Why does it seem unusually clear-cut to you that everyone should take part in a ritual in which one person acts like they care about the other’s emotional state by asking about it, the other one lies about it in order to maintain the narrative that Things Are Fine (even in cases where things aren’t fine and that would be important information to someone who actually cared about them), then sometimes they switch roles?
While I still endorse my description of what’s going on there (and thanks for linking it!), in hindsight it seems like I’m describing something that has some pretty substantial costs—as I mentioned in another thread it literally prevents me from actually asking the question “how are you?”.
It does make sense to exercise some care here, as one of the effects of this social ritual is to compel disprivileged people to participate in creating a shared narrative in which they’re fine, everything is fine, can’t complain or else I’ll be socially attacked, how are you? Asking such people not to lie in response to “how are you?” may sometimes not be a reasonable request.
I’m not sure where you got this really quite bizarre interpretation of my comment, but I suppose I had better clarify:
Whether you should ask about the well-being[1] of people you interact with is, of course, entirely up to you, and your own personal considerations surrounding whether to engage in certain rituals, follow certain patterns of social interaction, etc. etc., and in any case is quite beyond the scope of this discussion.
What I am saying, however, is that when you are asked such a question, it is entirely permissible—indeed, usually both expected by the asker, and prudent and right for the one asked—to lie, freely and without the slightest shred of guilt.
(Indeed, if you think that routinely giving replies like “Horrible!” to a so-called “question” like “How are you?” even constitutes honesty, then I daresay you are confused about just what exactly is going on in said interaction.)
[1] I am also not sure why you suggest that the “How are you?” question is an inquiry about emotional state, but that’s neither here nor there.
To be clear, by “everyone should participate” I meant “forall x. x should participate” not “everyone as a whole should participate”; sorry for the ambiguous wording.
But in any case: what is there here to be worth lying about? Avoiding being slightly awkward? I have often answered this question by actually talking about things that have been going on in my life lately, and that pretty much always goes well. And I don’t even think answering “Horribly!” would cause serious negative consequences (e.g. scapegoating). Maybe this is partially due to my privilege level, but I just don’t see what is so bad about answering the question honestly, if you are already pretty committed to being unusually honest.
I think “How are you?” is a question and that answering “Horribly!” to that question would be honest if, in fact, it is going horribly, while “good” would not be honest. Why? (a) If you look at the syntax, that is what is actually going on. (b) The common ritual probably started with people actually being concerned about each other’s state, then got corrupted once people started lying and asking when they weren’t actually concerned. (c) The current state of affairs actually makes it hard to ask someone about their state; it seems optimized against creating clarity in an important way, and it seems appropriate for someone trying to be unusually honest to break the ritual by creating clarity.
(good point about emotional state vs. state in general, that seems right)
I have often answered this question by actually talking about things that have been going on in my life lately, and that pretty much always goes well. And I don’t even think answering “Horribly!” would cause serious negative consequences (e.g. scapegoating). Maybe this is partially due to my privilege level, but I just don’t see what is so bad about answering the question honestly, if you are already pretty committed to being unusually honest.
It definitely looks like privilege to me. Almost all the time I am asked this question, the kinds of things that are bothering me in my life are not the kinds of things that it is OK to talk about.
Update: I moved to Berkeley last week and noticed a huge difference in how the rationalist/EA community deals with these sorts of conversations and how the rest of the world does. Yesterday I was talking to someone I had barely met and they asked “how are you doing?” I said “you just opened a whole can of worms” and we ended up having an interesting discussion, including about how the conversational norms are different here from elsewhere. In general, I think people in this community are both more likely to give an honest answer to such questions, and less likely to ask them if they aren’t interested in an honest answer.
In general, I think people in this community are both more likely to give an honest answer to such questions, and less likely to ask them if they aren’t interested in an honest answer.
I have noticed this myself, in my interactions with rationalist communities. In my experience, the latter fact (“less likely to ask … if they aren’t interested in an honest answer”) makes rationalist gatherings/spaces feel a lot less welcoming and friendly than their “normal-person” analogues. (This is part of a general trend of failing to perform politeness norms—either due to ignorance thereof, or active refusal, or some combination of both causes. It is quite unfortunate, and makes participation in rationalist gatherings/spaces a less pleasant experience than I wish it were.)
(And, of course, the former fact—“more likely to give an honest answer to such questions”—make it more difficult to interact with rationalist-type folks for other reasons, which have been discussed elsethread.)
Yeah, there are definitely both upsides and downsides. It certainly makes me feel more welcome, though I can see that many people would have the opposite experience. Maybe the important thing is that people know what they are getting into.
It’s worth noting: I fall pretty cleanly in the “smalltalk is a useful skill and social lubrication ritual” camp, and I think it’s pretty achievable to get the best of both worlds here.
The exchange “how are you” --> “you just opened up a whole can of worms” --> [Whatever Comes Next] is actually pretty reasonable. Person A showcases that they’re at least somewhat interested in interacting. Person B makes a bid for “I’d like to have a bit of a heart-to-heart as opposed to a low-key-professional-interaction”. Person A now has the ability to say either:
“Oh, I’m happy to open up a can of worms”,
or,
“Oh man, hope you’re okay. [ “I’m not sure I can dive into that right now” / “I have to get going in a few minutes but interested in the medium-version if that exists” / etc]
This seems pretty close to how SmallTalkAsSocialRitual is supposed to work, with the main difference between rationalist and typical-society versions being that the Regular Society version would replace some of the direct-question-ness with subtler facial expressions.
To be clear, by “everyone should participate” I meant “forall x. x should participate” not “everyone as a whole should participate”; sorry for the ambiguous wording.
That is, actually, what I assumed you meant, so consider my comments to stand unchanged.
But in any case: what is there here to be worth lying about? Avoiding being slightly awkward? I have often answered this question by actually talking about things that have been going on in my life lately, and that pretty much always goes well.
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.
Maybe this is partially due to my privilege level, but I just don’t see what is so bad about answering the question honestly
The “privilege” framing may not be all that useful here… let us say, rather, that you quite likely live in a… strongly-selected-for-unusual-traits social bubble.
I think “How are you?” is a question … Why? (a) If you look at the syntax, that is what is actually going on.
This is an exceedingly naive view of language.
(b) The common ritual probably started with people actually being concerned about each other’s state, then got corrupted once people started lying and asking when they weren’t actually concerned.
You wouldn’t base your behavior on a sociological just-so-story which you haven’t actually verified… would you?
(c) The current state of affairs actually makes it hard to ask someone about their state; it seems optimized against creating clarity in an important way, and it seems appropriate for someone trying to be unusually honest to break the ritual by creating clarity.
To the contrary; it does no such thing. What it does, rather, is enforce structures of social relationships, against forces which would otherwise erode them, to the detriment of those parties who are already the less-powerful ones in said relationships.
Relatedly, 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. For bonus points, also consider how patterns in the possession and exchange of information relate to social power relations, and what patterns of interaction have what game-theoretic consequences for said relations.
(I am, of course, only pointing at certain clusters of knowledge and understanding, while providing no details, for the simple reason that providing those details is the work of books, not of single forum comments… yet saying nothing at all would be worse than indicating, at least, the existence of relevant facts.)
