So, do you think you care too much about the truth or not? You say so in your first sentence, but the rest of your article seems to indicate that you actually think you care the right amount about the truth and the rest of the world is wrong.
In your construction, Yglesias is basically saying that rationalists value truth over tact, no? I certainly value truth over tact, but I bet Yglesias would actually argue that the two needn't be in opposition for "normal" people. I think that's wrong--a dedication to the truth absolutely means we need to dismiss tact, but it's not an unusual argument to make. And I'm not at all sure that making that argument means you have a lower standard of truthiness, but maybe?
I think Zeynep doesn't get what you're after at all. I'd actually be interested in her response here. I think her response is just that the lies were immaterial to the point she was making, even though it's your central point--why didn't she address the lies? The Fauci lies are, to me, the most problematic thing about him, but is his job actually to tell the truth? Suppose for a minute that he's actually able to save lives by lying (it's not hard to imagine a world where that's the case), is his lying justified? Note that I do not think that's the actual case here--I think his lying has cost lives, but in the hypothetical situation, should he lie?
I think you are right that that first line is a little bit less genuine than it should have been - better/more accurately (more truthfully!) phrased it would have been something like "I'm beginning to suspect that by a lot of other people's standards I care about truth too much", or something like that.
I think I agree with you on Yglesias thinking that truth and 'tact' as he understands it aren't fighting with each other. I've talked to people about this, and I think that's actually really really dangerous, because it's a free-for-all on what truths are "important enough" without some solid, reliable definition of tact. In Yglesias' example, he draws a picture of a movement being sort of jerks by bringing up that a lot of the foundations of popular wage-gap theory are shaky, but the justification he gives is just that a lot of people feel very strongly about it. People feel very strongly about virtually everything, though!
Zeynep is a different story and a different kind of example altogether. I think it's helpful to first note that whether or not we think Fauci-style lies and paternalistic withholding of truth were a mistake, Zeynep definitely does - that's her express point in bringing it up. If we create a flow chart of Zeynep at that point, she has three basic options:
A. Think that the lies were bad because lies are bad
B. Think that the lies were bad because of the outcomes of the lies
C. Both A. and C.
As you mentioned, Zeynep doesn't even seem to notice that A. is an option - when I express to her that lying is bad, she gets really confused; she doesn't seem to regard telling someone something that isn't true or withholding information you know is true in a way that misleads as lies in the first place, at least in the context of public health.
You ask if it's Fauci's job to not lie, and I'd argue that it is; that he is, at least theoretically, supposed to work for us. I view the bit where we've gotten to the point where we assume that someone like Fauci is lying to some extent all times as a problem, because in the end it means that sources of information we are supposed to be able to trust are fundamentally untrustworthy - they don't even think it's wrong to deceive, it doesn't even occur to them to weight honesty at all.
You throw up a hypothetical - what if Fauci really, really knew that his lie was necessary to save lives? I think that hypothetical is giving him too much slack, though - it's clear he will lie in a situation where he has very little certainty as to whether he's right or wrong. And it's becoming less and less clear that even if he did know with a rock-solid level of confidence that was proven right that his words will continue to have the desired effect of actually saving those lives. See: you, me and an increasing amount of people understanding from actual experience that Fauci will and does lie when he feels like it, for reasons that often don't turn out to be justified at all. I wonder how far we are from the public hearing Fauci say "Don't wear masks?" and running out to buy masks based on his anti-recommendation - it's probably not as close as I think, but it's hard to say we aren't headed in that direction.
Thanks. I agree with you, and these are excellent points. I often find that I struggle with over-prioritizing truth as compared to society at large, and I wonder whether that's as noble as I think it is. [Sure, I say plenty of false things, but not intentionally. Usually because I've misremembered, misunderstood, over-generalized or was too lazy to verify.] I do believe that striving for the truth makes us better, but I maybe it's healthy to push on that assumption. Given the low relative regard most of the world places on the truth, there's probably some argument to be made that because lying seems to be so innate in humans (or human society?) that lying must at times, be beneficial. I haven't been compelled by any such argument yet, though.
I mean, common sense tells us there must be pocket instances where lying is useful - if my son is about to walk off a cliff and the only way to save him is to claim that Butterfinger brand candy bars aren't gross, that lie would be beneficial even while I know it's wrong. So we sort of know there's a benefit - even if it's not a nice clean game-theory everybody-wins benefit, there's at least situations where the liar wins.
