Sometimes we say things that we think are true—perhaps even things that are true—which end up causing reasonable people to conclude something false. It's tempting to relate to such a situation primarily in terms of maintaining the innocence of one's soul—to say, fine, my readers became more wrong, but I'm not to be judged for it because I believed what I was saying; I wasn't being misleading just because the people who believed me were thereby led into falsehood.
The temptation reflects a confusion as to the nature of the judgment. Mostly, people don't care about judging the innocence of your soul; they care about whether they'll be led into falsehood the next time they take the risk of believing what you say—if there is a next time. If you want there to be a next time and you're going to have social emotions about it, the most productive emotion is embarrassment rather than defensiveness.
The function of embarrassment as a social emotion is as a signal of appeasement and social repair: embarrassment says, "I'm aware that I've become visible in a socially undesirable way; please don't take it as representative of me."
The socially undesirable appearance can come apart from any intended or actual wrongdoing. Jewish law has a concept of marit ayin, "appearance to the eye": the law prohibits actions that would themselves be permissible if they didn't create the appearance of a prohibited act. Hanging up wet clothes to dry on the sabbath is prohibited, because it looks like you were doing laundry on the sabbath (even if the clothes actually got wet for some other reason). One function of the marit ayin doctrine is to deny plausible deniability to norm-violators (as someone might try to do laundry on the sabbath if they felt secure that no one would punish them for merely hanging up the wet clothes). Those who want to be known for keeping the sabbath need to pay a price that's more expensive for sabbath-violators to pay; if you care about maintaining the norm itself, it shouldn't be much extra trouble for you to furthermore care about maintaining the appearance of the norm.
One time, I accidentally joined a work call unmuted while my housemate was playing a loud video game. I was deeply embarrassed, because it looked like I was playing video games during work hours. I think my marit ayin-like embarrassment was serving a useful socio-psychological function, even though it was my housemate's game and I was in fact totally innocent in my soul. If I were the sort of person who was totally unashamed about creating the appearance of slacking off, then I think my manager and coworkers would have reason to doubt my commitment to productively working from home.
Similarly, people who are visibly embarrassed after having accidentally misled people can be counted on to work hard to make sure that people won't regret believing them next time. Defensive people won't, because, well, why would they? They didn't do anything wrong.
Two Case Studies About Accidentally Misleading People
Once, I suspected an ideological rival of misrepresenting a citation: they had linked to a webpage featuring an embedded PDF of an essay, but when I used my web browser's "Ctrl-F" search functionality with appropriate search terms to see what in the essay justified their claim, I came up empty. When considering whether to escalate to complaining more loudly about my rival over this (after the rival didn't respond to a blog comment and DM), I mentioned the matter to a third party—who pointed out that the essay did contain my search term! On further testing, it appeared that my web browser's Ctrl-F behavior depended on which page element had focus: if the user had last clicked inside the embedded PDF viewer, the search returned results inside the PDF, but not if the user had last clicked elsewhere on the page.
I was so embarrassed.
To be clear, I knew I was innocent in my soul: the browser UX bug wasn't my fault, and if the browser hadn't been buggy, then my initial search would have succeeded and I never would have complained. I certainly didn't lie. (I didn't say that I read the essay and verified that it didn't support the claim, which would have been false; I said the Ctrl-F search came up empty, which was true.)
But the innocence of my soul didn't matter. I knew that raising a suspicion that turned out to be false looked bad for me, even if there was ultimately a perfectly reasonable explanation for my actions. If I didn't want to look bad, I couldn't count on everyone hanging around to listen to my perfectly reasonable explanation for why it was all the Firefox developers' fault. I would need to make some sort of generalizable change to my policy—perhaps, reading the entire PDF myself next time before raising the suspicion that an ideological rival was misrepresenting it.
(Recounting this seven years later, I went back and downloaded the PDF. Excluding the title page and the endnotes, it was six pages.)
⁂
Another time, a journalist wrote an article paraphrasing a source as saying that it "could be unfair" for journalists to discuss "both critics and supporters" of some controversial public figure and that they should instead "somehow prove statistically which side was right." I was familiar with the source's work, and the paraphrase didn't sound like something she would say. I brought up that line from the article when I had occasion to talk to the same journalist three years later: he maintained it was fair, so I asked the source about it afterwards. She told me that she recalled telling the journalist that she "wasn't a huge fan of 'both sides' journalism, where you just find someone with one opinion and someone with the other opinion" rather than trying to figure out the truth; she had also given suggestions for data sources that might bear on claims about the public figure's influence.
