Less Wrong Poetry Corner: Walter Raleigh's "The Lie"

I think you might be wrong about how fraud is legally defined. If the head of Pets.com says "You should invest in Pets.com, it's going to make millions, everyone wants to order pet food online", and then you invest in them, and then they go bankrupt, that person was probably biased and irresponsible, but nobody has committed fraud.

If Raleigh had simply said "Sponsor my expedition to El Dorado, which I believe has lots of gold", that doesn't sound like fraud either. But in fact he said:

For the rest, which myself have seen, I will promise these things that follow, which I know to be true. Those that are desirous to discover and to see many nations may be satisfied within this river, which bringeth forth so many arms and branches leading to several countries and provinces, above 2,000 miles east and west and 800 miles south and north, and of these the most either rich in gold or in other merchandises. The common soldier shall here fight for gold, and pay himself, instead of pence, with plates of half-a-foot broad, whereas he breaketh his bones in other wars for provant and penury. Those commanders and chieftains that shoot at honour and abundance shall find there more rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled with treasure, than either Cortes found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru. And the shining glory of this conquest will eclipse all those so far-extended beams of the Spanish nation.

There were no Indian cities, and essentially no gold, anywhere in Guyana.

I agree with you that lots of people are biased! I agree this can affect their judgment in a way somewhere between conflict theory and mistake theory! I agree you can end up believing the wrong stories, or focusing on the wrong details, because of your bias! I'm just not sure that's how fraud works, legally, and I'm not sure it's an accurate description of what Sir Walter Raleigh did.

I'm confused by your confusion. The first paragraph establishes that Raleigh was at least as deceptive as the institutions he claimed to be criticizing. The second paragraph argues that if deceptive people can write famous poems about how they are the lone voice of truth in a deceptive world, we should be more careful about taking claims like that completely literally.

If you want more than that, you might have to clarify what part you don't understand.

What exactly is contradictory? I only skimmed the relevant pages, but they all seemed to give a pretty similar picture. I didn't get a great sense of exactly what was in Raleigh's book, but all of them (and whoever tried him for treason) seemed to agree it was somewhere between heavily exaggerated and outright false, and I get the same impression from the full title "The discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado)"

Would your views on speaking truth to power change if the truth were 2x less expensive as you currently think it is? 10x? 100x?

Maybe not; probably; yes.

Followup question: have you considered performing an experiment to test whether the consequences of speech are as dire as you currently think? I think I have more data than you! (We probably mostly read the same blogs, but I've done field work.)

Most of the consequences I'm worried about are bad effects on the discourse. I don't know what experiment I'd to to figure those out. I agree you have more data than me, but you probably have 2x the personal data instead of 10x the personal data, and most relevant data is about other people because there are more of them. Personal consequences are more amenable to experiment than discourse consequences, but I already have lots of low-risk data here, and high-risk data would carry high risk and not be qualitatively more informative. (Doing an Experiment here doesn't teach you qualitatively different things here than watching the experiments that the world constantly does.)

Can you be a little more specific? "Discredited" is a two-place function [LW · GW] (discredited to whom).

Discredited to intellectual elites, who are not only imperfectly rational, but get their information via people who are imperfectly rational, who in turn etc.

"Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" [LW · GW] isn't a literal executable decision procedure—if you programmed your AI that way, it might get stabbed. But a culture that has "Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" as a slogan might—just might be able to do science or better [LW · GW]—to get the goddamned right answereven when the local analogue of the Pope doesn't like it [LW · GW].

It almost sounds like you're saying we should tell people they should always speak the truth even though it is not the case that people should always speak the truth, because telling people they should always speak the truth has good consequences. Hm!

I don't like the "speak the truth even if your voice trembles" formulation. It doesn't make it clear that the alternative to speaking the truth, instead of lying, is not speaking. It also suggests an ad hominem theory of why people aren't speaking (fear, presumably of personal consequences) that isn't always true. To me, this whole thing is about picking battles versus not picking battles rather than about truth versus falsehood. Even though if you pick your battles it means a non-random set of falsehoods remains uncorrected, picking battles is still pro-truth.

If we should judge the Platonic math by how it would be interpreted in practice, then we should also judge "speak the truth even if your voice trembles" by how it would be interpreted in practice. I'm worried the outcome would be people saying "since we talk rationally about the Emperor here, let's admit that he's missing one shoe", regardless of whether the emperor is missing one shoe, is fully dressed, or has no clothes at all. All things equal, being less wrong is good, but sometimes being less wrong means being more confident that you're not wrong at all, even though you are wrong at all.

(By the way, I think of my position here as having a lower burden of proof than yours, because the underlying issue is not just who is making the right tradeoffs, but whether making different tradeoffs than you is a good reason to give up on a community altogether.)

(This comment is really helpful for me to understand your positions.)

Some part of your brain is performing some computation that, if it works, to the extent that it works, is mirroring Bayesian decision theory. But that doesn’t help the part of you can that talk, that can be reached by the part of me that can talk.

Why not? It seems likely to me that the part of my brain that is doing something like Bayesian decision theory can be trained in certain directions by the part of me that talks/listens (for example by studying history or thinking about certain thought experiments).

I falsifiably predict that a culture that has “Use Bayesian decision theory to decide whether or not to speak the truth” as its slogan won’t be able to do science

I'm not convinced of this. Can you say more about why you think this?