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.
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”.