Strategic ignorance and plausible deniability

In the US, the law recognizes that people would sometimes benefit from plausible deniability, and thus sometimes has a standard of "knew or should have known."

I have two standards of trust.

The first one is trusting that someone's goals are aligned with mine, and that they don't intentionally do anything bad.

The second one is trusting that someone's actions are going to be lined up with their intentions, and that they will take the initiative to ensure this.

The second is much harder to earn, but can be earned without needing to necessarily have my goals.

If he was tested, he might find out he had a disease, and then he'd be accused of knowingly endangering others if he didn't tell them about his disease. If he isn't tested, he'll only be accused of not finding out that information, which is often considered less serious. [emphasis added]

This strikes me as being a major societal bug. I agree that it's in the short term interests of the person to avoid getting tested. But, many people avoiding testing and thereby creating a pressure that it's normal and okay to do that, is what causes the silly situation in the first place.

A lot of the other scenarios you write about seem similar: strategic ignorance can be helpful for the individual in the short term, but a general policy of deliberate non-ignorance would be better for everybody overall.

But then this can't be the sole explanation, because people are most likely to act when they're alone and there's nobody else around to know about your duty.

Actually I think concerns about plausible deniability explain that just fine. Someone who observes trouble while alone is in a fairly safe position, since they can withdraw at any point during investigation or intervention without any witnesses to accuse them of cowardice. That initial sense of safety motivates a greater degree of risk-taking, in the form of willingness to render assistance.

I always get confused by experiments involving how generous people are with money, because if I took 5/5 instead of 6/1 I'd be taking $3 from the experimenters! Who am I to say that they are less deserving than my co-experimentee?

This stands directly in the way of the maxim, "Whatever can be destroyed by the truth, should be."

Negative knowledge values imply reflective or dynamic inconsistency in one's decision theory. So in each of these cases where you benefit from well-placed ignorance, something in the system has a major value inconsistency. It may very well be optimal for one person within the system to be strategically ignorant, but the system has some crucial flaw nonetheless.

For example, any time you have people deliberately becoming ignorant of an injured person needing assistance, the system is probably excessively punishing (or under-rewarding) those who happen to be nearby. Counterintuitively, then, it may be better to have blanket immunity for those nearby who fail to act so as to increase the chance people will be around at all and who have something to offer.

A similar analysis applies to the trolley problem, much to my consternation: if people regard it as moral to "shuffle" risk around (such as by diverting a trolley from a dangerous to a safe area), then people have to overspend on risk avoidance, thereby reducing the chance that anyone will be around at all to help in such situations, and reducing the total societal resources available to manage risk in the first place.

I've recently started to have real secrets to keep (which I'm not used to), and it's making me really appreciate when people help me keep plausible deniability.

I think I remember people on this site saying that the most important part of a secret is that a secret exists. How true that is seems to depend on whether the person who learns that a secret exists wants to cooperate with you on keeping the secret (including from themselves), and how good they are at doing that.

There should be a link to Nick Bostrom's taxonomy of information risks somewhere in your article. It's here.

In general, people (and societies) often believe that if you know about something bad, you have a duty to stop it. If you don't know about something, then obviously you can't be blamed for not stopping it.

I don't think that's very obvious. We often transfer responsibility to certain roles. The president of a country is supposed to be responsible for what the bureaucrats under him are doing whether or not he knows what they are doing.

In general it's a useful social norm to hold people accountable for the promises they make whether or not they can tell you a story of how they didn't have proper information to fulfill on the promise.

I think you're confusing ignorance with other people's beliefs about that agent's ignorance. In your example of the police or the STD test, there is no benefit gained by that person being ignorant of the information. There is however a benefit of other people thinking the person was ignorant. If someone is able to find out whether they have an STD without anyone else knowing they've had that test, that's only a benefit for them. (Not including the internal cognitive burden of having to explicitly lie.)

Any tips on how to overcome these effects? In other words, do you have a suggestion for a kind of behaviour/rationality technique where one can be trained to overcome any instinct to prevent yourself from finding out certain information. Generally, speaking knowing something is (usually) better than not knowing, even if the situation is potentially high cost on both options that you mentioned (punish or ignore). To illustrate with an example, if I find out that my boss is a child molester, but I am in desperate need of my current job, I may be less inclined to report it to an authority even if my society (correctly) imposes a high taboo on child molestation. Nevertheless, knowing still benefits me as I will ensure that my children never meet my employer.

The example that I provided may sound a little besides the point, but I am not disagreeing with the conclusion of the post. I am merely trying to point out that the "not knowing" inducing behavior may be proving costly, and extremely so. If I were to try and construct a problem based on a topic a little closer to the heart of the LW zeitgeist, it would probably sound something like this:

If I am a retired man of age 85, who is truly a rags to riches story, and who has overcome several set-backs in life, to acquire a tremendous amount of wealth, which I now plan on using to support an altruistic, but evidently jingoistic cause. I plan to give millions of dollars away to support only a certain ethnic group, (at this point i'm thinking more along the lines of people of my sub-caste as opposed to people born in country X or native speakers of language Y). This imaginary version of me would surely be hesitant to educate himself about the prospect of machine intelligence. He would surely be reluctant to part with his hard earned money (which was earned by countless meetings with clients and sleepless nights rather than buying land and finding oil beneath). This is particularly tragic because, even the members of my pet ethnic group are more likely to benefit from even a "less than singularity" advance in technology, than by using my vast (but honestly earned) wealth to set up more monasteries, academies and other institutions (which generally make use of buildings and marketing campaigns).

One obvious reply is to brute force the problem and simply force yourself and members of society whom you have influence over to simply learn about everything. This may not be an effective solution as the behavioral pattern of strategic ignorance is instinctive.

But if the reasons as to why this is so can be enumerated, then perhaps a strategy can be formed regarding how to tackle this rather critical issue.