I'm on the side of honesty here despite the argument for secrecy, but I want to note your argument can be firmed up interestingly. You say "evil deeds require

I'm on the side of honesty here despite the argument for secrecy, but I want to note your argument can be firmed up interestingly. You say "evil deeds require secrecy 99% of the time" which means that P(need_secrecy | evil) = 0.99 However, you are saying you don't like secrecy because of this, which means you are accessing a different fact, P(evil | needs_secrecy) This is one of my favorite examples of flawed reasoning of all time because it is almost entirely hidden until you formalize things in one of a few ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor's_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor's_fallacy Comment note: P(A|B) = P(A&B)/P(B) is the "conditional probability" and is read "Probability of A given B".