# Reflections on 4 years of meta-honesty

Honesty is quite powerful in many cases: if you have a reputation for being honest, people will trust you more and your words will have more weight (or so the argument goes).

Unfortunately, being extremely honest all the time is also pretty difficult. What happens when the Nazis come knocking and ask if you have jews in the basement? Or when your girlfriend asks you if this dress makes her look fat? (Or so the argument goes)

[Meta-honesty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases) is a proposed solution to these problems. The gist is you act very honesty, but can lie when it’s very important to do so. The catch is you have to always be completely honest about what kinds of situations you’d lie in. In theory this lets you have all the benefits of being very honest without the worst of the drawbacks (some of the “drawbacks” are irreducible errors of course--you can’t betray or trick people as easily when you’re honest and that’s the point). But the arguments for meta-honesty are largely theoretical.

I started trying to rigorously abide by meta-honesty a little over four years ago. Here are some musings on the benefits and drawbacks I’ve observed, and the practical tips I’d have for anyone else who wanted to try it.

**The good**
============

1: **I’ve become a more honest person**.
----------------------------------------

This is probably the biggest actual benefit of meta-honesty to me. I used to lie habitually in a bunch of silly situations: I’d make up excuses when I ran late, I’d pretend to have heard about things I hadn’t heard of, I’d tell white lies as compliments. I think those kinds of lies are usually bad. Being intentional and mindful about honesty made me realize I was doing all of that way too much and helped me break the habit. (Though I still slip up and indulge in those things on occasion.)

2: **I’ve become much more honest and clear about things to myself.**
---------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s forced me to carefully think through which situations I would or wouldn’t want to lie in, it’s helped me notice places I feel compelled to lie in everyday speech, and it’s caused me to be mindful about lying and my reputation in ways I’ve benefited from.

For example, ever since I was a kid I’ve felt self-conscious about the media I consume (I guess because my mother thought my taste in media was cringe?), and got in the habit of pretending not to have seen various media I actually had seen. I lied to my partner about if I’d seen a TV show he’d recommended, which is a big deal because I was trying particularly hard to be honest with him. It was interesting to notice this quirk of mine and to reflect on why I felt self-conscious. (I did eventually come clean.)

3: **It’s a (credible?) signal about the kind of person I am**.
---------------------------------------------------------------

One might hope it’s at least a credible signal that I’m careful and thoughtful about honesty and integrity, and therefore that I’ve made the correct/wise decision to be pretty honest and high-integrity.

In practice it’s more like it mostly makes people go “oh this person has a weird obsession with honesty I guess???”, but that has the same effect (though it can also come off as weird and calculating in a way that backfires).

4: **On rare occasions, the system straightforwardly works.** 
--------------------------------------------------------------

There have been ~4 very crisp occasions where it was quite clear someone took what I said much more seriously and was much less skeptical than they otherwise would have been because I have such a strict honesty policy. There are a lot of other situations where people have generally trusted me to be honest or allowed me into high-trust environments (e.g. telling me sensitive information or things that make them look bad, entrusting me with large amounts of money without many mechanisms to prevent me from abusing it for personal gain, etc), but only because I’d earned their trust in more conventional ways.

I haven’t found any of this that useful and I think without meta-honesty it would have taken just a smidge of elbow-grease and creativity to get whatever benefits meta-honesty got me in these scenarios (as long as I was still generally pretty honest). It’s hard to pinpoint exactly which benefits come counterfactually from meta-honesty. I’d pay less than a thousand dollars for the actual benefits that have come from it that I’m aware of (in practice I might pay more on the off-chance my estimation of the benefits was wrong).

I think there are some rare (but not impossible) situations I could find myself in where meta-honesty was incredibly useful, it's just I live a rather humdrum life so they’ve never come up. (Though, per meta honesty, I’ll note there are some cases where I’d lie about all this!)

**The bad**
===========

Mental overhead
---------------

There’s some mental overhead to tracking my statements carefully. *Mostly* this is a feature not a bug, but it still has costs. I find the costs pretty manageable, especially with a little practice, but YMMV.

Sounding weird
--------------

My personal flavor of following meta-honesty includes being anal about clarifying that various statements are lies even when that’s kinda obvious. This has some social costs (and I try to be less anal when I’m with people who don’t know me well/would be weirded out). You could totally follow meta-honesty without being absurdly scrupulous of course.

