavior prevents me from actually asking the question in the most straightforward terms available. This substantially increases the cost of this sort of communication.
It seems like you’re assuming a follow-up argument along the lines of: therefore, it doesn’t make sense that someone might locally want to follow the norm or be protected by it. But I’m actually not saying that. I’m just saying that punishing people for taking “how are you?” literally prevents some communication.
Yes. I understand what you’re saying. What I would like you to either acknowledge as correct, or clearly state your disagreement with, is the proposition that this result you describe constitutes the said social norm working as intended.
Yes, that’s the social norm working as intended, insofar as “intent” is a relevant paradigm here.