I’m saying it’s a gross exaggeration not a lie. I can imagine someone disinterested saying “ok but can we present a democratic vision of EA where we talk about the hundred founders?” and then looking for people who put energy early into building up the thing, and Jacy would be on that list.
(I think this is pretty bad, but that outright lying is worse, and I want to protect language to talk about that.)
I want to flag that something like “same intention as outright lying, but doing it in a way to maximize plausible deniability” would be just as bad as outright lying. (It is basically “outright lying” but in a not stupid fashion.)
However, the problem is that sometimes people exaggerate or get things wrong for more innocuous reasons like exaggerated or hyperbolic speech or having an inflated sense of one’s importance in what’s happening. Those cases are indeed different and deserve to be treated very different from lying (since we’d expect people to self-correct when they get the feedback, and avoid mistakes in the future). So, I agree with the point about protecting language. I don’t agree with the implicit message “it’s never as bad as outright lying when there’s an almost-defensible interpretation somewhere.” I think protecting the language is important for reasons of legibility and epistemic transparency, not so much because the moral distinction is always clean-cut.
You are taking charitable interpretations to an absolute limit here. You seem to be saying “maybe Jacy was endorsing a highly expansive conception of ‘founding’ which implies that EA has hundreds of founders’”. This is indeed a logical possibility. But I think the correct credence to have in this possibility is ~0. Instead, we should have ~1 credence in the following “he said it knowing it is not true in order to further his career”. And by ‘founding’ he meant, “I’m in the same bracket as Will MacAskill”. Otherwise, why put it on your website and in your bio?
I don’t think it’s like “Jacy had an interpretation in mind and then chose statements”. I think it’s more like “Jacy wanted to say things that made himself look impressive, then with motivated reasoning talked himself into thinking it was reasonable to call himself a founder of EA, because that sounded cool”.
(Within this there’s a spectrum of more and less blameworthy versions, as well as the possibility of the straight-out lying version. My best guess is towards the blameworthy end of the not-lying versions, but I don’t really know.)
This feels off to me. It seems like Jacy deliberately misled people to think that he was a co-founder of EA, to likely further his own career. This feels like a core element of lying, to deceive people for personal gain, which I think is the main reason one would claim they’re the co-founder of EA when almost no one else would say this about them.
Sure I think it can also be called “gross exaggeration” but where do you think the line is between “gross exaggeration” and “lying”? For me, lying means you say something that isn’t true (in the eyes of most people) for significant personal gain (i.e. status) whereas gross exaggeration is a smaller embellishment and/or isn’t done for large personal gain.
I’m saying it’s a gross exaggeration not a lie. I can imagine someone disinterested saying “ok but can we present a democratic vision of EA where we talk about the hundred founders?” and then looking for people who put energy early into building up the thing, and Jacy would be on that list.
(I think this is pretty bad, but that outright lying is worse, and I want to protect language to talk about that.)
I want to flag that something like “same intention as outright lying, but doing it in a way to maximize plausible deniability” would be just as bad as outright lying. (It is basically “outright lying” but in a not stupid fashion.)
However, the problem is that sometimes people exaggerate or get things wrong for more innocuous reasons like exaggerated or hyperbolic speech or having an inflated sense of one’s importance in what’s happening. Those cases are indeed different and deserve to be treated very different from lying (since we’d expect people to self-correct when they get the feedback, and avoid mistakes in the future). So, I agree with the point about protecting language. I don’t agree with the implicit message “it’s never as bad as outright lying when there’s an almost-defensible interpretation somewhere.” I think protecting the language is important for reasons of legibility and epistemic transparency, not so much because the moral distinction is always clean-cut.
I agree with this.
You are taking charitable interpretations to an absolute limit here. You seem to be saying “maybe Jacy was endorsing a highly expansive conception of ‘founding’ which implies that EA has hundreds of founders’”. This is indeed a logical possibility. But I think the correct credence to have in this possibility is ~0. Instead, we should have ~1 credence in the following “he said it knowing it is not true in order to further his career”. And by ‘founding’ he meant, “I’m in the same bracket as Will MacAskill”. Otherwise, why put it on your website and in your bio?
I don’t think it’s like “Jacy had an interpretation in mind and then chose statements”. I think it’s more like “Jacy wanted to say things that made himself look impressive, then with motivated reasoning talked himself into thinking it was reasonable to call himself a founder of EA, because that sounded cool”.
(Within this there’s a spectrum of more and less blameworthy versions, as well as the possibility of the straight-out lying version. My best guess is towards the blameworthy end of the not-lying versions, but I don’t really know.)
This feels off to me. It seems like Jacy deliberately misled people to think that he was a co-founder of EA, to likely further his own career. This feels like a core element of lying, to deceive people for personal gain, which I think is the main reason one would claim they’re the co-founder of EA when almost no one else would say this about them.
Sure I think it can also be called “gross exaggeration” but where do you think the line is between “gross exaggeration” and “lying”? For me, lying means you say something that isn’t true (in the eyes of most people) for significant personal gain (i.e. status) whereas gross exaggeration is a smaller embellishment and/or isn’t done for large personal gain.