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Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

>That's not lying; that's just normal social etiquette.

That's the argument. Some amount of dishonesty is required to follow normal social etiquette. Saying I'm fine is expected even if you're not actually fine. We have cultural norms for what kind of dishonesty is acceptable. When you exceed those norms, you're lying.

Politely laughing at an unfunny joke, and telling someone that their food is "interesting", fall well within the realm of socially acceptable polite dishonesty. But skipping work to see a ballgame by inventing a fake funeral is considered lying by many (most?) people.

Like most things in life there is a gray area along that spectrum.

I also second what my sibling comment says about lying by omission. I think morally, both are equal.

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If you read the listicle I was responding to, the "how are you?" "fine" interaction is the only clear-cut example of that. Even then, there's a distinction between non-literal communication and dishonesty.

Even then, if a casual acquaintance asks me how I'm doing and I'm not in the middle of some sort of crisis that I would reasonably expect them to care about, the honest answer is to say that I am fine because my casual mood swings are not what they are asking me about. If it's a close friend or a counselor or someone like that, I should expand more. That's just normal context.

There's a weird fundamentalist notion of "honesty" that implies that anything short of continuously broadcasting all of your thoughts to everyone around you is "dishonest". Perhaps that's just innocent literalism, but I think a lot of that is, itself, a dishonest attempt to establish false equivalencies between submitting a completely fictitious resume on the one hand, and restraining yourself from barging into your boss's office to tell him he's a complete idiot every time you feel cheesed off (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079014).

It sounds like you are arguing with a concept you believe I'm representing rather than what I actually wrote.

You're responding to me. And no, I don't think you've established that normal social etiquette is "dishonest" in any meaningful sense.

Here is what you wrote.

>There's a weird fundamentalist notion of "honesty" that implies that anything short of continuously broadcasting all of your thoughts to everyone around you is "dishonest". Perhaps that's just innocent literalism, but I think a lot of that is, itself, a dishonest attempt to establish false equivalencies between submitting a completely fictitious resume on the one hand, and restraining yourself from barging into your boss's office to tell him he's a complete idiot every time you feel cheesed off"

Here is what I wrote that you were responding to.

>Politely laughing at an unfunny joke, and telling someone that their food is "interesting", fall well within the realm of socially acceptable polite dishonesty. But skipping work to see a ballgame by inventing a fake funeral is considered lying by many (most?) people.

>Like most things in life there is a gray area along that spectrum.

How does your response follow from my comment? There is no false equivalence on my part--there's no attempt at equivalence at all. I would place a completely fictitious resume clearly on the opposite the spectrum from polite social lie.

Again this your response was to a comment where I agreed with this previous comment of yours.

>That's not lying; that's just normal social etiquette

I even stated that this is the argument I'm making. Normal social etiquette isn't lying.

Where we seem to disagree is on what is normal social etiquette.

I think that politely laughing at an unfunny joke falls well within normal social etiquette. I think that telling your partner's grandmother that you like her food is well within normal social etiquette. I also think that telling a polite lie about your opinion of someone is within normal social etiquette.

I apologize if I misunderstood; I think the context of threaded conversations sometimes implies a disagreement when one may not necessarily exist.

I contend that there is zero overlap between what I would characterize as dishonesty and what I would characterize as acceptable behavior in a healthy professional environment.

What we seem to be focusing on at the moment is the relative honesty or dishonesty of polite social interactions, e.g. laughing at bad jokes or claiming to enjoy grandma’s cooking when you don’t. I think there’s likely an overlap between politeness and mild dishonesty in those situations, but by the same token, I don’t personally engage in many of these dishonesties—the polite “fake laugh” is more than I can pull off without coming across as sarcastic—but if you’re better at subtlety than I am, and you fake-laugh in a way that doesn’t come across as either sarcastic or genuine, and you reasonably expect the other person to be fluent and subtle enough to pick up on that, well, that’s not even dishonesty anymore, it’s just non-literal signaling, and after all, etiquette is largely a signaling dance where you show off and feel out how good each other is at subtle interpersonal signaling.

On the other hand, I also advise not dating people who unironically ask “does this dress make me look fat?”, and consider playing along with those games to be dishonest in a soul-eroding way. Although maybe that’s just because that’s a level of non-literal signaling that I just don’t have the patience for....

Expressions like the American greeting "How are you?" are examples of phatic expressions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression), meaning that they are functional as opposed to communicative. Although they take the form of communicative statements, in this case an interrogative, they are really not. Understanding this distinction was very helpful for me, letting me answer "fine" with no ethical concern when asked this sort of question in quotidian encounters such as checking out of a grocery store. I don't think there is any dishonesty in that. Again, the speaker is not really asking the question, but performing a social ritual, and they neither expect nor wish a reply to its literal form.

It's quite different if someone asks a real question such as the example you give about the quality of their food. If I don't want to be honest with whatever level of tact, I may avoid directly answering. I won't choose to lie to them. I don't agree with you if your view is that my unwillingness to declare my feelings about their food (omission) is equivalent to telling a lie about my feelings about their food.

Polite dishonesty is no less a social ritual than polite laughter or mild praise for food you didn't really like. Most people don't expect you to be honest. To be considered polite, you must occasionally be dishonest because that is what is socially acceptable.

You can chose not to be polite, but you will acquire a reputation. Refusing to play the expected social game will have negative consequences.

You clearly have no problem playing the "I'm fine" game. I'm not sure why you have a problem with the "answer the inconsequential question the way people expect it to be answered" game.

> If I don't want to be honest with whatever level of tact, I may avoid directly answering. I won't choose to lie to them.

If you avoid answering, the person asking will assume you hated it. You might as well just say so.

>I don't agree with you if your view is that my unwillingness to declare my feelings about their food (omission) is equivalent to telling a lie about my feelings about their food.

A moral code that makes harmful omissions perfectly fine, but benign untruths immoral is, to me at least, very bizarre.

If it really bothers you to "lie" and say, "fine", just reflect the question back. "Hi, how are you?". You'll see how it wasn't intended as a real question.

The Sopranos version is, Q: "How you doin'?" ... A: "How YOU doin'?"

There is such a thing as pragmatics[1] where the same words might mean different things in different situations. For any normal human being trying to communicate honestly their speech will be full of things that are wrong or don't strictly make sense but both partners in a conversation have to interpret each other generously for a conversation to proceed. "I spent the entire day doing paperwork!" has to be interpreted as the person spending the bulk of their productive day on paperwork, it doesn't mean that they never slept or ate to any reasonable person. If an answer promotes accurate beliefs then that's a good honest answer. If someone refuses to impart information in their answer then that's their right. If they promote inaccurate beliefs in their answer that's dishonesty.

[1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatics/

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