[...] What I write is true to the best of my knowledge, because I can look it over and check before publishing. What I say aloud sometimes comes out false because my tongue moves faster than my deliberative intelligence can look it over and spot the distortion. Oh, we’re not talking about grotesque major falsehoods—but the first words off my tongue sometimes shade reality, twist events just a little toward the way they should have happened...
From the inside, it feels a lot like the experience of un-consciously-chosen, perceptual-speed, internal rationalization. I would even say that so far as I can tell, it’s the same brain hardware running in both cases—that it’s just a circuit for lying in general, both for lying to others and lying to ourselves, activated whenever reality begins to feel inconvenient.
There was a time—if I recall correctly—when I didn’t notice these little twists. And in fact it still feels embarrassing to confess them, because I worry that people will think: “Oh, no! Eliezer lies without even thinking! He’s a pathological liar!” For they have not yet noticed the phenomenon, and actually believe their own little improvements on reality—their own brain being twisted around the same way, remembering reality the way it should be (for the sake of the conversational convenience at hand).
[… I once asked someone] “Have you been hurt in the past by telling the truth?” “Yes”, he said, or “Of course”, or something like that -
(- and my brain just flashed up a small sign noting how convenient it would be if he’d said “Of course”—how much more smoothly that sentence would flow—but in fact I don’t remember exactly what he said; and if I’d been speaking out loud, I might have just said, “‘Of course’, he said” which flows well. This is the sort of thing I’m talking about, and if you don’t think it’s dangerous, you don’t understand at all how hard it is to find truth on real problems, where a single tiny shading can derail a human train of thought entirely -) [...]
[...] The German philosopher Fichte once said, “I would not break my word even to save humanity.”
Raymond Smullyan, in whose book I read this quote, seemed to laugh and not take Fichte seriously.
Abraham Heschel said of Fichte, “His salvation and righteousness were apparently so much more important to him than the fate of all men that he would have destroyed mankind to save himself.”
I don’t think they get it.
If a serial killer comes to a confessional, and confesses that he’s killed six people and plans to kill more, should the priest turn him in? I would answer, “No.” If not for the seal of the confessional, the serial killer would never have come to the priest in the first place. All else being equal, I would prefer the world in which the serial killer talks to the priest, and the priest gets a chance to try and talk the serial killer out of it. [...]
I approve of this custom and its absoluteness, and I wish we had a rationalist equivalent.
The trick would be establishing something of equivalent strength to a Catholic priest who believes God doesn’t want him to break the seal, rather than the lesser strength of a psychiatrist who outsources their tape transcriptions to Pakistan. Otherwise serial killers will, quite sensibly, use the Catholic priests instead, and get less rational advice.
Suppose someone comes to a rationalist Confessor and says: “You know, tomorrow I’m planning to wipe out the human species using this neat biotech concoction I cooked up in my lab.” What then? Should you break the seal of the confessional to save humanity?
It appears obvious to me that the issues here are just those of the one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, and I do not consider it obvious that you should defect on the one-shot PD if the other player cooperates in advance on the expectation that you will cooperate as well.
There are issues with trustworthiness and how the sinner can trust the rationalist’s commitment. It is not enough to be trustworthy; you must appear so. [...]
There’s a proverb I failed to Google, which runs something like, “Once someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind.” You wouldn’t want others to expect you to lie, if you have something important to say to them; and this issue cannot be wholly decoupled from the issue of whether you actually tell the truth. If you’ll lie when the fate of the world is at stake, and others can guess that fact about you, then, at the moment when the fate of the world is at stake, that’s the moment when your words become the whistling of the wind. [...]
For the benefit of others reading this, then, here’s what I consider to be the best presentation of the opposite view (the one Eliezer mentions, but rejects, in the first linked post): Paul Christiano’s “If we can’t lie to others, we’ll lie to ourselves”.
Some context from Eliezer’s Honesty: Beyond Internal Truth (in 2009):
And from Prices or Bindings? (2008):
I see, thanks.
For the benefit of others reading this, then, here’s what I consider to be the best presentation of the opposite view (the one Eliezer mentions, but rejects, in the first linked post): Paul Christiano’s “If we can’t lie to others, we’ll lie to ourselves”.