Agnes:

So here’s a paradox (I didn’t come to this myself, I got it from my husband): You might think that honesty is a kind of terminal norm of communication. So like you should just hold up your communication to the standard of it’s being honest, which is to say, being as truthful as you can. That’s one horn of the dilemma. The other horn is that every case of communication, in addition to being a case of speech, is also a case of action, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So every act of communication, you’re doing something, and there’s only one terminal norm of action, which is do what’s good, right?

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

Accomplish what’s good.

Robin:

Exactly.

Agnes:

And, you know, if we accept the second horn, we have to say, you know, be honest, if it happens to be good.

Robin:

Yes, exactly.

Agnes:

Right? But otherwise, be honest. And so, how can… So what’s your solution to this puzzle?

Robin:

I will frame this in the context of the concept of norms.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

That is, I will say, you know, typically we each just have a complicated set of things we want, some of which we can articulate and some of which we can’t. Other people have other things they want, some of which they can articulate, some of which they can’t. And we often find that we are in conflict with each other. And unless we coordinate, these conflicts will be destructive. And so we often adopt norms as a way to adjudicate these conflicts to make us all better off. Sometimes we embody these norms in laws and we make them more formal.
But before there were laws there were norms. So a norm is a description of a feature of behavior that you should or shouldn’t be doing that is not just a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a good or bad thing that we choose together to call a norm and to celebrate or denigrate, and that we are going to go to some degree to promote this norm by praising the people who do the good thing or criticizing the people who do the bad thing. And that’s what a norm is. And being honest is a norm.

Agnes:

What about the other side, doing good—is that also a norm?

Robin:

It’s more than a norm, it’s more what we each might want to do if we were feeling especially generous. It’s also maybe the goal of the norm system to get people to do that. But the key idea might be that we can’t just set up a norm where we say, Each of us should just do what we can to just make everybody better off. That— In some sense, that would be the ideal norm: We just say, Everybody should just do what they can. Sacrifice sometimes personally if it will help us altogether, and we can define this altogether goal. And that would be the ideal norm, but it’s hard to enforce. Because it’s hard to tell in any one person and action whether what they’re doing is, in fact, helping us all.
And so what we do is we make a compromise, a trade-off, where we choose rules of thumb that are easier to identify whether you did or didn’t follow the rule of thumb, so that we can then praise or criticize you for following that, when we choose those rules such that on average we think we’re all better off if we have the rule than if we don’t have a rule. But we know, you know, it’s not always going to be the right thing for our goals to follow the rule, and that’s just a cost.

Agnes:

So I hear you as just grabbing one of the horns of the dilemma, which is to say, Well there’s this— I mean in a way there’s this norm, which is like a heuristic, right, for doing good, and then…

Robin:

Well, it’s more than a heuristic. It’s a collectively enforced heuristic.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

We’re gonna make you follow this heuristic, even if you don’t think it’s the right thing to do.

Agnes:

Right. But then there’s the actual goal of the whole norm system, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Which is like doing, you know, while…

Robin:

Good for the rest of us.

Agnes:

…doing good for everyone, including oneself. And so in effect you think, like, look, the second thing is the thing that’s really valuable in the end, but we can’t sort of enforce that and enforce coordination around it. And we enforce coordination around it by way of these collective and enforced heuristics that, you know, like, are going to achieve more good even though in a given case they might…

Robin:

Exactly.

Agnes:

…achieve less good. So you suppose you know you’re in one of those cases, right? Suppose you’re in a case where at least you believe that you can do more good by being dishonest than by being honest. And that calculation includes any penalty you think you’re likely to face for dishonesty.

Robin:

Exactly.

Agnes:

What do you think you should do?

Robin:

Well, so the easy— So these rules of thumb tend to have a number of standard exceptions. For example, one of the exceptions is if you can convince us that in fact clearly we’re all better off if you make this exception, then we allow that exception. For example, we might say, Usually we can’t tell, that’s why we have these rules, but if in this case you can show us and we are convinced that we’re all better off here, then yes, we will allow the exception.

Agnes:

Of course if you could actually convince the person you wouldn’t have to be dishonest.

Robin:

Well that seems almost like— So maybe there’s a third party I’m being dishonest to, for example…

Agnes:

Okay, okay.

Robin:

So you know, the classic: The Nazis come to the door—“Are you hiding one?” “No, I’m not hiding one.” But I’m really hiding someone. Right?

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So that’s a classic, you know, reason why you might want to lie and be dishonest, right?

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So we might expect that some audience, when they hear about this later on, they will praise your actions. Instead of criticizing they’ll say, Obviously yes, we all agree that in this sort of situation you should have been dishonest, that that was fine. But what if you don’t think you can convince other people? Well now, yes, as you alluded, you’d have to do this calculation: Well, if I do the good thing, then—and other people find out; I mean, they might not—but if they do they might punish me and sanction me through my reputation, including…
And that will have cost not just to me, but to everyone, in the sense that I might, say, lose my reputation for being honest and a good person, and then I might be listened to less in the future and be taken less seriously. And that would be a cost not just for me but for other people. So I’d want to weigh those costs.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

But yes, I would think if you’ve— I mean it also matters just how much you care about other people. And I’m going to take that as some feature of you that’s not obvious. So I say all of us care about other people to some degree (we care about ourselves a bit more), but weigh together, in this situation, how much you do care about other people and how much you care about yourself. And putting that together, if the net effect is positive from you, say, telling the tr— lying in this case, then yeah, you should.

Agnes:

It’s weird to me that you’re giving me a normative assessment of what you should do. But do you want to take it as fixed how much I value other people—which might be very little, right?—instead of saying like, Well step one, you should value other people a lot. And now I’ll tell you what you should do given that you value other people a lot.

Robin:

Yes, yes.

Agnes:

So why are you inclined to kind of insert the normativity only in that spot but not in like— presuming you have views about how much you should value other people…

Robin:

