Radical Honesty

I'm a very honest person. I never tell a lie without believing it first. ;)

This came to mind: http://xkcd.com/69/

I have a couple people with whom I can be totally open and honest. It makes life much nicer. In general though, radical honesty would, it seems to me, cut one off from truth. One would be intrinsically unable to keep a trust with a third party who was not of the same philosophy. In practice, it would also simply be impossible to meaningfully be "radically honest" with the vast majority of people who don't even share my opinions about background knowledge such as what "belief" means. As is, I think a much greater than typical level of honest with epistemic peers is utility maximizing. It enables Aumann Agreement, if nothing else (but really much else). Expanding that circle would just be stupid. I am a bit inspired to test the psychologist from the article though. What would he be willing to sell his "services" for? It seems to me that trade creates overwhelming incentives to deception regarding one's producer or consumer surplus and willingness to pay.

"such rationalist values as seeking truth by teaching yourself a habit of honesty, or not wishing to deceive others because it infringes on their autonomy".

How can values be rational? To me, to take Eliezer's example, it is perfectly rational to lie in a journal, if you think you can get away with it. Of course this is something everyone else should dislike from a selfish point of view so we should certainly urge honesty from others (and do what we can to make sure that they are honest), but a rational person should aim to maximise his or her utility, and should ignore this external pressure when it comes to making their own decisions as to whether to lie.

Note that I am being slightly provocative here, since I have a conscience (whether cultural, or genetically determined it doesn't matter) so I am generally truthful even when I could lie without damage to my reputation, i.e. I usually have utility in being truthful.

It would be interesting to get a field report about how this seems to work out in practice.

I think Michael Vassar nailed it at the end of his post. We seem to live in a transactional world (not just in matters of commerce) where one party being completely transparent to another constitutes unilateral disarmament in a variety of social settings. Also, the existence of 3rd and 4th party observers means there are performance incentives for the two parties in interaction separate from their transactional incentives.

The difficult choices are not between truths and falsehoods. The difficulty is in choosing which truth to voice in any given moment. Last week my mother said to me, "Your children suffered when you divorced their mother." That was true. I had difficulty hearing it not because I don't believe it. I do believe it. I was unhappy to hear this because of what my mother's choice to voice this truth at that moment revealed about her attitude towards me.

Choosing which truths to voice and the context for voicing them has great political significance. "The men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center were Muslims." This is the truth. If many people say that loudly many times a day for years, is that simple truth-telling, a good, enlightening thing? The question reveals why the writing of history is always political.

"I wonder what it would be like to have anyone in the world, even a single person, who you could absolutely trust. Or what it would be like for there to be anyone in the world, even a single person, whom you had to tell all your thoughts, without possibility of concealment."

I think Christians have been wondering the same thing for a couple thousand years. Radical honesty and Crocker's Rules aren't exactly new concepts, are they?

Consider Ephesians 4: Speak the truth, but do so in love considering the feelings of others. There's an obnoxious way to be truthful, and a much more fruitful way to be truthful.

"Speak the truth in love" "each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body." "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen."

If you are Radically Honest then you can't keep a secret. Wouldn't that make you less trustworthy and thus lower incentives for people to be honest with you?

Tomhs, perhaps sometimes the truth you should tell people is "It's None Of Your Business".

I have seen that people who tell the truth tend to get diagnosed as Asperger's Syndrome, or maybe high-functioning autism.

It's a sign of poor socialization.

Interesting point, J Thomas, there is often more than one truth that could be told. How would/should you choose which one to tell? The difference between Eliezer's "tell no lies" and Radical Honesty no longer seems so clear cut to me.

The whole article is well worth reading. What impresses me most is that we have a limited capacity for honesty, and so must allocate it well. Be more honest with yourself, on the topics that are most important to you.

Blanton doesn't support honesty 100% of the time -- he actively encourages lying to government officials (admitting to taking unwarranted deductions on his tax returns) and says it's fine to tell the Nazis no one's home when Anne Frank is hiding in your attic. In that vein, I'd guess it would be acceptable to keep a secret, but it would be up to the individual's judgment whether that secret was "worth" keeping. If said secret were originally mine, I would seriously hesitate to share with such an "honest" person for fear they would decide at some inopportune moment to "free" me of the burden of my secret and share it at a dinner party.

