Notes on Honesty mentions a few more, including trustworthiness/reliability/dependability/conscientiousness (being honest about your promises by following-through on them), parrhesia (a sort of super-frankness pioneered by the Cynic philosophers), reputability (earning a reputation for honesty), sincerity/earnestness/authenticity (being honest in deed, not behaving ironically or in plausibly-deniable ways), straightforwardness (communicating directly, not requiring interpretation or second-guessing).
See also Notes on Sincerity and such.
I think parts of your Notes on Honesty are as close to the post I was trying to write as what I actually wrote was. I wonder if I had some cryptomnesia going on, even. In any case, thanks for writing that and for pointing it out here!
I tend to think that all the virtues are described over-simply and that we'd do well to consider that their actual value is contextual, but their signaling value is anti-contextual (it's more valuable for others to think you will exhibit the virtue in places where it's probably detrimental to you to actually do so).
Thanks for the write-up, and I'd recommend you add "self-honesty" to the list, in terms of what one believes about oneself, regardless of how accurate or forthright one is to any given external audience.
This [‘honesty’] is the only one here that I follow near-absolutely and see as an important standard that people can reasonably be expected to follow in most situations.
What do you think about the keeping of secrets, dissimulation (in the military sense), protecting others from malefactors who wish to use information in your possession against them, etc.?
Here's one that you overlooked: Deceptive Honesty
No, really.
People generally process language and information the best that they can, but there are many limitations and biases that constrain these attempts. One of the most obvious, and easiest to overcome, is cultural bias. Although it isn't the only type, I will use this bias as an example.
U.S. American and Japanese culture fall at opposite ends of the Individualism-Collectivism continuum. American societal culture is arguably the most individualistic in the world, while Japanese culture is strongly collectivist. All humans come into the world with individual preferences, desires, likes, aversions and unconsciously act on these. In Japan, a great deal of collective effort is put into teaching young children to control and limit their individualistic impulses and behavior, and to conditioning them to accommodate the norms, rules, and requirements of whatever group they are in (such as a classroom). In the U.S., the same occurs to some extent, but to a much lesser degree. In the U.S., individual preference and opinion is encouraged, and obsequiously sacrificing one's individuality, opinions, and preferences for the sake of the group is not held in high regard. U.S. Americans so value their individuality that the idea of it being stripped from them to accomodate a collective can seem almost nightmarish. (It has often been suggested that the Borg race from Star Trek was modeled after the Japanese. What makes the Borg so horrifying isn't the threat that they might kill you, but the even more horrifying possibility that they may strip you of your individuality in service to their collective.)
The consequence of these differences in values and childrearing methodologies is that to the average Japanese person, American individualistic behavior generally comes across-- not so much as annoying, obnoxious, or rude but as IMMATURE and CHILDISH. That is how it is most often percieved and categorized. Furthermore, what most U.S. Americans would consider to be "assertiveness" the average Japanese would define to be "aggressiveness." What the average American would consider to be "frank," the average Japanese would consider to be "rude." These are, of course, generalizations, but they are statistically quite accurate.
Therefore, in a conversation between Americans and Japanese people, particularly when language translation is involved, the term "individualism" is likely to be interpreted as "childishness," and "assertive individualist" is likely to be filtered by the Japanese people's minds into "aggressive childish person." This is just one example of many, many terms, concepts, and paradigms which cannot be ACCURATELY conveyed without, essentially, lying. The mental worlds, including deep values, of Japanese and U.S. Americans are so very different that intentional distortion-- outright lying-- is often necessary to more accurately and honestly convey ideas between these two cultures. Of course, these are white lies, which are meant to convey ideas MORE accurately and honestly.
This being the case, in many cross-cultural situations, one virtue of honesty that is missing from your list is Deceptive Honesty. Intentional misrepresentation of reality in order to compensate for communication distortion due to value differences, stereotypical expectations, and cultural biases.