Right. Okay, so you’ve given me the opening here to do a little dealism as I’m explaining [laughs], because that’s the answer to your question. So many people, even most people, are very comfortable, often, talking in moral terms. And so I feel I should learn to talk in those terms too. But I don’t necessarily always think in those terms, and so I have a translation in my head between the terms I would rather think in terms of and the terms people more often talk in terms of.
So I’m an economist, for example. And economists have a simple standard way we evaluate policies called economic welfare, and it’s a simple function of different people’s preferences. And philosophers, sometimes, like yourself—though I don’t know you in particular ever did—criticize economists by saying that we are neglecting a lot of complexity in moral analysis. Our simple proxy for what’s good is way too simple, and doesn’t include a whole bunch of other important things.
And so this is a common criticism of economic analysis. And of course it’s claiming that, you know, morality is complicated, and there is no simple summary, and you’ll have to dive into this deep literature if you want to be able to say what’s moral. Which of course gets in the way of our attempts to do a lot of broad, ambitious analysis with relatively simple tools.
Okay, so having said all that, I would say an important role that I can play as an economist, and that economists can play in the world, is to suggest to people deals they can make. So if there’s a legislature trying to pass a bill, or a board of directors trying to make a decision about a firm, or a church trying to wrestle with a key controversy: Basically they will be looking to come up with a deal that they can— enough of them can get behind. And when they do that, they each have their different preferences, which include their concept of morality, and how much they’re committed to it, and its realization in this context. But fundamentally they have preferences, i.e., what they would choose in various— given various options.
And standard economic tools of welfare analysis are exactly well suited to suggest deals that they might all be willing to adopt. And we economists, therefore, using our standard welfare analysis in this sort of context, are telling people, Consider the following deals as things that you might all prefer over other potential deals. And that’s what I think of doing in many of these contexts, is thinking about what would be the deal.
So in that context I have to take any one person’s degree of altruism as a given. I have to say this person cares about other people a lot, that person doesn’t. And when I’m thinking about deals they could make together, I have to take that as a given and then suggest what deals would be. So that’s the context of which, even about myself, I might say, Well, depending on how much I care about other people.
Now in this context, moral persuasion is certainly allowed. That is, you know, when people get together they will be trying to persuade each other to have different moral attitudes, and to perhaps subtly announce that if you violate their moral standards, they will be complaining to some audience, etc. So there’ll be moral persuasion.
And you could even, in the context of seeing the deal we might propose, tell people that violates a moral principle and that they should change their preferences and context of seeing the consequences of their preferences acted out in this context. That’s all fine and legitimate, but nevertheless, given any set of people and the current moral positions they have and their current preferences, there is a set of deals that’s the, what we call the Pareto frontier: The maximum best deals they could all get, given that other people have different preferences. And that’s what economists do. We offer that set of preferences.

Agnes:

So is the reason why you’re inclined to offer these deals to these people, one of whom may happen to be yourself, is that you just happen to have a brute preference for people making deals? And so that you’re satisfying that preference of yours by offering these deals?

Robin:

Well I think the world is better off when they can find better deals; that is, all else equal, a world of people who make bad deals is a worse-off world. That is, they’re all getting less than than they could from their point of view. So I think on average the world’s better off. Now, in any one case I might think that a particular deal is bad for the world.

Agnes:

But the fact that you think the world is better off if people make deals: That by itself would motivate you. You would have to have a preference for the world being better off, right?

Robin:

Sure.

Agnes:

Some nasty person might have a preference for the world being worse off.

Robin:

All else equal. But again, that doesn’t make me full altruist. I still might put more weight on myself relative to the rest of the world.

Agnes:

Right. So you sometimes might not offer deals even when you see them because you see more advantage to yourself in not offering the deal.

Robin:

If there were no cost to making exceptions. So this is related to the exception of the two norms we talked about before, right? So I want to take a simple stance to the world. I want to say, I’m an economist, and when I put my economics hat on this is what I will do for you. And the more I have to explain, “Except…,” and the more that’s complicated, the harder that stance will be to take.

Agnes:

And is the wanting to take the simple stance—is that a brute preference?

Robin:

No, that’s part of being able to be an expert in the world. So you know, if there are many different kinds of experts, that for each kind of expert, that kind of expert is more palatable, more attractive, if they present themselves in a simple, understandable way, as to the kind of advice they will give.

Agnes:

Is that because the expert in some sense has to convey to the non-expert information that the, in some sense, the non expert is not in a position to evaluate, so that the expert has to be able to almost have like a cloak of simplicity?

Robin:

Well, it’s more that you might help— use different experts to check on each other.

Agnes:

Uh huh.

Robin:

So for example if a— Doctors might present themselves to you, as I think they do, as “The advice I will give you will be the thing that promotes your health, taking somewhat into account cost.” Okay, but I’m not trying to like get you to marry my daughter or something, right? Like, that’s illegitimate as a thing a doctor would be doing with their advice, right?
And so if in fact some other doctor saw them recommending that you marry their daughter as a solution to your medical problem, they could call them on that and complain to the larger medical community that they have broken the understanding of what it is to be a doctor, and therefore risk the reputation of doctors if it became more widely known that this sort of thing was happening a lot.

Agnes:

So I just want to go back to honesty. One way you might think about honesty is that it’s a kind of value of communication, where different arenas of human life have different sort of forms of goodness that are the characteristic form of goodness of that thing. So, like, art. Okay, let’s say art is supposed to be beautiful. That’s controversial, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just an example.

Robin:

Okay, sure.

Agnes:

Okay. So you might say, Look, beauty is the characteristic value that art is supposed to have. You might say, you know, of certain kinds of entertainment, its being entertaining or interesting or engaging to your attention might be the characteristic value of that sort of thing, right? That is, you know, the world is full of like heterogenous kinds of goods, right?

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

And so you might think that honesty isn’t just a rule that we follow while talking, right? Any more than beauty is like a rule that we follow while making art. We might follow lots of rules while talking. Right? Like we might follow rules about, like, don’t spit in a person’s face, and don’t be nasty and whatever, but that honesty is more intimately connected to communication—that it is sort of what it is for the communication to be good as communication in the way that someone might argue, though controversially, that beauty is what it is for art to be good as art.
And that your conception of, There’s just a norm that we agree on and coordinate around to constrain people for the greatest possible benefit—that would be consistent with we can have a norm like don’t talk too loud, right?

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

We do have such a norm. We have a norm for how far you’re supposed to stand in front of a person. We have all these norms to coordinate communication. Honesty seems different to me because those things don’t seem to me to be what it is for the communication to be done well. Those just seem to be arbitrary forms of coordination that we had to adopt so that we can get along. But the honesty part is what it is for the communication to be good.

Robin:

So it’s certainly true that norms vary in a number of interesting dimensions. One of those would be how important is the problem the norm is addressing and how badly could things go if the norm is violated. We do that with laws as well, of course. And so in the context of art you could certainly say that, you know, the norm of “don’t bother people” is less important than the norm of being beautiful. Therefore offensive art is okay.
But they’re both things we care about; we just care about the beauty more. So… And we also have norms areas— we talked before on how enforceable they are, how easy it is for someone to see, and then therefore what sort of evidence you would need to be convinced there was a norm violation.
So I’m happy to admit that in many different areas there are different issues to different degrees. So I would certainly say in art, beauty is a bigger issue than convenience even, perhaps. So if you had a really enormous painting and it was really beautiful, and you might say, Well, that’s just inconvenient to put in our museum, people might say, No, we’re fundamentally about art—we must find room for this piece of art even if it’s inconvenient, because that’s a more fundamental value in our museum.
So with respect to honesty, I’m happy to admit that, you know, honesty could have— Dishonesty could have much larger consequences than some other norms like spitting in the face. Spitting in the face is not good, but it’s not that big a deal in the context of most conversations. But honesty can be a really big deal, and so we might want to therefore, you know, pay a lot more attention to honesty than the others.

