Degrees of Radical Honesty

You have left out one horrible option.

(6) Talk to the Nazis about Jews. Like many other Europeans of the time become convinced that they are right and gladly tell them where Anne Frank is hiding.

Telling the truth is an expression of trust, in addition to being a way to earn it: telling someone something true that could be misused is saying "I trust you to behave appropriately with this information". The fact that I would lie to the brownshirts as convincingly as possible shouldn't cause anyone else to mistrust me as long as 1) they know my goals; 2) I know their goals and they know that I do; 3) our goals align, at least contextually; and 4) they know that I'm not just a pathological liar who'll lie for no reason. The Nazis will be misled about (1), because that's the part of their knowledge I can manipulate most directly, but anyone with whom I share much of a trust relationship (the teenage daughter playing the piano, perhaps) will know better, because they'll be aware that I'm sheltering Jews and lying to Nazis.

The fact that I would lie to save the world should only cause someone to mistrust my statements on the eve of the apocalypse if they think that I think that they don't want to save the world.

A small scale and probably more common example-- a friend who lost his job because his co-workers and his immediate boss didn't trust him because he wouldn't pad his expense account.

I think the problem was that having a non-standard moral system meant he was too unpredictable.

Admittedly, (and I only have his account of his life) there was another problem-- he has Asperger's and he's a large guy. Neurotypicals (perhaps only neuroytypical men) would automatically see him as physically threatening.

If you want to offer advice about the situation he was in, please make it hypothetical. At this point, his depression and anxiety are bad enough that he's on disability and not in the job market.

For another example, note that whistle-blowers need legal protection to keep their jobs. In the case of the man who released the Abu Graib photos, he needed protection because of death threats.

Where does signaling absolute honesty fit in a world where many people make it unwelcome?

Somewhere in Polybius is a line about character. Men have characters. Yours may lead you to greatness, but when times change and your character is ill-suited to new circumstances, you remain the same. Disaster follows.

I agree that there is a problem. I think that it has been recognised long ago and has no solution.

I was very struck that in our imaginations we are always the good guys. I have developed serious doubts about this. Looking back on my life it struck me that as a young man I was rather attracted by authoritarian governments. If I had been a 13 year old German boy when Hitler came to power in 1933 I would have worshipped the man. He would have been my hero and I would have believed all that stuff about Jews.

I'm not trying to shock or abase myself. There is actually an element of smugness as I feel ahead of head of the pack in realising that the good guys and the bad guys are mostly just ordinary guys and land on one side or the other because it is hard to transcend ones circumstances. We know that Hitler was popular in 1933. What must also be true is that if we had been young and German we might well have fallen under his spell. We might perhaps have been proud of our philosophical sophistication and knowledge of Heidegger but it wouldn't have helped.

I see the post as aiming way too high. If you are crap at lying that has consequences, perhaps good, perhaps bad. Time will tell, don't worry about it. The more interesting question is about how to transcend ones circumstances. How does one avoid being one of the brownshirts?

When we worry here about promoting maximally accurate beliefs it is self-deception that is the principle concern, not the deception of others. Eliezer posted about affective death spirals. An example could be being so impressed by the Fuehrer that we believe everything he says. Later, we notice that he says an awful lot. We notice, wtih some surprise, that It is all true. What a genius! And round we go. I've understood Eliezer to be addressing the issue of how we can tell from the inside; how we can escape our own affective death spirals. That is a very different problem from seeing the problem in others and opposing them.

Perhaps this is tangential, but if we're assuming non-omniscient perspectives then what allows you to conclude that the only way to be trusted absolutely is to never be observed to have lied?

If the supervisors weigh positive evidence over negative evidence, a very common bias, then we should actually expect them to trust you more if they have accumulated a great deal of reliable evidence of when you do lie. That's one reason being caught in an understandable lie is a way con artists can build trust.

It seems that you're using honesty as a behavior, truth as a value of a statement or a communication, and trust as a feature of a relationship as though they are interchangeable. But they really aren't.

Even if you wish to behave in such a way to communicate things as accurately as possible (honesty) it becomes necessary to say things which are not accurate in themselves (lie), in order that the outcome of communication is accurate (honest).

If the soldiers are old, play 3: become the person who has nothing to hide.

4 might work against the young, maybe. Older soldiers would notice that you're behaving differently from most houses they knocked on.

To be specific, try to become the most common sort of person the soldiers would encounter who has nothing to hide - a decent German patriot, but still nervous of course about being questioned.

Now, I'll nitpick a bit, but the site's name is "less wrong", so I'll give it a go:

I do not think the scenarios proposed in this post are realistic, and I think it shows that a lot of the commenters are Americans, who seem to not know a lot about how things worked in Europe during the War.

I'm a Dane, not a German, but my great grandparents did hide a member of the Danish resistance - my grandfathers brother - for the Germans during the war. If they had not helped him hide in the barn one night where four members of the SS came looking for him at their house, he would have been caught and sent to the Danish koncentration camp in Frøslev. They all knew that their own lives were at stake as well - hiding jews or members of the resistance was often enough to make you a member of the resistance in the eyes of the Nazis, and everybody knew this.

