Most people avoid saying literally false things, especially if those could be audited, like making up facts or credentials. The reasons for this are both moral and pragmatic — being caught out looks really bad, and sustaining lies is quite hard, especially over time. Let's call the habit of not saying things you know to be false ‘shallow honesty’[1].

Often when people are shallowly honest, they still choose what true things they say in a kind of locally act-consequentialist way, to try to bring about some outcome. Maybe something they want for themselves (e.g. convincing their friends to see a particular movie), or something they truly believe is good (e.g. causing their friend to vote for the candidate they think will be better for the country).

Either way, if you think someone is being merely shallowly honest, you can only shallowly trust them: you might be confident that [...]

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Outline:

(01:43) Examples of shallow (versus deep) honesty

(03:45) Why deep honesty?

(06:47) What deep honesty is not

(06:59) It is not a universal stance

(07:14) It is not independent of the listener

(07:29) It is not telling people everything

(07:54) It does not relieve you of a responsibility to be kind

(08:35) It is not incompatible with consequentialism

(10:00) Challenging cases for deep honesty

(10:29) Large inferential gaps

(11:51) Audiences you don’t want to cooperate with

(12:09) Multiple audiences

(13:09) What being deeply honest might look like

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.