As a completely separate concrete example of this phenomenon, imagine how difficult it might be to describe Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Barack Obama to an American plantation owner with 200 slaves in the early 1800s. You would have to intentionally mis-represent who and what these individuals are in order to accurately convey your thoughts and feelings about them. Referring to them as "intelligent, well-educated black men" would be a non-sequitur. It simply would not compute. Both of these individuals are stupid, ignorant, dirty, and intrinsically inferior by definition in the mind of the 19th century slave owner.
As a completely separate concrete example of this phenomenon, imagine how difficult it might be to describe Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Barack Obama to an American plantation owner with 200 slaves in the early 1800s. You would have to intentionally mis-represent who and what these individuals are in order to accurately convey your thoughts and feelings about them. Referring to them as “intelligent, well-educated black men” would be a non-sequitur. It simply would not compute. Both of these individuals are stupid, ignorant, dirty, and intrinsically inferior by definition in the mind of the 19th century slave owner.
This seems quite false. You could name any number of examples that the slave owner might be familiar with, to compare Tyson or Obama to:
Not to mention the fact that the slave owner might himself be black!
Yes, you're right. But my intention in writing what I did was not to make the assertion that a slave owner would necessarily be white, or even racist. Rather, I was trying to present an easily comprehensible example of a situation in which cultural bias or ignorance could present such a barrier to communication that intensional distortion of the facts as one sees them might be necessary for maximally accurate and honest communication. The point you're making is perfectly valid-- including the possiblility that the slave owner themselves could be black. But it's like critically appraising a finger that's pointing at the moon rather than looking at the moon.
Hm, I guess I haven’t quite got my meaning across. Let me try again.
You gave what you described as an example (explaining who Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Barack Obama is to an antebellum slave-owner, and expecting to have difficulty doing so, due to the latter’s preconceptions making it impossible to understand the simple truth) of a general phenomenon (having difficulty explaining something to someone, due to that person’s preconceptions making it impossible to understand the simple truth).
And I am saying that your purported example is not, in fact, an example of the general phenomenon which are you describing. In the case you provided as an example, the slave-owner would not in fact have difficulty understanding the simple truth.
This should make us (including you!) lower our probability estimate of the purported general phenomenon being a real thing at all.
You also specified a remedy for this purported problem—namely, lying. But if the phenomenon you describe is not real, or if it’s even much more rare that you think it is (as we must surely take seriously as a possibility, given that we have just demonstrated that your ability to recognize a situation as belonging to this class is worse than you thought it to be), then we must also downgrade our estimate of how useful, or how often useful, the proposed remedy is.
In short, my comment is not some sort of “critically appraising a finger” nitpick. It is directly relevant to the core question of whether your characterization of this aspect of reality is accurate, and whether your suggested actions are appropriate.
Since writing this comment, a better example of document evidence for the use of what I've termed "deceptive honesty" has occurred to me.
Throughout history, female authors have often published their work under male pen names in order to get published and to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field. Mary Ann Evans employed the male pen name George Eliot. The Bronte sisters used gender-neutral pen names, and were sometimes referred to as "the Bell brothers." When Charlotte Bronte sent a sample of her poetry to the famous poet Robert Southey, his reply was, "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life." Alice Mary Norton used the pen name Andre Norton. Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin used the name George Sand. Alice Bradley Sheldon wrote under the pen name James Tiptree Jr. Violet Paget used the pen name Vernon Lee. Katharine Burdekin used the pseudonym Murray Constantine in her works about war and totalitarianism. Ann Rule wrote police novels under the pen name Andy Stack.
These women used male pen names in order to overcome the cultural biases of their day and be taken seriously as writers. They lied about their sex in order to be treated as equals. I present this as an empirical example of deceptive honesty. These authors believed that lying would lead to a more objective and less distorted perception and evaluation of their work. They lied in order to present themselves as authors, and their literary works, in as undistorted a manner as possible.
A similar example would be an atheist lying about believing in god in order to get elected. Is a politician who does this presenting themselves to the voters more accurately or less accurately? In a straight-forward sense, they're lying, but by lying they hope to counter unwarranted assumptions and unjustified biases. By lying, they hope to present themselves more accurately and in a less distorted manner.
