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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Interesting Esquire article on Radical Honesty.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

del