But that's part of why we have norms - they are the tool we have for pushing back on counterproductive human-nature behavior. The big question for me is "Do the individual benefits of lies outweigh the overall benefit of living in a society with strict, uncompromising honesty norms where we can at least assume someone's taking a substantial personal risk by lying, should he or she be caught out?".
I'd argue our best case scenario is one where Fauci can say "Listen, everyone - we don't have enough masks for everybody, from what I can tell. So we need to put those where they do the most good - that's medical personnel. Overall this is going to save a lot of lives compared to our other options, and you might even be safer in absolute terms that way, since healthy medical personnel not spreading disease is so vital to us getting through this".
In that situation where we basically can trust him on that, it becomes plausible to, say, make it illegal for a time for non-medical personnel to get masks - we might want the masks, but we understand the basic rational at play, maybe. But nobody is going to go for that in our actual-world scenario where we understand Fauci is only telling the truth on accident to the extent he does at all.
What gets me is that Fauci lies and Fauci knows he lies. He even knows he's been caught, but he seems confused as to why this could possibly hurt his credibility - he seems to think it absurd that someone wouldn't trust him. That's not just a Fauci thing - I find that's the general attitude of anyone in public health, this bewilderment that the people they knowingly lie to all the time somehow made a judgement about their reliability based on that.
Sure, there's an obvious personal benefit for lying in some circumstances, but is there a societal benefit? Not only does our desired society not exist, I don't know of any evidence that anything like it ever has existed, beyond occasional lip service.
For instance, the US military academies have a strict honor code: "A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do." And they make a really big deal about it. But given the regular cheating scandals at these institutions, I suspect that the actual culture isn't what they portray. I suspect cheating is rampant, mostly ignored and overlooked like it is at all US universities.
We are certainly fond of saying that honesty is an important societal norm, but it's never seemed like it actually is. As best as I can tell, all human societies are like this: claim that honesty is a strong social norm while in fact tolerating large amounts of dishonesty. I haven't researched this point, but as far as I can tell this is neither recent nor distinctly American.
I've been working more aggressively recently to put filters on my reading habits to minimize exposure to writers who don't put a high priority on factual truth. I really appreciate this post.
"To the intelligentsia preoccupied with planning, managing, and guiding, no idea will seem so patently absurd as that the masses, if left wholly to themselves, would labor and strive of their own accord." - Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change. Societal manipulation is about power and status, some people are nicer about it than others. I think this doesn't have to be separate from the result even if it is distasteful.
A desirable goal can be a part of poor character . I will do what it takes to get rid of the virus and my status is improved. As opposed to, I will do what it takes to maintain my status.
I getcha. I think my main problem with this if we accept that as an excuse (This was a good lie! I thought it would do good!) it's fully generalizable to anything they can make a plausible excuse for. That's especially concerning to me in situations like the one sketched out by Zeynep, where they are lying or withholding information on a number of things with an excuse not better than "Well, we thought you guys were too stupid to know".
Take anything I say on the subject with a grain of salt - I sort of hate the public health community. But my experience with public health people is there's no estimate of intelligence so low they won't assume it of everybody outside of their bubble; I'm not sure I'm comfortable with being lied to that much, or that I believe they are thoughtful enough to really only lie when it's absolutely necessary. This is worsened by the fact that I'm still dumb enough to believe that they should think of themselves as working for us, and not ruling us - in reality that ship probably sailed longer ago than I'm comfortable admitting.
The response by Cheng Tien Pao is particularly interesting. I appreciate the corrosive effect that the Fauci type lies can have, but the charitable take is that he was probably making a calculation in the spirit of what those Buddhist sutras illustrate.
Oh, he definitely had an effect; even if you had a pre-existing belief that all politicians are lying most of the time (I did) Trump changed the algebra a lot by being very bad at it; even before you count the number of lies, that's significant.
That's part of why we need these voices to care about truth, though - Trump being a liar amplifies the need for truth rather than muting it. And where I could rely on Yglesias to be uniformly negative about Trump, I really need him to bring his honesty A-game for someone like Biden. Biden's on his side, and it's more difficult to call fouls on your own team.
So, do you think you care too much about the truth or not? You say so in your first sentence, but the rest of your article seems to indicate that you actually think you care the right amount about the truth and the rest of the world is wrong.
