Your Honesty Budget
Kira Newman runs The Honesty Experiment:
30 days. Complete honesty. Can they survive it? — Follow their journey and read about honesty in life, love, and business.
She interviewed me recently. One excerpt:
Honesty Experiment: How do we solve this conundrum?
Hanson: I think the first thing you’ll have to come to terms with is wondering why you think you want to be otherwise. We’re clearly built to be two-faced – we’re built to, on one level, sincerely want to and believe that we are following these standard norms – and at the other level, actually evading them whenever it’s in our interest to get away with it. And since we are built that way, you should expect to have a part of yourself that feels like it sincerely wants to follow the norms, and you should expect another part of you that consistently avoids having to do that.
And so, if you observe this part of yourself that wants to be good (according to the norms), that’s what you should expect to see. It’s not evidence that you’re different from everybody else. So a real hard question is: how different do you want to be, actually? How different are your desires to be different? . . . Overall, you should expect yourself to be roughly as hypocritical as everybody else.
I later recommend compromise:
It would be simply inhuman to actually try to be consistently honest, because we’re so built for hypocrisy on so many levels. But what you can hope for is perhaps a better compromise between the parts of you that want to be honest and the parts of you that don’t. Think more in terms of: you have a limited budget of honesty, and where you should spend it.
The communication works as following: some sequences of words and the like are made to produce specific picture or a mental model in the listener's head. When they are made to produce a false picture, that's a lie.
Telling someone that they are e.g. a most beautiful woman in the world evokes the picture of your love, and thus it is a lie if this picture is false (e.g. if you are only doing this to get them in bed). From the autistic standpoint, it is a lie unless you built a beauty-meter and evaluated everyone.
People on the autistic spectrum seem not to model the information-receiving aspect of communication very well, and so they might describe statements that are in some sense not literally correct as "lies", even though those do not produce any deception, or describe correct statements which have been e.g. cherry picked to create a false impression, as "truths".
Suppose you are reporting on people who took some medicine, and you neglect to report anyone who suffered any adverse effect, in an interaction where the listener would expect you to. You are doing this to sell the drug. Even if none of the statements made were literally false, you're being manipulative and deceptive in a way that hurts other people for sake of your private gain, and you should feel bad about it.
I don't see why honesty would have a budget, unless of course you exhaust will power any time you are forcing yourself to be honest instead of lying.
On the other hand, lying definitely has a budget, in the sense that for a given amount of non lying there's limited amount of lying that can be done before there's sufficient Bayesian evidence for the other parties.
People who lie effectively also tend to inappropriately divulge details about themselves which most honest people tend to neglect to divulge.