It's easy to mess up
--------------------

Meta honesty is quite tricky to actually do in practice! To follow meta-honesty you need to accurately predict your own mental-state in all kinds of weird hypotheticals (and in the far future!). It’s easy to accidentally  have too rosy a picture of yourself (it’s easy to say “I’d never lie about XYZ” until you’ve actually done XYZ). When I first started meta honesty, I realized a lot of my lies are habitual/almost involuntary, and I was surprised by some of the situations I realized I lied about.

Because nobody’s ever really pressed me on anything other than absurd situations, I haven’t had too much trouble answering questions in practice. But I think it could be easy to slip up and lose one’s credibility. It feels weird to have my credibility hung on something so easy to mess up. And it’s so easy to misremember and hard to litigate whether I did mess up! I *think* I’ve never flubbed my meta honesty but I’m not, like, 100% sure. I could imagine having said (in the early days when I was less careful, or casually without thinking) that I wouldn't lie in some situation or another, and then years later that situation happening and the circumstances being different than I pictured and me lying.

On a few occasions, being so scrupulous has caused me notable distress where I second-guess myself and try to desperately ask friends to recall if I ever said various things. I notice that often my brain goes “I’m sure I’ve never lied about XYZ” and then I go “hmm am I really sure though?” and then I second-guess myself, and I think this often creates a false memory type of thing/the memory gets fuzzier the more I look at it.

I err conservative in ways that can make it harder to say anything about when I'd lie
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If I’m asked about if I’d lie in a specific situation, I default to a noncommittal answer, at which point the meta honesty isn’t as useful (though if it really mattered I’d think it through and say something, but it almost never matters). If I didn't follow meta-honesty, maybe I'd feel free to say something more informative (but I can't recall this ever being very important).

**Observations**
================

**I have almost never been asked questions about which situations I’d lie in**.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Almost every time it’s come up, it’s because I mention I follow meta-honesty, and people curiously try to poke at it by asking random questions about where I would or wouldn’t lie. They’re not usually very invested in these questions and these interactions have a similar vibe to playing hot seat or truth-or-dare. They’ll usually ask about whacky hypotheticals like “would you tell me if you murdered someone”, but occasionally they'll think of things that might put me in a bind like “would you tell me if you secretly hated me”. My answer to both is usually something like “well, it would depend on the details of the hypothetical. Can you tell me about X, Y, and Z?” I either end up answering something like “if I try to imagine the distribution of scenarios you’re trying to ask about here, I’d confess in most of those scenarios” or “in most worlds where I hated you and it seemed genuinely important to you to know, I’d answer you honestly, but I can think of plenty of edge-cases”, or I ask enough questions about the specifics of the situation that my inquisitor ends up bored and changes the topic.

I can think of one somewhat important situation where someone proactively and quite seriously inquired about under what circumstances I’d lie (though perhaps I’m forgetting some). I had just told them I felt confident some people I knew weren’t involved in/didn’t know about some bad behavior some people socially adjacent to them had engaged in, and they asked if I’d lie about that.

(It does come up slightly more often that I say “I wouldn’t lie about XYZ” and people put some weight in that.)

**I have never really felt bottlenecked on people trusting my honesty/integrity**
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am often bottlenecked on people being unsure if I have sufficient competence or knowledge or calibration: people know I won’t *lie* to them lightly but if they’re worried I might be gullible or mistaken or confused, that’s not much better.

Meta honesty likewise makes it hard to commit to something I plan to break, but it doesn't help me get around the fact that I sometimes fail to do things I earnestly intended to do. (These days I don’t word commitments in ways where my incompetence makes me very liable to break them, but that just means the only thing I can commit to are fairly weak).

**I’ve never found meta-honesty very useful for interacting with people outside my weird bay-area bubble**
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I can’t tell if this is because I don’t have enough interactions to build up a credible reputation of actually adhering to this policy in other communities or simply because the idea is rigid and first-principles-y in a way that doesn’t mesh well with the norms of other communities.

This is somewhat unfortunate, because one of the main advantages I hoped to get from meta-honesty was being able to coordinate and cooperate with people who might naturally be very wary of me, and most of those people are not in my immediate bubble.

Most ways of creating trust in the real world seem based around incentives and coalition-building. Meta honesty hasn’t let me escape this and engage in any new interesting conversations.

Conclusions
===========

Overall I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend meta-honesty to most people. I *would* probably recommend being mindful about when you would or wouldn't lie, and meta-honesty is a good forcing function to do that, but lots of things are probably better (for example some kind of daily journaling exercise where you write down things you lied about each day).

I would also recommend being very honest overall.