Rules for Epistemic Warfare?

I haven't yet thought in detail about whether this particular set of suggestions is good, but I think dealing with the reality of "conflict incentivizes deception", figuring out what sort of rules regarding deception can become stable schelling points seems really important.

There are no enemies.  More importantly, there are no pure allies.  There are only changing and varied relationships, which include both cooperation and conflict.  

There is a difference of degree, not of type, between your closest friend and your bitter enemy.  And it changes over time, at a different rate than information exchange does.  In the same sense you don't want to literally torture and kill someone you're currently at war against (since you could be allies in the next conflict, AND since you don't want them to take the same attitude toward you), you don't want perfect transparency and honesty with your current family or friends (knowing you will be opposing them on some topics in the future).

Heck, most people aren't well-served by putting most of their effort into self-truth. Many truths are unhelpful in day-to-day activities, and some may be actually harmful.  I suspect (but it's hard to measure) there's a kind of uncanny valley of truth - for some topics, marginal increase in true knowledge is actually harmful, and it takes a whole lot of more knowledge to get back above the utility one before starting.  

For some topics, of course, lies and misdirection are wasteful and harmful, to friends as well as enemies.  

This might be the lowest karma post that I've given a significant review vote for. (I'm currently giving it a 4). I'd highly encourage folk to give it A Think.

This post seems to be asking an important question of how to integrate truthseeking and conflict theory. I think this is probably one of the most important questions in the world. Conflict is inevitable. Truthseeking is really important. They are in tension. What do we do about that?

I think this is an important civilizational question. Most people don't care nearly enough about truthseeking in the first place. The people who do care a lot about truthseeking tend to prefer avoiding conflict, i.e. tend to be "mistake theory" types.

Regular warfare is costly/terrible and should be avoided at all costs... but, "never" is just not an actually workable answer. Similarly, deception is very costly, in ways both obvious and subtle.  One of my updates during the 2019 Review was that it is plausible that "don't lie" is actually even more important than "don't kill" (despite those normally being reversed in in my commonsense morality). But, like violent warfare, the answer of "never" feels like an overly simplified answer to "when is it acceptable to lie?"

Eliezer's discussion of meta-honesty explores one subset of how to firm up honesty aroun the edges [LW · GW]. I like Gentzel's post here for pointing in a broader direction

This is not necessarily an endorsement of any particular point made here, only that I think the question is important. I think people who gravitate towards "truthseeking above all else" have a distaste for conflict theory. Unfortunately, I trust them more than most conflict theorists on how to develop norms around truthtelling that hold up under extreme conflict.

I think the model of a war between two sites is fundamentally flawed for epistemic warfare. For most players with power internal struggles within their community matter more for their personal success then whether their community win against other communities. See all the post about the problems of moral mazes.

If you keep the analogy of war, historically in-group rules have not been the driving force behind deescalation, inter-group treaties have. So I would be much more interested in a draft of rules that would be applied simultaneously to all sides with the goal to deescalate in mind.