Does allowing prophets, whistle-blowers, and dissidents to tell people truths they don’t want to hear help those other people or hurt them? Today I heard an excellent talk (see slides and paper) by Roland Benabou explaining how it can help or hurt, depending on the situation:
HURT: If your future is likely to be enjoyable, and if before then anticipating your great future gives you enough joy, then if you come across bad news suggesting otherwise you might enjoy your life more overall if you quickly look the other way and forget about it. Even if later on you realize you are the sort of person who would forget such news, you’d still reasonably guess you had a good chance of an enjoyable future, and you’d enjoy savoring that prospect, at least for a while. Someone who forced you to pay attention to the bad news could do you a real harm.
HELP: On the other hand, if a group of you worked together to build an enjoyable future, how hard you each worked might depend on the chances you each assigned to your efforts working out well. Given that you expected other people to avoid looking at bad news, you might also find it in your interest to avoid looking at bad news, so that you were all in an equilibrium where you all avoided bad news. But for certain parameter values you might all be better off in a different equilibrium where you all expect each other to look at bad news and change your behavior in response. In this case someone who collected bad news, saved it, and later forced you all to pay attention to the bad news you had tried to forget could upgrade your equilibrium. This could do you all a favor, a favor you were individually not willing to do for yourselves.
The value of truth is contingent, and depends on the details of your world and values. It is not guaranteed. So honestly demands that my commitment to truth also be contingent.
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9 Comments
Happily, my values place truth above most other things, so I do not have to worry too much about this dilemma.
How can I trust that you’re being honest about this?
Good and sufficient reason not to bother reading Robin’s posts anymore.
The argument is a little hedonistic for me, and it only deals with the effect of truth on an individual. I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut because I’m afraid of popping someone’s bubbly facade of contentment? No greater purpose can be served by popping many of those bubbly facades? No critical mass of education can be reached, person by person, in order to effect change?
I don’t buy it.
Honesty demands that we admit truth-telling can hurt people, not that we refrain from truth-telling.
Thanks for the reference. This is a topic that I looked into in my PhD. There’s a standard economic result that information cannot have a negative expected utility, but clearly people can be information-averse, so there is an explanatory gap waiting to be bridged.
That said, your post doesn’t seem to say much more than that if a man’s wife asks him if that dress makes her look fat, and it does, he shouldn’t say “Yes”.
If your future is likely to be enjoyable, and if before then anticipating your great future gives you enough joy, then if you come across bad news suggesting otherwise you might enjoy your life more overall if you quickly look the other way and forget about it.
There are a couple of key phrases here:
-’likely’ to be enjoyable — what kind of probabilities are we looking for here? And, don’t we have reason to believe that people are not so good at accurately assesing the probability of their favored outcome?
-’enough’ joy — how much joy is enough to outweigh any additional long-term happiness one might gain by changing course in the light of bad news? And, don’t we have reason to believe that people are not good at weighing future joy vs. present joy?
So how does the math work here? If we don’t know how probable someone’s future joy is, and we don’t know how much future joy can be gained from responding to bad news, and we can’t accurately compare future joy with present joy, how does this calculation work? This is why most (by which I mean ‘all’) people develop truth rules to guide them: ‘Always spare my wife’s vanity when she asks if she looks fat’ is an example of a truth rule. These rules seem to be based on some form of collective calculation about the harms and benefits of certain kinds of ‘bad news’, but interestingly, people are mostly expected to abide by them (and be polite) whether or not their calculations lead to the same policy.
So, basically you chose a very wordy way of saying “While bad news might upset you, they might also contain useful information”
What does this have to do with whistle-blowers? Isn’t that situation explicitly framed as a conflict of interests? Often principal-agent-subagent interests?