Agnes:

See, it doesn’t seem true— Spitting in someone’s face is a pretty big deal, and you’re likely to start a fight. And a given instance of dishonesty might not even be such a big deal. It’s— so it’s—

Robin:

But then spitting in the face won’t have spreading repercussions for the rest of the community so much. Where dishonesty— If I tell you something dishonest and you believe me, and you spread it, and then, you know, it could keep going farther. And so there’s more— harder to prove all the risks. If somebody spits in your face you’ll probably notice it; if you don’t notice it, it’s not a problem. And so you can— Even if it’s a direct personal harm, it’s not something the rest of us need to pay attention to with norms because you will probably deal with it yourself, the pair of you.

Agnes:

Suppose you had to guess like, the, you know, average person, how many times do they lie in a week? You just had to give a number. What number would you give?

Robin:

I just happened to, yesterday, look at an old blog post of mine.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

Talking about how in a five-minute conversation there would be several lies, typically.

Agnes:

Okay, so that seems to refute the claim you just made that like, if you violate the honesty norm the whole system is going to collapse. It seems like we violate it all the time and the system doesn’t collapse.

Robin:

Oh, sure. It’s just— There would be large instances that could be a risk. But yes, most lies are relatively tiny.

Agnes:

Like I think, actually, honesty is interesting. You could think of a norm as like— One way to assess a norm is like, How robust is it to violations, right? Some norms, if you start violating them, it really starts to feel like that’s actually not the norm anymore? Right? So I actually think beauty is an example of this, right? And there was a kind of like outrage in the artistic community in periods where the art moves away from the norm of beauty. And I think now it’s actually quite controversial even to say that beauty is no regard, right? Because that’s being the norm is in a way predicated on people following it pretty regularly.
And honesty seems to me to be an area where that’s not true, where people violate the norm all the time. Like every day, and everybody knows that everybody violates the norm. And yet it’s such a profound value to us that we hold on to the norm in the face. It’s extremely robust. So what would explain that?

Robin:

I’m not sure this is the answer your question because I have this thought in my head that was responding to your previous question, which is that in different areas of life we like have a whole bunch of things we care about, but we also, I think—you know, to accept your point—we coordinate on what we’re doing together there. Right? And so we might, say, decorate shoes. And because we like to have decorated shoes and we’re going to a party tonight where we have to use our decorated shoes, and in that context we might not frame ourselves as artists, we might just be decorating shoes.
And we might do roughly the same thing but think of ourselves as artists. And now that would influence what we’ve decided to do together and the norms that might make sense. So if I’m offended by the way your shoes look if we’re—if this is art, I might think I have more of an obligation to accept it. Whereas if we’re going to the party tonight together wearing the shoes I’d think, Those are ugly shoes, try again.
So in that sense, I could see a place for making a distinction, you know, on—in terms of the priority of norms, and the kind of norms, etc.—on what it is we’ve decided we are doing in a context relative to other considerations. And so if you want to say that in some contexts, what we are doing is more central to honesty, that’s the thing we are saying that we’re doing together, then in that context honesty would be more important.

Agnes:

But it seems— I mean it seems like at that point the paradox recurs. Like, how can honesty be the thing that we’re doing together? Isn’t the thing that we’re doing together always just doing what’s good? And if what’s honest isn’t what’s good, then…

Robin:

No! I mean, so the world is huge, we are a lot of different people, we have a lot of different hours in our life. And so we specialize, right? Each of us does different things. And at any one interaction we frame it as the kind of thing we’re doing together. And that helps us be more effective because of the great division of labor. If every relationship was simultaneously a doctor-advising relationship, and an art relationship, and an econ-consulting relationship, and an auto fixing relationship, then, you know, we’re just trying to do the good but we’re not sure what we’re doing. And we don’t necessarily coordinate well.
So to coordinate well we need to agree together, roughly, on what we are doing in any one context, and have that be the focus and priority of that interaction. You know, it could be— it’s open to change. But we do need to choose what we’re doing, and then it won’t just be doing the good, it’ll be doing the good in that context. It’ll be the kind of good that you have agreed to do together.

Agnes:

So then let’s say you’re right, and that there are sort of going to be like, We lie a lot in conversation but there’s maybe going to be some contexts in which honesty is especially important…

Robin:

For a trial, for example, where you are sworn to be honest and it’s not— You know, and it’s considered much more of a problem if you’re dishonest when testifying in court.

Agnes:

Right. So that’s one way to know. But normally if you want to know whether you’re in the context in which that value is paramount, or like— It’s not always made explicit. So like, are we in such a context now? Or how can one tell whether one is in the honesty context or not? Because it seems a little bit puzzling. Like if you were to tell me, We’re not in the honesty context and I can’t believe anything you say—is that a thing you can say? I mean I think you can say we’re in it, but can you say we’re not in it?

Robin:

Well, I agree that in almost all conversations there is some implicit norm of honesty default with an expectation of common violations. And if you’re going to be unusually dishonest, you may need to flag that; i.e., actors on the stage have flagged for themselves that they are unusually dishonest with each other, they are playing these characters, and they are not themselves.

Agnes:

Do you think actors are being dishonest?

Robin:

There’s a sense in which they are. But I mean, it’s less important—I mean less, you know— Exactly what the word “honesty” means matters less to me than what it should mean, maybe, or what the useful concept is. Similarly, I don’t think I’m going to be very helpful in finding out what the actual honesty norms are, right? To find out that you’d want to specialize in, you know, surveys and talking to a lot of different people, and cultures and ages and genders etc., to see what their attitude toward honesty is in different contexts.
And then you want to know what what their attitude— which of those attitudes are norm-based versus just other-based, right? So but I think we could have a more productive conversation about what should be the basis for choosing the honesty norms: How would we know how to decide when we have good honesty norms? That is, what are our standards for them?

Agnes:

Before we have that conversation I want to go back to this question of, Okay, so you’re in the situation where you have these honesty norms where it’s partly accepted that you’re not going to be totally honest. So let’s say we’re in one of those situations right now, where I don’t have to be like 100% honest, I only have to be like 80% honest.

Robin:

It’s probably more like 95. But yeah.

Agnes:

Okay, 95. Alright. And then like it still seems to me that if you learned, like, you know, that I told this little lie during this conversation, like, you might—or at least I, if it were the other way around—I wouldn’t be like, Well, that was within the 5%. I would be like annoyed that you lied. And so—

Robin:

That’s difficult, because usually you can’t tell…

Agnes:

Oh sure, but I should expect, like, is it irrational? Because…

Robin:

I mean, basically, you’re trying to estimate their rate of lying—

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

—but you always probably are with everybody. You don’t get that many signals, you don’t actually catch them in a lie very often. And so when you do that’s a big data point. And you’re wondering, you know, updating your estimate; I mean, maybe they’re pretending to be 95%, maybe they are only 80. And you know, seeing two lies in a row in five minutes that you caught you might think, This person’s lying a lot more than most.