[This is written as a moderator, and is a suggestion to Said Achmiz, jessicata, and others, posted here because this is currently the highest-placed comment on the page that follows a particular pattern.]
Not paying attention to the semantic content of this comment, but rather its structure, notice that it is a series of quotes, often of a single sentence, followed by similarly short replies. While this is a standard technique in forum arguments, I claim that is mostly for undesirable reasons (like it being optimized for “scoring points”), and have found that it’s not a particularly helpful method of discussion.
My suggestion (and it is only a suggestion) is that you try an approach where you share your understanding of your interlocutor’s whole point or position with a paraphrase, attempt to identify the most fruitful part of the disagreement to work on, and then devote the remainder of the comment to that point. This keeps discussions focused on moving forward, doesn’t give an edge to the party with more attention to spare to the discussion, makes it harder to talk past one another repeatedly, and makes it easier to notice when core points are simply dropped from the argument.
Sometimes detailed line-checking is actually the correct thing to do, and a tree of point and counterpoint is the right approach. (And I haven’t read this thread carefully enough to decisively say this is not one of those situations.) But oftentimes this is much more effective once more foundational issues have been converged upon, such that the leaves of the tree do actually propagate back upwards to change root positions.
I made a proposal for a moderator tool that seems like it might have been helpful to this thread, partly in response to your bracketed text, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2/issues/610
Another question to ask, with regards to launching into unprompted explanations of one’s personal life, is whether the other person actually wants that information. Like it or not, most people subscribe to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, which means by telling people of your problems, you are implicitly making it their problem (else why would you bother sharing?).
If I said, “Hi, how are you,” and your response was a 5-minute long explanation of how your aunt died, your car broke down and how your dog needs surgery, my reaction will be awkward silence, not because I have no sympathy for your plight, but because I am wondering whether there is any obligation for me to step in and help.
That is, actually, what I assumed you meant, so consider my comments to stand unchanged.
I’m confused because it does seem like you think everyone should participate, i.e. you endorse people lying about their state if asked about it. (I didn’t mean “everyone should go out of their way to participate” but rather “everyone should participate at all” e.g. when pressed to by someone else)
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.
I’m actually fine with this as a filter. Anyway, if someone’s code of honesty is unable to actually resist the pressure of “if I were honest then it would be slightly awkward and some people would talk to me less” then it is doing very little work. I don’t see why anyone would want such a code of “honesty” except to lie about how honest they are.
You wouldn’t base your behavior on a sociological just-so-story which you haven’t actually verified… would you?
The just-so story seems true based on my social models, and I would bet on it if it were possible. That’s enough to base my behavior on.
My main argument here is that (a) saying you’re doing well when you’re not doing well is literally false and (b) in context it’s part of a pattern that optimizes against clarity, rather than something like acting that is clearly tagged as acting. I don’t actually see a counterargument to (b) in the text of your comment.
I’m confused because it does seem like you think everyone should participate, i.e. you endorse people lying about their state if asked about it. (I didn’t mean “everyone should go out of their way to participate” but rather “everyone should participate at all” e.g. when pressed to by someone else)
Ok, back up. What exactly are you talking about, here? “Participate” in what? What am I “participating” in when I respond to “How are you?” with something other than a true accounting of my current state?
Originally, you asked about “participation” in
… a ritual in which one person acts like they care about the other’s emotional state by asking about it, the other one lies about it in order to maintain the narrative that Things Are Fine (even in cases where things aren’t fine and that would be important information to someone who actually cared about them), then sometimes they switch roles
But—as I alluded to in my response—there is a clear difference between the two halves of this “ritual”! Are you treating them as a single unit? If so—why? If not, then I am hard-pressed to parse your remarks. Please clarify.
… if someone’s code of honesty is unable to actually resist the pressure of “if I were honest then it would be slightly awkward and some people would talk to me less” then it is doing very little work. I don’t see why anyone would want such a code of “honesty” except to lie about how honest they are.
You seem to assume, here, that any “code of honesty” must use the same concept of “honesty” as you do. You may reasonably disagree with my understanding of what constitutes honesty, but it is tendentious to suggest that, in fact, I am using the same concept of honesty as you are, except that I am being dishonest about it. (In other words, you speak as if I share your values but am failing to live up to them, while hypocritically claiming otherwise. The obvious alternative account—one which I, in fact, suggested upthread—is that my values simply differ from yours.)
The just-so story seems true based on my social models, and I would bet on it if it were possible.
This is nothing more than a circular restatement that you believe said just-so-story to be true. We already know that you believe this.
(a) saying you’re doing well when you’re not doing well is literally false
Perhaps, but all this means is that the concept of “literal falsehood” which you are using is inadequate to the task of modeling human communication. (Once again, one person’s modus ponens…)
The problem with such naive accounts of “truth” in communication is that they do not work—in a very real and precise sense—to predict the epistemic state of actual human beings after certain communicative acts have been undertaken. That should signal to you that something is wrong with your model.
(b) in context it’s part of a pattern that optimizes against clarity, rather than something like acting that is clearly tagged as acting
You’re going to have to unpack “clarity” a good bit—as well as explaining, at least in brief, why you consider it to be a desirable thing—before I can comment on this (beyond what I’ve already said, which I do not see that you’ve acknowledged).
But—as I alluded to in my response—there is a clear difference between the two halves of this “ritual”! Are you treating them as a single unit?
If you should participate in the ritual as the B role, then you should participate in the ritual at all. This seems like a straightforward logical consequence? Like, “if you should play soccer as defense, then you should play soccer.”
You seem to assume, here, that any “code of honesty” must use the same concept of “honesty” as you do.
What does “honesty” mean to you, and what is it for? Does honesty ever require doing things that are slightly awkward and cause fewer people to want to talk to you?
This is nothing more than a circular restatement that you believe said just-so-story to be true. We already know that you believe this.
It seems like you were implying that there was something illegitimate about me acting based on my social models? If you don’t think this then there is no conflict here.
The problem with such naive accounts of “truth” in communication is that they do not work—in a very real and precise sense—to predict the epistemic state of actual human beings after certain communicative acts have been undertaken.
I agree that you should not update on someone saying “X” by proceeding to condition your beliefs on “X.” You at least have to take pragmatics and deception into account. I think this is a case of deception in addition to pragmatics, rather than pragmatics alone. You would not expect people saying “fine” if they were not fine from a model like the ones on this page where agents are trying to inform each other while taking into account the inferences others make; you would get it if there were pressure to deceive.
You’re going to have to unpack “clarity” a good bit—as well as explaining, at least in brief, why you consider it to be a desirable thing—before I can comment on this (beyond what I’ve already said, which I do not see that you’ve acknowledged).
“Clarity” means something like “information is being processed in a way that is obvious to all parties.” For example, people are able to ask about what state each other are in, and either receive a true answer or a refusal to provide this information. When things aren’t fine, this quickly becomes obvious to everyone. And so on.
This is often desirable for a bunch of reasons. For example, if I can track what state my friends are in, I can think about what would improve their situations. If I know things aren’t fine more generally, then I can investigate the crisis and think about what to do about it.