In a straight-forward sense, they’re lying, but by lying they hope to counter unwarranted assumptions and unjustified biases.
If you don't count this as lying, the exception will swallow the rule. Everyone who is trying to convince someone of something believes their target has unwarranted assumptions and biases, or at least can convince themselves that the target does.
What if the politician isn't an atheist, he just wants to implement some unpopular policy? He believes this policy is good, so he lies about his intentions to implement the policy because the general public is unfairly biased against the policy. By your reasoning he isn't really lying.
My original comment wasn’t about slave owners, female writers, or atheist politicians. I only introduced those (objectively lame) examples because few Americans have sufficient experience living in a very different culture and speaking a very different language to recognize the empirical reality that I was attempting to describe. If I told a person from Monaco that the state of Texas is bigger than France, and they’d never been to Texas but they’d been to Ohio, I might make reference to how big Ohio is-- for the purpose of giving them a hint about what I was saying regarding Texas. If they challenge my claim that Ohio isn’t bigger than France, they’re right. But I never intended to claim that Ohio is bigger than France. I was only trying to help them understand just how big Texas is.
Jiro-- to answer your question about the example of the atheist politician, I’m not claiming that lying about one’s gender or race or religious beliefs with good intentions is necessarily okay or honest. I’m claiming that IT CAN BE, SOMETIMES, provided that the communicator is trying to communicate as accurately as possible, the biases are unequivocal and clearly-defined, and the person is not simply trying to maneuver around any biases or prejudices that they may perceive. How does the assertion that, “white lies CAN SOMETIMES, IN SOME PARTICULAR INSTANCES improve the accuracy and effectiveness of communication” equal “it’s always okay to lie as long as your intentions are good?” This comment has five overall karma and three agreement karma. On a website that’s all about meticulous logic and rigorous reasoning? I’m not saying this to be critical of the person who wrote the comment. That person is obviously very intelligent, and was thoughtful enough, patient enough, and nice enough to take the time to explain the problems that they saw with my reasoning, some of which were quite valid. No, I’m addressing the site community as a whole.
As lame as the example of female writers using male pen names is, it very clearly conveys a black and white instance of unjustified bias and a lack of moral wiggle room. No problem there, so no one attacks it. Neither does any one address the original cross-cultural example that I gave which inspired my original comment. But the sharks smell blood. Oooooh. I detect a logic flaw in that last example he gave. Swimming past the main point, and the point about the female writers, let’s attack that logic flaw. Mad frenzy, and the water turns red. (I’m not saying this with hostility or animosity. Yes, I’m being critical, but I’m just poking fun, with friendly intention. Please don’t take offense. I mean none.)
I detect two things going on here. One is a direct consequence of English being a low-context language and American culture being a low-context culture. (In contrast, Japanese is a high-context language, and Japan is a high-context culture.) The other is what I can only describe as a logic police thing. We’re all familiar with the fashion police and the grammar police. On LessWrong, I often encounter logic police. Now, don’t get me wrong. Correcting flaws in people’s logic is fine, as long as it’s done politely and with patience. I myself am a grammar policeman. I have to bite my lip sometimes. The problem only occurs when the logic police who speak a low-context language and have been raised in a low-context culture encounter big picture, multilayered, accumulation-based explanatory dialog. If they can’t see the forest for the trees, a sickly tree can seem like a sickly forest.
What do I mean by “high-context” or “low-context” language? High-context language depends on a shared, mutually-known context to work. If I say, “A stitch in time saves nine…” I don’t have to finish the quote in order for you to know what meaning I’m trying to convey because we both know the proverb. That’s high-context communication. The ultimate extreme of low-context language is legal text. In a legal contract every tiny detail is spelled out explicitly to such an extreme extent that it can be almost impossible to read. People who live in low-context cultures can sometimes, occasionally, in some situations, miss the big picture in communication, not seeing the forest for the trees. These criticisms of my comments remind me of coders who are focused on fixing small coding errors in a line of data. Looking only at the code line by line, and not taking it in the context of the whole, integrated program. I will attempt to better explain what I am saying, because I know that it’s not immediately intuitive:
I wrote, “A similar example would be an atheist lying about believing in god in order to get elected.” Taken out of context, the reply, “What if the politician isn't an atheist, he just wants to implement some unpopular policy? By your reasoning he isn't really lying.” makes perfect sense. It’s a valid response.