Agnes:

Right, I get that one thing that I can do is be adjusting my estimate of how much they’re lying. But another thing I can do is be morally outraged at the norm violation. Right? And what I’m saying is, it seems to me that it— If you were right about how we only expect so much honesty, then when we encounter lies, at least some of the time we shouldn’t— or much of the time, anyway, we should be like, Well, that falls within my estimate. So it’s actually a permissible amount. So they didn’t actually violate the norm, unless they want to bump the [inaudible]

Robin:

No, I mean… So in general, in law we have this concept of enforceability, and we have many kinds of laws that are just quite commonly broken. Nevertheless we accept that any one case where you find the violation should be enforced. Like speeding, for example, right? A lot of speeding violations, but we still say if, you know, they pull them over and they caught them speeding, then yeah, that they should be prosecuted. So it’s quite possible to have a norm that’s commonly violated. Nevertheless our norm is still that if a violation is pointed out to us in a clear way, then we will apply the usual enforcement.

Agnes:

But I thought you were saying that we expect different degrees of honesty in different contexts, right? And so I was trying to pick one of those contexts in which we only expect 95% honesty. And if you only expect 95% and I give you 95%, which includes my lie that I told you, then I haven’t violated the norm.

Robin:

If the norm were to be 95% honest, but that’s not the norm. The norm is to be 100% honest, but it’s violated 5% of the time.

Agnes:

But I thought you said that there were contexts in which we’re doing honesty together, right? And like in the law it’s like serious, maybe in the law it’s 100%.

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

Right? But now, you know, we’re not— this isn’t— We’re not in a law court, we’re just doing a podcast. So maybe it’s 95%. So that’s our context. Doesn’t that mean that that’s a different norm that we’re applying? We’re applying the norm “be 95% honest.” Such that if I were only 10% honest you would have a real claim against me: “Agnes, you’re lying too much.”

Robin:

So take speeding, right?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

There’s a norm not to speed, but the degree of severity of the violation is considered to depend on context.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So in that sense you could say the norm is different. Like if it’s raining heavily, and people can’t see very much, then speeding is a bigger violation, whereas if the air is clear and there aren’t very many cars, then speeding is less of a violation, etc., right? So we have a way we vary our speeding norm by context even if we might enforce any one case that we see as a violation. As we still have the rule, Okay, you were speeding! Then that’s breaking. We might say, Well, we’ll punish you less in this context for speeding than in that context. So the norm can vary by context without necessarily giving an excuse differently in different contexts, although that also applies.

Agnes:

Right. Okay, so you might say, for example, if my lie was small enough— like suppose you asked me how I was doing and I was like, “Good,” but actually I was like not doing well, right?

Robin:

I could even see that on your face, perhaps, but…

Agnes:

And then I’m— And then you’re like, Okay, but that’s like speeding five miles an hour over the limit, that’s fine. I’m just gonna let that one go. Right? So that’s your— Is that your thought, that we are enforcing these norms, and there are these little lies which even if we catch the person in the little lie we don’t get outraged. And then not getting outraged is like the not— either small fine or no fine.

Robin:

I’m not even sure outrage is binary either. So again the legal analogy, I think, helps us show the range of dimensions that are possible with respect to laws, and most of those dimensions are also possible with respect to norms. So laws can vary in not just, you know, where the line is drawn, say, for speeding, but, say, the size of the punishment by different contexts. We can also vary how much we pay for enforcers to be out there looking for them. We may also vary how much we will trust any one witness who claims to have seen it. There’s just all these different dimensions.
And then yes, of course, typically the enforcers have a budget and they choose priorities. And they quite often do—the police quite often do say, Jaywalking, you know, it’s just not a priority. Unless somebody really puts it in our face we’re not going to— Even if I see it as I drive by I’m not even going to do anything unless somebody makes me, right?
And that’s also the kind of thing we do with norms. We, you know, we know that when we see a norm violation that we could complain about it. And we would be entitled to complain, and, you know, if it were the following characteristics, another would feel obligated to acknowledge that we— It was a violation, and to join in sanctioning it to some degree.
But for many more violations we see we don’t actually bother to complain. And this outrage in your head is some sort of indication inside you of how inclined you are to complain. You know, if the outrage bubbles to a high enough level you just feel compelled to complain, but if it’s a low level of outrage, then it’ll be, How busy am I? And you know, Do I have a beef with this person I might complain about? And you know, you have all these different, you know, factors that you include in deciding subconsciously how outraged to feel and whether to complain about the violation.

Agnes:

So there’s a different way to see honesty. Like the way you’re seeing it is you’re kind of taking for granted the concept of coordinating with people…

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

…like that we coordinate with other people, but then that coordination—

Robin:

We use norms to do so.

Agnes:

—has to be governed by norms. So the norms…

Robin:

Well, it doesn’t—I mean, there are many ways to coordinate. It’s one of the ways we coordinate.

Agnes:

Okay, but, right: So norms come in as a means of kind of like regulating this coordinating behavior. But you might think— So like, I think— I connect honesty up with concepts like trust and betrayal, right? Where there are many norm violations that someone could do. Like spitting in my face would be a norm violation and might be very upsetting. And it might be a betrayal of trust under the relevant context. But you know— but like certainly something like speeding, it’s like you might be breaking a rule, but I just might not care that much, right?
But if— Especially in some contexts, lying, what it seems to do is to shake the very possibility of coordination. That is, you’re helping yourself to the idea of coordination, like here’s this thing coordination, right? But you might think that part of what honesty is is it sort of describes a kind of coordination. That is, if I’m honest with you I’m like giving you access to my mind, right? And I’m sort of like letting you into my mind. And so then when we communicate, we are in effect coordinating our minds. If I’m dishonest with you then I’m having you coordinate sort of with someone else who I’m not, right? With like an image that I want you to— you know, and I’m in some sense then, not even— I’m like almost manipulating your mind, right? I’m like trying to give you these beliefs, sort of, right?

Robin:

Sure.

Agnes:

I’m trying to give you these beliefs that are not the beliefs that I have. Right? And so you might just think honesty is a kind of name for coordination. It’s how we coordinate, it’s not that we coord— You know…

Robin:

No, I mean, so for example, one way we coordinate is trade. Right? And so imagine the typical bazaar scenario: You’re walking through a bazaar and there’s a rug you find intriguing. And you pause and you stare at the rug, and the proprietor says, This rug, for you today, discounted. I offer you, you know, x price. And you say, No, it’s not worth that much. I would bet most people like pay y for this. Right? And then you go back and forth in price negotiations.
Now everybody knows that that’s usually somewhat dishonest, in the sense that, “The lowest I will take was x” is not true, because a minute later you will take x minus 100. And vice versa. But it’s part of the usual routine of negotiating and trade, is to make offers and counteroffers that you sometimes pretend are your final offer. And you coordinate successfully in the sense that you often do make the trade and buy the rug.
But you both know that the other one is going to be trying to get the best deal. And part of their trying to get the best deal is to not admit quite as much how much they want it, or the cost of giving it up. That’s a context in which a very standard, accepted degree of dishonesty is part of the coordination.