This is not always desirable. For example, if someone were doing drugs and the police were questioning them about it, then it would probably be correct for them to optimize for unclarity by lying or misdirecting (assuming they can get away with it). But optimizing against clarity is pretty much the same thing as being deceptive, and pretending that this is compatible with acting unusually honesty is meta-dishonest. (Of course, someone can act unusually honestly most of the time while being deceptive other times)
In general clarity is good for enabling positive-sum interactions, and highly situational in situations with a substantial adversarial/zero-sum element.
For saying “fine” when greeted with “how are you?” or “how’s it going?” to be a case of deception in addition to pragmatics, it would need to be the case that the person saying “fine” expects to be understood as saying that their life is in fact going well.
I don’t think people generally expect that.
(Though there’s something kinda a bit like that that people maybe do expect. If my life is really terrible at the moment then maybe my desire for sympathy might outweigh my respect for standard conventions and make me answer “pretty bad, actually” instead of “fine”; so when I don’t do that, I am giving some indication that my life isn’t going toooo badly; so if it actually is but I still say “fine”, maybe I’m being deceptive. But that’s only the case in so far as, in fact, if my life were going badly enough then I would be likely not to do that.)
Having this convention isn’t (so it seems to me) “optimizing against clarity” in any strong sense. That is: sure, there are other possible conventions that would yield greater clarity, but it’s not so clear that they’re better that it makes sense to say that choosing this convention instead is “optimizing against clarity”. (For comparison: imagine that someone proposes a different convention: whenever two people meet, they exchange bank balances and recent medical histories. This would indeed bring greater clarity; I don’t think most of us would want that clarity; but it seems unfair to say that we’re “optimizing against clarity” if we choose not to have it.)
For saying “fine” when greeted with “how are you?” or “how’s it going?” to be a case of deception in addition to pragmatics, it would need to be the case that the person saying “fine” expects to be understood as saying that their life is in fact going well.
Almost no one expects marketers to actually tell the truth about their products, and yet it seems pretty clear that marketing is deceptive. I think this has to do with common knowledge: even though nearly everyone knows marketing is deceptive, this isn’t common knowledge to the point where an ad could contain the phrase “I am lying to you right now” without it being jarring.
Having this convention isn’t (so it seems to me) “optimizing against clarity” in any strong sense. That is: sure, there are other possible conventions that would yield greater clarity, but it’s not so clear that they’re better that it makes sense to say that choosing this convention instead is “optimizing against clarity”
The convention is optimized for preventing people from giving information about their state that would break the narrative that Things Are Fine. People’s mental processes during the conversation will actually be optimizing against breaking this narrative even in cases where it is false. See Ben’s comment here.
You may be right about marketing and common knowledge; if so, then I suggest that the standard “how are you? fine” script is common knowledge; everyone knows that a “fine” answer can be, and likely will be, given even if the person in question is not doing well at all.
I agree that when executing the how-are-you-fine script people are ipso facto discouraged from giving information about their state that contradicts Things Are Fine. That’s because when executing that script, no one is actually giving any information about their state at all. If you actually want to find out how someone’s life is going, that isn’t how you do it; you ask them some less stereotyped question and, if they trust you sufficiently, they will answer it.
Again, if the how-are-you-fine script were taken as a serious attempt to extract (one one side) and provide (on the other) information about how someone’s life is going, then for sure it would be deceptive. But that’s not how anyone generally uses it, and I don’t see a particular reason why it should be.
The convention is optimized for preventing people from giving information about their state that would break the narrative that Things Are Fine.
You have made this sort of assertion several times now; I’d like to see some elaboration on it. What sorts of social contexts do you have in mind, when you say such things? On what basis do you make this sort of claim?
Person A and B are acquaintances. A asks B “how are you?” B is having serious problems at work, will probably be fired, and face serious economic consequences. B says “fine.” Why did B say “fine” when B was in fact not fine?
Suppose B said “I’m going to lose my job and be really poor for the near future.” Prediction: this will be awkward. Why would this be awkward?
Hypothesis: it is awkward because it contradicts the idea that things are fine. While this contradiction exists in the conversation, A and B will feel tension. Tension can be resolved in a few ways. A could say “oh don’t worry, you can get another job,” contradicting the idea that there is a problem in an unhelpful way that nevertheless restores the narrative that things are fine. A could also say “wow that really sucks, let me know if you need help” agreeing that things aren’t fine and resolving the tension by offering assistance. But A might not want to actually offer assistance in some cases. A could also just say “wow that sucks;” this does not resolve the tension as much as in the previous case, but it does at least mean that A and B are currently agreeing that things aren’t fine, and A has sympathy with B, which ameliorates the tension.
Compare: rising action in a story, which produces tension that must be resolved somehow.
The account you present is rather abstract, and seems to be based on a sort of “narrative” view of social interactions. I am not sure I understand this view well enough to criticize it coherently; I also am not sure what motivates it. (It is also not obvious to me what could falsify the hypothesis in question, nor what it predicts, etc. Certainly I would appreciate a link or two to a more in-depth discussion of this sort of view.)
In any case, there are some quite obvious alternate hypotheses, some of which have been mentioned elsethread, viz.:
All of these alternate hypotheses (and similar ones) make use only of simple, straightforward interests and desires of individuals, and have no need to bring in abstract “narrative” concepts.
“Clarity” means something like “information is being processed in a way that is obvious to all parties.” For example, people are able to ask about what state each other are in, and either receive a true answer or a refusal to provide this information. When things aren’t fine, this quickly becomes obvious to everyone. And so on.
…
In general clarity is good for enabling positive-sum interactions, and highly situational in situations with a substantial adversarial/zero-sum element.
I see, thanks.
This is not how I would normally use the word “clarity” (which is why I said “it does no such thing” in response to your claim that the norm in question “optimizes against clarity”). That having been said, your usage is not terribly unreasonable, so I will not quibble with it. So, taking “clarity” to mean what you described…
… I consider this sort of “clarity” to not be clearly desirable, even totally ignoring the sorts of “adversarial/zero-sum” situations you allude to. (In fact, it seems to me that a naive, unreflective dedication to “clarity” of this sort is particularly harmful in many categories of potentially-positive-sum interactions!)
This is a topic which has been much-discussed in the rationalist meme-sphere (and beyond, of course!) over the last decade; I confess to being surprised that you appear to be unaware of what’s been said on the subject. (Or are you aware of it, but merely disagree with it all? But then it seems to me that you would, at least, not have been at all surprised by any of my comments…) I do not, at the moment, have the time to hunt for links to relevant writings, but I will try to make some time in the near future.
Given the clarification in this subthread, let me now go ahead and respond to this bit:
You would not expect people saying “fine” if they were not fine from a model like the ones on this page [i.e., an implicature / Gricean-maxim model. —SA] where agents are trying to inform each other while taking into account the inferences others make
Indeed, you certainly would not; the problem, however, lies in the assumption that someone responding “Fine” to “How are you?” is trying to inform the asker, or that the asker expects to be informed when asking that question.
In any case, this is a point we’ve covered elsethread.
If you should participate in the ritual as the B role, then you should participate in the ritual at all. This seems like a straightforward logical consequence? Like, “if you should play soccer as defense, then you should play soccer.”
This is very bizarre logic, to be frank. The entire conception of such social interactions as coherent “rituals” that both the asker and the asked are willing “participants” in, qua ritual, is quite strange, and does not accord with anything I said, or any of my understanding of the world.
What does “honesty” mean to you, and what is it for?
