Honesty

Giving Up Lying #

Five years ago I gave up lying for Lent. Even before Lent I was an unusually honest person, but I decided to give up white lies too, things like “I’m too tired” when the truth was that I didn’t want to see someone. My reasoning was rule-utilitarian even if I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Empirically, the lies I had told in my life up to that point had been massively negative in utility. Some of the reasons this was the case:

• If I tell one person a lie, I will have to lie to others, lie to maintain a consistent story, remember about and act on the lie in the future. Costs multiply in hard-to-anticipate ways.
• Lying is stressful and cognitively demanding.
• It’s hard to lie to others and be honest with yourself. Keeping two distinct worldviews in your brain is difficult. My brain sometimes subconsciously discards the truthful worldview.
• When I used to occasionally lie, I felt like people had a right to not believe me even when I was telling the truth. I accepted low-trust relationships. Now that I can say to myself “I haven’t lied in years” I feel entitled to be in high-trust relationships.
• The plurality of my lies were instantaneous decisions to “not hurt others’ feelings.” This was a known bad habit. It’s hard to tell someone “I have no other plans but I still don’t want to watch soccer. I’d rather smoke weed and watch Youtube.” It’s much easier to say “I’m busy with work.” Or “I have plans with someone else.” When I stopped lying, almost no one was ever hurt by the truth.

Over the course of Lent I began to appreciate these hidden costs, and started to love not lying anymore. I have kept my no-lying pledge (almost) ever since.

Lying That’s “Baked In” #

Assume that 90% of men claim to be exactly one inch taller than they really are on their Hinge profile. You are 6’. How tall should you claim to be on Hinge?

Arguments in favor of 6’1”:

• Claiming 6’1” will give your matches the most accurate information on your height; they will correctly assume you are 6’.
• Claiming you’re 6’1” is more fair than claiming 6’, in that you’ll be put on equal footing with 90% of people. Why let the liars have an advantage?

Arguments in favor of 6’:

• “I will lie when the median person lies” is not a bright-line, easy-to-follow rule like “never lie” is.
• If everyone lies by one inch, then the sleaziest people will lie by two. Who’s to say from first principles where the equilibrium lies. But your decision to lie pushes it further from the truth.

So many situations are analogous to “lying by one inch on your Hinge profile because everyone does.” To say this more concretely: saying words which are literally false, but which accurately communicate reality because both parties roughly agree on how much lying is expected.

• “I’ll be there in 5”
• “We’ll ship that next week”
• “Let’s grab lunch sometime”
• “You crushed it at your piano recital congratulations!”

This state of affairs is more costly than people appreciate.

Lying as Cultural Barrier #

I read here (first comment) that foreign startup founders have no idea what lies are and aren’t acceptable, and thus end up in jail. Selling a product when all you have to deliver is a Figma? Totally acceptable. Not doing much accounting and making up plausible figures? Also fine if you’re small enough. Raising a tiny follow-on raise at a massive markup to inflate your valuation? It would be rude not to. But knowingly lying about your user count, revenue, etc.? Financial fraud, you could go to jail. If there’s a hard and fast rule about what lying is and isn’t OK, or a clear line of reasoning that neatly separates the two, I’m not aware of it.

Trust Is More Than Honesty #

If someone says they’ll be at your place in 30 minutes, and they show up in 45, did they lie? In a literal sense, yes. By common parlance, no.

We use the word trustworthy to describe several phenomena:

1. A person will not knowingly deceive you.
2. A person will reliably do what they say they will do.
3. A person’s predictions are accurate.

It’s no coincidence that we use the same word. These three attributes are in my experience remarkably correlated. I can think of counterexamples (eg pathological liars who are very smart and thus make good predictions). But only smart sociopaths with high EQ can pull this off. They hold two coherent worldviews in their brain, a real one to use to make predictions and a fake one to spoon-feed to you. This requires a lot of cognitive horsepower.

More typical is the person who will tell you whatever you want to hear, but accidentally convinces themself of these falsehoods too. They double-book themselves, realize halfway through one event that they’re late to another, and blame their tardiness on unforeseeable circumstances. They promise they’ll do something every week, and every week their other projects take longer than expected and they fail to help you out.

Disambiguating between incompetence, bad luck, and deception is difficult. I don’t try. A person is trustworthy, or not.

Meta-Honesty #

Eliezer Yudkowsky came up with the useful concept of meta-honesty:

“Don’t lie when a normal highly honest person wouldn’t, and furthermore, be honest when somebody asks you which hypothetical circumstances would cause you to lie or mislead—absolutely honest, if they ask under this code. However, questions about meta-honesty should be careful not to probe object-level information.”

The piece is worth a read. I am obliged to include Yudkowsky’s disclaimer:

THIS IS NOT THE IDEA THAT IT’S OKAY TO LIE SO LONG AS YOU ARE HONEST ABOUT WHEN YOU WOULD LIE IF ANYONE ASKS.

I wish I’d asked more explicitly to previous employers: What regulations do we reinterpret because they’re horribly written and everyone ignores them? What parts of our business do we sugarcoat to customers? To investors? I wish the answer to those questions was “we follow all regulations exactly, and give customers and investors the most accurate possible picture of our business,” and I would love to try to run my own business that way, but this hasn’t been the case anywhere I’ve worked.

Put another way: most people are meta-honest, even though they’ve never heard of the term. They’ll never tell you in which situations they think lying is OK unless you ask. You should ask.