In your construction, Yglesias is basically saying that rationalists value truth over tact, no? I certainly value truth over tact, but I bet Yglesias would actually argue that the two needn't be in opposition for "normal" people. I think that's wrong--a dedication to the truth absolutely means we need to dismiss tact, but it's not an unusual argument to make. And I'm not at all sure that making that argument means you have a lower standard of truthiness, but maybe?
I think Zeynep doesn't get what you're after at all. I'd actually be interested in her response here. I think her response is just that the lies were immaterial to the point she was making, even though it's your central point--why didn't she address the lies? The Fauci lies are, to me, the most problematic thing about him, but is his job actually to tell the truth? Suppose for a minute that he's actually able to save lives by lying (it's not hard to imagine a world where that's the case), is his lying justified? Note that I do not think that's the actual case here--I think his lying has cost lives, but in the hypothetical situation, should he lie?
I think you are right that that first line is a little bit less genuine than it should have been - better/more accurately (more truthfully!) phrased it would have been something like "I'm beginning to suspect that by a lot of other people's standards I care about truth too much", or something like that.
I think I agree with you on Yglesias thinking that truth and 'tact' as he understands it aren't fighting with each other. I've talked to people about this, and I think that's actually really really dangerous, because it's a free-for-all on what truths are "important enough" without some solid, reliable definition of tact. In Yglesias' example, he draws a picture of a movement being sort of jerks by bringing up that a lot of the foundations of popular wage-gap theory are shaky, but the justification he gives is just that a lot of people feel very strongly about it. People feel very strongly about virtually everything, though!
Zeynep is a different story and a different kind of example altogether. I think it's helpful to first note that whether or not we think Fauci-style lies and paternalistic withholding of truth were a mistake, Zeynep definitely does - that's her express point in bringing it up. If we create a flow chart of Zeynep at that point, she has three basic options:
A. Think that the lies were bad because lies are bad
B. Think that the lies were bad because of the outcomes of the lies
C. Both A. and C.
As you mentioned, Zeynep doesn't even seem to notice that A. is an option - when I express to her that lying is bad, she gets really confused; she doesn't seem to regard telling someone something that isn't true or withholding information you know is true in a way that misleads as lies in the first place, at least in the context of public health.
You ask if it's Fauci's job to not lie, and I'd argue that it is; that he is, at least theoretically, supposed to work for us. I view the bit where we've gotten to the point where we assume that someone like Fauci is lying to some extent all times as a problem, because in the end it means that sources of information we are supposed to be able to trust are fundamentally untrustworthy - they don't even think it's wrong to deceive, it doesn't even occur to them to weight honesty at all.
You throw up a hypothetical - what if Fauci really, really knew that his lie was necessary to save lives? I think that hypothetical is giving him too much slack, though - it's clear he will lie in a situation where he has very little certainty as to whether he's right or wrong. And it's becoming less and less clear that even if he did know with a rock-solid level of confidence that was proven right that his words will continue to have the desired effect of actually saving those lives. See: you, me and an increasing amount of people understanding from actual experience that Fauci will and does lie when he feels like it, for reasons that often don't turn out to be justified at all. I wonder how far we are from the public hearing Fauci say "Don't wear masks?" and running out to buy masks based on his anti-recommendation - it's probably not as close as I think, but it's hard to say we aren't headed in that direction.
Thanks. I agree with you, and these are excellent points. I often find that I struggle with over-prioritizing truth as compared to society at large, and I wonder whether that's as noble as I think it is. [Sure, I say plenty of false things, but not intentionally. Usually because I've misremembered, misunderstood, over-generalized or was too lazy to verify.] I do believe that striving for the truth makes us better, but I maybe it's healthy to push on that assumption. Given the low relative regard most of the world places on the truth, there's probably some argument to be made that because lying seems to be so innate in humans (or human society?) that lying must at times, be beneficial. I haven't been compelled by any such argument yet, though.
I mean, common sense tells us there must be pocket instances where lying is useful - if my son is about to walk off a cliff and the only way to save him is to claim that Butterfinger brand candy bars aren't gross, that lie would be beneficial even while I know it's wrong. So we sort of know there's a benefit - even if it's not a nice clean game-theory everybody-wins benefit, there's at least situations where the liar wins.