I see a very large distinction between an outright lie and simply not saying something at all, a line which Blanton seems to blur significantly (if not erase outright). Many times, saying exactly what we're thinking or feeling at the moment without taking the time to think it through can have disastrous effects when, five minutes later, you realize you really feel completely different but now cannot get your listener to believe your radical shift in honesty.

Perhaps the Internet could be of assistance in getting some benefits from radical honesty. You could keep a blog anonymously and write down what you really think about people. You could change names and places to avoid hurting yourself or others, but the substance would be, hopefully, unchanged. Then people could give you feedback (even anonymously if they don't like being known as someone who hurt someone).

I think there's a website out there that allows you to query people about something and people who don't know you can write what they think. People are sometimes mean for the sake of being mean, rather than being honest, though, which is problematic.

Tomhs, I don't have it worked out which truths I owe people. In general I believe that I have the right to find out anything about this fascinating world I want to, and often this is not only a right but a duty -- anything I don't understand is dangerous until I do.

But I certainly believe that some things are not some other people's business. People ought to have some right of privacy from some other people. Exactly where to draw the lines there is not always clear.

So I tend to play it by ear. If I think something isn't somebody's business I tell them. "That isn't any of your business." Whether I think the answer would interest them or not. And if they disagree they're welcome to explain to me why it is their business.

Mike Kenny, great comment. Since all the nonanonymous blogging experts on this site probably have ideas and thoughts of social value, but that woulde harm their narrative arcs and reputations, I encourage them to have separate anonymous blogs where they share these ideas. Certain topics, like IQ and genetics, jewish influence in media, finance, and politics, eugenics, and limiting disenfranchisement seem to come with large reputational costs that probably drive away the brightest minds. Also, there's probably reputational pressure for experts not to criticize pet ideas of other experts.

Graduate students should be blogging pointed disagreements with their thesis advisors, tenure-seeking professors their disagrements with people who will influence whether they get tenure, scientists/economists their disagrements with people who may influence whether they receive professional prizes and honors -at least anonymously.

Then if the idea becomes accepted in a widespread way, they have the option of revealing themselves to be the anonymous blogger, and thus get the reputational gains for being an early and influential advocate for a particular idea or policy.

Crocker's Rules are appealing. That's taking responsibility! As to never lying -- even by selective silence --it would be valuable to have a hair-trigger interior recognition when you want to lie, and figure out whether it is for your sake or for the other person's. First case, tell the truth instead. Second, tread very carefully. But be aware, maybe even creative.

Some scripts for common lies might help. "I don't care." > "It's not something I think about much." "Yes, you look fat in that." > "Look, a shooting star! Here, out the window!" Or, "I always love you in green."

The old guy whose poetry was mediocre? Possible to --pick out your "favorite" line; --write him back one more time, chatty, asking how he's doing; --send him a book on writing poetry, saying something about how good poetry is for the soul, whether or not it is published or famous. The lying the reporter did in that case was to save himself any outlay of human kindness.

I don't like the Blanton guy. I think he shows signs of pumping his endorphins at the expense of other people. But at least he makes us notice how much and how easily we lie, and as such generates some motivation to find ways to be more authentic. (Samuel Johnson to Boswell: "Clear your mind of cant!") At worst he encourages more endorphin addicts, bullies with a self-righteous theory.

This was surprisingly hard to explain to people; many people would read the careful explanation and hear, "Crocker's Rules mean you can say offensive things to other people."

Perhaps because it resembles the "2" part of a common verbal bully's 1-2 punch, the one that first insults you and then when you react, slurs you for allegedly not being able to handle the truth. I'm specifically thinking of the part of Crocker's Rule that goes "If you're offended, it's your fault".

Yes, I see that one is "me" and the other is "you". But the translation to "you" is so natural that even that writeup of Crocker's Rule slips into it.

I also think Crocker's Rules is an ivory-tower sort of position that starts with assumptions that just doesn't reflect the real world. Perhaps in Lee Crocker's experience, all debating opponents are at the worst mere curmudgeons who wrap truths in unpleasant rhetoric, but I doubt that's true even for him. It's certainly not my experience.