But if we pull back a bit, and look at the larger conversation, the full comment was: “A similar example would be an atheist lying about believing in god in order to get elected… By lying, they hope to present themselves more accurately and in a less distorted manner.” [YES, THIS IS NUANCED, BUT PRESENTING ONESELF MORE ACCURATELY AND IN A LESS DISTORTED MANNER ISN’T QUITE THE SAME AS MANEUVERING AROUND PEOPLE’S BIASES. BUT, GIVEN THE NUANCE, WE NEED TO PULL BACK FURTHER.]
If we pull back further, a paragraph before I said, “These women used male pen names in order to overcome the cultural biases of their day and be taken seriously as writers…. I present this as an empirical example of deceptive honesty.” [NO FUZZINESS OR MORAL WIGGLE ROOM IN THIS EXAMPLE. NO LATITUDE FOR ETHICAL ABUSE. PRETTY BLACK AND WHITE.]
And if we pull back even further and look at my earlier comments on this topic, I said: “I was trying to present an easily comprehensible example of a situation in which cultural bias or ignorance COULD present such a barrier to communication and that intentional distortion of the facts as one sees them MIGHT be necessary for maximally accurate and honest communication.” [MY META-MESSAGE ISN’T THAT ALL CASES OF LYING WITH GOOD INTENTION ARE NECESSARILY ACCEPTABLE, BUT ONLY SOME PARTICULAR OCCASIONAL CASES. THE POINT IS THAT DECEPTIVE HONESTY EXISTS, NOT THAT ALL LYING WITH GOOD INTENTION CONSTITUTES DECEPTIVE HONESTY.]
To really understand the relevance of the quote above, we must necessarily pull back farther still: “To the average Japanese person, American individualistic behavior generally comes across-- not so much as annoying, obnoxious, or rude but as IMMATURE and CHILDISH. That is how it is most often perceived and categorized. Furthermore, what most U.S. Americans would consider to be "assertiveness" the average Japanese would define to be "aggressiveness." What the average American would consider to be "frank," the average Japanese would consider to be "rude." … Therefore, in a conversation between Americans and Japanese people, particularly when language translation is involved, the term "individualism" is likely to be interpreted as "childishness," and "assertive individualist" is likely to be filtered by the Japanese people's minds into "aggressive childish person." This is just one example of many, many terms, concepts, and paradigms which cannot be accurately conveyed without, essentially, lying.” [FIRST OF ALL, THIS WAS MY ACTUAL POINT. THE OTHER EXAMPLES WERE ATTEMPTS TO FIND EMPIRICAL SITUATIONS THAT THE READER MIGHT BE MORE FAMILIAR WITH IN ORDER TO CLARIFY WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT IN THE ORIGINAL EXAMPLE— MY ACTUAL ASSERTION. SECONDLY, THIS, LIKE THE EXAMPLE OF THE MALE PEN NAMES, HAS VERY LITTLE WIGGLE ROOM, THOUGH ONE WOULD HAVE TO BE FLUENT IN JAPANESE LANGUAGE AND KNOLEDGABLE OF JAPANESE CULTURE TO KNOW THAT. THERE’S NO FUZZY MORAL WIGGLE ROOM; THIS IS HOW PEOPLE WHO SPEAK JAPANESE THINK. EVEN I LEARNED TO THINK THIS WAY BECAUSE, IF I DIDN’T, I WASN’T LINGUISTICALLY AND CULTURALLY IN SINK WITH THE PEOPLE AROUND ME. NO MORAL WIGGLE ROOM AT ALL.]
