Honesty: Beyond Internal Truth

I find that there is often a conflict between a motivation to speak only the truth and a motivation to successfully communicate as close approximations to the most relevant truths as constraints of time, intelligence and cultural conversational conventions allow.

a born nerd, who seeks to become even more rational, should allow themselves to lie, and give themselves safe occasions to practice lying, so that they are not tempted to twist around the truth internally

I'm starting to think that this is exactly correct.

As we all know, natural language sentences (encoded as pressure waves in the air, or light emitted from a monitor) aren't imbued with an inherent essence of trueness or falseness. Rather, we say a sentence is true when reporting it to a credulous human listener would improve the accuracy of that human's model of reality. For many sentences, this is pretty straightforward ("The sky is blue" is true if and only if the sky is blue, &c.), but in other cases it's more ambiguous, not because the sentence has an inherently fuzzy truth value, but because upon interpreting the sentence, the correspondence between the human's beliefs and reality could improve in some aspects but not others; e.g., we don't want to say "The Earth is a sphere" is false, even though it's really more like an oblate spheroid and has mountains and valleys. This insight is embedded in the name of the site itself: "Less Wrong," suggesting that wrongness is a quantitative rather than binary property.

But if sentences don't have little XML tags attached to them, then why bother drawing a bright-line boundary around "lying", making a deontological distinction where lying is prohibited but it's okay to achieve similar effects on the world without technically uttering a sentence that a human observer would dub "false"? It seems like a form of running away from the actual decision problem of figuring out what to say. When I'm with close friends from my native subculture, I can say what I'm actually thinking using the words that come naturally to me, but when I'm interacting with arbitrary people in society, that doesn't work as a matter of cause and effect, because I'm often relying on a lot of concepts and vocabulary that my interlocutor hasn't learned (with high probability). If I actually want to communicate, I'm going to need a better decision criterion than my brain's horrifyingly naive conception of honesty, and that's going to take consequentialist thinking (guessing what words will produce what effect in the listener's mind) rather than moralistic thinking (Honesty is Good, but Lying is Bad, so I'm not Allowed to say anything that could be construed as a Lie, because then I would be a Bad Person). The problem of "what speech acts I should perform in this situation" and the problem of having beliefs that correspond to reality are separate problems with different success criteria; it really shouldn't be surprising that one can do better on both of them by optimizing them separately.

Looking back on my life, moralistic reasoning---thinking in terms of what I or others "should" do, without having a consequentialist reduction of "should"---has caused me a lot of unnecessary suffering, and it didn't even help anyone. I'm proud that I had an internalized morality and that I cared about doing the Right Thing, but my conception of what the Right Thing was, was really really stupid and crazy, and people tried to explain to me what I was doing wrong, and I still didn't get it. I'm not going to make that (particular) mistake again (in that particular form).

I have a small theory - "enhancing reality" is normal part of human social interactions, we are designed to lie exactly for this reason, and not doing it properly hurts your signaling skills and lowers your ability to achieve your social goals (including getting mates and so on).

So based on the premise that rationality is about success, rationalists should have no qualms about lying when situation is right. I'm quite good at lying, and also I'm pretty sure I'm extremely honest with myself.

It is a good question, but I fear I'm lacking data to answer. It is much harder to see my own self-deceptions than my lies, making it hard to see the sign of the correlation between them.

I have noticed that, in addition to being honest, rationalists (or those striving toward rationality) seem to also speak very precisely (although not necessarily accurately) . This is a trait that they seem to share in common with philosophers, lawyers, programmers, etc.

I suspect this is because these people recognize the confusion caused by the vagueness of language.

Agreed about the non-universality and impact of personal history. I got an 800 SAT verbal and have been reasonably popular and hanging with a smart and very accepting crowd from college on. I have also never had to financially rely on any entity more conservative than Google. And I live more unusual and transparent life than most people, being open about things that most people are private about.

It is tempting to think that my open approach is the best way for everyone, but the fact is that I have not suffered for my openness at all and lots of other people have. All my exploration of non-mainstream sexuality, for example, has happened in either LA or SF, where such things are not only not lynch-worthy, they are cool and hip.