I took that statement as confirmation of my suspicion that the paraphrase in the article was misleading. "[S]omehow prove statistically which side was right" leads readers who aren't familiar with the source's work to imagine that she has an unreasonable faith in the power of statistics to resolve all questions, whereas voicing skepticism of false balance is eminently reasonable. "Somehow" implies vagueness, but pointing out data sources that bear on some question is supplying a specific "how."
When I complained about this again to the journalist, he didn't seem embarrassed. "I had to boil down what she said to plain English," he said. I said that it hadn't worked. He said it did. He recounted that the source had objected when he said his coverage would represent both views of the public figure. When I interrupted to insist that it seemed like a bad paraphrase when compared to what the source had told me later, he said, "Is that necessarily what she said to me?"
And in absolute fairness, maybe it wasn't, necessarily. I of course was not present for the years-prior conversation between the journalist and the source; I don't have the recording, if there was one. Even if the source can be assumed to be an authority about what she meant to say, I cannot with absolute certainty rule out the scenario where the "somehow prove statistically which side was right" line was a reasonable paraphrase of the words she had literally said at the time and that her reconstruction years later of what she remembered saying was unintentionally injecting more nuance after the fact. The source apparently hadn't objected during a fact check call. If the journalist had reasonably paraphrased the words that were said to him at the time, then he was innocent in his soul. Even if his readers walked away with a distorted impression of what the source privately believed (but did not manage to successfully communicate in the interview), the miscommunication wasn't his fault.
I still think this episode looks bad for him and that he should have been embarrassed, because there should have been generalizable policy changes that could have prevented this class of error—perhaps, thinking more carefully about whether a paraphrase that makes a subject look unreasonable truly reflects the subject's views before going to print with it. Potential sources deciding whether they should talk to the journalist are mostly worried about the risk that their views will end up being miscommunicated, not whose fault a miscommunication would be if it happened. Unlucky accidents do not impinge upon the innocence of one's soul under the moral law, but the moral law is unmercifully permissive about everyone else's right to avoid unlucky people.
Higher Innocence
And that's why accidentally misleading people should be embarrassing: because the desire to avoid such embarrassment motivates a counterfactual reduction in such incidents of people being misled, notwithstanding that it was a totally unintentional accident and the speaker is perfectly innocent in their soul.
That's the conclusion of the post. Thanks for reading!
... or that's how I'd prefer to end the post, with a message of absolution and hope. Absolution—that those whose actions have propagated falsehood need not question what we know to be true of our souls. And hope—that we all might learn to do better in the future. There's just one little nuance that continues to haunt me, that I could not, unfortunately, end the post without explaining. (Not because I didn't try, but because my prereader Said Achmiz didn't let me get away with it.) Just a tiny subtlety, almost irrelevant, really, affecting almost none of the logic except to clarify that souls aren't real.
I've been writing this post to try to get through to people who are resistant to noticing when they've been misleading because they're terrified of judgment and social punishment. When you point out to them that their words led reasonable readers to walk away with the wrong model, they double-triple-quadruple down on playing dumb, insisting that they weren't lying, and that even if readers ended up being more wrong, it wouldn't be any substantial evidence against their integrity. This post has been trying to offer these people some moral absolution (which I don't care about one way or the other) in exchange for orienting towards the problem that I actually care about (of creating accurate shared maps): to say, look, I believe that you weren't lying, I believe that you're innocent in your soul, but the part where reasonable readers walk away with the wrong model is still a problem you should care about, even if it was an accident.
But was it an accident? Was it, really? It is written that the one who wishes to believe asks, "Does the evidence permit me to believe?" while the one who wishes to disbelieve asks, "Does the evidence force me to believe?" If you have a bottom line that you want to believe, and you go around looking for evidence that permits you to believe it, I really have to question in what sense it's an "accident" if you end up misleading people towards your bottom line.
It's surely an accident in some sense. The browser bug really wasn't my fault. But if I was too lazy to read six pages to check when it was my rival, but would have read the six pages if it had been my ally, that's a reason people should be suspicious when I claim that my rivals did something wrong. I wasn't lying, and that's a kind of innocence, but the cold light of "Six pages? Really?" makes me want to aspire to a higher form of innocence.
the moral law is unmercifully permissive about everyone else's right to avoid unlucky people.
they double-triple-quadruple down on playing dumb, insisting that they weren't lying, and that even if readers ended up being more wrong
There is a parable[1] about Chinese generals who raise a rebellion against the emperor when their punishment for some honest mistake or failing from bad luck was to be as severe as that for treason. Perhaps this "moral law" has in fact lost the Mandate of Heaven, and needs replacing.