Agnes:

Right. So maybe one way to think about it is we could take coordination and evaluate it on a metric. And the metric would be, kind of, closeness. And I’m not sure exactly how to sort of— how to make this precise, but it would be something like, there are forms of coordination that are very loose, right? And then there are ones that are tighter. And the loose ones—it’s like, you know, there could be a thing, for instance, where there’s like a location, and people just leave stuff there when they don’t need it, and then other people take stuff when they need it, right?

Robin:

Exactly. That would be very low coordination.

Agnes:

Very low. And like a market is tighter than that, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

But so I think of honesty as maybe marking sort of that innermost boundary of extremely tight coordination. Right? And that’s why it’s in a way right to say honesty is coordination, but also true to say that there are forms of coordination that are dishonest, but those are the looser ones.

Robin:

I might more just frame the question in terms of what facilitates cooperation, and that includes multiple forms. And when we get to that level, you know, much of, say, negotiation… Negotiation is one form of coordination, right? Where we make offers to each other and then make a choice. And in negotiation over deals, a reputation for honesty, and a habit of honesty, and a belief in honesty, will help it— help you be easier to make good deals.
So that’s a general feature of negotiation. If both of you can just be honest about what you want, what you don’t want, then you can more quickly figure out the deal that gives you, you know, the most for each of you. So, and that’s good, right? So that’s a sense in which honesty helps coordination. It’s not the only thing that helps coordination, though—we can identify a number of other features in these contexts that will promote coordination. And there are other kinds of coordination. But in other kinds of coordination, honesty could still help with coordination.

Agnes:

So I have like a general rule in how I think about reputation for— Anytime a reputation for x is valuable, that’s going to be because, independently and in the first instance, x is valuable, right? So saying like a reputation for x is good is explanatorily posterior to some other thing, where you explain why x itself is good.

Robin:

But honesty facilitates core— deals, deal making.

Agnes:

Well, so I want to say, you know: Coordination, deals, cooperation, all of that is… You could view it in two ways: You could have the number of deals, right, so like people can make more deals, right? And that’s the thing you’re into, them making more deals…

Robin:

We would want to do a weighted sum of the value of the deals times the number, you know.

Agnes:

Okay. But there’s another— I’m looking at it from another angle. It’s like, imagine there’s another dimension to the problem in addition to the dimensions that you’re looking at. And my dimension is how tight is the coordination. So like, if you look at circumstances in which dishonesty is viewed as especially betrayal, like, and violation of trust and whatever, it’s going to be saying intimate relationships, right?

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

So those tend, I think, tend to be the context in which people view dishonesty as especially destructive. Now…

Robin:

The tail of the distribution is there. I mean, in most relationships, there are conversations they have on elevators, plenty of very low-scale— some of them, right?

Agnes:

Yes, absolutely. And so even there, there’s going to be maybe certain topics on which dishonesty about those topics is critically problematic. But the point is, what you have— In an intimate relationship—what is an intimate relationship? It’s a form of coordination, right? It’s a form of cooperation—but it’s, you know, there’s a difference between the way you cooperate with your child or your spouse on the one hand, and the way that you cooperate with buying or selling something.
And the way that I’m trying to describe that difference is that you— it’s more tight with the spouse or the child. And so because you’re doing a different kind of coordination, right? One that is tighter, which is to say, one that in some sense it like more directly involves like your mind coordinating with their mind. Honesty, like, is the… It sort of describes that form of tight coordination. And then as people do the looser forms of coordination they can leverage off of that, and be like, Oh, you’re a trustworthy business associate because you treat me almost as though I were your wife, and you’re gonna be that honest to me, right?
So that’s your reputation, right? The reputation for honesty, in a way, is like a reputation for taking this very tight form of coordination that’s appropriate in intimate relationships, and actually like, you know, having that be like— apply more generally.

Robin:

I agree that we can spread, you know, relationships on a spectrum, tight or loose, sort of deep, intimate, you know, strong relationships on one end, and loose, distant, temporary relationships, say, on the other end of the spectrum. And that one of the, you know, classic descriptions of the modern world is that we have fewer deep relationships and more distant relationships. And you know, that’s the market economy, for example: More trade with arm’s length relationships. And in the past, you know, your cobbler was your friend, and you knew them, and the, you know, etc.
And you know we also, like, people are nostalgic for times of war sometimes after the time of war, because “We all felt so close back then.” And they felt that there was just a lot at stake in their relationships, and they felt bonded to each other because they had this common enemy. And so there’s certainly a lot of interesting things to say about to what degree do we want relationships to be how close, and whether we’re getting enough of that today.
And it’s certainly true that for any one thing you might say you could get away with lying about it more easily to a stranger than to a close intimate. They will, you know— And that you are therefore less likely to lie about any one thing merely because they would know different, right? At the bazaar, selling the rug, you could tell them that you were a— You could tell them that you were a computer programmer who doesn’t have much use for rugs and not be honest that you’re a dentist and plan on putting it in your entrance lobby, you know, at which point they might want to charge you for that.
But with your wife you can’t lie to them and tell them that you’re a programmer instead of a dentist because they will know otherwise, right? So it’s just true as a nature of the fact that relationships are close that we just know a lot more about each other. And therefore a lot of things, it would just not make sense to lie about. But then there are going to be things that a boundary of things where they might not be so sure, and then that would be the issue of how honest you are now. It’s not clear to me that in fact, taking that into account, closer relationships are more honest. You know, so…

Agnes:

Yeah, good. I think you’re right about that. So okay, so maybe let’s bring in a third thing here. I think you’re right that this spectrum doesn’t quite track what I want it to track. And there is one context in which—let’s say maybe more than one context—which is a kind of conceit that this paradox of honesty doesn’t exist. Which is to say that telling the truth and doing the good are just gonna come together.
I think the legal context is one context where there’s some conceit of that kind, but maybe intellectual activity, intellectual inquiry, like what we’re doing right now—like, I think that it would just be weird if I were lying to you. Like it’s a little hard to imagine that I can achieve some good by lying to you in this context.

Robin:

Well, I think you just need to spend a little longer, then you’ll be able to imagine these things! [They laugh] Nothing’s that hard!

Agnes:

Right. I mean one can certainly imagine it in the law case too, right? It’s not unimaginable, but it’s— What I want to say is it’s a kind of, you know— So we have these norms. I think the norms of honesty are extremely strong in intellectual pursuits, right? Like if you’re writing a physics paper or something, you’re not supposed to like make up false physics.

Robin:

The lip service for them is strong, whether the practice is strong is a different question.

Agnes:

Okay. Well so you were just saying like, Are people actually more honest in intimate relationships? Do you think people are more honest in, you know, their published research or something?