But if I had grown up in different circumstances, I'm not sure I would have been less open and honest. It's a pretty strong drive for me. I think I might just have ended up miserable and bitter about the awfulness and dishonesty of the world.

Interesting Esquire article on Radical Honesty.

When I noticed this sort of thing in myself (I don't remember exactly when, but probably in my teens), I started intentionally pausing and rehearsing what I was about to say before saying it, in most situations. This might or might not have made me less of a liar, but it sure made me say less, because after vetting what I'm about to say, it's often the case that I don't feel the need to actually say it. Most things I would say in person don't seem worth saying once I've reviewed them for a bit.

In general I'm honest with people I think are at least moderately sane and high in agreeableness and openness, in a cooperative context. Otherwise I tend to think of myself as an actor in an improvised play that's "based on a true story." I don't seem to have too much difficulty keeping track of this, but I admit the possibility I'm self-deceived.

There are competitions that honest people regularly do poorly at, because liars have an advantage. Mating and attracting venture capital are examples. I knew a kid who claimed to have had sex with 100 women by the time he was 20. "How?" I asked. "I told them all I loved them," he said.

(Though, in my experience, telling women you love them before you've had sex with them is more likely to get you labeled 'creepy' than get you laid. Maybe it's different for teenagers.)

If detecting falsehood and discovering truth are not the same skill in practice, then practicing honesty probably makes you better at discovering truth and worse at detecting falsehood. If I thought I was going to have to detect falsehoods - if that, not discovering a certain truth, were my one purpose in life - then I'd probably apprentice myself out to a con man.

I've heard from many sources that con men are actually among the easiest to deceive. The rationale seems to be along the lines that con men have utter contempt for their marks, and therefore once a con man thinks of you as a mark he'll be oblivious to any signs that you're actually the one playing him.

(I've also heard, separately, a saying to the effect of "It is difficult/impossible to deceive an honest man", but it comes with no justification other than perhaps a religious one.)

I never before thought of poor social skills as simply a disregard for the standard signals. I have a problem with that interpretation though because I often find that groups with poor social skills have their own sets of in-group signals and that they jockey for position just as much as the rest of us.

We're all operating using human brains. It simply isn't safe to assume we don't lie or decieve ourselves constantly. The failure to notice self-deceptions is, I expect, one of the most pervasive forms of akrasia, if not, obviously, one of the most self-evident ones.

I doubt focused honesty or even radical honesty will have a major effect on the frequency of self-deception. It seems too much like sympathetic magic. So I expect it to work like any other placebo ritual.

I expect combating self-deception will require working against the akrasia directly. But most anti-akrasia approaches asume at least a small window of consciousness of the akrasia, which in this case is often not possible.

I had fun writing Lies. I do not know if it is a fun read.

I don't think Zelazny's statement makes out that "detecting falsehood and discovering truth are not the same skill in practice". He just seems to be saying that you can have good 'detecting falsehood' skills without caring much about the truth ("I’m not at all sure, though, that they care much about truth").

If I thought I was going to have to detect falsehoods - if that, not discovering a certain truth, were my one purpose in life - then I'd probably apprentice myself out to a con man.

I think that's equating 'detecting falsehood' too much with 'detecting tricks of deception'.

If detecting falsehood and discovering truth are not the same skill in practice, then practicing honesty probably makes you better at discovering truth and worse at detecting falsehood.

I'm very doubtful that practising honesty, itself, could make you worse at detecting falsehoods.

Being naive -- for example, by assuming anything that superficially seems to make sense must be true -- can make you worse at detecting falsehoods. We often associate honesty with a kind of naivety, but the problem with being poor at detecting falsehoods is a problem with naivety not with honesty.

A certain kind of naivity is thinking that since you have good intentions about being honest, you therefore are honest. Saying or thinking or feeling that you are honest does not necessarily mean you are actually honest. Yes, having a genuine desire to be honest is going to make you more likely to be honest, and put you on the right track to being honest, but claims of honesty don't necessarily equate with a genuine desire.

To actually make sure you're more honest takes work. It requires you to monitor and reflect on what you say and do. It requires you to monitor and reflect upon the ways that you or others can be dishonest. And I reckon that means that having the ability to be genuinely honest also means you'll have pretty good skills for detecting falsehood.

