Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist

The folk theory of lying is a tiny bit wrong and I agree it should be patched. I definitely do not agree we should throw it out, or be uncertain whether lying exists.

Lying clearly exists.

1. Oftentimes people consider how best to lie about e.g. them being late. When they settle on the lie of telling their boss they were talking to their other boss and they weren't, and they know this is a lie, that's a central case of a lie—definitely not motivated cognition.

To expand our extensional definition to noncentral cases, you can consider some other ways people might tell maybe-lies when they are late. Among others, I have had the experiences [edit: grammar] of

2. telling someone I would be there in 10 minutes when it was going to take 20, and if you asked me on the side with no consequences I would immediately have been able to tell you that it was 20 even though in the moment I certainly hadn't conceived myself as lying, and I think people would agree with me this is a lie (albeit white)

3. telling someone I would be there in 10 minutes when it was going to take 20, and if you asked me on the side with no consequences I would have still said 10, because my model definitely said 10, and once I started looking into my model I would notice that probably I was missing some contingencies, and that maybe I had been motivated at certain spots when forming my model, and I would start calculating... and I think most people would agree with me this is not a lie

4. telling someone I would be there in 10 minutes when it was going to take 20, and my model was formed epistemically virtuously despitely obviously there being good reasons for expecting shorter timescales, and who knows how long it would take me to find enough nuances to fix it and say 20. This is not a lie.

Ruby's example of the workplace fits somewhere between numbers 1 and 2. Jessica's example of short AI timelines I think is intended to fit 3 (although I think the situation is actually 4 for most people). The example of the political fact-checking doesn't fit cleanly because politically we're typically allowed to call anything wrong a "lie" regardless of intent, but I think is somewhere between 2 and 3 and I think nonpartisan people would agree that, unless the perpetrators actually could have said they were wrong about the stat, the case was not actually a lie (just a different type of bad falsehood reflecting on the character of those involved). There are certainly many gradations here, but I just wanted to show that there is actually a relatively commonly accepted implicit theory about when things are lies that fits with the territory and isn't some sort of politicking map distortion as it seemed you were implying.

The intensional definition you found that included "conscious intent to deceive" is not actually the implicit folk theory most people operate under: they include number 2's "unconscious intent to deceive" or "in-the-moment should-have-been-very-easy-to-tell-you-were-wrong obvious-motivated-cognition-cover-up". I agree the explicit folk theory should be modified, though.

I also want to point out that this pattern of explicit vs implicit folk theories applies well to lots of other things. Consider "identity"—the explicit folk theory probably says something about souls or a real cohesive "I", but the implicit version often uses distancing or phrases like "that wasn't me" [edit: in the context of it being unlike their normal self, not that someone else literally did it] and things such that people clearly sort of know what's going on. Other examples include theory of action, "I can't do it", various things around relationships, what is real as opposed to postmodernism, etc etc. To not cherry-pick, there are some difficult cases to consider like "speak your truth" or the problem of evil, but under nuanced consideration these fit with the dynamic of the others. I just mention this generalization because LW types (incl me) learned to tear apart all the folk theories because their explicit version were horribly contradictive, and while this has been very powerful for us I feel like an equally powerful skill is figuring out how to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

Sorry it's taken this long for me to reply to this.

"Appeal to consequences" is only a fallacy in reasoning about factual states of the world. In most cases, appealing to consequences is the right action.

For example, if you want to build a house on a cliff, and I say "you shouldn't do that, it might fall down", that's an appeal to consequences, but it's completely valid.

Or to give another example, suppose we are designing a programming language. You recommend, for whatever excellent logical reason, that all lines must end with a semicolon. I argue that many people will forget semicolons, and then their program will crash. Again, appeal to consequences, but again it's completely valid.

I think of language, following Eliezer's definitions sequence, as being a human-made project intended to help people understand each other. It draws on the structure of reality, but has many free variables, so that the structure of reality doesn't constrain it completely. This forces us to make decisions, and since these are not about factual states of the world (eg what the definition of "lie" REALLY is, in God's dictionary) we have nothing to make those decisions on except consequences. If a certain definition will result in lots of people misunderstanding each other, bad people having an easier time confusing others, good communication failing to occur, or other bad things, then it's fine to decide against it based on those grounds, just as you can decide against a programming language decision on the grounds that it will make programs written in it more likely crash, or require more memory, etc.

I am not sure I get your point about the symmetry of strategic equivocation. I feel like this equivocation relies on using a definition contrary to its common connotations. So if I was allowed to redefine "murderer" to mean "someone who drinks Coke", then I could equivocate "Alice who is a murderer (based on the definition where she drinks Coke)" and also "Murderers should be punished (based on the definition where they kill people) and combine them to get "Alice should be punished". The problem isn't that you can equivocate between any two definitions, the problem is very specifically when we use a definition counter to the way most people traditionally use it. I think (do you disagree?) that most people interpret "liar" to mean an intentional liar. As such, I'm not sure I understand the relevance of the Ruby's coworkers example.