Embarrassment and Innocence
Sometimes we say things that we think are true—perhaps even things that are true—which end up causing reasonable people to conclude something false. It's tempting to relate to such a situation primarily in terms of maintaining the innocence of one's soul—to say, fine, my readers became more wrong, but I'm not to be judged for it because I believed what I was saying; I wasn't being misleading just because the people who believed me were thereby led into falsehood.
The temptation reflects a confusion as to the nature of the judgment. Mostly, people don't care about judging the innocence of your soul; they care about whether they'll be led into falsehood the next time they take the risk of believing what you say—if there is a next time. If you want there to be a next time and you're going to have social emotions about it, the most productive emotion is embarrassment rather than defensiveness.
The function of embarrassment as a social emotion is as a signal of appeasement and social repair: embarrassment says, "I'm aware that I've become visible in a socially undesirable way; please don't take it as representative of me."
The socially undesirable appearance can come apart from any intended or actual wrongdoing. Jewish law has a concept of marit ayin, "appearance to the eye": the law prohibits actions that would themselves be permissible if they didn't create the appearance of a prohibited act. Hanging up wet clothes to dry on the sabbath is prohibited, because it looks like you were doing laundry on the sabbath (even if the clothes actually got wet for some other reason). One function of the marit ayin doctrine is to deny plausible deniability to norm-violators (as someone might try to do laundry on the sabbath if they felt secure that no one would punish them for merely hanging up the wet clothes). Those who want to be known for keeping the sabbath need to pay a price that's more expensive for sabbath-violators to pay; if you care about maintaining the norm itself, it shouldn't be much extra trouble for you to furthermore care about maintaining the appearance of the norm.
One time, I accidentally joined a work call unmuted while my housemate was playing a loud video game. I was deeply embarrassed, because it looked like I was playing video games during work hours. I think my marit ayin-like embarrassment was serving a useful socio-psychological function, even though it was my housemate's game and I was in fact totally innocent in my soul. If I were the sort of person who was totally unashamed about creating the appearance of slacking off, then I think my manager and coworkers would have reason to doubt my commitment to productively working from home.
Similarly, people who are visibly embarrassed after having accidentally misled people can be counted on to work hard to make sure that people won't regret believing them next time. Defensive people won't, because, well, why would they? They didn't do anything wrong.
Two Case Studies About Accidentally Misleading People
Once, I suspected an ideological rival of misrepresenting a citation: they had linked to a webpage featuring an embedded PDF of an essay, but when I used my web browser's "Ctrl-F" search functionality with appropriate search terms to see what in the essay justified their claim, I came up empty. When considering whether to escalate to complaining more loudly about my rival over this (after the rival didn't respond to a blog comment and DM), I mentioned the matter to a third party—who pointed out that the essay did contain my search term! On further testing, it appeared that my web browser's Ctrl-F behavior depended on which page element had focus: if the user had last clicked inside the embedded PDF viewer, the search returned results inside the PDF, but not if the user had last clicked elsewhere on the page.
I was so embarrassed.
To be clear, I knew I was innocent in my soul: the browser UX bug wasn't my fault, and if the browser hadn't been buggy, then my initial search would have succeeded and I never would have complained. I certainly didn't lie. (I didn't say that I read the essay and verified that it didn't support the claim, which would have been false; I said the Ctrl-F search came up empty, which was true.)
But the innocence of my soul didn't matter. I knew that raising a suspicion that turned out to be false looked bad for me, even if there was ultimately a perfectly reasonable explanation for my actions. If I didn't want to look bad, I couldn't count on everyone hanging around to listen to my perfectly reasonable explanation for why it was all the Firefox developers' fault. I would need to make some sort of generalizable change to my policy—perhaps, reading the entire PDF myself next time before raising the suspicion that an ideological rival was misrepresenting it.
(Recounting this seven years later, I went back and downloaded the PDF. Excluding the title page and the endnotes, it was six pages.)
⁂
Another time, a journalist wrote an article paraphrasing a source as saying that it "could be unfair" for journalists to discuss "both critics and supporters" of some controversial public figure and that they should instead "somehow prove statistically which side was right." I was familiar with the source's work, and the paraphrase didn't sound like something she would say. I brought up that line from the article when I had occasion to talk to the same journalist three years later: he maintained it was fair, so I asked the source about it afterwards. She told me that she recalled telling the journalist that she "wasn't a huge fan of 'both sides' journalism, where you just find someone with one opinion and someone with the other opinion" rather than trying to figure out the truth; she had also given suggestions for data sources that might bear on claims about the public figure's influence.