That question is the genesis of quite a long discussion. I hardly think this is the time and place for it.
Does honesty ever require doing things that are slightly awkward and cause fewer people to want to talk to you?
That is certainly not out of the question.
It seems like you were implying that there was something illegitimate about me acting based on my social models?
I don’t know about “illegitimate”, but basing your social models on unverified just-so-stories is epistemically unwise.
I think this is a case of deception in addition to pragmatics, rather than pragmatics alone.
What do you mean by “deception”, here? If a casual acquaintance greets me with “How are you?” and I respond with “Fine, you?”—in a case when, in fact, a monster truck has just run over my favorite elephant—do you consider this an instance of “deception”? If so, do you view “deception” as undesirable (in some general sense) or harmful (to the said casual acquaintance)?
You would not expect people saying “fine” if they were not fine from a model like the ones on this page where agents are trying to inform each other while taking into account the inferences others make; you would get it if there were pressure to deceive.
That page seems to be some sort of highly technical discussion, involving code in a language I’ve never heard of. Would you care to summarize its core ideas in plain language, or link to such a summary elsewhere? Failing that, I have no comment in response to this.
(rest of your comment addressed in a separate response)
Re: “ritual,” it seems like “social script” might have closer to the right connotations here.
My main point here is that, if you are trying to build a reputation as being unusually honest, yet you lie because otherwise it would be slightly awkward and some people would talk to you less, then your reputation doesn’t actually count for anything. If someone won’t push against slight awkwardness to tell the truth about something only a little important, why would I expect them to push against a lot of awkwardness to tell the truth about something that is very important?
By definitions of “honesty” commonly used in American culture, being unusually honest usually requires doing things that are awkward and might cause people to talk to you less. For example, in the myth about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, it is in fact awkward for him to admit that he chopped down a cherry tree, and he could face social consequences as a result. But he admits it anyway, because he is honest. (Ironically this didn’t actually happen, but this isn’t that important if we are trying to figure out what concepts of honesty are in common usage)
I would count saying “fine” when you are not fine to be a form of deception, one which is usually slightly harmful to both participants, but only slightly. For someone who is not attempting to be unusually honest as a matter of policy, this is not actually a big deal. It might be worth saying “fine” to minimize tension.
But the situation is very different for someone attempting to be unusually honest as a matter of policy. This type of person is trying to tell the truth almost all the time, even when it is hard and goes against their local incentives. There may be some times when they should lie, but it should have to be a really good reason, not “it would be slightly awkward if I didn’t lie.” If someone is going to lie whenever the cost-benefit analysis looks at least as favorable to lying as it does in the “saying you are fine when you are not fine” case, then they’re going to lie quite a lot about pretty important things, whenever telling the truth about these things would be comparably awkward.
Would you care to summarize its core ideas in plain language, or link to such a summary elsewhere?
Sure. Suppose I have seen a bunch of apples, which may be red or green. I say “some of the apples are red.” Is it correct for you to infer that not all the apples are red? Yes, probably; if I had seen that all the apples were red, I would have instead said “all of the apples are red.” Even if “some of the apples are red” is technically correct if all the apples are red, I would know that you would make less-correct inferences about the proportion of apples that are red if I said “some of the apples are red” instead of “all of the apples are red.” Basically, the idea is that the listener models the speaker as trying to inform the listener, and the speaker to model the listener as making these inferences.
Suppose I have seen a bunch of apples, which may be red or green. I say “some of the apples are red.” Is it correct for you to infer that all the apples are red? Yes, probably …
I assume you mean, infer that not all the apples are red?
In any case, thanks for the summary. It sounds like it’s simply the Gricean maxims / the concept of implicature, which is certainly something I’m familiar with.
Re: “ritual,” it seems like “social script” might have closer to the right connotations here.
I don’t really know that this makes your comments about it any more reasonable-sounding, but in any case this sub-point seems like a tangent, so we can let it go, if you like.
My main point here is that, if you are trying to build a reputation as being unusually honest, yet you lie because otherwise it would be slightly awkward and some people would talk to you less, then your reputation doesn’t actually count for anything. If someone won’t push against slight awkwardness to tell the truth about something only a little important, why would I expect them to push against a lot of awkwardness to tell the truth about something that is very important?
I just don’t think that this identification of “honesty” with “parsing spoken sentences in the most naively-literal possible way and then responding as if the intended meaning of your interlocutor’s utterance coincided with this literal reading” is very sensible. If someone did this, I wouldn’t think “boy, that guy/gal sure is unusually honest!”. I’d think “there goes a person who has, sadly, acquired a most inaccurate understanding, not to mention a most unproductive view, of social interactions”.
Suppose you are asked a question, where all of the following are true:
Your interlocutor neither expects nor desires for you to take the question literally and answer it truthfully.
You know that you are not expected to, and you have no desire to, take the question literally and answer it truthfully.
Your interlocutor would be harmed by you taking the question literally and answering it truthfully.
You would be harmed by you taking the question literally and answering it truthfully.
Do you maintain that, in such a case, “honesty” nevertheless demands that you do take the question literally and answer it truthfully?
If so, then this “honesty” of yours seems to be a supreme undesirable trait to have, and for one’s friends and acquaintances to have. (I maintain the scare quotes, because I would certainly not assent to any definition of “honesty” which had the aforesaid property—and, importantly, I do not think that “honesty” of this type is more predictive of certain actually desirable and prosocial behaviors, of the type that most people would expect from a person who had the as-generally-understood virtue of honesty.)
I would count saying “fine” when you are not fine to be a form of deception, one which is usually slightly harmful to both participants, but only slightly.
I would be interested to hear why you think this. It seems incorrect to me.
But the situation is very different for someone attempting to be unusually honest as a matter of policy. This type of person is trying to tell the truth almost all the time, even when it is hard and goes against their local incentives. There may be some times when they should lie, but it should have to be a really good reason, not “it would be slightly awkward if I didn’t lie.” If someone is going to lie whenever the cost-benefit analysis looks at least as favorable to lying as it does in the “saying you are fine when you are not fine” case, then they’re going to lie quite a lot about pretty important things, whenever telling the truth about these things would be comparably awkward.
Once again, you are relying on a very unrealistic characterization of what is taking place when one person says “How are you?” and another answers “Fine”. However, we can let that slide for now (in any case, I already addressed it, earlier in this comment), and instead deal with the substantive claim that someone who does not respond to “How are you?” with a report of their actual state, is “going to lie quite a lot about pretty important things …”.
I firmly dispute this claim. And given how strong of a claim it is, I should like to see it justified quite convincingly.
If someone did this, I wouldn’t think “boy, that guy/gal sure is unusually honest!”. I’d think “there goes a person who has, sadly, acquired a most inaccurate understanding, not to mention a most unproductive view, of social interactions”.
These are not necessarily mutually exclusive explanations. Sometimes the point of a social transaction is to maintain some particular social fiction.
I just don’t think that this identification of “honesty” with “parsing spoken sentences in the most naively-literal possible way and then responding as if the intended meaning of your interlocutor’s utterance coincided with this literal reading” is very sensible.
I don’t make this identification, given that I think honesty is compatible with pragmatics and metaphor, both of which are attempts to communicate that go beyond this. I would identify honesty more with “trying to communicate in a way that causes the other person to have accurate beliefs, with a significant preference for saying literally true things by default.”
