Know thyself vs. know one another

post by KatjaGrace · 2010-11-09T20:40:02.000Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

People often aspire to the ideal of honesty, implicitly including both honesty to themselves and honesty with others. Those who care about it a lot often aim to be as honest as they can bring themselves to be, across circumstances. If the aim is to get correct information to yourself and other people however, I think this approach isn’t the greatest.

There is probably a trade off between being honest with yourself and honest to others, so trying hard to be honest to others only detriments being honest to yourself, which in turn also prevents correct information getting to others.

Why would there be a trade off? Imagine your friend said, ‘I promise that anything you tell me I will repeat to anyone who asks’. How honest would you be with that friend? If you say to yourself that you will report your thoughts to others, why wouldn’t the same effect apply?

Progress in forcing yourself to be honest to others must be somewhat an impediment to being honest to yourself. Being honest with yourself is presumably also a disincentive to your being honest with others later, but that is less of a cost, since if you are dishonest with yourself you are presumably deceiving them about those topics either way.

For example imagine you are wondering what you really think of your friend Errol’s art. If you are committed to truthfully admitting whatever the answer is to Errol or your other friends, it will be pretty tempting to sincerely interpret whatever experience you are having as ‘liking Errol’s art’. This way both you and the others come off deceived. If you were committed to lying in such circumstances, you would at least have the freedom to find out the truth yourself. This seems like the superior option for the truth-loving honesty enthusiast.

This argument relies on the assumptions that you can’t fully consciously control how deluded you are about the contents of your brain, and that the unconscious parts of your mind that control this respond to incentives. These things both seem true to me.

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