Robin:

So I mean, actually I would say probably the main factor affecting how honest people are is how likely they are to get caught if they’re dishonest. So— And that’s also true for intellectuals. So intellectuals will be honest, especially carefully, on things that if they are dishonest they will get caught likely, and where the consequences would seem to be large. So among intellectuals if you sort of date the first draft of your paper August and it was really September, we might not get very upset about that. But as other important parts of the paper—maybe the data set that was all made up—then that would be a much bigger deal.
But academics are dishonest, as we know, in many ways that violate their norms. Like, as you know, there’s this recent replication crisis and, say, p-hacking crisis. And the p-hacking crisis is about how much search you do to find a particular statistical analysis that apparently gives statistical significance. And the norm would be first of all that you don’t do any search, you just define your, you know, procedure up front, and you just report it. Or if you do search you report the search and adjust your p values for the degree of search you did. And— But that’s very hard to monitor and enforce.
And so we see from the overall academic literature that there is, in fact, a lot of p-hacking going on. A lot of people search among specifications and then report the p for the specification as if they didn’t do any search. So— and there are a number of other ways that the literature on academic behavior finds widespread dishonesty when it’s hard to catch and enforce. So there are often interesting that— You can look at an average of behavior and find on average the level of honesty, and not be able to identify any one case which one is being honest. And that’s these ways where we can tell how honest people are being in cases where each one of them doesn’t get caught.

Agnes:

That’s interesting. So people are, I mean, so, you know, I guess one thing is it’s not going to be a function of how likely people are to get caught, it’s going to be a function of how— that is, how many lies we catch is going to be a function of how good people are at predicting, right, whether or not. So maybe also intellectuals are, you know, they might be good at— they’re good at predicting whether or not they’re going to get caught, right?

Robin:

Right. So why wouldn’t they know they won’t get caught more often?

Agnes:

But you know, so do you think— One thing you might care about is whether you’re going to get caught, and another thing you might care about is whether this whole phenomenon will be caught even if you aren’t individually. But so your thought is people don’t care about the second thing, they just care about—

Robin:

Right. Because we find it relatively easy to see overall levels of dishonesty when we can’t tell individual dishonesty.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, so I think that, you know, as I see it, this thing— this p-hacking thing is called a crisis for a reason, right? And if you did a study of married couples or something and you discovered like, you know, there’s like 20% lying or something, I don’t think we called it “the marital crisis.” So I still think that that is…

Robin:

I think that’s kind of hype and misleading bluster. I wouldn’t call it a crisis. In fact, I don’t think they care very much. So let me offer you concrete evidence on the related replication crisis. So the replication crisis is that people often do studies, and through p-hacking in part, but in other ways, to produce a result that won’t replicate. That is if you try it again you won’t get the same answer. And of course it’s seen as a problem that we have so many results that don’t replicate.
One of the things you could do as a journal to not publish papers that won’t replicate is you could do a survey or a prediction market where you ask people, Will this paper replicate? And it turns out people can judge that pretty well. People who look at a paper and have some, you know, experience in replication literature can judge whether individual papers will or won’t replicate. So journals have it within their power to reject papers that are much more [un]likely to replicate. And one way they could do this is to, when they have a submission to a paper, put that paper to a prediction market, say—ask, Will this paper replicate? And then if they get an especially low number, say, No thank you, this paper won’t replicate.
So I have been somewhat on the periphery involved with the project, which not only had prediction markets on papers and whether they would replicate, which showed that in fact it’s relatively easy to predict if papers will replicate. But at the beginning of this project, you know, I had the group try to approach journals saying, Would you like to be part of this project such that you would tell your people who submit to your journal that they will be part of this project? So their paper will be put up for evaluation, and the score that we get about the chance of your paper replicating will go into our evaluation of your paper. No journals were interested, basically.

Agnes:

Right. So I mean, the way to think about this, right, is that the whole journal system and more largely the academic system is caught in the sort of crosshairs of the honesty paradox, right? Which is that— Let’s just take at the level of the individual researcher, the individual researchers incentives are that they have to produce some surprising results, right, in order to get published, in order to, you know, get a job, keep their job, etc, right?
And so in order to do good as they see it, that’s what they have to do, right? Whereas in order to tell the truth, right, they’d have to do a different thing. Right? So we have— There are like pragmatic facts about the way that the system works, where the desire to do good is going to pull you in the opposite—at least for yourself—is going to pull you in the opposite direction from the desire to tell the truth.
Do you think there are any contexts— So what we can conclude there is, at least as it stands, academia is caught in this, and the attempts to correct it are perhaps getting caught in the same trap, right? Because there’s no reason to think that attempts to correct it aren’t going to like— Once these things are aligned then they would be very open to suggestions like yours, right? But right now they’re not because the things— You’re like the same position as an individual researcher.

Robin:

This is the concept of institutions and institution reform. And this has been a specialty of mine for many decades. And I’m an economist, and then, you know, studied this academically, etc. So the key idea is to say that in any particular area of life, if people have some usual degree of selfishness, say, or bias toward themselves, then their local incentives produce a net behavior that can be lamentable for the whole system, and recommending to any one person that they sacrifice themselves for the benefit of improving the system, you know, falls on deaf ears. Unless, you know, you could say, We’re trying to coordinate to a new system. And so that’s the question about institution reform: How do we ever coordinate to change systems?

Agnes:

Right, but it looks like the person that you’re going to talk to at the journal is still part of the same system, the same incentives.

Robin:

Exactly. So in all different areas of life the question is, you know, Who is the best audience for suggesting reform? And what is the best kind of pitch? Or what kind of homework should you have done before you make the pitch? That is, what should they have a right to expect from you in your pitch to make a change?

Agnes:

Do you think— Suppose they’re unwilling to make the change to their system? Do you think that that shows that you screwed up? That is, that you didn’t make the right pitch or you didn’t approach the right person?

Robin:

Well so in one fundamental sense, we might say, there’s an ultimate customer. And if we think like an institution is all for the customer, then if we make our pitch to the customer and the customer doesn’t want it, then yes, there’s more of a sense in which we didn’t understand the customer. So for example think about medicine. We say, What’s medicine for? You might say, Well, medicine’s for the doctors to have a nice office and a hospital, right? For us to watch medical TV shows. We might say, No no no—medicine is for the patients! Right?
That’s— So it’s all for the patients, right? And if something’s going wrong, you don’t go recommend it to the doctors per se, or to the hospital or to the health insurance company. You might try that. Then you might be able to succeed. But if they say no you might think, The customer is the ultimate person I should be making my pitch to. Can I convince the customer to make a switch?
So for example, you know, this happened with, say, HMOs. Right? We had the ordinary fee-for-service doctor relationship long ago. And then there was a long period of producing the innovation of HMOs, Health Maintenance Organizations. And the difference was you pay us per month and then we do everything for you. And you know, if we have to do a lot this month, we lose, and we do a little this month, we win. But that’s going to be the new deal.
And if you suggested that to any one doctor in 1900 they might say, Well I don’t like it, I think I’ll make more money under the fee-for-service. But somebody was willing to create an HMO, a new institution, then try to attract customers. And as soon as they did that the doctors used the government to try to prevent them from doing it, because they coordinated to make it illegal and then to put a lot of legal roadblocks.
It was actually World War Two that really got HMOs going, with Kaiser at the shipyards in Oakland. Because the, you know, the government needed ships, and whatever it took to get those workers happy to make the ships, they were willing to do it. And that they wanted an HMO in there—the union wanted an HMO for their health plan, and that was okay.
But anyway that’s an example of going to the customer. And over time HMOs have become much more common. And many customers became convinced it was a better deal. Like me: I use an HMO. But many other customers have not been convinced, and you might say that’s a problem, whatever your theory is that says HMOs are a better deal for customers. The fact that most customers don’t choose HMOs means that your model isn’t fully right. You’re missing something.