Do you maintain that, in such a case, “honesty” nevertheless demands that you do take the question literally and answer it truthfully?
Depends on the situation. If it’s actually common knowledge that the things I’m saying are not intended to be true statements (e.g. I’m participating in a skit) then of course not. Otherwise it seems at least a little dishonest. Being dishonest is not always bad, but someone trying to be unusually honest should avoid being dishonest for frivolous reasons. (Obviously, not everyone should try to be unusually honest in all contexts)
If you’re pretty often in situations where lying is advantageous, then maybe lying a lot is the right move. But if you are doing this then it would be meta-dishonest to say that you are trying to be unusually honest.
I would be interested to hear why you think this. It seems incorrect to me.
I think saying false things routinely to some extent trains people to stop telling truth from falsity as a matter of habit. I don’t have a strong case for this but it seems true according to my experience.
the substantive claim that someone who does not respond to “How are you?” with a report of their actual state, is “going to lie quite a lot about pretty important things …”.
This is a pretty severe misquote. Read what I wrote.
Most of your comment seems to indicate that we’ve more or less reached the end of how much we can productively untangle our disagreement (at least, without full-length, top-level posts from one or both of us), but I would like to resolve this bit:
the substantive claim that someone who does not respond to “How are you?” with a report of their actual state, is “going to lie quite a lot about pretty important things …”.
This is a pretty severe misquote. Read what I wrote.
Well, first of all, to the extent that it’s a quote (which only part of it is), it’s not a misquote, per se, because you really did write those words, in that order. I assume what you meant is that it is a misrepresentation/mischaracterization of what you said and meant—which I am entirely willing to accept! (It would simply mean that I misunderstood what you were getting at; that is not hard at all to believe.)
So, could you explain in what way my attempted paraphrase/summary mischaracterized your point? I confess it does not seem to me to be a misrepresentation, except insofar as it brackets assumptions which, to me, seem both (a) flawed and unwarranted, and (b) not critical to the claim, per se (for all that they may be necessary to justify or support the claim).
Agreed that further engagement here on the disagreement is not that productive. Here’s what I said:
If someone is going to lie whenever the cost-benefit analysis looks at least as favorable to lying as it does in the “saying you are fine when you are not fine” case, then they’re going to lie quite a lot about pretty important things, whenever telling the truth about these things would be comparably awkward.
I am not saying that, if someone says they are fine when they are not fine, then necessarily they will lie about important things. They could be making an unprincipled exception. I am instead saying that, if they lied whenever the cost-benefit analysis looks at least as favorable to lying as in the “saying you are fine when you are not fine” case, then they’re likely going to end up lying about some pretty important things that are really awkward to talk about.
Yes, this is correct. The exception is entirely principled (really, I’d say it’s not even an exception, in the sense that the situation is not within the category of those to which the rule applies in the first place).
I see. It seems those assumptions I mentioned are ones which you consider much more important to your point than I consider them to be, which, I suppose, is not terribly surprising. (I do still think they are unwarranted.)
I will have to consider turning what I’ve been trying to say here into a top-level post (which may be no more than a list of links and blurbs; as I said, there has been a good deal of discussion about this stuff already).
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.
Why does it seem unusually clear-cut to you that everyone should take part in a ritual in which one person acts like they care about the other’s emotional state by asking about it, the other one lies about it in order to maintain the narrative that Things Are Fine (even in cases where things aren’t fine and that would be important information to someone who actually cared about them), then sometimes they switch roles?
This is my preferred, in-depth answer to some of the implied questions here.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/huRxRzwcvwTzvtEPY/handshakes-hi-and-what-s-new-what-s-going-on-with-small-talk
While I still endorse my description of what’s going on there (and thanks for linking it!), in hindsight it seems like I’m describing something that has some pretty substantial costs—as I mentioned in another thread it literally prevents me from actually asking the question “how are you?”.
It does make sense to exercise some care here, as one of the effects of this social ritual is to compel disprivileged people to participate in creating a shared narrative in which they’re fine, everything is fine, can’t complain or else I’ll be socially attacked, how are you? Asking such people not to lie in response to “how are you?” may sometimes not be a reasonable request.
I’m not sure where you got this really quite bizarre interpretation of my comment, but I suppose I had better clarify:
Whether you should ask about the well-being[1] of people you interact with is, of course, entirely up to you, and your own personal considerations surrounding whether to engage in certain rituals, follow certain patterns of social interaction, etc. etc., and in any case is quite beyond the scope of this discussion.
What I am saying, however, is that when you are asked such a question, it is entirely permissible—indeed, usually both expected by the asker, and prudent and right for the one asked—to lie, freely and without the slightest shred of guilt.
(Indeed, if you think that routinely giving replies like “Horrible!” to a so-called “question” like “How are you?” even constitutes honesty, then I daresay you are confused about just what exactly is going on in said interaction.)
[1] I am also not sure why you suggest that the “How are you?” question is an inquiry about emotional state, but that’s neither here nor there.
To be clear, by “everyone should participate” I meant “forall x. x should participate” not “everyone as a whole should participate”; sorry for the ambiguous wording.
But in any case: what is there here to be worth lying about? Avoiding being slightly awkward? I have often answered this question by actually talking about things that have been going on in my life lately, and that pretty much always goes well. And I don’t even think answering “Horribly!” would cause serious negative consequences (e.g. scapegoating). Maybe this is partially due to my privilege level, but I just don’t see what is so bad about answering the question honestly, if you are already pretty committed to being unusually honest.
I think “How are you?” is a question and that answering “Horribly!” to that question would be honest if, in fact, it is going horribly, while “good” would not be honest. Why? (a) If you look at the syntax, that is what is actually going on. (b) The common ritual probably started with people actually being concerned about each other’s state, then got corrupted once people started lying and asking when they weren’t actually concerned. (c) The current state of affairs actually makes it hard to ask someone about their state; it seems optimized against creating clarity in an important way, and it seems appropriate for someone trying to be unusually honest to break the ritual by creating clarity.
(good point about emotional state vs. state in general, that seems right)
It definitely looks like privilege to me. Almost all the time I am asked this question, the kinds of things that are bothering me in my life are not the kinds of things that it is OK to talk about.
Update: I moved to Berkeley last week and noticed a huge difference in how the rationalist/EA community deals with these sorts of conversations and how the rest of the world does. Yesterday I was talking to someone I had barely met and they asked “how are you doing?” I said “you just opened a whole can of worms” and we ended up having an interesting discussion, including about how the conversational norms are different here from elsewhere. In general, I think people in this community are both more likely to give an honest answer to such questions, and less likely to ask them if they aren’t interested in an honest answer.
I have noticed this myself, in my interactions with rationalist communities. In my experience, the latter fact (“less likely to ask … if they aren’t interested in an honest answer”) makes rationalist gatherings/spaces feel a lot less welcoming and friendly than their “normal-person” analogues. (This is part of a general trend of failing to perform politeness norms—either due to ignorance thereof, or active refusal, or some combination of both causes. It is quite unfortunate, and makes participation in rationalist gatherings/spaces a less pleasant experience than I wish it were.)
(And, of course, the former fact—“more likely to give an honest answer to such questions”—make it more difficult to interact with rationalist-type folks for other reasons, which have been discussed elsethread.)
