My intuition says presenting bad facts or pieces of reasoning is wrong, but withholding good facts or pieces of reasoning is less wrong. I assume most of you agree.
This is a puzzle, because on the face of it, the effect is the same.
Suppose the Walrus and the Carpenter are talking of whether pigs have wings.
Scenario 1: The Carpenter is 80% sure that pigs have wings, but the Walrus wants him to believe that they don't. So the Walrus claims that it's a deep principle of evolution theory that no animal can have wings, and the Carpenter updates to 60%.
Scenario 2: The Carpenter is 60% sure that pigs have wings, and the Walrus wants him to believe that they don't. So the Walrus neglects to mention that he once saw a picture of a winged pig in a book. Learning this would cause the Carpenter to update to 80%, but he doesn't learn this, so he stays at 60%.
In both scenarios, the Walrus chose for the Carpenter's probability to be 60% when he could have chosen for it to be 80%. So what's the difference? If there isn't any, then we're forced to claim bias (maybe omission bias), which we can then try to overcome.
But in this post I want to try rationalizing the asymmetry. I don't feel that my thinking here is clear, so this is very tentative.
If a man is starving, not giving him a loaf of bread is as deadly as giving him cyanide. But if there are a lot of random objects lying around in the neighborhood, the former deed is less deadly: it's far more likely that one of the random objects is a loaf of bread than that it is an antidote to cyanide.
I believe that, likewise, it is more probable that you'll randomly find a good argument duplicated (conditioning on it makes some future evidence redundant), than that you'll randomly find a bad argument debunked (conditioning on it makes some future counter-evidence relevant). In other words, whether you're uninformed or misinformed, you're equally mistaken; but in an environment where evidence is not independent, it's normally easier to recover from being uninformed than from being misinformed.
The case becomes stronger when you think of it in terms of boundedly rational agents fishing from a common meme pool. If agents can remember or hold in mind fewer pieces of information than they are likely to encounter, pieces of disinformation floating in the pool not only do damage by themselves, but do further damage by displacing pieces of good information.
These are not the only asymmetries. A banal one is that misinforming takes effort and not informing saves effort. And if you're caught misinforming, that makes you look far worse than if you're caught not informing. (But the question is why this should be so. Part of it is that, usually, there are plausible explanations other than bad faith for why one might not inform -- if not, it's called "lying by omission" -- but no such explanations for why one might misinform.) And no doubt there are yet others.
But I think a major part of it has to be that ignorance heals better than confusion when placed in a bigger pool of evidence. Do you agree? Do you think "lies" are worse than "secrets", and if so, why?
A banal one is that misinforming takes effort and not informing saves effort.
That's an important distinction. In both scenarios, the Carpenter suffers the same disutility, but the utility for Walrus is higher for "secret" than for "lies" if his utility function values saving effort. Perhaps that's the reason we don't feel morally obligated to walk the streets all day yelling correct information at people even though many of them are uninformed.
However, this rationalization breaks down in a scenario where it takes more effort to keep a secret than to share it (such as an interrogation), although I assume our intuitions regarding such a scenario would likewise change.
I'm glad I took the time to read all the way to the bottom because this is exactly what I wanted to point out.
If the Carpenter must act to misinform, then the Carpenter is busy. If the Carpenter can withhold information effortlessly, then he is free to do something else. The opportunity cost of lying might account for some of the pro-omission rationalization.
Then again, we're not surrounded by so many opportunities in the real world, are we?
But we might consider that this is specifically a conversation about revealing painful truths. Like in a world whe... (read more)
My intuition says presenting bad facts or pieces of reasoning is wrong, but withholding good facts or pieces of reasoning is less wrong. I assume most of you agree.
This is a puzzle, because on the face of it, the effect is the same.
Suppose the Walrus and the Carpenter are talking of whether pigs have wings.
Scenario 1: The Carpenter is 80% sure that pigs have wings, but the Walrus wants him to believe that they don't. So the Walrus claims that it's a deep principle of evolution theory that no animal can have wings, and the Carpenter updates to 60%.
Scenario 2: The Carpenter is 60% sure that pigs have wings, and the Walrus wants him to believe that they don't. So the Walrus neglects to mention that he once saw a picture of a winged pig in a book. Learning this would cause the Carpenter to update to 80%, but he doesn't learn this, so he stays at 60%.
In both scenarios, the Walrus chose for the Carpenter's probability to be 60% when he could have chosen for it to be 80%. So what's the difference?
If there isn't any, then we're forced to claim bias (maybe omission bias), which we can then try to overcome.
But in this post I want to try rationalizing the asymmetry. I don't feel that my thinking here is clear, so this is very tentative.
If a man is starving, not giving him a loaf of bread is as deadly as giving him cyanide. But if there are a lot of random objects lying around in the neighborhood, the former deed is less deadly: it's far more likely that one of the random objects is a loaf of bread than that it is an antidote to cyanide.
I believe that, likewise, it is more probable that you'll randomly find a good argument duplicated (conditioning on it makes some future evidence redundant), than that you'll randomly find a bad argument debunked (conditioning on it makes some future counter-evidence relevant). In other words, whether you're uninformed or misinformed, you're equally mistaken; but in an environment where evidence is not independent, it's normally easier to recover from being uninformed than from being misinformed.
The case becomes stronger when you think of it in terms of boundedly rational agents fishing from a common meme pool. If agents can remember or hold in mind fewer pieces of information than they are likely to encounter, pieces of disinformation floating in the pool not only do damage by themselves, but do further damage by displacing pieces of good information.
These are not the only asymmetries. A banal one is that misinforming takes effort and not informing saves effort. And if you're caught misinforming, that makes you look far worse than if you're caught not informing. (But the question is why this should be so. Part of it is that, usually, there are plausible explanations other than bad faith for why one might not inform -- if not, it's called "lying by omission" -- but no such explanations for why one might misinform.) And no doubt there are yet others.
But I think a major part of it has to be that ignorance heals better than confusion when placed in a bigger pool of evidence. Do you agree? Do you think "lies" are worse than "secrets", and if so, why?