It’s black and white. Don’t take my word for it, ask an interpreter or translator. One that regularly bridges very different languages and cultures. If you do, first ask them if there are things that cannot be translated in real time. Then ask them how creative they have to be as an interpreter or translator. How much is it science, and how much is it art? Finally, broach this idea of deceptive honesty— essentially, bending the facts as you yourself see them in order to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of cross-cultural communication. Not simply for the purpose of coping with bias or prejudice, but towards the focused goal of communicating the message with maximum functional accuracy and delivering a translation that most closely approximates the communicative intent embodied in the original language. “Honesty” here means finding a translation that most effectively matches the communicative intent of the speaker.
So what’s my point? What am I talking about here with this low-context, high-context stuff? Attacking minor logical errors in the code is fine—perfectly fine— as long as this is done with an awareness of what the entirety of the program is doing, and how this section of the line of code fits into the program in its entirety. Only looking at the code, and any flaws in it, line by line by line, misses the message. Why? There are multiple reasons, but one of the biggest is that the author of the original comment is trying to convey something that the reader is expected to not only be unfamiliar with, but also unable to process conceptually without some help. It’s unfamiliar, counter-intuitive, and deeply ironic—given that the assertion that’s being made is that deception or lying can, in some very particular and occasional instances, be done with the goal of maximizing accuracy and minimizing distortion in communication.
Explaining water to a fish can’t be done in a sound bite; explaining cultural differences to someone who has never been outside their own country can’t be done in one or two sentences; conveying the empirical reality that many Japanese values are the exact opposite of American values can’t be done in just a paragraph or two. When a concept is this unfamiliar, counter-intuitive, and seemingly oxymoronic, explaining it is often a gradual, integrative, process requiring many, many passes. Each of those passes contributes to the entirety of the explanation. Each line of code fits into the whole, and can only be meaningfully interpreted in the context of the entire message. I’m not bitching about the logic police; I’m trying to explain that every line of code fits into the full program, and can only be meaningfully evaluated in the context of the full program.
Additionally, a bad example doesn’t devalue an argument. A sickly tree is not a sickly forest. Yes, it’s possible for an example to be used as a logical building block for an argument. However, examples can also be used as teaching tools. Not all arguments are logical piles of Jenga blocks. The assertion that the Earth goes around the Sun is a statement of empirical fact. However, it’s not obvious or intuitively apparent that the Earth goes around the Sun, even though it is an empirical fact. If the communication and teaching strategies that I use to elicit a paradigm shift in the mind of the person that I’m communicating with are imperfect, that doesn’t mean that the empirical fact that the Earth goes around the Sun isn’t true. It just means that the example I used wasn’t effective for communicating the counter-intuitive concept. An empirically-based assertion isn’t a logical pile of Jenga blocks which can be toppled by removing one block.
Finally, we must address the difference between a white lie and what I’ve termed deceptive honesty. The nuanced distinction between these two things may not be clear. Deceptive honesty is a special case of a white lie, just as a white lie is a special case of lying in general. A politician who lies about his or her intentions to implement an unpopular policy which they believe serves the greater good is telling a white lie, but this is not an example of deceptive honesty. Not all white lies are deceptive honesty. On the other hand, even though it is a lame example, an atheist who, when asked if he or she believes in god, lies— for the purpose of not being misperceived as a intrinsically immoral person and remaining in the running— is doing something more than just telling a white lie. This politician is seeking to be seen and evaluated for what he or she actually is, rather than being misperceived and misunderstood. The focus is on presenting themselves as ACCURATELY as possible. The bias that he or she faces is obvious and clearly-defined, just like the bias that female writer’s faced a century ago. The atheist politician is a bad example, yes, and I regret using it. The example of the female writers using male pen names is better, but still inadequate. I regret using that example, too, because it wasn’t taken in the context of my original comment about cross-cultural differences and became a distraction. If there is going to be a logic police feeding frenzy, it should be focused on the original comment regarding communication across profound cultural and linguistic differences. I invite you to respond to the original comment.