The following is just sketchy thoughts:

In relation to rationality, I'd say that rationality requires certain types of honesty to yourself, and being rational is likely to make you more honest to yourself as well.

If you can be successfully rational (without any major pockets of irrationality), then you're probably more likely to be considerate of others (because you're better able to appreciate the negative consequences of your actions), and are thus more likely to be honest to people in matters where there could be non-trivial negative consequences.

But I still suspect you can be quite rational without it necessitating that you're particularly honest to others.

I know I'm a really crap rationalist. Lots of the ways I fail at reason are in the category of "lying to myself", "making things easier by adopting a role", "maintaining a bubble of cosy normality". When I'm not lying to myself overtly, manipulating others can be a means to untruth-maintenance.

Honestly, even if lying were useful, I don't think I can trust myself with it.

Maybe a graduate Beisutsukai can lie, but an student ought to be scrupulous with truth.

Aside: I don't think its really verbal ability, e.g. as measured by the SAT, which truthtelling requires. What is more important is having a good theory of mind and knowing what deserves emphasis. An aspect of emotional intelligence, no?

What, in your view, and in your experience, is the nature of the interaction between honesty and rationality? Between external truthtelling and internal truthseeking?

Could it be as simple as forming a habit?

Being honest as much as possible 'by default' turns into a habit that can be very helpful when it comes to being rational. I have the feeling that external truthtelling helps form that habit, which leads to fewer internal lies. But I can't prove it (maybe it's just me).

The chain goes something like: habit of external truth -> helps internal truth, even when it's inconvenient -> helps to practice the art of rationality, because it's harder to avoid tough questions and problems by deceiving yourself.

After I first read this article about a year ago, I set out to be more honest in all my conversations. (At this point in time it has become a part of my persona and I no longer do it consciously.) There are a few things I've noticed since I made the switch:

• It is easier for me to think clearly during social events. I suspect this is because I no longer have to generate lies and keep track of all of them.

• I have become more outgoing, although undoubtedly more socially awkward. Occasionally, a person will be shocked at how carelessly I reveal something considered to be embarrassing.

• It is easier for me to detect certain lies. I attribute this to my being able to think more clearly, because as Eliezer points out, detecting falsehood might be negatively correlated to being honest.

Note that there is still much more room for me to improve, and my personal reflections on this matter are likely to be deeply flawed.

I think there is a link between external truth-telling and external truth-seeking.

Say I make a decision for the reason that it is my best guess at the right thing to do in a given situation, based on the facts I have. Suppose further it is not viewed as the right thing to do for social or political reasons among my peers. (This has happened to me now and then.)

I'd like to be able to defend my decision against vaguely stated, uninformed, logically inconsistent or otherwise irrational objections, by reference to measurable and demonstrable facts. I can only plausibly take this position (not guaranteed of success, as I'm sure we all know), as long as I stick to facts. If at any point I become known as a "liar" I lose the social standing to do so in the future, even when the facts are on my side.

Someone with much better social skills could probably charm their way through dispute situations without having to bother with mere facts.

I can't pick apart my tendency towards truth-telling into its various components and their causes, but maybe my love of the truth is partly fear of the quicksand of uncontrollable social situations. I long for solid ground, and stand there fiercely.

del

A 'Machiavellian rationalist' would only speak truths when in its in his/her own best interests, and lie when that is more useful.

However, I think Eliezer wants to be a 'friendly rationalist'[1]. Then, speaking the truth becomes the optimal thing in many more cases. It could also make it harder to succeed in fields like trade, politics, war, where bluff, misrepresentations etc. are important. And what about 'Daddy, do you like this drawing I spent three hours making for you?'

And sometimes lying seems simply the best choice - no matter what Kant thinks. The classical gestapo-knocks-on-door example comes to mind. The disutility of lying can be smaller than utility of saving other people's life (as well as you own).

Truthfulness is something to aspire to, but it's hard to be absolutist about it. I think being 'friendly'[1] is a useful dividing line, even if it can be abused to rationalize away lies.

