Not Technically Lying

Maybe I'm just deluding myself, or as Michael Vassar would put it, expressing codes of morality that I learned by being socialized by fantasy novels as a kid...

...but for me, one of the primary motivations against lying is "Once a man gets a reputation for lying, he might as well be whistling in the wind." At least if you get a reputation for Not Technically Lying, your words still mean things, they just have to be carefully double-checked. Depending on how much trouble you go to in order to Not Technically Lie, when anyone else would just lie and be done with it, it expresses an odd sort of respect for the truth. A lot of that would depend on context and motivation, I expect. And maybe if you aren't socialized by fantasy novels you just don't care about the difference at all.

I think there are grades of Not Technically Lying, too. For example, there's Not Literally Lying According To Sentence Syntax But Lying If You Added Words That Appear By Gricean Implication, like the missing "because" in the opening paragraph. In contrast, Subtly Changing the Subject or Not Answering the Original Question, actually seem to me substantially less similar to outright lies - the original sentence becomes a lie if an implied word "because" is said out loud; Subtly Changing the Subject is more... semantic.

It probably comes from reading too many fantasy novels and from playing Ultima IV during my formative years, but I somehow acquired a strong aversion to telling literal lies, to the point where I basically can't do it at all. On the other hand, using the truth with an intent to deceive feels fine; it doesn't trigger the same "OMG this is bad and wrong" emotional reaction I get when I think about lying outright to someone. It's like the restrictions on Aes Sedai in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.

I also tell people this.

Among lawyers, this can show high status. Lying to a court is completely unacceptable, and can make an advocate useless to future clients. However NTL is OK.

The pupil barrister: "To be honest..."

Head of Chambers: Lawyers are always honest. The lawyer will say, "To be frank..."

(taken from the BabyBarista blog)

Lots of people say "don't talk to the police--they'll take things out of context"; that is, they'll NTL about the conversation (and substantively lie about their interpretation). Some people say "don't talk to the police--they'll fabricate an incriminating remark." But such people never say that the police will fabricate a conversation. Is there some magic line that the police won't cross that tells us more about how most people operate than the concept of NTL in this post?

(an alternate explanation is that police don't fabricate incriminating remarks; they just take things out of context and the victim lies about having stumbled into the trap; the person recounting the story doesn't want to accuse the victim, an ally, of lying, so he accuses the police.)

I would be interested to see what people think of some other options:

4) "I'll tell you later." [Fails to answer the question; is neither a Technical Lie nor actively misleading; may lead the patient to believe it's a painkiller or similar anyway]

5) "I'm doing everything I can to help you; please don't distract me." [True statement and a request; may lead the patient to believe it's a painkiller or similar anyway]

6) "It's a 300-osmolarity isotonic solution of chloridated alkali metal." [Technobabble; the average patient will have no clue what this means. Unless I'm misusing chemical terms found on Wikipedia, it's completely accurate. Will probably discourage further questions, especially if stated rapid-fire in a curt tone.]

I would say that making an unnecessary injection for the purposes of creating a false belief is already going way past lying. What do words count for compared to actions?

The example introduces a difficulty unrelated to the topic of the article. The statement "this is the strongest painkiller I have", or even better "This will help your pain" is such that its truth value depends on it having been pronounced. This complicates the issue of whether it's true, because "platonically", taken outside the context of being pronounced, it's "not technically a lie", while when it's actually pronounced, it becomes true to the situation, less misleading.

This is an intuitive difficulty akin to that with reflective consistency: at the moment, you prefer one decision, and later you prefer another. The situation changes, and so do decisions or valuations of decisions. In this case, before the statement is pronounced, it seems to be more untrue than after it's pronounced. The reflectively consistent solution is to value what remains possible as a result of your decisions (and use that as a basis for your decisions). In this case, the true valuation takes into account how true the statement is given that it's pronounced, at which point it's more true than not.