I took that statement as confirmation of my suspicion that the paraphrase in the article was misleading. "[S]omehow prove statistically which side was right" leads readers who aren't familiar with the source's work to imagine that she has an unreasonable faith in the power of statistics to resolve all questions, whereas voicing skepticism of false balance is eminently reasonable. "Somehow" implies vagueness, but pointing out data sources that bear on some question is supplying a specific "how."
When I complained about this again to the journalist, he didn't seem embarrassed. "I had to boil down what she said to plain English," he said. I said that it hadn't worked. He said it did. He recounted that the source had objected when he said his coverage would represent both views of the public figure. When I interrupted to insist that it seemed like a bad paraphrase when compared to what the source had told me later, he said, "Is that necessarily what she said to me?"
And in absolute fairness, maybe it wasn't, necessarily. I of course was not present for the years-prior conversation between the journalist and the source; I don't have the recording, if there was one. Even if the source can be assumed to be an authority about what she meant to say, I cannot with absolute certainty rule out the scenario where the "somehow prove statistically which side was right" line was a reasonable paraphrase of the words she had literally said at the time and that her reconstruction years later of what she remembered saying was unintentionally injecting more nuance after the fact. The source apparently hadn't objected during a fact check call. If the journalist had reasonably paraphrased the words that were said to him at the time, then he was innocent in his soul. Even if his readers walked away with a distorted impression of what the source privately believed (but did not manage to successfully communicate in the interview), the miscommunication wasn't his fault.
I still think this episode looks bad for him and that he should have been embarrassed, because there should have been generalizable policy changes that could have prevented this class of error—perhaps, thinking more carefully about whether a paraphrase that makes a subject look unreasonable truly reflects the subject's views before going to print with it. Potential sources deciding whether they should talk to the journalist are mostly worried about the risk that their views will end up being miscommunicated, not whose fault a miscommunication would be if it happened. Unlucky accidents do not impinge upon the innocence of one's soul under the moral law, but the moral law is unmercifully permissive about everyone else's right to avoid unlucky people.
Higher Innocence
And that's why accidentally misleading people should be embarrassing: because the desire to avoid such embarrassment motivates a counterfactual reduction in such incidents of people being misled, notwithstanding that it was a totally unintentional accident and the speaker is perfectly innocent in their soul.
That's the conclusion of the post. Thanks for reading!
... or that's how I'd prefer to end the post, with a message of absolution and hope. Absolution—that those whose actions have propagated falsehood need not question what we know to be true of our souls. And hope—that we all might learn to do better in the future. There's just one little nuance that continues to haunt me, that I could not, unfortunately, end the post without explaining. (Not because I didn't try, but because my prereader Said Achmiz didn't let me get away with it.) Just a tiny subtlety, almost irrelevant, really, affecting almost none of the logic except to clarify that souls aren't real.
I've been writing this post to try to get through to people who are resistant to noticing when they've been misleading because they're terrified of judgment and social punishment. When you point out to them that their words led reasonable readers to walk away with the wrong model, they double-triple-quadruple down on playing dumb, insisting that they weren't lying, and that even if readers ended up being more wrong, it wouldn't be any substantial evidence against their integrity. This post has been trying to offer these people some moral absolution (which I don't care about one way or the other) in exchange for orienting towards the problem that I actually care about (of creating accurate shared maps): to say, look, I believe that you weren't lying, I believe that you're innocent in your soul, but the part where reasonable readers walk away with the wrong model is still a problem you should care about, even if it was an accident.
But was it an accident? Was it, really? It is written that the one who wishes to believe asks, "Does the evidence permit me to believe?" while the one who wishes to disbelieve asks, "Does the evidence force me to believe?" If you have a bottom line that you want to believe, and you go around looking for evidence that permits you to believe it, I really have to question in what sense it's an "accident" if you end up misleading people towards your bottom line.
It's surely an accident in some sense. The browser bug really wasn't my fault. But if I was too lazy to read six pages to check when it was my rival, but would have read the six pages if it had been my ally, that's a reason people should be suspicious when I claim that my rivals did something wrong. I wasn't lying, and that's a kind of innocence, but the cold light of "Six pages? Really?" makes me want to aspire to a higher form of innocence.