[1] with 'friendly' here I mean: 'being nice to the rest of humanity determines your utility function in a significant way'

From what i've read and able to understand(a little) after spending 3 months reading this blog is that rationality is (just to put what has already been said lot of times by eliezer) "something that helps us getting more of what we want", please correct me if i have got it dead wrong, else i might be "de-rationalised" in a rational way. Im a pathalogical liar, i have little to hide (nobody who knows me visits this blog, i think, and if somebody does and happens to read this, then he wouldn't mind it i'm sure).

"........- the theory being that if you give yourself permission to lie outright, you will no longer feel the need to distort internal belief. In this view the choice is between lying consciously and lying unconsciously, and a rationalist should choose the former."

I like the idea of outright lying, but what i've realised over a period of time is that the "outward lying" slowly creeps into the "conscious" and "aware" mind and sometimes i forget that i am lying, i guess it happens to other also.

Again, from the definition of rational (as i ve put it above), i think honesty is related to rationality, since not being honest may help us want more of what we want or just get us what we want. How well we manage lies and are able to separate conscious and unconscious lies is subjective.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies--Ralph waldo emerson

If detecting falsehood and discovering truth are not the same skill in practice, then practicing honesty probably makes you better at discovering truth and worse at detecting falsehood.

It seems to me that the hard part of both is being "more confused by fiction than reality", and that the only relevant additional concern when detecting falsehood to have a reasonable prior on deliberate deception.

The problem, as I see it, is that it's not possible to lie to people and simultaneously act in their interests.

Lying to someone is an inherently hostile act, and indicates that (at least in regard to the matter at hand) you're enemies. There may be very special cases in which it's the act of an ally or friend (in the same way that semi-hostile microorganisms may be beneficial to our immune functioning) but they must be quite rare.

Even if some of the consequences of the lie are 'good', you're reinforcing the other person's tendencies towards irrationality by getting them to believe untruths and profiting by it.

Truth-telling is necessary but not sufficient for honesty. Something more is required: an admission of epistemic weakness. You needn't always make the admission openly to your audience (social conventions apply), but the possibility that you might be wrong should not leave your thoughts. A genuinely honest person should not only listen to objections to his or her favorite assumptions and theories, but should actively seek to discover such objections.

What's more, people tend to forget that their long-held assumptions are assumptions and treat them as facts. Forgotten assumptions are a major impediment to rationality--hence the importance of overcoming bias (the action, not the blog) to a rationalist.

Now that you mention it, I have kind of noticed this. Social skills appear to consist of a certain amount of glossing over details that you don't want to derail the more important thought processes. You don't mention aloud exactly everything you are thinking, because if you do you end up labeled "dork".

Writing/typing is a little different because you know in advance that whatever comes out is not going to be percieved immediately by anyone, so it goes through fewer filters at first. Afterwards you have the chance to edit it to be less embarassing (flow or emotion) or more correct (factually or logically).

Overall this means you can reveal more without risking as much. Rather than revealing half-formed thoughts (which people find to be threatening), you can fully develop them before revelation, and make yourself sound sophisticated. Even so, some thoughts are best left out (in some contexts) because they distract from the main point -- you can only develop so many concepts in a given amount of space.

For a long long time I've tried not to say anything false. Usually this take the form of caveats or 'weasel words'. This can make me seem less confident than I actually am, so I guess they're misleading in their own way.

Not sure how this influences self-deception. It probably makes it easier for me to misremember my confidence.

In practice, the people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills.

It's the same "liar circuitry" that you're fighting, or indulging, in the internal or external case - that would be my second guess for why rational people tend to be honest people.

I have another alternate hypotheses: most normal people are such poor rationalists, that it simply isn't worth the effort to develop proper "lying skills" (if that's an acceptable term - yes, i know it sounds weird as a phrase!!). In a majority of the situations that rationalists find themselves in, normal people will do such a thoroughly good job at deceiving themselves, and convince themselves so thoroughly, that there isn't any point in trying anymore. For that matter, there is probably a reason why even seasoned con-men have set patterns.. the number of ways in which people(average joe/jane) can be manipulated, is not just finite, but also likely to be extremely limited.