In my experience, the majority of people who this rule seems applicable to use petty and truthless rhetoric to defend minor points of lifestyle or ideology. Usually the arguing parties have already understood each other as much as they care to and are shouting their talking-points and postures past each other. It's true that usually one or both sides could stand to listen and learn, but for the people that applies to, invariably that's just what they don't want.

I won't belabor the point, but Crocker's apparent assumption about the nature of contentious rhetoric is grossly wrong in the real world.

Tom Breton---very good discussion.

It reminds me of a panel in which I participated. The panel was celebrating diversity of one sort or another at my institution, and one speaker was a contemporary of MLK. He discussed the need to engage "the other side" in one's debates.

A student from the audience asked, "But what if the other side won't listen?"

"Keep talking!" was the response.

Well, here I really felt like I should jump in, but it would have been rude. In any case, everything I've learned about communication I learned from being married. When we think someone "won't listen" (which is probably not accurate---this seems to occur whenever we think that we're right and the other person is wrong; it has nothing to do with their listening), then we ourselves probably need to do less talking and more listening.

To do this successfully, it requires humility, and, of course, the desire to overcome one's own bias.

Surely either form of radical honesty falls at the first hurdle: how many people are even capable of forming an honest opinion, rather than parroting back something they or others opined earlier?

If I were being honest, I would say that the number of my truly self-made personal opinions is low, even counting the poorly reasoned ones - and I acknowledge this isn't one of them. So how can I be honest. Who is the me that could be honest?

It doesn't actually appear that many of you have actually read Blanton's book(s), because had you read them you might not make so many assumptions on what Radical Honesty's ramifications are. Damage is being done all the time to relationships because people continue to stroke one another's egos about things they really don't like. What if you gave real feedback to people? Then you could encourage them to change things that you (and possibly others) find annoying, offensive and outright wrong. Why aren't we totally honest? Because then we have to face total honesty from others--which will probably include a demand for change on our part. So as long as I don't challenge, no one will challenge me. And that is how chicken shits live their lives.

As too the last comment, why bother writing anything if that is truly what you believe? and who is the you that believes it? You won't get anywhere practicing beliefs like that (and trust me you don't practice them)

Re: J Thomas: "It's a sign of poor socialization."

Poor is subjective. It is a sign of the rejection of social mores as false. What constitutes "good socialization," and where do we get these values? There are cultural biases. It seems that the failure of autistic individuals to observe social convention is more an expression of tabula rasa than a pathology itself.

Eliezer, I suggest you read the whole book. Many articles I saw regarding this book was superficially written and choose only "teasers" from it. The main message (and question) in the Radical Honesty is: how much we are lying to ourselves? And how much benefits we will get by stop lying to ourselves.

in the event anyone reads this, one thing learned from Josh Harris (90's .com entrepreneur) is that living open and in the public may sound feasible and today we may even have much of our lives on the internet but the idea of being truly honest and having your thoughts and views in the public is psychology rough, in fact the idea of big brother is really is more the mindset and not a tangible object/person/group

So what you are saying is, we should all be Aspies?

Sounds good to me.

A few thoughts:

Whether this is a good idea or not might very well be something you have to try for yourself to know; but on the flip side we are fairly different people, 20 years after any particular decision. While some decisions may be final, especially in an age where we can display attributes of ourself very publicly it might make more sense to have a publicly accessible Crocker's Flag somewhere that might be unset perhaps 20 years down the line so that you don't damn your future self to a life of shameful feelings beyond necessary.

Secondly, 'none of your business' is neither radically honest, and with the possible exception of the person hiding from the secret police, I've long maintained that since MAD/nuclear weapons became a possibility that there is no such thing as 'none of your business'; we all have a vested interest in the emotional situation and financial incentives of those in the global village. Should a veil of secrecy exist, it may very well cover that which will undo us all.

edit 2013-me did not understand the full consequences of global surveillance. While it's true that what's covered by a veil of secrecy would doubtless cover the seeds of our destruction, we are all hiding from the secret police, post 2013. Proceed with caution

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a26792/honesty0707/ Non-broken link to article.