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dmytryl's avatar

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.

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dmytryl's avatar

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.

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