I think there's a significant difference in having a reputation for lying, and a reputation for truth but Not Technically a Lie. The difference is, it is meaningless to converse with a person with a reputation for lying on a subject they are likely to lie about. One can however converse with someone with a reputation for NTL, because you know they will answer truthfully -- but you have to avoid filling in vagueness like you would for an honest person. If need be, you can choose an exact wording and ask them to repeat it. Note: my presumption is that you cannot earn a reputation for Not Technically Lying if you are willing to blatantly lie when you can't NTL.

Another difference is that part of the responsibility for the untruth belongs to the person filling in the details that make the Not Technically a Lie become false. You may think otherwise, but let me ask you this: how much effort are you willing to go through to make sure that nobody misinterprets anything you say in a way that would be false? At some point you will decide that the majority or entirety of the fault for a false interpretation belongs to the listener. Then it all comes down to intent, which will make the consequentialists among us rather nervous.

It occurs to me that NTL may be a safer deception technique than outright lying for another reason: an honest person may fail to disclose relevant information purely by accident - they did not realize that their audience was ignorant of it - and thereby leave a false impression. Intent is therefore harder to demonstrate in NTL cases.

Perhaps I'm just arguing for the conclusion I want, and thus digging myself deeper, but in your example, 3 seems entirely truthful to me. You're administering saline, sure, but you're administering it in order to treat pain. If you had a better means of treating pain, you would be using that. Given those circumstances "The strongest painkiller I have." actually seems accurate.

I agree with this. It's closely related to the saying "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires.", which I've always interpreted to be about much more than just lying.

My main objection to NTLs is that they seem to be generated when a person is trying to convince themselves that they're not the type of person who lies, even though they are (where misleading == lying). If you want to be the type of person who never misleads people, you can't NTL. If you think you're that type of person, but you also think that NTLs are okay in some situations, you're going to run into trouble, because those things conflict pretty strongly, and you're likely to wind up misleading yourself in an attempt to avoid acknowledging the situation.

I've taken the third option, personally - I fully admit that I believe there are some times when misleading someone is appropriate, and that's worked well for me. The natural complications involved in lying are enough to make me avoid it even in most situations where it would be potentially useful, and I haven't noticed any problems in remembering the truth about the situations I have lied about.

Much of this is academic once you realize that in communication, especially effective communication (and, really, if we're rationalists concerned with "winning communication" what other sort are we concerned with?), the truth value of a statement from our internal interpretation is irrelevant, and, indeed our intention is also irrelevant unless it is indicated over some other channel during our communication, because none of these are accessible to the people we are communicating with.

Your statement may be accurate and come from honest intent when it started out, but that gives you no guarantee that it will be interpreted as such when it is received by others. The whole discourse of lies, NTLs, honesty, and radical honesty is only giving excuses that you have tried hard enough when communication fails. After that you can just claim that it was the other person(s) fault.

But does the rationalist (who is playing to win), let herself lose the game just because trying to anticipate which cooperative strategy another player could choose is difficult?

I suggest the solution isn't choosing which single person model to permit or reject, rather it's to recognize that communication involves more than one person, and that reducing it to such a simple model is causing too much error to be truly effective.

Feynman's Who Stole the Door? story is a great example of NTL and demonstrates that "can be accused of having intended to deceive" is a very low standard.

i think people who (think they) are frequently misinterpreted are more likely to be sympathetic to not technically lying. I have had to go out of my way quite a lot to stop myself accidentally not technically lying to people, some of whom would, when I explained what I meant, not believe me. This at first caused me to take the attitude: "LISTEN TO THE WORDS IM SAYING, YOUR HEURISTICS OBVIOUSLY AREN'T WORKING." Now that I know, to some extent, how people will misinterpret me, I don't feel at all guilty about talking as I naturally do, in a manner I expect to be misinterpreted, and actually ok going out of my way to not technically lie. Some of the motivation for Going out of my way to NTL lie is, knowing I'm going to "NTL" (from someone's perspective) despite my best efforts, trying to condition people to LISTEN TO THE WORDS I'M SAYING WITH MY MOUTH, rather than what they hear, part vindictiveness (they deserve it if their listening heuristics are on too low and their social ones are on too high), and part discomfort with saying things which are false.

From my personal observations, it seems very hard for the human brain to live with lies which are not technically lies, and at the same time remain un-damaged in other ways. I have this concept marked as one of the major leading causes of "pretzel-brain".