But that's part of why we have norms - they are the tool we have for pushing back on counterproductive human-nature behavior. The big question for me is "Do the individual benefits of lies outweigh the overall benefit of living in a society with strict, uncompromising honesty norms where we can at least assume someone's taking a substantial personal risk by lying, should he or she be caught out?".
I'd argue our best case scenario is one where Fauci can say "Listen, everyone - we don't have enough masks for everybody, from what I can tell. So we need to put those where they do the most good - that's medical personnel. Overall this is going to save a lot of lives compared to our other options, and you might even be safer in absolute terms that way, since healthy medical personnel not spreading disease is so vital to us getting through this".
In that situation where we basically can trust him on that, it becomes plausible to, say, make it illegal for a time for non-medical personnel to get masks - we might want the masks, but we understand the basic rational at play, maybe. But nobody is going to go for that in our actual-world scenario where we understand Fauci is only telling the truth on accident to the extent he does at all.
What gets me is that Fauci lies and Fauci knows he lies. He even knows he's been caught, but he seems confused as to why this could possibly hurt his credibility - he seems to think it absurd that someone wouldn't trust him. That's not just a Fauci thing - I find that's the general attitude of anyone in public health, this bewilderment that the people they knowingly lie to all the time somehow made a judgement about their reliability based on that.
Sure, there's an obvious personal benefit for lying in some circumstances, but is there a societal benefit? Not only does our desired society not exist, I don't know of any evidence that anything like it ever has existed, beyond occasional lip service.
For instance, the US military academies have a strict honor code: "A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do." And they make a really big deal about it. But given the regular cheating scandals at these institutions, I suspect that the actual culture isn't what they portray. I suspect cheating is rampant, mostly ignored and overlooked like it is at all US universities.
We are certainly fond of saying that honesty is an important societal norm, but it's never seemed like it actually is. As best as I can tell, all human societies are like this: claim that honesty is a strong social norm while in fact tolerating large amounts of dishonesty. I haven't researched this point, but as far as I can tell this is neither recent nor distinctly American.
(Apologies- just realized you partially answered this question in another reply that for some reason I missed on my first read.)
Thanks man.
I've been working more aggressively recently to put filters on my reading habits to minimize exposure to writers who don't put a high priority on factual truth. I really appreciate this post.
"To the intelligentsia preoccupied with planning, managing, and guiding, no idea will seem so patently absurd as that the masses, if left wholly to themselves, would labor and strive of their own accord." - Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change. Societal manipulation is about power and status, some people are nicer about it than others. I think this doesn't have to be separate from the result even if it is distasteful.
I'm not sure I understand the last sentence - could you expound?
A desirable goal can be a part of poor character . I will do what it takes to get rid of the virus and my status is improved. As opposed to, I will do what it takes to maintain my status.
I getcha. I think my main problem with this if we accept that as an excuse (This was a good lie! I thought it would do good!) it's fully generalizable to anything they can make a plausible excuse for. That's especially concerning to me in situations like the one sketched out by Zeynep, where they are lying or withholding information on a number of things with an excuse not better than "Well, we thought you guys were too stupid to know".
Take anything I say on the subject with a grain of salt - I sort of hate the public health community. But my experience with public health people is there's no estimate of intelligence so low they won't assume it of everybody outside of their bubble; I'm not sure I'm comfortable with being lied to that much, or that I believe they are thoughtful enough to really only lie when it's absolutely necessary. This is worsened by the fact that I'm still dumb enough to believe that they should think of themselves as working for us, and not ruling us - in reality that ship probably sailed longer ago than I'm comfortable admitting.
Buddhist ethics is interesting on this. You can get a flavor in the Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Buddha-ever-lie
The response by Cheng Tien Pao is particularly interesting. I appreciate the corrosive effect that the Fauci type lies can have, but the charitable take is that he was probably making a calculation in the spirit of what those Buddhist sutras illustrate.
One minor factor that you may have accidentally overlooked:
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
Oh, he definitely had an effect; even if you had a pre-existing belief that all politicians are lying most of the time (I did) Trump changed the algebra a lot by being very bad at it; even before you count the number of lies, that's significant.
That's part of why we need these voices to care about truth, though - Trump being a liar amplifies the need for truth rather than muting it. And where I could rely on Yglesias to be uniformly negative about Trump, I really need him to bring his honesty A-game for someone like Biden. Biden's on his side, and it's more difficult to call fouls on your own team.