Honest isn’t easy
Also published at Less Wrong.
So, you wanna be a rationalist, huh? Then it’s more than likely that at some point you’ve had the thought: “I should be completely honest with everyone. I shouldn’t hide any truth.” And it’s likely you’re a bit more honest than the average human. (Robin Hanson might take issue here.) And it’s likely you’re nothing like completely honest with everyone. So where, and why, do these ideals fall short?
First, strict honesty is a form of vulnerability. You’re bound to say a particular thing in any given situation, regardless of how it may work to your advantage or disadvantage. You pass up opportunities to manipulate or obfuscate that could work to your advantage. In the game of life, you’re conceding ground. Now, this is made up for, to some extent, by the reputational advantages of honesty. Is the balance positive? Not hardly, in my opinion. (And we haven’t even considered the “telling it like it is” problem yet.)
Second, it takes a lot of active effort to stay honest with someone. And that effort needs to pay off for honesty to be worthwhile. Strict honesty can only pay off with particular people. You say you want honesty. No, what you want is honesty from someone who thinks rather highly of you and is committed to your well-being. Someone who doesn’t have much negative to say about you at all, compared to the positive.*
Really, I think what people are searching for with these honesty impulses is reciprocal honesty. Reciprocal honesty is much more practicable than strict honesty. You can be reciprocally honest in limited ways, with specific people on certain topics. You can pick and choose. (Do you feel an obligation to tell the truth to those who lie to you?)
Reciprocal honesty between pairs of people can form a sort of iterated prisoner’s dilemma (and will, on those individual items of fact where one would be tempted to lie), in which knowledge of defection is (very) imperfect. I’m not too familiar with this particular game, but I imagine it’s amenable to many standard strategies to promote cooperation.
The next big complication to being honest is avoiding harsh truths. The practice of “tiptoing around (a topic)” which makes up most of dishonesty as it’s practiced, is pretty much a default, hard-wired position everywhere with everyone. In fact, I think that many or most people who claim to be honest don’t even consider it as a form of dishonesty. (Hopefully self-professed rationalists have higher standards!) There are, of course, the obvious cases, such as the canonical “Do I look fat in these pants?”, but the problem can be much more subtle and can lead to genuine dilemmas for someone interested in honesty but not already practicing strict honesty.
Take as an example a private instructor (perhaps a music teacher) and one of their students, this one perhaps not particularly talented. Of course, honesty would demand the question “Am I any good?” be met with the harsh truth, if it were harsh, but the much harder question is “How well did I play that song?” Of course, the answer is almost always “absolutely horribly, but better than last time”, but exactly how do you put that? This is, of course, is tact—a complicated and difficult skill that takes many years to master, and practiced by many even as its necessity is abhorred.
I suggest the solution is to group the harsh truths by topic and person, and treat each topic separately for each person with which you’re reciprocally honest. If you have a relationship you want to be totally honest, bring up each topic carefully as it comes up and actively reaffirm the desired honesty. If you have a less intimate relationship, like a professional relationship, then you’re probably better off just making do with the tact your mother taught you. But if you feel a strong desire for more honesty—if the tip-toing is wearing you out, for instance—then there’s probably no handy solution there.
Hey, look, I’ve single-handedly recreated conventional wisdom. Well, it all adds up to normality, right? Still, it’s a little disappointing when compared to those childhood dreams of complete honesty with everyone.
*Which is all well and good. That’s my ideal relationship right there. If you’re committed enough to rationality, you should be able to handle that. (I suppose some people out there are like that, though I’m still looking, myself.)