Yeah, there are definitely both upsides and downsides. It certainly makes me feel more welcome, though I can see that many people would have the opposite experience. Maybe the important thing is that people know what they are getting into.
It’s worth noting: I fall pretty cleanly in the “smalltalk is a useful skill and social lubrication ritual” camp, and I think it’s pretty achievable to get the best of both worlds here.
The exchange “how are you” --> “you just opened up a whole can of worms” --> [Whatever Comes Next] is actually pretty reasonable. Person A showcases that they’re at least somewhat interested in interacting. Person B makes a bid for “I’d like to have a bit of a heart-to-heart as opposed to a low-key-professional-interaction”. Person A now has the ability to say either:
“Oh, I’m happy to open up a can of worms”,
or,
“Oh man, hope you’re okay. [ “I’m not sure I can dive into that right now” / “I have to get going in a few minutes but interested in the medium-version if that exists” / etc]
This seems pretty close to how SmallTalkAsSocialRitual is supposed to work, with the main difference between rationalist and typical-society versions being that the Regular Society version would replace some of the direct-question-ness with subtler facial expressions.
That is, actually, what I assumed you meant, so consider my comments to stand unchanged.
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.
The “privilege” framing may not be all that useful here… let us say, rather, that you quite likely live in a… strongly-selected-for-unusual-traits social bubble.
This is an exceedingly naive view of language.
You wouldn’t base your behavior on a sociological just-so-story which you haven’t actually verified… would you?
To the contrary; it does no such thing. What it does, rather, is enforce structures of social relationships, against forces which would otherwise erode them, to the detriment of those parties who are already the less-powerful ones in said relationships.
Relatedly, 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. For bonus points, also consider how patterns in the possession and exchange of information relate to social power relations, and what patterns of interaction have what game-theoretic consequences for said relations.
(I am, of course, only pointing at certain clusters of knowledge and understanding, while providing no details, for the simple reason that providing those details is the work of books, not of single forum comments… yet saying nothing at all would be worse than indicating, at least, the existence of relevant facts.)
[This is written as a moderator, and is a suggestion to Said Achmiz, jessicata, and others, posted here because this is currently the highest-placed comment on the page that follows a particular pattern.]
Not paying attention to the semantic content of this comment, but rather its structure, notice that it is a series of quotes, often of a single sentence, followed by similarly short replies. While this is a standard technique in forum arguments, I claim that is mostly for undesirable reasons (like it being optimized for “scoring points”), and have found that it’s not a particularly helpful method of discussion.
My suggestion (and it is only a suggestion) is that you try an approach where you share your understanding of your interlocutor’s whole point or position with a paraphrase, attempt to identify the most fruitful part of the disagreement to work on, and then devote the remainder of the comment to that point. This keeps discussions focused on moving forward, doesn’t give an edge to the party with more attention to spare to the discussion, makes it harder to talk past one another repeatedly, and makes it easier to notice when core points are simply dropped from the argument.
Sometimes detailed line-checking is actually the correct thing to do, and a tree of point and counterpoint is the right approach. (And I haven’t read this thread carefully enough to decisively say this is not one of those situations.) But oftentimes this is much more effective once more foundational issues have been converged upon, such that the leaves of the tree do actually propagate back upwards to change root positions.
I made a proposal for a moderator tool that seems like it might have been helpful to this thread, partly in response to your bracketed text, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2/issues/610
Please write more proposals like this.
Another question to ask, with regards to launching into unprompted explanations of one’s personal life, is whether the other person actually wants that information. Like it or not, most people subscribe to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, which means by telling people of your problems, you are implicitly making it their problem (else why would you bother sharing?).
If I said, “Hi, how are you,” and your response was a 5-minute long explanation of how your aunt died, your car broke down and how your dog needs surgery, my reaction will be awkward silence, not because I have no sympathy for your plight, but because I am wondering whether there is any obligation for me to step in and help.
I’m confused because it does seem like you think everyone should participate, i.e. you endorse people lying about their state if asked about it. (I didn’t mean “everyone should go out of their way to participate” but rather “everyone should participate at all” e.g. when pressed to by someone else)
I’m actually fine with this as a filter. Anyway, if someone’s code of honesty is unable to actually resist the pressure of “if I were honest then it would be slightly awkward and some people would talk to me less” then it is doing very little work. I don’t see why anyone would want such a code of “honesty” except to lie about how honest they are.
The just-so story seems true based on my social models, and I would bet on it if it were possible. That’s enough to base my behavior on.
My main argument here is that (a) saying you’re doing well when you’re not doing well is literally false and (b) in context it’s part of a pattern that optimizes against clarity, rather than something like acting that is clearly tagged as acting. I don’t actually see a counterargument to (b) in the text of your comment.
Ok, back up. What exactly are you talking about, here? “Participate” in what? What am I “participating” in when I respond to “How are you?” with something other than a true accounting of my current state?
Originally, you asked about “participation” in
But—as I alluded to in my response—there is a clear difference between the two halves of this “ritual”! Are you treating them as a single unit? If so—why? If not, then I am hard-pressed to parse your remarks. Please clarify.
You seem to assume, here, that any “code of honesty” must use the same concept of “honesty” as you do. You may reasonably disagree with my understanding of what constitutes honesty, but it is tendentious to suggest that, in fact, I am using the same concept of honesty as you are, except that I am being dishonest about it. (In other words, you speak as if I share your values but am failing to live up to them, while hypocritically claiming otherwise. The obvious alternative account—one which I, in fact, suggested upthread—is that my values simply differ from yours.)
This is nothing more than a circular restatement that you believe said just-so-story to be true. We already know that you believe this.
Perhaps, but all this means is that the concept of “literal falsehood” which you are using is inadequate to the task of modeling human communication. (Once again, one person’s modus ponens…)
The problem with such naive accounts of “truth” in communication is that they do not work—in a very real and precise sense—to predict the epistemic state of actual human beings after certain communicative acts have been undertaken. That should signal to you that something is wrong with your model.
You’re going to have to unpack “clarity” a good bit—as well as explaining, at least in brief, why you consider it to be a desirable thing—before I can comment on this (beyond what I’ve already said, which I do not see that you’ve acknowledged).
If you should participate in the ritual as the B role, then you should participate in the ritual at all. This seems like a straightforward logical consequence? Like, “if you should play soccer as defense, then you should play soccer.”
What does “honesty” mean to you, and what is it for? Does honesty ever require doing things that are slightly awkward and cause fewer people to want to talk to you?
It seems like you were implying that there was something illegitimate about me acting based on my social models? If you don’t think this then there is no conflict here.
I agree that you should not update on someone saying “X” by proceeding to condition your beliefs on “X.” You at least have to take pragmatics and deception into account. I think this is a case of deception in addition to pragmatics, rather than pragmatics alone. You would not expect people saying “fine” if they were not fine from a model like the ones on this page where agents are trying to inform each other while taking into account the inferences others make; you would get it if there were pressure to deceive.
“Clarity” means something like “information is being processed in a way that is obvious to all parties.” For example, people are able to ask about what state each other are in, and either receive a true answer or a refusal to provide this information. When things aren’t fine, this quickly becomes obvious to everyone. And so on.