The most interesting example I have found so far is of an individual who thinks of himself as always honest - and he maintains this image by never lying at the meta-level. He introduces himself as a liar to all new people he meets, and, if asked directly if a statement he's made is a lie, he will answer truthfully, to the best of his ability. It's not technically a lie if people know you're honest, and can catch you in the act if they try.

The one thing that stands out for me in this is that it seems to go from the same "figures don't lie but liars sure can figure" assumption that NTL is much easier fool people with than making stuff up.

But, in my experience, that's not true. There are indicators when someone is NTL, versus actually being honest, just as I've noticed over the years that there are indications when a statistic is being taken out of context.

Most forms of deceit are either very short term, or fall quite rapidly to logic of the form "If this is true as it stands, what else would that imply?"

And maybe that's my advantage - I'm not entirely sure I consider myself all that principled a person as such, I simply noticed at a very young age that deception doesn't actually work all that well. Simpler to convince people you are right because you're actually right and can tell people why.

Created a wiki page: Not technically a lie.

I wonder if being literally honest but willing to tell Not Technically Lies serves culturally in the same way that being willing to tell "little white lies" but not break an official oath/vow does. People know you're willing to be deceptive, so you're not going to be cornered into spilling any secrets they tell you, you're not going to make a tactless ass of yourself, etc. But they also know that they can trust you if they're willing to spend the time and effort to corner you on anything that's exceptionally important to them.

The NTL restriction is stronger: people don't usually insist that you take oaths, whereas people often accidentally phrase questions in such a way that it's not possible to give a deceptive answer undetected. But I think its modern popularity is because it seems more logically objective: "don't deceive by saying things that aren't true" is more cross-cultural than "don't deceive if your hand is on a special book" or "don't deceive unless your fingers are crossed" or "don't deceive unless you didn't say 'I swear' first".

I guess this is where I come down on this:

1. Whether you say 2 or 3, you are deliberately encouraging false beliefs in your patient.

2. Assuming that your patient is not an abnormal human decision maker, he would probably prefer less pain over some trivial but accurate information about what substance is in a bag.

3. If you are a utility-maximizer or a volition-extrapolator you would tell the guy whatever lie seems most likely to mitigate his suffering.

Is this what you read when you came up with this idea?

From an ethical perspective, there is little difference between L and NTL. If we define a lie as 'an attempt to deceive' (as Michael Vassar puts it), they are just the same.

In practice though, for people it does seem to make a significant difference; it seems that many people avoid plain lying, and instead try some NTL or some related class of non-truth. E.g., not answering 'No, I did not do that', but instead saying 'Where could I have found the time to do that?'. For some reason, that's easier.

But again, from an ethical viewpoint it seems not very useful to make a big distinction -- the nature of language is such that one could express just about any lie into NTL. Likewise, a sufficiently pedantic listener could demonstrate that many 'true' statements are not technically true.

I know that this is simply an exercise but I think it points out my epistemic belief that there are no such things as gray areas in deceit.

The doctor could have easily have said "It's the weakest painkiller I have," or "It's the strongest sedative I have," or any other number of technically true but misleading statements

In reality the Saline IV is neither a painkiller nor a sedative whatsoever therefore:

The strongest painkiller I have

is actually as much of a lie as the morphine statement.

Now of course you go on to say this:

Because language does not specify single, clear meanings...

However in this case there is a clear meaning for "painkiller" or "sedative."

I think there are good examples of shaping perceptions (which is what NTL's really seem to be) on these types of issues. Here is an alternative for your example. The doctor could have said this:

"This is something which might help your pain"

That is both technically true and verifiable as not NTL. Does it have the same effect as making a definitive statement? Perhaps not, but it also does not lead to a false conclusion about morphine or the ethics of the doctor which the patient may make when he is slicing and dicing.

If lying is never justified because of its effect on the listener, then neither is NTL.

To which I would agree, but I pose another question: Is shaping another person's perception in any way, based on reasonable knowledge of the outcomes and given authority (Such as the case with doctors) a positive heuristic?