A politician who lies about his or her intentions to implement an unpopular policy which they believe serves the greater good is telling a white lie, but this is not an example of deceptive honesty. ... On the other hand, even though it is a lame example, an atheist who, when asked if he or she believes in god, lies— for the purpose of not being misperceived as a intrinsically immoral person and remaining in the running— is doing something more than just telling a white lie. This politician is seeking to be seen and evaluated for what he or she actually is, rather than being misperceived and misunderstood.
How are those different, though?
You think the atheist is different because he wants to be evaluated for what he "actually is", but that's a matter of definition. He actually is an atheist, but he isn't actually an evil person. Whether the lie makes people know more about what he actually is or less about what he actually is depends on which part you're counting.
Needless to say, I could say the same thing about the policy guy. The lie makes people know less about one thing (what his position really is) but more about another thing (that he has good policies).
Status: musings. I wanted to write up a more fleshed-out and rigorous version of this, but realistically wasn't likely to every get around to it, so here's the half-baked version.
In a state like this, having a conversation with an LLM can sometimes allow you to get farther.
Status: musings. I wanted to write up a more fleshed-out and rigorous version of this, but realistically wasn't likely to every get around to it, so here's the half-baked version.
Related posts: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases, Deep honesty
There are nuances to this, but I think a good summary is 'Not intentionally communicating false information'.
This is the only one here that I follow near-absolutely and see as an important standard that people can reasonably be expected to follow in most situations. Everything else here I'd see as either supererogatory, or good-on-balance but with serious tradeoffs that one can reasonably choose to sometimes not make, or good in some circumstances but not appropriate in others, or good in moderation but not in excess.
...or perhaps frankness?
I was originally inspired to write this up due to a conversation in which I wanted to emphasize the distinction between honesty and forthrightness: where honesty is about not giving false information, what I mean by forthrightness is a tendency not to hold back relevant true information.
Being forthright enables people to justly assume that if you haven't spoken out against something you're likely okay with it, that if you haven't expressed an interest in something you're likely not interested in it, and so on.
Personally, I follow a policy of near-absolute honesty, but am not particularly forthright; I think it's good not to hold back relevant true information without a good reason, but good reasons are not all that uncommon.
I'd describe circumspection as the virtue of holding back information when there is a good reason to do so; the counterpart to forthrightness..
I don't have as confident a concise description of what I think of tact as meaning, but my best attempt would be something like... recognizing that whatever you say isn't just a transfer of information, it's also a speech act, and avoiding speech acts that would cause problems.
It seems particularly easy for this to run counter to some of the other virtues here described, especially forthrightness and deep honesty, but it's certainly possible to have both at once.
I don't have a good term for this one, but I think there's a concept related to honesty wherein one attempts to give accurate signals even when not explicitly communicating.
Perhaps, for example, there's reason not to, say, wear a suit, if there are widely understood assumptions about suit-wearers that are broadly true and reasonable (and that you're therefore not deliberately challenging) but that are not true of you - you'd be giving the wrong impression.
I don't know of anyone who takes this idea very seriously. I don't think I'd even endorse taking it very seriously. But I also don't know anyone who's mentioned giving it any thought at all, and I do think it bears some consideration.
The main point of this post as originally conceived was to frame a description of this concept, which I didn't have a term for at the time. But before I got around to attempting to write this up, Aletheophile did a much more thorough job of describing a very similar idea, so I'll just refer you to that post.
(Although maybe I'm making a conceptual rounding error here and the version I had in mind was slightly but significantly different, in which case I might ought actually write it.)
Even when committed to not intentionally communicating false information, you can still be misunderstood. In some situations you can predict in advance that misunderstanding is likely, and I would say that it would be dishonest to take advantage of that and deliberately be misunderstood, but it's not dishonest to just shrug and decide it's not worth clearing up the misunderstanding.
One might then consider the virtue that I'd dub proactive honesty, for lack of a better term: not just not deliberately giving false information, but deliberately not giving false information; going out of one's way to not be misunderstood.
Again, I refer you to a previous post that describes this more thoroughly than I could.