This is often desirable for a bunch of reasons. For example, if I can track what state my friends are in, I can think about what would improve their situations. If I know things aren’t fine more generally, then I can investigate the crisis and think about what to do about it.
This is not always desirable. For example, if someone were doing drugs and the police were questioning them about it, then it would probably be correct for them to optimize for unclarity by lying or misdirecting (assuming they can get away with it). But optimizing against clarity is pretty much the same thing as being deceptive, and pretending that this is compatible with acting unusually honesty is meta-dishonest. (Of course, someone can act unusually honestly most of the time while being deceptive other times)
In general clarity is good for enabling positive-sum interactions, and highly situational in situations with a substantial adversarial/zero-sum element.
See The Engineer and the Diplomat for more on this model.
You said “it does no such thing” re: optimizing against clarity and I’m contesting that.
For saying “fine” when greeted with “how are you?” or “how’s it going?” to be a case of deception in addition to pragmatics, it would need to be the case that the person saying “fine” expects to be understood as saying that their life is in fact going well.
I don’t think people generally expect that.
(Though there’s something kinda a bit like that that people maybe do expect. If my life is really terrible at the moment then maybe my desire for sympathy might outweigh my respect for standard conventions and make me answer “pretty bad, actually” instead of “fine”; so when I don’t do that, I am giving some indication that my life isn’t going toooo badly; so if it actually is but I still say “fine”, maybe I’m being deceptive. But that’s only the case in so far as, in fact, if my life were going badly enough then I would be likely not to do that.)
Having this convention isn’t (so it seems to me) “optimizing against clarity” in any strong sense. That is: sure, there are other possible conventions that would yield greater clarity, but it’s not so clear that they’re better that it makes sense to say that choosing this convention instead is “optimizing against clarity”. (For comparison: imagine that someone proposes a different convention: whenever two people meet, they exchange bank balances and recent medical histories. This would indeed bring greater clarity; I don’t think most of us would want that clarity; but it seems unfair to say that we’re “optimizing against clarity” if we choose not to have it.)
Almost no one expects marketers to actually tell the truth about their products, and yet it seems pretty clear that marketing is deceptive. I think this has to do with common knowledge: even though nearly everyone knows marketing is deceptive, this isn’t common knowledge to the point where an ad could contain the phrase “I am lying to you right now” without it being jarring.
The convention is optimized for preventing people from giving information about their state that would break the narrative that Things Are Fine. People’s mental processes during the conversation will actually be optimizing against breaking this narrative even in cases where it is false. See Ben’s comment here.
You may be right about marketing and common knowledge; if so, then I suggest that the standard “how are you? fine” script is common knowledge; everyone knows that a “fine” answer can be, and likely will be, given even if the person in question is not doing well at all.
I agree that when executing the how-are-you-fine script people are ipso facto discouraged from giving information about their state that contradicts Things Are Fine. That’s because when executing that script, no one is actually giving any information about their state at all. If you actually want to find out how someone’s life is going, that isn’t how you do it; you ask them some less stereotyped question and, if they trust you sufficiently, they will answer it.
Again, if the how-are-you-fine script were taken as a serious attempt to extract (one one side) and provide (on the other) information about how someone’s life is going, then for sure it would be deceptive. But that’s not how anyone generally uses it, and I don’t see a particular reason why it should be.
I was going to write a longer response but this thread covers what I wanted to say pretty well.
You have made this sort of assertion several times now; I’d like to see some elaboration on it. What sorts of social contexts do you have in mind, when you say such things? On what basis do you make this sort of claim?
Person A and B are acquaintances. A asks B “how are you?” B is having serious problems at work, will probably be fired, and face serious economic consequences. B says “fine.” Why did B say “fine” when B was in fact not fine?
Suppose B said “I’m going to lose my job and be really poor for the near future.” Prediction: this will be awkward. Why would this be awkward?
Hypothesis: it is awkward because it contradicts the idea that things are fine. While this contradiction exists in the conversation, A and B will feel tension. Tension can be resolved in a few ways. A could say “oh don’t worry, you can get another job,” contradicting the idea that there is a problem in an unhelpful way that nevertheless restores the narrative that things are fine. A could also say “wow that really sucks, let me know if you need help” agreeing that things aren’t fine and resolving the tension by offering assistance. But A might not want to actually offer assistance in some cases. A could also just say “wow that sucks;” this does not resolve the tension as much as in the previous case, but it does at least mean that A and B are currently agreeing that things aren’t fine, and A has sympathy with B, which ameliorates the tension.
Compare: rising action in a story, which produces tension that must be resolved somehow.
I see.
The account you present is rather abstract, and seems to be based on a sort of “narrative” view of social interactions. I am not sure I understand this view well enough to criticize it coherently; I also am not sure what motivates it. (It is also not obvious to me what could falsify the hypothesis in question, nor what it predicts, etc. Certainly I would appreciate a link or two to a more in-depth discussion of this sort of view.)
In any case, there are some quite obvious alternate hypotheses, some of which have been mentioned elsethread, viz.:
The “Copenhagen interpretation of ethics”
Guarding against a disadvantageous change in power relations
A simple desire for privacy
All of these alternate hypotheses (and similar ones) make use only of simple, straightforward interests and desires of individuals, and have no need to bring in abstract “narrative” concepts.
I see, thanks.
This is not how I would normally use the word “clarity” (which is why I said “it does no such thing” in response to your claim that the norm in question “optimizes against clarity”). That having been said, your usage is not terribly unreasonable, so I will not quibble with it. So, taking “clarity” to mean what you described…
… I consider this sort of “clarity” to not be clearly desirable, even totally ignoring the sorts of “adversarial/zero-sum” situations you allude to. (In fact, it seems to me that a naive, unreflective dedication to “clarity” of this sort is particularly harmful in many categories of potentially-positive-sum interactions!)
This is a topic which has been much-discussed in the rationalist meme-sphere (and beyond, of course!) over the last decade; I confess to being surprised that you appear to be unaware of what’s been said on the subject. (Or are you aware of it, but merely disagree with it all? But then it seems to me that you would, at least, not have been at all surprised by any of my comments…) I do not, at the moment, have the time to hunt for links to relevant writings, but I will try to make some time in the near future.
Given the clarification in this subthread, let me now go ahead and respond to this bit:
Indeed, you certainly would not; the problem, however, lies in the assumption that someone responding “Fine” to “How are you?” is trying to inform the asker, or that the asker expects to be informed when asking that question.
In any case, this is a point we’ve covered elsethread.
This is very bizarre logic, to be frank. The entire conception of such social interactions as coherent “rituals” that both the asker and the asked are willing “participants” in, qua ritual, is quite strange, and does not accord with anything I said, or any of my understanding of the world.
That question is the genesis of quite a long discussion. I hardly think this is the time and place for it.
That is certainly not out of the question.
I don’t know about “illegitimate”, but basing your social models on unverified just-so-stories is epistemically unwise.
What do you mean by “deception”, here? If a casual acquaintance greets me with “How are you?” and I respond with “Fine, you?”—in a case when, in fact, a monster truck has just run over my favorite elephant—do you consider this an instance of “deception”? If so, do you view “deception” as undesirable (in some general sense) or harmful (to the said casual acquaintance)?
