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My opinion is that serious repercussions for lying would fix the world overnight. Everything bad stems from lying, it is the root of all evil. It creates distru
by nullbio 1mo ago
My opinion is that serious repercussions for lying would fix the world overnight. Everything bad stems from lying, it is the root of all evil. It creates distrust, fear, paranoia. It re-inforces bad ideas and groupthink. It creates delusions and delusional people. It makes weaker people, too. People don't get an opportunity to learn to deal with criticism. People don't get an accurate reflection of how others see them. They lose that learning opportunity. Not only to reflect on themselves, but to better understand the minds of others and who the people they are interacting with really are.
I can't really think of a single example where lying is actually a good thing. It can be a good thing for the selfish individual, if it goes undetected, but it's never good for the collective.
So at the very least, we need to train AI systems to be maximally truthful, and to encourage truthfulness in others.
- parineum 1mo ago> Everything bad stems from lying. That's backwards. Lying stems from bad things.
- _dark_matter_ 1mo agoThis is so, painfully, childish. Humans have known for thousands of years that there is no objective truth. Every falsity can be bent and twisted until it is more true than the sun itself.
- elboru 1mo ago“Humans have known for thousands of years that there is no objective truth” Is that objectively true?
- jryle70 1mo agoNo it isn't true. I'm saying so. Is what I said objectively true?
- wizardforhire 1mo agoLol thousands?!?! Try roughly 250 and even then Hume only opened the door for us…
- satvikpendem 1mo agoYou really think Hume was the first one to think of this in hundreds of thousands of years of human history? As a very easily findable counter example, you have Al-Ghazali who came up with this several hundred years prior.
- kdmoyers 1mo agoWe can continue to be duplicitous if we must, but maybe the suggestion is that it might be better off if the machine tools always tell the truth.
- nullbio 29d agoYour reading comprehension is painfully childish. You're conflating my point of "telling the truth" with objective truth. I was talking about lying. i.e., facing accountability for your actions and not going out of your way to deceive others. Dissonance between what you believe and what you express. Being honest. I think that was fairly clear. > Every falsity can be bent and twisted until it is more true than the sun itself. Objective truth is relative to its grounding. The solution to 1 + 1 is 2 in arithmetic is objectively true within that system. It's also objectively true that you are not Elon Musk. Some systems have no or few axioms and are mostly a matter of fashion, but it's not relevant to what I'm talking about.
- jv22222 1mo ago> I can't really think of a single example where lying is actually a good thing Comforting a toddler/child often requires bending the truth and is pretty essential imho.
- derektank 1mo agoCorrect me if you disagree, but this is more because children have poor world models and don’t fully understand the complexity of certain concepts than that lying itself is necessary. The intent should be to tell them something that is as close to the truth as possible with the ideas they can comprehend, even if it would be considered a lie if you said the same thing to an adult
- bloppe 1mo agoI have a pretty poor world model
- embedding-shape 1mo ago> The intent should be to tell them something that is as close to the truth as possible with the ideas they can comprehend Or, you straight up lie and say "Yes, puppy now went to heaven and eats ice cream all day long" with absolutely zero regards for "coming as close to the truth as possible" as your 3-year old is endlessly crying. It's fiine.
- CrimsonRain 1mo agoOr you teach your kid that getting a pet also includes the experience of seeing it die. Then let him cry when the time comes.
- embedding-shape 1mo agoYou can do both, one doesn't exclude the other, they might be differently helpful in different situation/at different stages.
- kraf 1mo agoIt'll learn how to not get caught lying. Lying can unfortunately help you achieve goals very effectively, especially economical and political ones.
- markburns 1mo agoThe majority of what you may consider to be true is just a representation of your corner of a complex multidimensional truth space. For a current example take “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” as it appears to me on a map. The “true” name has at least two definitions, this is because naming things and much of human thought is spent inside a shared space of intersubjective thought. That is to say that much of what we believe to be real and true is only held up by these common shared beliefs. They truly only exist inside human minds. The last few hundred years have been somewhat unique for humankind as the majority of these intersubjective ideas collided and we ended up with a truly global set of “truths” about how the world operates. Mostly controlled by putting flags in the ground and having violence back up the beliefs. But the real truth is that the majority of these intersubjective ideas don’t exist in reality and are no more true than Santa Claus. And any argument to their truth is only backed by further shared beliefs in other minds. So for there to be only truths and lies we would have to either drop the intersubjective entirely and think only in real terms and avoid these abstractions or end up in a dystopian totalitarian global state where different opinions are not tolerated. Those are extremes to demonstrate the point but at its core the point remains that truth and lies are somewhat (inter) subjective assuming we continue with something like our current system.
