The Onion Test for Personal and Institutional Honesty

I have thoughts, but they are contingent on better understanding what you mean by "types" of hidden information. For example, you used "operating a cocaine dealership" as a "type" of information hidden by the question about health information. Operating a cocaine dealership is not a health matter, except perhaps indirectly if you get high on your own supply.

To further illustrate this ambiguity, a person might be having gay sex in a country where gay sex is criminalized, morally condemned, and viewed as a shocking aberration from normal human behavior. It does not seem to me to be out of integrity for a gay person to refrain from telling other people that they have gay sex in this (or any other) context.

Where this becomes problematic is when the two people have different expectations about what constitutes reasonable expectations and moral behavior. If we give free moral license to choose what to keep private, then it seems to me there is little difference between this onion model and an algorithm for "defining away dishonesty." One can always justify oneself by saying "other people were foolish for having had such unreasonable expectations as to have been mislead or upset by my nondisclosure." If "outsiders" are expected to be sufficiently cynical, then the onion model would even justify outright lying and withholding outrageous misbehaviors as within the bounds of "integrity," as long as other people expected such infractions to be occurring.

It short, it seems that this standard of integrity reduces to "they should have known what they were getting into."

As such, the onion model seems to rely on a pre-existing consensus on both what is epistemically normal and what is morally right. It is useful as a recipe for producing a summary in this context, but not for dealing with disagreement over what is behaviorally normal or right.

Figuring out the edge cases about honesty and truth seem important to me, both as a matter of personal aesthetics and as a matter for LessWrong to pay attention to. One of the things people have used to describe what makes LessWrong special is that it's a community focused on truth-seeking, which makes "what is truth anyway and how do we talk about it" a worthwhile topic of conversation. This article talks about it, in a way that's clear. (The positive example negative example pattern is a good approach to a topic that can really suffer from illusion of transparency.)

Like Eliezer's Meta-Honesty post, the approach suggested does rely on some fast verbal footwork, though the footwork need not be as fast as Meta-Honesty. Passing the Onion Test consistently requires the same kind of comparison to alternate worlds as glomarization, which is a bit of a strike against it but that's hardly unique to the Onion Test.

I don't know if people still wind up feeling mislead? For instance, I can imagine someone saying "I usually keep my financial state private" and having their conversation partners walk away with wildly different ideas of how they're doing. Is it so bad they don't want to talk about it? Is it so good they don't want to brag? If I thought it was the former and offered to cover their share of dinner repeatedly, I might be annoyed if it turns out to be the latter.

I don't particularly hold myself to the Onion Test, but it did provide another angle on the subject that I appreciated. Nobody has yet used it this way around me, but I could also see Onion Test declared in a similar manner to Crocker's Rules, an opt-in social norm that might be recognized by others if it got popular enough. I'm not sure it's worth the limited conceptual slots a community can have for those, but I wouldn't feel the slot was wasted if Onion Tests made it that far.

This might be weird, but I really appreciate people having the conversations about what they think is honest and in what ways they think we should be honest out loud on the internet where I can read them. One can't assume that everyone has read your article on how you use truth and is thus fairly warned, but it is at least a start. Good social thing to do, A+. I don't know if more people thinking about this means we'd actually find a real consensus solution and it's probably not actually the priority, but I would like a real consensus solution and at some previous point someone's going to have to write down the prototype that leads to it.

Ultimately I don't actually want this in the Best of 2022, not because it isn't good, but because I'd worry a little about someone reading through the Best Of collections and thinking this was more settled or established than it is. The crux here is that I don't think it's settled, established, or widely read enough that people will know what you mean if you declare Onion Test. If I knew everyone on LessWrong would read everything in the Best Of 2022, then I'd change my mind and want this included so as to add the Test to our collective lexicon.

I don't have much to add, but I basically endorse this, and it's similar to what I try to do myself.

Figuring out when and how to proactively share information about my inner-layers with people is a balancing act I'm still figuring out, but I've found it generally valuable for building trust.

It's not that clear to me exactly what test/principle/model is being proposed here.

A lot of it is written in terms of not being "misleading", which I interpret as 'intentionally causing others to update in the wrong direction'. But the goal to have people not be shocked by the inner layers suggests that there's a duty to actively inform people about (some aspects of) what's inside; leaving them with their priors isn't good enough. (But what exactly does "shocked" mean, and how does it compare with other possible targets like "upset" or "betrayed"?) And the parts about "signposting" suggest that there's an aim of helping people build explicit models about the inner layers, which is not just a matter of what probabilities/anticipations they have.

This is an example of a clear textual writeup of a principle of integrity. I think it's a pretty good principle, and one that I refer to a lot in my own thinking about integrity.

But even if I thought it was importantly flawed, I think integrity is super important, and therefore I really want to reward and support people thinking explicitly about it. That allows us to notice that our notions are flawed, and improve them, and it also allows us to declare to each other what norms we hold ourselves to, instead of sort of typical minding and assuming that our notion of integrity matches others' notion, and then being shocked when they behave badly on our terms.

I think about this framing quite a lot. Is what I say going to lead to people assuming roughly the thing I think even if I'm not precise. So the concept is pretty valuable to me. 

I don't know if it was the post that did it, but maybe!

Isn't this more like an onion test for... honesty?

Integrity is broader.

Curated. I'm a big fan of people thinking about how to be honest/meta-honest [LW · GW]/not mislead/etc, it feels like doing so important for cooperation, but also important for one's own epistemics. An easy way to lie to others is to lie to yourself, and by corollary, if you can make it easy to not lie to others, you can not lie to yourself.  

I feel like there is a difference between a Secret That You Must Protect, and information that is status-restricted. 

Say you are preparing a secret birthday party for Alice, and they ask you if you have plans on their birthday. If the birthday is a Secret You Must Protect, then you would be Meta-Honest, and tell Alice you don't have plans. If it's just status-restricted, then you could tell Alice that you have something planned, but you can't say more or ruin the surprise. Thereby passing the Onion test. 

I think the danger is in confusing the two types of information. If you make a secret smelly, so that people know what kind of thing it is, then it loses a lot of the protection of being a secret in the first place. Half of a secret is the fact there is one, right? On the other hand, if you make everything a Secret You Must Protect then people may be surprised and feel betrayed when information was not sign-posted.