I dug up that conversation, and the point you’re referring to is presumably here. The story he tells is: he’s trying but failing to be a vegatarian, gets asked by another vegetarian in a social setting whether he is one, says he is, and then never eats meat ever again.
I know I’m contradicting what I just said since it is technically a lie, but honesty this doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. ImE you can genuinely lie “without wanting to” in social situations. Someone asks you a question, and some unconscious process in your brain produces an answer within a second before “you” really get to have a say on it. This happened to me several times. And I can understand why it happened here since he was trying to be a vegetarian.
Thanks for giving the details, I couldn’t quite remember the full story and should’ve looked it up and quoted directly. I don’t quite know what to make of him doing this—on the one hand, a small lie about being vegetarian doesn’t seem particularly pernicious or noteworthy, especially given he went vegetarian after lying about it. On the other hand, it does at least strike me as somewhat odd to do this if he had just eaten a cheeseburger a few hours earlier. It does update me ever-so-slightly towards thinking that he’s liable to lie if it makes him look good—it might not just be a ‘lie without intending to’ situation.
It’s possibly worth noting that in his conversation with Tyler Cowen he did mention that he had previously lied (briefly) about being vegetarian.
I dug up that conversation, and the point you’re referring to is presumably here. The story he tells is: he’s trying but failing to be a vegatarian, gets asked by another vegetarian in a social setting whether he is one, says he is, and then never eats meat ever again.
I know I’m contradicting what I just said since it is technically a lie, but honesty this doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. ImE you can genuinely lie “without wanting to” in social situations. Someone asks you a question, and some unconscious process in your brain produces an answer within a second before “you” really get to have a say on it. This happened to me several times. And I can understand why it happened here since he was trying to be a vegetarian.
Thanks for giving the details, I couldn’t quite remember the full story and should’ve looked it up and quoted directly. I don’t quite know what to make of him doing this—on the one hand, a small lie about being vegetarian doesn’t seem particularly pernicious or noteworthy, especially given he went vegetarian after lying about it. On the other hand, it does at least strike me as somewhat odd to do this if he had just eaten a cheeseburger a few hours earlier. It does update me ever-so-slightly towards thinking that he’s liable to lie if it makes him look good—it might not just be a ‘lie without intending to’ situation.
+1 to this, can attest I’ve done the same, and immediately regretted it lol