In short, if you were living in Nazi Germany during WW2 and you hid jews for the Nazis, you would share the fate of the jews you were hiding if they were ever found, no matter what you told the search party. Telling the truth would not only condemn the jews to death - it could also quite easily become the same as signing your own death sentence.

EY was quoted as:

If you'll lie when the fate of the world is at stake, and others can guess that fact about you, then, at the moment when the fate of the world is at stake, that's the moment when your words become the whistling of the wind.

For the vast majority of people, however, the fate of the world will never be at stake in a way that turns on their statements. For those people (and those of us who expect to be them), mentioning that we'd lie to save the world increases others' trust in a way that asserting that we'd never lie no matter what fails to do so.

I hate to burst the feel-good bubble of #5, but have you noticed that would just put the burden of lying right back onto the newly rational brownshirts? Unless that is you were such a capable rationalist teacher that you could train them to teach, on a few hours notice - and set lose a recursion that would obliterate the Nazi ideology in days, leaving the rest of the world caught between relief and awe, and wondering if such a pointedly infectious idea ought to be quarantined.

I think you have entirely missed the point. If there are Nazis at your door, sabotaging them is exactly what you are trying to do. There's nothing irrational about that. Black Belt isn't saying rationalists don't lie, he's saying they don't lie to people they don't want to harm.

The point of the Eliezer quote isn't radically different either. If your friends think you'd lie to them "for their own good", then they may disbelieve you when you need their trust the most. So again, don't lie to your friends.

If the wise are truly wise they wouldn't judge your honesty as a binary choice. They would allow you to run more complex algorithms that were scrupulously honest in some situations but dishonest in others and see them as separate clusters in person-honesty-given-situation space.

Is this question really so hard? Remind me never to hide from Nazis at your house!

First off, Kant's philosophy was criticized on exactly these grounds, i.e. that by his system, when the authorities come to your door to look for a friend you're harboring, you should turn him in. I briefly scanned for clever Kant references (e.g. "introduce the brownshirts to your strangely-named cat, Egorial Imperative") but found none. Kant clarified that he did not think it immoral to lie to authorities looking to execute your friend.

The larger issue here is the purpose of rationality. We start in medias res and reason is a tool to help us navigate the world better. I imagine that none of us have a commitment to rationality for its own sake, but rather support a clearer world-view out of some initial kind self-interest. Consequently I'm a-okay with engaging in the Dark Arts in cases where even my basic interest (my own and my friend's continued survival) and that of another party totally diverge. Otherwise the joke about the engineer (or atheist) and the guillotine isn't really a joke.

Often the long-term best strategies in game theory are irrational in the short-term; as in, games of chicken, or in punishing wrongdoers even though the cost of punishment is more than letting them off.

I think you're undervaluing the value of simple respect in the equation, as opposed to strict honesty. There is the potential for simply telling your boss - "I don't have the skill required to explain this in laymens terms yet, and you don't have the skill required to evaluate this as raw data yet, but we have a serious problem. Give me time to get someone smarter than me to either debunk this or verify it"

It has worked for me numerous times.

Not that it matters to the discussion, but Anne Frank lived in Amsterdam, Netherlands (not in Nazi Germany). As a native of the city I can't not make this remark. There have been many Jews in Amsterdam for centuries, until WW2. But it would be relatively hard to find German establishments there. Sorry for being off-topic.

If you'll lie when the fate of the world is at stake, and others can guess that fact about you, then, at the moment when the fate of the world is at stake, that's the moment when your words become the whistling of the wind.

But there's implicit assumptions there; for instance that you can credibly signal that you would not lie with the fate of the world at stake. You can do this by building up something of a reputation, but most people will not believe that you will scale your truth-telling to the "fate of the world" level.

There is only one way to do this: to have told the truth when the fate of the world was at stake, when it would have been advantageous to lie. Preferably, to have done this more than once.

Similarly, the only way of being entirely credible when the Nazis ask you "are you hiding jews?" is if you have previously hidden jews, and previously denounced them when asked.

I am having trouble with the Nazi scenario because it seems paradoxical. Hiding is implicitly lying, so the always honest person should not be able to get into this situation in the first place. (The family could make this explicit simply by asking what you would do if the Nazis came.) Turning the family away may lead to horrible deaths as well, so this may not be an improvement. One may simply be the type of person who is too honest to hide a fugitive, no matter the benefit.

The basis for honesty are arguments for development of a an egalatarian relationship. If the relationship is not based on equality then dishonesty is an inevitable result in resolving moral dilemmas. In the example case there is no reason to consider whether or not deception in words should mirror the deception of hiding filthy Jews. To split hairs further the ability to convey the truth is absolutely impossible in language. The allusion of of the 1st quote is towards this understanding: anything contained in language is only an approximation of the truth. So how honest can we really be?

Success in option 5 has much more to do with persuasiveness than rationality. I believe that a hyper-rational Urkel would fail every time.

Is it ethical to use irrational persuasion techniques to convince people to become more rational?

If you'll lie when the fate of the world is at stake, and others can guess that fact about you, then, at the moment when the fate of the world is at stake, that's the moment when your words become the whistling of the wind.

Is it correct to interpret this as similar to Pascal's Wager? The possibility of a fate-of-the-world moment is very low but the payout for being an honest fellow in this case is huge?

Don't lie, just kill all of the Nazis. http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/03/violence.html