I think you're making too hard a divide between the "Hobbesian dystopia" where people misuse language, versus a hypothetical utopia of good actors. I think of misusing language as a difficult thing to avoid, something all of us (including rationalists, and even including me) will probably do by accident pretty often. As you point out regarding deception, many people who equivocate aren't doing so deliberately. Even in a great community of people who try to use language well, these problems are going to come up. And so just as in the programming language example, I would like to have a language that fails gracefully and doesn't cause a disaster when a mistake gets made, one that works with my fallibility rather than naturally leading to disaster when anyone gets something wrong.

And I think I object-level disagree with you about the psychology of deception. I'm interpreting you (maybe unfairly, but then I can't figure out what the fair interpretation is) as saying that people very rarely lie intentionally, or that this rarely matters. This seems wrong to me - for example, guilty criminals who say they're innocent seem to be lying, and there seem to be lots of these, and it's a pretty socially important thing. I try pretty hard not to intentionally lie, but I can think of one time I failed (I'm not claiming I've only ever lied once in my life, just that this time comes to mind as something I remember and am particularly ashamed about). And even if lying never happened, I still think it would be worth having the word for it, the same way we have a word for "God" that atheists don't just repurpose to mean "whoever the most powerful actor in their local environment is."

Stepping back, we have two short words ("lie" and "not a lie") to describe three states of the world (intentional deception, unintentional deception, complete honesty). I'm proposing to group these (1)(2,3) mostly on the grounds that this is how the average person uses the terms, and if we depart from how the average person uses the terms, we're inviting a lot of confusion, both in terms of honest misunderstandings and malicious deliberate equivocation. I understand Jessica wants to group them (1,2)(3), but I still don't feel like I really understand her reasoning except that she thinks unintentional deception is very bad. I agree it is very bad, but we already have the word "bias" and are so in agreement about its badness that we have a whole blog and community about overcoming it.

When conscious intent is selectively discouraged more than unconscious intent, the result is rule by unconscious intent. Those who can conveniently forget, who can maintain narcissistic fantasies, who can avoid introspection, who can be ruled by emotions with hidden causes, will be the only ones able to deceive (or otherwise to violate norms) blamelessly.

Only a subset of lies may be detected by any given justice process, but "conscious/unconscious" does not correspond to the boundary of such a subset. In fact, due to the flexibility and mystery of mental architecture, such a split is incredibly hard to pin down by any precise theory.

"Your honor, I know I told the customer that the chemical I sold to them would cure their disease, and it didn't, and I had enough information to know that, but you see, I wasn't conscious that it wouldn't cure their disease, as I was selling it to them, so it isn't really fraud" would not fly in any court that is even seriously pretending to be executing justice.

But even while frowning internally, I want to avoid tone-policing people whose word-choice procedures are calibrated differently from mine when I think I understand the structure-in-the-world they’re trying to point to.

What if you think that you know what the author is trying to convey, but due to different calibration on word choices, a large fraction of the audience will be mislead? Worse, what if you suspect that the author is deliberately or subconsciously using a more extreme word choice (compared to what most of the audience would choose if they were fully informed) for non-epistemic reasons (e.g., to get more attention, or to mislead the audience into thinking the situation is worse than it actually is)? It seems to me that tone-policing is useful for getting everyone to have (or to be closer to having) the same calibration on word choice, and to help prevent and defend against non-epistemic motivations for word choice. (Although maybe "tone-policing" is a bad word for this, and "word-choice-policing" makes more sense here.)

Like anything, it can be misused, but I guess the solution to that is to police the word-choice-policing rather than to avoid it altogether?

But this is an appeal to consequences. Appeals to consequences are invalid because they represent a map–territory confusion, an attempt to optimize our description of reality at the expense of our ability to describe reality accurately (which we need in order to actually optimize reality).

This sounds like you are saying that the purpose of language is only to describe reality, so we should not appeal to consequences when discussing word boundaries. If so, that seems wrong to me - language serves several different purposes, of which prediction is only one.

As an example, consider the word "crime", and more specifically the question of defining which things should be crimes. When discussing whether something might be a crime, people often bring in considerations like "lying is bad, but it shouldn't be a crime, because that would have worse consequences than it being legal"; and it would seem clearly wrong to me not to.