Agnes:

My view is that medicine is not for the patients. My view is medicine is for the sake of health. But I think we have to save that for another conversation because I want— We only have a little bit of time left and I want to go back to the honesty thing. So what we’ve determined is that there are these like, two, let’s say, motivations or incentives, that pull apart the desire to do good and the desire to speak the truth. And that like in many contexts they’re going to pull apart, and even in intimate relationships they pull apart, and even in academic or intellectual contexts they pull apart. Do you think there’s any context in which they don’t? That is, in which one can…

Robin:

I think I want to resist the framing here. I would say, you know, more generally, the way we economists think about it is there’s your individual interest, and there’s a collective interest, and those are pulling apart. And in this context that happens to be via the mechanism of being dishonest. But it’s not fundamentally about honesty as the conflict; it’s about the collective good. That is, everybody who does p-hacking can look and see that on average we’re all worse off because we do p-hacking. But they each have an individual incentive still to do p-hacking.

Agnes:

So that seems— Like I get how you could carve things up that way in terms of if you’re doing institution reform, that’s going to be what you’re interested in. But I’m carving things up differently in that I’m interested in cases where you’re going to say what’s false because you think it does more good. In some of those cases it might do more good overall—like maybe in intimate relationships, people actually do more good overall by saying what’s false.
But I would still say that’s a context that is not optimized for truth telling, right? If in fact you’re regularly going to be in a situation where you can do more good by saying what’s false, then you have an, I would say, a non-ideal communicative context. And so academia too is going to be a non-ideal communicative context— at least certain kinds of research, right? And in academia there’s an additional issue, which is maybe that society is also worse off. But I’m less interested in that. I’m just interested in the pulling apart between honesty and the good.

Robin:

Just to connect them together: I might say, you know, in general if you see an equilibrium where people are being dishonest, I think it’s reasonable to infer there’s an alternative equilibrium where they were honest which would be at least as good. And therefore, you know, it’s showing you, Hey, there’s something better we could do. I think that is roughly right. And in fact there’s a theorem in incentive design—mechanism design—about basically, for any equilibrium, there’s an equivalent truth-telling equilibrium where you tell the truth.
But that’s an abstract formal result. It may not be so relevant to individual conversations. But I definitely think that it’s a very strong heuristic and a powerful heuristic that an equilibrium where people are lying is probably worse. There’s probably some other in principle improvement where they could tell the truth. But the question is, Can we figure out how to get there?

Agnes:

Okay wait, I want to challenge you to actually produce that in a given case. So take my— I’m wearing a very pretty dress that has flying fish on it. And so I ask you, Do you like my dress? And now the equilibrium that we live in, in my experience, is if I ask you that question, you have to say you like it?

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

Right? So that’s a kind of lying equilibrium about, Do you like people’s clothing. So tell me, how do we switch to the truth-teller?

Robin:

Well in the context of these usual game theories, they’re not including the effect I think you’re alluding to here. But you know, in a sense we might interpret my saying “I like your dress” as meaning that your dress is acceptable. Because— If that’s what it usually actually means. That is, this word “like” isn’t, you know, its meaning isn’t written in stone. And we could then… And I think people often do reinterpret these words in these contexts.

Agnes:

No, that’s not what I mean. Like, I mean, like, Is it pretty? Like is it especially nice? And I want everyone to tell me that all my dresses are especially nice. And I think you can pretty much get people to do that by being like, Don’t you think this is an especially nice dress? or something. And they’ll be like, “Yeah.” Certainly, like, my friends would probably say like, “Yeah”—in some moods, they would say no.

Robin:

So in that sort of context I think what you fundamentally want is a relative ranking. So you know— So for example, think of letters of recommendation for students or even for professors, right?

Agnes:

Mm-hm.

Robin:

Yeah. So we know that people exaggerate. Right?

Agnes:

Mm-hm.

Robin:

So, and then the game is, you know, where does it stand relative to the usual distribution of exaggeration? So when you read a letter like that, you basically, if they say that this person is the, you know, top 1% of students I’ve ever seen, you think, What does that really mean? Maybe it means 10%. And you’re adjusting in your mind the exaggerated claims to calibrate them to a more realistic distribution of claims. Now if we had a system with letters where they actually had a budget of these rankings, and they had to like post all of the people they ever gave a letter of recommendation to and put them in an overall order, then they wouldn’t be able to lie about that order. Right?
And then when you saw 10%, you know, it really was 10%. It didn’t mean 30%. And then, you know, we’d all be roughly in the same situation and getting the same information out of the letter. So the fact is, if my saying that dress was pretty, I was forced to have this budget of how often, you know, I said that, and where it was in the ranking, then I might have to choose, right? If I tell you your dress is at the 80th percentile level today, then the next person I tell I’ll have to say it’s a 10th— 20th percentile. And I’m asking, you know, am I willing to pay that cost later to especially rank you high at the mall?

Agnes:

Right. So—and just as an aside—of all the kinds of texts that I read regularly in my life, the kind that I have the hardest time extracting information from are letters of recommendation. And you would think that like, you know, after like a decade as a professor, I would get good at this. I don’t seem to have improved. Like basically I can’t get anything out of them. Like I think I’m unusually bad at like— There’s something that’s being said, and—

Robin:

This is one of the costs of lying, is that it’s harder to calibrate what things mean. So I mean I’ve heard people interpreting letters of recommendation, and what they do is they have a very field-specific, context-specific interpretation strategy where they know that this person has said these things, and they heard from somebody else that this other person has those things. And that means they need to use a lot of context to be able to interpret it. And that’s a cost of this ambiguous kind of language.
And that’s in general a cost of ambiguous language. That is, there’s a sense in which if we were all just very clear and direct in our language, then we would all have a lower cost of understanding; that our habit of being vague on purpose, often, in many things we say, puts us all at a disadvantage, because now all of us have trouble figuring out what these vague things mean. There aren’t clear definitions of vague words.