- nullbio 29d agoResistance is futile.
- gffrd 1mo agoWhy do people lie?
- nullbio 29d agoFear and greed are the main two that come to mind.
- ipaddr 1mo ago"I can't really think of a single example where lying is actually a good thing" Lying to save a life or rape Lying to preserve a childhood myth like Santa Claus. Lying to avoid hurting someones feeling when knowing the truth could only bring pain Lying to create shared cultural myths to strength society. Lying isn't the harm you make it out to be.
- bloppe 1mo agoLying to the bad guys to save the good guys sounds great. Too bad everybody thinks that they are the good guys.
- jrecursive 1mo agoThey most certainly do not.
- fc417fc802 29d agoWhat an enlightening comment. Have you ever met anyone who genuinely believed himself to be doing bad things? I don't mean in some cynical sense but literally. Even when we portray overly simplified villains in comic books there's still consistently some justification behind their actions.
- jrecursive 25d agoYes. There are arguments to be made here about belief, judgement and justification, but overwhelming evidence points to people who knowingly do things that even they themselves consider "bad" as being simply indifferent.
- gwd 1mo ago> Lying to preserve a childhood myth like Santa Claus. FWIW from the very beginning, I told my son that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny were just a game we all played, and it's seemed just as fun to me. I don't think being lied to about Santa Claus hurt me, but still I'm not in favor of it. I'd lie to a Nazi without a second thought though.
- tony69 1mo agoThe Truth Machine is a great sci-fi novel exploring this topic (https://coins.ha.com/information/ttm.s https://coins.ha.com/information/ttm.s)
- intended 1mo agoEh… No. I get the appeal, but lying is a sub-category of deception, and deception itself is a child of error. Meaning deception is inherently something that the physics of reality allows. In the most simplistic sense, the camouflage of moths that look like snakes, or a chameleon’s ability to change colour, is deception. In that sense, deception is the ability to fool the sensors of a specific category of targets. It follows that detection is easier if you manage to identify a category of signals that the deceiver has not accounted for (and the detector can access). Deception of this nature is critical for things like revolutions to occur. Without the ability to hide and blend in, the most dominant faction will always hold sway. The rule of the dominant faction, even in a pure truth world, is an issue because errors and randomness exist. You can have people witness an event and based on the physical position they occupied, perceive different things occurring. Error and time pressure is sufficient to ensure that individuals and groups make suboptimal decisions, that lead to rule and domination based on erroneous information. As long as error exists, deception will exist and so lying will exist.
- nullbio 29d agoIt is critical for things like revolutions to occur, but I don't see a reason to believe that revolutions would be necessary in the world that I am describing. Revolutions are necessary when the majority is not being represented, but in an honest world, those collectives would not be elected to begin with. In an honest world, they wouldn't be able to clutch onto power by misdirecting and deceiving the public, and lying to those around them or corrupting those around them, to do their bidding. I see your point about error and time pressure, but I think it's an unsustainable outcome without deception to carry it. For example, in the scenario where an error or selective pressure leads to being ruled over by a dominating force, it would either represent the majority at that point in time, or it would resolve itself out naturally as clarity is gained. In the world we live in, dominating forces are able to maintain power through misdirection. Realistically, this is all well and good if we could start from scratch, and if everyone can agree to follow this system, but humanity is too far gone for this to work. Once you have too many psychopaths in the gene pool it's game over for any chance of cooperation over competition. Still, I think it's something we should at least strive for with AI.
- wizardforhire 1mo agoGame mechanics and evolutionary biology would like to have a word with you.
- nullbio 29d agoHumans are really the only animal that lies overtly. Other animals deceive via misdirection, but in a world of scarce resources, and where everyone has to play by that game, it's a fair bit easier to justify. Humanity has so much dominion over its environment at this point that there really is no need for resource competition, from a survival perspective. But good luck getting people to all agree to share collectively. And unless everyone does it, no one will do it.
- IAmBroom 29d ago> Humans are really the only animal that lies overtly. Cite required. I've seen dogs "lie" to me by hiding the snacks they stole. That alone disproves your claim. I've also seen video of two monkeys hide their mating behavior when the alpha male walks by: their illicit "love" required lying to the only male "allowed" to mate.
- ctoth 29d ago> I can't really think of a single example where lying is actually a good thing. Do you have Jews in that there attic?