One might object that legal terms are a special case, since they are part of a formal system with wide-ranging impact. But is that so different from other words, other than quantitatively? A legal term is primarily a tool for coordination, but so are rubes and bleggs [LW · GW]: on average, bleggs contain vanadium and rubes contain palladium, and the reason the factory draws those boundaries is to be able to instruct their workers on how to sort the things. If it turned out that their standard definitions were too confusing to their workers and made it harder to extract vanadium and palladium efficiently, then the factory would want to redefine the terms so as to make the sorting more efficient.

Or if I am a speaker of American English and want to ask my friend to bring me what are called chips in US English, but I know him to be a Brit, I might ask him to bring me crisps... because that word choice will have better consequences.

This is still compatible with all the standard words-as-disguised-queries stuff, because the language-as-prediction and language-as-coordination can be viewed as special cases of each other:

• From the language-as-prediction model, the ultimate disguised query is "what are the consequences of defining the word in this way and do those consequences align with my goals"; that is still capturing statistical regularities, those regularities just happen to also be defined in terms of one's values.
• From the language-as-coordination model, sometimes we want to coordinate around a purpose such as describing reality in a relatively value-neutral way, in which case it's good to also have terms whose queries make less reference to our values (even if the meta-algorithm producing them still uses our values as the criteria for choosing the object-level query; e.g. different occupations develop specialized vocabulary that allows them to do their jobs better, even though the queries implicit in their vocabulary don't directly reference this).

More succinctly: both "Language is about coordination, and sometimes we want to coordinate the best way to make predictions" and "Language is about prediction, and sometimes we want to predict the best ways to coordinate" seem equally valid, and compatible with the standard Sequences.

This is a great post! A lot of these points have been addressed, but this is what I wrote while reading this post:

It's not immediately clear that an 'appeal to consequences' is wrong or inappropriate in this case. Scott was explicitly considering the policy of expanding the definition of a word, not just which definition is better.

If the (chief) purpose of 'categories' (i.e. words) is to describe reality, then we should only ever invent new words, not modify existing ones. Changing words seems like a strict loss of information.

It also seems pretty evident that there are ulterior motives (e.g. political ones) behind overt or covert attempts to change the common shared meaning of a word. It's certainly appropriate to object to those motives, and to object to the consequences of the desired changes with respect to those motives. One common reason to make similar changes seems to be to exploit the current valence or 'mood' of that word and use it against people that would be otherwise immune based on the current meaning.

Some category boundaries should reflect our psychology and the history of our ideas in the local 'category space', and not be constantly revised to be better Bayesian categories. For one, it doesn't seem likely that Bayesian rationalists will be deciding the optimal category boundaries of words anytime soon.

But if the word "lying" is to actually mean something rather than just being a weapon, then the ingroup and the outgroup can't both be right.

This is confusing in the sense that it's obviously wrong but I suspect intended in a much more narrow sense. It's a demonstrated facts that people assign different meanings to the 'same words'. Besides otherwise unrelated homonyms, there's no single unique global community of language users where every word means the same thing for all users. That doesn't imply that words with multiple meanings don't "mean something".

Given my current beliefs about the psychology of deception, I find myself inclined to reach for words like "motivated", "misleading", "distorted", &c., and am more likely to frown at uses of "lie", "fraud", "scam", &c. where intent is hard to establish. But even while frowning internally, I want to avoid tone-policing people whose word-choice procedures are calibrated differently from mine when I think I understand the structure-in-the-world they're trying to point to.

You're a filthy fucking liar and you've twisted Scott Alexander's words while knowingly ignoring his larger point; and under cover of valuing 'epistemic rationality' while leveraging your privileged command of your cult's cant.

[The above is my satire against-against tone policing. It's not possible to maintain valuable communication among a group of people without policing tone. In particular, LessWrong is great in part because of it's tone.]

I suspect we're very far apart on your first point. "lie" is not in the territory, it's all about which map you are using. Which definition(s) you prefer are context- and audience-dependent, and if you suspect something is unclear, you should use more words rather than expending a lot of energy on over-generalizing this use of one word.

I'm more sympathetic to your second point, but note that you are arguing from consequences - you want to use the word in such a way that it apportions blame and influences behavior in the ways you (and I, TBH) prefer.

Thanks for redirecting to the question of "What is the Psychology of Deception like?"

Upon inspection, one way my mind treats "lying" is directly as the decision to punish. I also might use "intentional deceit" as a definition when prompted. This was the first time that I checked if my gut sense of when people should be punished maps onto "intentional deceit". No conclusions on if they're mismatched, but it's no longer obvious to me that they are the same.

Maybe it is worth starting with a core definition of a lie that most people would agree with, something like "an utterance that is consciously considered by the person uttering it to misrepresent reality as they know it at that moment, with the intention to force the recipient to adjust their map of reality to be less accurate". Well, that's unwieldy. Maybe "an attempt to deceive through conscious misrepresentation of one's models"? Still not great.