Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Parasitic Language Games: maintaining ambiguity to hide conflict while burning the commons, published by Hazard on March 12, 2023 on LessWrong.

“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game”- R. D. Laing

"It's not lying if everyone knows it's lying."

I see this sentiment in a lot of places. It pops up in corporate managerial contexts. It's been used as a legal defense and worked. It's a claim that communication that looks adversarial isn't, it's just high-context communication between people "in the know", there's no deception happening, no conflict, you just don't get how we do things here.

I don't buy it. My claim in a nutshell:

It situations where people insist "it's not lying because everyone knows it's lying" the people in the know aren't deceiving each other, but the reason this game is being played is to fool people not in the know, and insisting that it's just "high context communication" is part of an effort to obscure the fact that a conflict is going on.

If that makes perfect sense to you, dope, you already get my main point. The rest of this post is adding nuance, actually arguing the case, and providing more language for talking about these sorts of dynamics.

Case Study: "Are Founders Allowed to Lie?"

This essay by Alex Danco talks about how "it's not lying because everybody knows it's lying" works in the Silicon Valley startup scene. It's short enough that it's worth reading now so you can decide for yourself if I'm misrepresenting him. If you don't feel like reading it I still quote enough of it for my post to make sense.

Some snippets.

It's really hard to start a business without lying:

If you are only allowed to tell the literal, complete truth, and you’re compelled to tell that truth at all times, it is very difficult to create something out of nothing. You probably don’t call it “lying”, but founders have to will an unlikely future into existence. To build confidence in everyone around you – investors, customers, employees, partners – sometimes you have to paint a picture of how unstoppable you are, or how your duct tape and Mechanical Turk tech stack is scaling beautifully, or tell a few “pre-truths” about your progress. Hey, it will be true, we’re almost there, let’s just say it’s done, it will be soon enough.

It's not lying because everyone's in on it.

You’re not misleading investors; your investors get it: they’re optimizing for authenticity over ‘fact-fulness’. It’s not fraud. It’s just jump starting a battery, that’s all.

Some abstracted examples of what this "pre-truth" looks like:

You’ve all seen this. It doesn’t look like much; the overly optimistic promises, the “our tech is scaling nicely” head fakes, the logo pages of enterprise customers (whose actual contract status might be somewhat questionable), maybe some slightly fudged licenses to sell insurance in the state of California. It’s not so different from Gates and Allen starting Microsoft with a bit of misdirection. It comes true in time; by the next round, for sure.

Why it's important and also why you can't talk about it:

Founders will present you with something pre-true, under the total insistence that it’s really true; and in exchange, everyone around them will experience the genuine emotion necessary to make the project real. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.

Before investigating if Danco's story checks out I'm going to introduce some frames for talking about communication to make it easier for me to clarify what's going on here.

Context & Language Games

All communication relies on context and context has a nested structure which operates on multiple levels of communication. Some context operate...