“Would I be willing to publicly defend this as a situation in which unusually honest people should lie, if somebody posed it as a hypothetical?” Maybe that just gets turned into “It’s permissible to lie so long as you’d be honest about whether you’d tell that lie if anyone asks you that exact question and remembers to say they’re invoking the meta-honesty code,” because people can’t process the meta-part correctly.
Thank you for this direct contrast! It gave me the opportunity to understand why you added this part in the first place.
(The difference between the statements seemed obvious enough, but engaging with the difference, I think I now understand why you specifically say “willing to publicly defend … if someone posed it as a hypothetical?”—because that thought process is needed for your counterfactual selves to feel safe with you, basically.
Speaking with all realities equally existing for a moment: If you do not check that box, and someone asks you a hypothetical that describes a counterfactual self’s actual circumstances in which they believed that unusually honest people should lie, you will not think to defend it, thereby putting you roughly in the situation of “I only Glomarize if I have something to hide”. (This is much less precise than your essay, obviously, but I needed to phrase it in a way that is natural to me to check if my understanding is actually present.))
I think the issue is with the “get what I want” part. Isn’t this treating people as a means to an end, instead of treating them as an end in and of itself?* (I think that Kant would not be happy—though I don’t know of anything that has been written on lesswrong about this.)
If you are talking to another person and you are trying to convince them to adopt a certain view of you, that is not what I would call truth-oriented. So, whether you specifically lie, omit, or whatever; it’s already secondary. If your goal is to have an honest interaction with another being, I don’t think you can in that interaction want to edit their perception of you (apart from misunderstandings etc).
I’d say that the way you achieve your goal is to become what you want to be seen as. This is, of course, harder than just lying, but in a way it takes less effort, too.
Plus, you avoid another important pitfall I could see here: Lying to yourself about wanting a connection with a person who doesn’t share your values. If you have to lie to fit in with them, maybe not fitting in with them is a good thing, and you should pay attention to that. In this way, the impulse to lie may be similarly useful as the tiny voice telling you that you are confused.
(The following is just about the effort it takes to lie vs truth. Not really required for the core idea, read if you wish^^)
Imagine what insane effort it would take to lie all the time but try to be perceived as being honest! While “just” being honest is hard in a different way, though on subtler and subtler levels, I at least was freed of a lot of the mental overhead that lying brings with it. (Sure, part of that was replaced by the mental habits of self-checking, but still, way less. I don’t have to worry about what I may have said at some point if I don’t remember. I will see what I would say now, and unless I acquired new information or insight, this will probably approximate what I said then. If I am also honest about this process, my self-perceived fault of not perfect memory isn’t too bad anymore. This can never work with lying, because you need to keep tabs on what you told whom, how they may have gained additional information, etc.)
*(The fact that you specified the gender of the other person also implies a certain degree of “means to an end” to me (yes, even without knowing your gender) unless you are talking about one specific situation and nothing else. But that may just as well be wrong.)