Truth Vignettes

aka nerds nerding out about / obsessing about / fetishizing Truth

This is just a list I’m collecting, possibly for a future blog post, or just because. Hover over the links for further commentary.

  1. Why To Always Say “No Comment”
  2. Meta-Honesty: Firming up honesty around its edge-cases
  3. Don’t Be a Smarmbot
  4. Slytherin 404 Errors
  5. In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization
  6. From the Commits.to spec: It was really bugging me that my future-tense statements could sometimes be falsehoods. So I started building this system so that instead of making a potentially false statement about what I’ll do, I can instead, impeccably truthfully and more informatively, always give an exact probability that I’ll do the thing. My current reliability for doing what I say is ~94%.
  7. Beeminder support rule: Never type “I canceled the charge” and then cancel the charge. Even if you don’t send it till you’ve canceled it, just typing a momentarily false statement should feel wrong.
  8. Beeminder’s copyright date
  9. Derek Parfit’s synthetic cat
  10. Notes on Honesty by David Gross, and sequel, Notes on Sincerity
  11. Beeminder on psychological pricing
  12. A “tell the truth” tattoo
  13. Explicit Honesty, by Scott Alexander (subscribers-only post)
  14. Fake Data Is The Devil

Candidates for inclusion that I haven’t vetted yet: