Epistemic status: I am not claiming to be unusually honest or literally honest. in this post. I expect the average reader will converge closer to the truth by reading this post than by not reading it.1 I also believe that you will get more out of this post if you apply constant vigilance.
Disclaimer: I am neither a liar, magician, or a priest. But I am a storyteller.
Honesty
I once heard somebody claim that rationalists ought to practice lying, so that they could separate their internal honesty from any fears of needing to say what they believed. That is, if they became good at lying, they’d feel freer to consider geocentrism without worrying what the Church would think about it. I do not in fact think this would be good for the soul, or for a cooperative spirit between people. This is the sort of proposed solution of which I say, “That is a terrible solution and there has to be a better way.”
I think rationalists should practice lie detection.
Doublespeak
A lot of people get horrified about doublespeak when they first learn about it.
What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.
I think humans often have this false belief that ‘normal’ communication is about ‘honesty’. They believe that the default is to say true things, and this will result in people transferring non-untrue information. (Meta-honesty already explains why literal truths are not enough of a solution for this; I will focus on the complicated case.)
Let me quote Scott’s review of Sadly Porn:
Psychologically healthy people have desires. Sometimes they fantasize about these desires, and sometimes they act upon them. You’ve probably never met anyone like this. Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it. So instead, you spend all your time playing incredibly annoying mind-games with yourself whose goal is to briefly trick yourself into believing you are high status. Everyone else, so far as you even recognize their existence at all, is useful only as a pawn in this game. For example, you can trick a psychoanalyst into giving you a dream interpretation denying your repressed baggage, and then feel good about yourself because you don’t have any repressed baggage (or at least you’ve convinced a representative of Abstract Society of that, which is the same thing). Or, you can trick a hot girl/guy into sleeping with you, thus proving you’re the kind of high-status person who gets (deserves?) hot girls/guys.
I will present a shallower model that cuts the psychoanalysis and simplifies the status game: humans want to believe nice things.
And because humans have this feature, lie detection has two applications that are quite transitive: Detection of internal lies, and detection of external lies.2
The benefits of lies
Claim: Most people are not interested in maps that get them closer to the territory.
I think most people are interested in maps that make them feel good.
Why is it so?
Theory: Evolution, social connections and cohesion being more important for survival than ‘the truth’, has lead to humans desiring to believe the ‘normal things’.
Example:
People are more bothered when they don’t know what they should think about an issue (as in: what their claimed external identity, and their social group, ‘should’ believe about the issue), than they are bothered by not knowing the literal truth value of a statement.
We can test this!
Ponder the following examples for some 10 seconds each before moving forward
- Parfit’s hitchhiker is not equivalent to Newcomb’s
Which reaction was more intense? Why do you think it is?
How to lie
Explaining Rasputin
What’s the difference between a priest, a faith healer, and a magician?
Magic
Pulling from an interview with Penn and Teller:
The most interesting part of the show is after each performance, Penn talks in this magician doublespeak to clue in the audience to the trick’s method. How much of this is trying to maintain the secret, and how much is coding to teenagers interested in magic where they can learn these techniques?
It’s all of that. When Penn talks about magic, he tries not to spoil the trick for the home audience—that takes away the fun for people who want to watch it over and over again, or people just delighted by the effect. So Penn deliberately uses jargon terms that will communicate to the magician and to the community of magicians that we do know indeed what’s going on, without wrecking the trick for the home audience.
Everyone who writes about magic should read [author] Jim Steinmeyer’s description of magic secrets. He says the most important secret in magic is that most people believe there’s a safe somewhere that contains all the magic secrets that’s heavily guarded and carefully locked. The biggest secret magicians have to keep is that that safe is empty.
Elsewhere, Penn has also said:
There are no beautiful secrets in magic, only ugly secrets
The Art of lies War
“the secret to being a great magician is to put far more effort into your tricks than anyone would expect”
magic, pranks, lies, religion, morality, hacking; what’s the common factor
lies
- i wouldn’t say i’m a particularly good liar. i can’t actually remember the last time i lied.
what’s the general thing?
in broad strokes, believability is a function of (decent-to-good) effort
- [proof-of-work](kalzuneus link tarkka kohta täältä https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/regulation-e/ ) is trusted specifically because it would be costly to fake
- of course we, mere mortals that we are, don’t literally track proofs of work. we track proxies for effort put in.
let’s inspect suntzi:
Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.
All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
But how to deceive?
apply more Art of War!
- You have to believe in yourself.
- Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.
- Hide your lies weakpoints in the areas that appear strong, and strongest points in the areas that people will inspect.
- Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.
- (valitse sopiva lainaus) - Frame Control. Control how they see you, and you have already won.
[lazy theory callback. teema täällä: how to attack a defence equilibriun?]
people could adopt the general policy that sees through these. but it’s costly as a general policy.
- what is the general policy?
- broadest one: when something doesn’t make sense to you, figure it out
- radically breaks the 80/20 heuristic
=> outcome: people invent excuses for why they don’t want to see through the lies
Real-life examples
I’m not going to point out a person to you. But I’ll give you prompts:
Who is the best liar you know?
Hypothesis: If you came up with someone, who you know lies, they are not the best liar you know. (If you came up with someone where you are uncertain if they lie or not, I think you’re getting closer.)
you can probe deeper by thinking who is the most respectable person you know, and who would benefit from lies, that don’t get caught. and then reasoning if, for their entire person, the Occam’s razor answer includes a bunch of lying.
I solemnly affirm that the evidence to be given by me shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
I solemnly swear I am up to no good
Clippings
- I did most truthiness judgment calls in the post by intuition, and I do not actually know if there are lies, and if there are where are they. But I read the post through once done, and I endorse what I’m teaching. ↩
- I think this is part of a durable solution to the category of problems that cognitive biases are also an instantiation of. You should utilize the patterns that have been made legible to develop a good heuristic for detecting the entire category of things. ↩