Alternately with trained rationalists, the odds of successfully telling a lie are relatively and significantly smaller, so it serves as a tremendous pico-economic disincentive to even attempt telling a fabrication. This would also explain, perhaps in some ways better than the internal circuitry theory why there is a strong correlation between rationality and honesty.

My view of the relationship between honesty and rationality is similar to taw's theory 'enhanced reality' in his comment on this page, but I would think of it as a 'augmented reality theory', I don't think we are designed to lie just that the truth is normally very complex, and we are designed to simplify.

I think there are two basic factors that limit honesty Language, and the way the human mind works.

LANGUAGE

Even a person who is trying to tell the truth and be honest is always going to have language problems, it's important to remember that new words are still being created all the time and it is impossible for one person to know them all, and we have to learn them, and even when two people are speaking the same language there is still going to be miss interpretations. before I found this site I had a lot of ideas in my head but wouldn't have been able to describe them or write them down clearly because I didn't know what words to use or the way to use the words, to express what I meant.

So for example I am doing a IT degree and I have been asked by my wife before what are you doing when I have been sitting at the computer writing, Some times I give her an accurate and honest answer like "I'm trying to fix a problem in the back propagation learning function in the code for my neural net assignment." and she just looks at me funny, because she doesn't know what half those words mean, and other times I just tell I'm programming or doing an assignment, even through a lot of the time I'm not exactly programming or doing an assignment I might be installing software I need so I can program or reading information so I can learn how to do an assignment. But giving a long more accurate answer would actually tell her less than giving a short slightly inaccurate one.

The Way The Mind Works

The other problem with honesty and the truth I think is the human mind, because peoples minds work by building associative links and over time the more these links in the mind are used the stronger they become it becomes impossible to change them instantly, and so to change them will take time. For example I have christian friends that if I was to sit down and argue with them that God doesn't exist would be pointless I would most likely just get a circular argument and even if I did provide them with the evidence they wouldn't accept it. The best thing can do is understand where they are at and slowly introduce new concepts. this isn't just something that happens with people who are religious if you look at a lot of the scientific break through s they where not instantly accepted because they where logical and gave the correct answers the ideas where slowly accepted over time.

So I think it is sometimes important to lie when the lie is a part of a bigger process of getting to the truth.

E.-

I think you are refining yourself for very good reasons. It could happen that you help 'raise' a seed AI someday. Like the quote on your pin there is, 'be the person you are seeking'. Perhaps your personal honesty practices are very important for your AI work. If you ever find yourself working with an evolving machine consciousness, it might be very good that you've taken time to search yourself.

I like your comment about feeling your nervous system change while run into that inconvenience-of-reality-what-to-say-or-do-myaaa!... thing. I think it's lucky that there are feelings to go along with lying, but very sad that it is so common and uncomfortable. You've seen others lie? A chill falls on things? Being absorbed in loads of truth seems like a flow state. Again, what is happening in our brains when we've really got it right?

Last, the practical part of my comment; have you considered having a look at your brain activity in some kind of honesty experiment? I know that would be expensive to do on a whim, but something to keep in mind for the future. In the next decade or so, wouldn't it be nice to get to know that 'wetware'; grab Nick Bostrom, Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, and have an MRI party? I'm being cheeky, but also sincere; you folks are so likely to be involved in some sort of GAI success, it would be neat to know your own minds in presently unusual but really useful ways.

If this is non-sense, go easy. I'm a dreamer.

There is no theorem which proves a rationalist must be honest

I'd like to see the non-existence proof of that claim. Absent that, it should really start "I am not aware of the existence of a theorem which..."

How do we know that there is no such theorem?

It's a special case of the interaction between seeking and sharing.

If you want something for yourself, are you obligated to help others achieve it, or at least not hinder them, even against your own interest? If you want something for yourself, are people who don't want it just wrong? Should you push it on them?

Different people will handle it different ways.

I don't have an absolute rule. I avoid lying, or try to, but I don't particularly avoid being silent.

There is no theorem which proves a rationalist must be honest - must speak aloud their probability estimates.

Speaking what you believe may be frankness, candour or tactlessness, but it isn't honesty. Honesty is not lying. It involves no requirement to call people Fatty or Shorty.