Being honest is hard, and there are many difficult and surprising edge-cases, including things like context failures, negotiating with powerful institutions, politicised narratives, and compute limitations.
On top of the rule of trying very hard to be honest, Eliezer’s post offers an additional general rule for navigating the edge cases. The rule is that when you’re having a general conversation all about the sorts of situations you would and wouldn’t lie, you must be absolutely honest. You can explicitly not answer certain questions if it seems necessary, but you must never lie.
I think this rule is a good extension of the general principle of honesty, and appreciate Eliezer’s theoretical arguments for why this rule is necessary.
Eliezer’s post introduces some new terminology for discussions of honesty—in particular, the term ‘meta-honesty’ as the rule instead of ‘honesty’.
If the term ‘meta-honesty’ is common knowledge but the implementation details aren’t, and if people try to use it, then they will perceive a large number of norm violations that are actually linguistic confusions. Linguistic confusions are not strongly negative in most fields, merely a nuisance, but in discussions of norm-violation (e.g. a court of law) they have grave consequences, and you shouldn’t try to build communal norms on such shaky foundations.
I and many other people this post was directed at, find it requires multiple readings to understand, so I think that if everyone reads this post, it will not be remotely sufficient for making the implementation details common knowledge, even if the term can become that.
In general, I think that everyone should make sure it is acceptable, when asking “Can we operate under the norms of meta-honesty?” for the other person to reply “I’d like to taboo the term ‘meta-honesty’, because I’m not sure we’ll be talking about the same thing if we use that term.”
This is a valuable bedrock for thinking about the true laws, but not currently at a stage where we can build simple deontological communal rules around. I’d like to see more posts advancing both fronts.
For more details on all that, I’ve written up the above at length here.
I don’t really stand by the last half of the points above, I.e. the last ~3rd of the longer review. I think there’s something important to say here about the relationship between common knowledge and deontology, but that I didn’t really say it and I said something else instead. I hope to get the time to try again to say it.
Here are my thoughts.
Being honest is hard, and there are many difficult and surprising edge-cases, including things like context failures, negotiating with powerful institutions, politicised narratives, and compute limitations.
On top of the rule of trying very hard to be honest, Eliezer’s post offers an additional general rule for navigating the edge cases. The rule is that when you’re having a general conversation all about the sorts of situations you would and wouldn’t lie, you must be absolutely honest. You can explicitly not answer certain questions if it seems necessary, but you must never lie.
I think this rule is a good extension of the general principle of honesty, and appreciate Eliezer’s theoretical arguments for why this rule is necessary.
Eliezer’s post introduces some new terminology for discussions of honesty—in particular, the term ‘meta-honesty’ as the rule instead of ‘honesty’.
If the term ‘meta-honesty’ is common knowledge but the implementation details aren’t, and if people try to use it, then they will perceive a large number of norm violations that are actually linguistic confusions. Linguistic confusions are not strongly negative in most fields, merely a nuisance, but in discussions of norm-violation (e.g. a court of law) they have grave consequences, and you shouldn’t try to build communal norms on such shaky foundations.
I and many other people this post was directed at, find it requires multiple readings to understand, so I think that if everyone reads this post, it will not be remotely sufficient for making the implementation details common knowledge, even if the term can become that.
In general, I think that everyone should make sure it is acceptable, when asking “Can we operate under the norms of meta-honesty?” for the other person to reply “I’d like to taboo the term ‘meta-honesty’, because I’m not sure we’ll be talking about the same thing if we use that term.”
This is a valuable bedrock for thinking about the true laws, but not currently at a stage where we can build simple deontological communal rules around. I’d like to see more posts advancing both fronts.
For more details on all that, I’ve written up the above at length here.
I don’t really stand by the last half of the points above, I.e. the last ~3rd of the longer review. I think there’s something important to say here about the relationship between common knowledge and deontology, but that I didn’t really say it and I said something else instead. I hope to get the time to try again to say it.