I prefer not to lie, but there are so many cases where the weight of projected futures is overwhelmingly in favor of lying that I can’t call it a rule, or give much moral weight to it.
Lying has costs (it’s unpleasant, if found out, reduces trust, etc.). Truth-telling has costs (hurt feelings, punishments, etc.). Silence (including Glomar’s response) has a cost (much the same as both lying and truth-telling). Weighing costs and benefits of actions (including communication and signals to other entities) is what we do.
Any sane decision theory will choose “lie” in some inputs, “truth” in others, and “silence” in still others.
Note: I do subscribe to the (rejected by you) notion that
rationalists ought to practice lying, so that they could separate their internal honesty from any fears of needing to say what they believed.
Belief is different from communication, which is different from signaling/manipulation. They are all mixed up in different proportions in different contexts, and trying to generally solve for one without acknowledging the others is likely to lead to pain.
I also think that the idea of “honesty” AND by extension “meta-honesty” is an attempt to signal (perhaps to yourself, as virtue-signaling often is) a continuity and baseline expectation that should not exist in rational agents who live among intermittently-cooperative other agents. I’m happy to join in the signaling when I think it’s useful, but internally I recognize it as just signaling.
Finally, I think you’re not winning if you play any games or otherwise fail to directly lie, convincingly and with no prevarication or hesitation, to the gestapo about the family in your basement. And you should meta-lie in order to make your ruse more effective.
Now, if you’re just saying “for the vast majority of interactions with people, when there’s no direct and immediate risk of serious harm, I prefer to speak close to truth, and expect to receive it”, then I fully agree. But there’s nothing absolute about it, no matter how many metas you add. Communication is contextual and has mixed motivations all the way down.
I’m pretty sure you are correct that honesty is a sort of signaling thing, but I do not find it possible to “join in the signaling when it is useful”—it seems to me that evidence as to the honesty / dishonesty of a person usually accumulates slowly, so you more-or-less have to pick a strategy and stick to it. (My personal experience is that I have a hard time getting people to believe the things I say even when I’m ~100% honest, and that my persuasiveness goes down hill rapidly if I dial that back.)
Finally, I think you’re not winning if you [do anything but] directly lie … to the gestapo
In the usual situation where the gestapo questions you, I think you are correct. However, the hypothetical was unusual in that:
1) The gestapo agent is fluent in meta-honesty
2) The gestapo agent knows that you firmly adhere to a code of meta-honesty
3) #1 and #2 are common knowledge between you and the gestapo agent
Together, these (as Eliezer notes, very unlikely) requirements mean that not “playing the meta-honesty game” by directly lying is in fact a strong tell of object-level dishonesty—why would you break your code of protecting your counterfactual selves if you were not hiding *actual* jews? (Or at least nervous because of the proximal authority figure.)
Again, I agree that in reality, this falls apart—for instance, without #1 your response reads as prevarication, and without #3 you’d likely lie and be caught lying.
(It is interesting that, unless I’m missing something, you don’t have to assume #2 - if the agent doesn’t know that you’re meta-honest, you don’t get punished for that strategy; you just don’t get the benefit from your long history of honest meta-honest conduct.)
Yes, intentional signaling is hard, and the easiest way to do it is to just be honest most of the time. I follow and recommend this (though I do NOT recommend truthful-but-misleading linguistic games in most cases, and don’t make much moral distinction between that and lying. It is more deniable, so more convenient signaling). But I don’t hesitate to diverge when it’s clearly positive-value.
To be clear, I recommend meta-lie-ing to the gestapo as well. Claim that I’ve gone further down the road since they read my blogs and taken a vow of absolute object-level truth. Claim that I’ve discovered meta-meta-truth, which prevents withholding information even if not asked, and confess some other minor crime instead. Whatever it takes to get them to leave.
I prefer not to lie, but there are so many cases where the weight of projected futures is overwhelmingly in favor of lying that I can’t call it a rule, or give much moral weight to it.
Lying has costs (it’s unpleasant, if found out, reduces trust, etc.). Truth-telling has costs (hurt feelings, punishments, etc.). Silence (including Glomar’s response) has a cost (much the same as both lying and truth-telling). Weighing costs and benefits of actions (including communication and signals to other entities) is what we do.
Any sane decision theory will choose “lie” in some inputs, “truth” in others, and “silence” in still others.
Note: I do subscribe to the (rejected by you) notion that
Belief is different from communication, which is different from signaling/manipulation. They are all mixed up in different proportions in different contexts, and trying to generally solve for one without acknowledging the others is likely to lead to pain.
I also think that the idea of “honesty” AND by extension “meta-honesty” is an attempt to signal (perhaps to yourself, as virtue-signaling often is) a continuity and baseline expectation that should not exist in rational agents who live among intermittently-cooperative other agents. I’m happy to join in the signaling when I think it’s useful, but internally I recognize it as just signaling.
Finally, I think you’re not winning if you play any games or otherwise fail to directly lie, convincingly and with no prevarication or hesitation, to the gestapo about the family in your basement. And you should meta-lie in order to make your ruse more effective.
Now, if you’re just saying “for the vast majority of interactions with people, when there’s no direct and immediate risk of serious harm, I prefer to speak close to truth, and expect to receive it”, then I fully agree. But there’s nothing absolute about it, no matter how many metas you add. Communication is contextual and has mixed motivations all the way down.
I’m pretty sure you are correct that honesty is a sort of signaling thing, but I do not find it possible to “join in the signaling when it is useful”—it seems to me that evidence as to the honesty / dishonesty of a person usually accumulates slowly, so you more-or-less have to pick a strategy and stick to it. (My personal experience is that I have a hard time getting people to believe the things I say even when I’m ~100% honest, and that my persuasiveness goes down hill rapidly if I dial that back.)
In the usual situation where the gestapo questions you, I think you are correct. However, the hypothetical was unusual in that:
1) The gestapo agent is fluent in meta-honesty
2) The gestapo agent knows that you firmly adhere to a code of meta-honesty
3) #1 and #2 are common knowledge between you and the gestapo agent
Together, these (as Eliezer notes, very unlikely) requirements mean that not “playing the meta-honesty game” by directly lying is in fact a strong tell of object-level dishonesty—why would you break your code of protecting your counterfactual selves if you were not hiding *actual* jews? (Or at least nervous because of the proximal authority figure.)
Again, I agree that in reality, this falls apart—for instance, without #1 your response reads as prevarication, and without #3 you’d likely lie and be caught lying.
(It is interesting that, unless I’m missing something, you don’t have to assume #2 - if the agent doesn’t know that you’re meta-honest, you don’t get punished for that strategy; you just don’t get the benefit from your long history of honest meta-honest conduct.)
Yes, intentional signaling is hard, and the easiest way to do it is to just be honest most of the time. I follow and recommend this (though I do NOT recommend truthful-but-misleading linguistic games in most cases, and don’t make much moral distinction between that and lying. It is more deniable, so more convenient signaling). But I don’t hesitate to diverge when it’s clearly positive-value.
To be clear, I recommend meta-lie-ing to the gestapo as well. Claim that I’ve gone further down the road since they read my blogs and taken a vow of absolute object-level truth. Claim that I’ve discovered meta-meta-truth, which prevents withholding information even if not asked, and confess some other minor crime instead. Whatever it takes to get them to leave.