That page seems to be some sort of highly technical discussion, involving code in a language I’ve never heard of. Would you care to summarize its core ideas in plain language, or link to such a summary elsewhere? Failing that, I have no comment in response to this.
(rest of your comment addressed in a separate response)
Re: “ritual,” it seems like “social script” might have closer to the right connotations here.
My main point here is that, if you are trying to build a reputation as being unusually honest, yet you lie because otherwise it would be slightly awkward and some people would talk to you less, then your reputation doesn’t actually count for anything. If someone won’t push against slight awkwardness to tell the truth about something only a little important, why would I expect them to push against a lot of awkwardness to tell the truth about something that is very important?
By definitions of “honesty” commonly used in American culture, being unusually honest usually requires doing things that are awkward and might cause people to talk to you less. For example, in the myth about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, it is in fact awkward for him to admit that he chopped down a cherry tree, and he could face social consequences as a result. But he admits it anyway, because he is honest. (Ironically this didn’t actually happen, but this isn’t that important if we are trying to figure out what concepts of honesty are in common usage)
I would count saying “fine” when you are not fine to be a form of deception, one which is usually slightly harmful to both participants, but only slightly. For someone who is not attempting to be unusually honest as a matter of policy, this is not actually a big deal. It might be worth saying “fine” to minimize tension.
But the situation is very different for someone attempting to be unusually honest as a matter of policy. This type of person is trying to tell the truth almost all the time, even when it is hard and goes against their local incentives. There may be some times when they should lie, but it should have to be a really good reason, not “it would be slightly awkward if I didn’t lie.” If someone is going to lie whenever the cost-benefit analysis looks at least as favorable to lying as it does in the “saying you are fine when you are not fine” case, then they’re going to lie quite a lot about pretty important things, whenever telling the truth about these things would be comparably awkward.
Sure. Suppose I have seen a bunch of apples, which may be red or green. I say “some of the apples are red.” Is it correct for you to infer that not all the apples are red? Yes, probably; if I had seen that all the apples were red, I would have instead said “all of the apples are red.” Even if “some of the apples are red” is technically correct if all the apples are red, I would know that you would make less-correct inferences about the proportion of apples that are red if I said “some of the apples are red” instead of “all of the apples are red.” Basically, the idea is that the listener models the speaker as trying to inform the listener, and the speaker to model the listener as making these inferences.
I assume you mean, infer that not all the apples are red?
In any case, thanks for the summary. It sounds like it’s simply the Gricean maxims / the concept of implicature, which is certainly something I’m familiar with.
Whoops, thanks for the correction (edited comment).
I don’t really know that this makes your comments about it any more reasonable-sounding, but in any case this sub-point seems like a tangent, so we can let it go, if you like.
I just don’t think that this identification of “honesty” with “parsing spoken sentences in the most naively-literal possible way and then responding as if the intended meaning of your interlocutor’s utterance coincided with this literal reading” is very sensible. If someone did this, I wouldn’t think “boy, that guy/gal sure is unusually honest!”. I’d think “there goes a person who has, sadly, acquired a most inaccurate understanding, not to mention a most unproductive view, of social interactions”.
Suppose you are asked a question, where all of the following are true:
Your interlocutor neither expects nor desires for you to take the question literally and answer it truthfully.
You know that you are not expected to, and you have no desire to, take the question literally and answer it truthfully.
Your interlocutor would be harmed by you taking the question literally and answering it truthfully.
You would be harmed by you taking the question literally and answering it truthfully.
Do you maintain that, in such a case, “honesty” nevertheless demands that you do take the question literally and answer it truthfully?
If so, then this “honesty” of yours seems to be a supreme undesirable trait to have, and for one’s friends and acquaintances to have. (I maintain the scare quotes, because I would certainly not assent to any definition of “honesty” which had the aforesaid property—and, importantly, I do not think that “honesty” of this type is more predictive of certain actually desirable and prosocial behaviors, of the type that most people would expect from a person who had the as-generally-understood virtue of honesty.)
I would be interested to hear why you think this. It seems incorrect to me.
Once again, you are relying on a very unrealistic characterization of what is taking place when one person says “How are you?” and another answers “Fine”. However, we can let that slide for now (in any case, I already addressed it, earlier in this comment), and instead deal with the substantive claim that someone who does not respond to “How are you?” with a report of their actual state, is “going to lie quite a lot about pretty important things …”.
I firmly dispute this claim. And given how strong of a claim it is, I should like to see it justified quite convincingly.
These are not necessarily mutually exclusive explanations. Sometimes the point of a social transaction is to maintain some particular social fiction.
I don’t make this identification, given that I think honesty is compatible with pragmatics and metaphor, both of which are attempts to communicate that go beyond this. I would identify honesty more with “trying to communicate in a way that causes the other person to have accurate beliefs, with a significant preference for saying literally true things by default.”
Depends on the situation. If it’s actually common knowledge that the things I’m saying are not intended to be true statements (e.g. I’m participating in a skit) then of course not. Otherwise it seems at least a little dishonest. Being dishonest is not always bad, but someone trying to be unusually honest should avoid being dishonest for frivolous reasons. (Obviously, not everyone should try to be unusually honest in all contexts)
If you’re pretty often in situations where lying is advantageous, then maybe lying a lot is the right move. But if you are doing this then it would be meta-dishonest to say that you are trying to be unusually honest.
I think saying false things routinely to some extent trains people to stop telling truth from falsity as a matter of habit. I don’t have a strong case for this but it seems true according to my experience.
This is a pretty severe misquote. Read what I wrote.
Most of your comment seems to indicate that we’ve more or less reached the end of how much we can productively untangle our disagreement (at least, without full-length, top-level posts from one or both of us), but I would like to resolve this bit:
Well, first of all, to the extent that it’s a quote (which only part of it is), it’s not a misquote, per se, because you really did write those words, in that order. I assume what you meant is that it is a misrepresentation/mischaracterization of what you said and meant—which I am entirely willing to accept! (It would simply mean that I misunderstood what you were getting at; that is not hard at all to believe.)
So, could you explain in what way my attempted paraphrase/summary mischaracterized your point? I confess it does not seem to me to be a misrepresentation, except insofar as it brackets assumptions which, to me, seem both (a) flawed and unwarranted, and (b) not critical to the claim, per se (for all that they may be necessary to justify or support the claim).
Agreed that further engagement here on the disagreement is not that productive. Here’s what I said:
I am not saying that, if someone says they are fine when they are not fine, then necessarily they will lie about important things. They could be making an unprincipled exception. I am instead saying that, if they lied whenever the cost-benefit analysis looks at least as favorable to lying as in the “saying you are fine when you are not fine” case, then they’re likely going to end up lying about some pretty important things that are really awkward to talk about.
I think that Said is arguing that they’re making a *principled* exception. Vaniver’s comment makes a decent case for this.
Yes, this is correct. The exception is entirely principled (really, I’d say it’s not even an exception, in the sense that the situation is not within the category of those to which the rule applies in the first place).
I see. It seems those assumptions I mentioned are ones which you consider much more important to your point than I consider them to be, which, I suppose, is not terribly surprising. (I do still think they are unwarranted.)
I will have to consider turning what I’ve been trying to say here into a top-level post (which may be no more than a list of links and blurbs; as I said, there has been a good deal of discussion about this stuff already).
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.