Agnes:

Right. But I think— So going back to the dress case, I think, like, if you were like, you know, That’s in the top like 30% of dresses that I’ve seen this month or something, like I wouldn’t be that happy with that. Because, like, I want that— Maybe I want this dress to be more special than that or something. Whereas like—and I might be okay with it, right? I might be. But like then if you were like, you know, Maybe it’s only in the top 50%. Right? Versus if I’m just like, Do you like my dress, and you’re like, Oh, it’s very pretty, I’m happy with that whole encounter.
So what I’m wondering is, you told me that we were going to be able to have another equilibrium that’s the truth-telling equilibrium that captures everything I wanted out of the lying equilibrium, in which I’m happy because people tell me my dress is pretty. And, but it seems to me that the one you’re proposing, with a limited budget of praise words, it’s not gonna make me happy.

Robin:

So just to be clear, these usual game-theory models I’m referring to are assuming what we call rational agents who have a set of preferences, and then their beliefs are just instrumental in producing actions that help them achieve their preferences. Now…

Agnes:

Are you saying I’m not a rational agent? [Laughs]

Robin:

I’m saying that we have a preference for a certain kind of dishonesty. And that is that it seems more plausible that we just more directly have the preference for dishonesty here.

Agnes:

And if we do have that preference then the theorem doesn’t hold anymore.

Robin:

Exactly. Of course.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

And then this is part of how we’re built, and this is a key thing to understand about people. So people are hypocritical and in some ways they want to be hypocritical, and a world that produces the same outcomes without the hypocrisy will be less happy because they less have the pretense that they want. They— People want pretense of various sorts in many ways. They want to pretend to themselves that they are prettier than they are, and they want to pretend to themselves that they’re more honest than they are. And many of our institutions are vague and hard to enforce exactly, to allow these sorts of pretenses.

Agnes:

And— But so going back to— Do you— Like, so there are different contexts, right, in different spheres of human life, and honesty is going to be differentially important in those different contexts. If you had to pick like, is there some context—and you can be as specific as you want, right?—in which that preference for dishonesty is at a minimum, what would it be?

Robin:

Well, my preference would have to go along with other people sharing this preference. Otherwise it’s not going to work.

Agnes:

Right, so you might— Right, I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about what context, right? And then who might sort of be in that context.

Robin:

So I mean, I would think that we have some things we say that are especially important, where a lot is at stake.

Agnes:

And you think in those contexts? Because you might think you might be very inclined to lie those contexts, to make sure that—

Robin:

Right, but I would like there to be a community at least which shares a strong knowing that at least in this community—and this community specializes in these important topics, say a community of intellectuals—so for example, say, forms of government. Like it’s important that we have a good form of government. Right? So people who specialize in understanding different forms of government—who would be in a position to expertly recommend different, even new, forms of government—that’s a really important choice.
And it would be great if those people in that community had a norm of being especially honest about the most special, important things they talk to each other about there. And even better if outsiders believed they had that norm, so that they could in fact make a recommendation on a really important thing, and have people believe they were in fact being very honest about their recommendation, so that we could all then believe what they say, and do what they say, and be better off.

Agnes:

Which of— Suppose you had to choose between them actually having the norm and them being believed to have the norm. Which is more important?

Robin:

Well, the conjunction is the important thing. If you believe they’re honest and they’re not, then they won’t be telling you what the actual best forms of government is and you’ll be adopting the recommendations that aren’t best, and that won’t be very good at all.

Agnes:

But presumably you would at some points be willing to trade off some amount of intra-group honesty for extra-group reputation, because otherwise they’re not going to make their thing happen.

Robin:

It’s a matter of like who the audiences are that they should be pitching to, and we just need a big enough audience to believe them. We don’t need everybody to believe them. So for example imagine there are startup cities in the world who are in the market for a new form of government. We want those people especially to believe the honest recommendations about forms of government, because they are especially people to take action on.
So in general, like, who do we need to believe doctors if doctors are telling the truth? Well we need sick people that believe doctors. We don’t really need well people to believe them if they aren’t taking any action based on what the doctors say. So lots of ordinary well people not believing doctors is just fine.

Agnes:

In this platonic dialogue called the Gorgias this orator named Gorgias says, You know sometimes my brother who’s a doctor and I, we both go to the patient, because I’m an orator. I’m much better at persuading the patient to take painful medicine than my brother who’s a doctor. Right? So you know, it might be the case that there is a trade-off. You have two values here, right? You have the value of this group, an intellectually honest way of pursuing this end, and then you want them to have a reputation among at least some people, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And so it’s that package that you really want, right?

Robin:

So that highlights the importance of our institutions of advice: That is, our institutions of advice are in some sense our most important, most meta institutions, because all the other institutions are only going to be valuable if they can be fed through the institution of advice. If they produce insight but then nobody will believe them, or the important people who take action don’t believe them, then they’re not very useful. So yes. And in fact I have tried to center my attention on the institution of advice.

Agnes:

So that would be, then, the place where you would most want to both have—and to have a reputation for—honesty, is in the institution of advice.

Robin:

Yes. Absolutely. Even more than forms of government, right? If I can create an institution of advice that’s reliable, then that could even create incentives for people who, say, specialize in forms of government to actually be honest, because the institution of advice will make them be honest.

Agnes:

But you might think that there’s going to be a problem in centering— your attempting to center the honesty there, because if they ask, Who are the kinds of people who want to give advice, right?

Robin:

Yeah?

Agnes:

Not everyone does.

Robin:

Of course.

Agnes:

But I would say wanting to give advice that is actually then taken, right, is sort of close to wanting to rule. Right? That is, you want the order as you see it in your mind to be the order of how things are. That’s quite different from wanting to know the truth about things. So like, it could be coincidental that there is somebody who wants to know the truth, and he also wants the order in his mind to inform the world. But those are two independent facts that just could coincidentally come together.

Robin:

Let’s just clearly define what we want, and I think it encompasses all these effects. I mean, we want a good institution for advice. That good institution for advice needs to therefore meet a number of criteria here. So it first of all needs to give advice on the topics of advice desired. Whoever the customers are for advice—if it’s advising them on shoestring color and they don’t care about shoestring color, then that’s a failure of this institution of advice—it should be advising people on the things they care about.
Secondly, it should be capable of convincing the people who are there advising that it in fact is good advice: accurate, high status, whatever else they want from the advice. Next, given the kind of advice that customers want, and that they want accurate, informed advice, it needs to go induce other people who might be able to learn about those topics to go bother to do that effort and to participate in the institution somehow, so that their advice is included. And presumably there are many people who participate, so the advice then needs to be merged and aggregated into some summary forms and then given to the customers who want the advice.
So if there are people reluctant to give advice, then this institution faces that problem. And that’s— A good institution will be an institution that finds a way to overcome that problem. And if there are people who are dishonest and wanting to influence the advice, which there are because they have agendas, this institution needs to be properly skeptical about those people. And again, that’s the problem faced by the institution of advice.

Agnes:

And I mean presumably you would want the institution also to grow such people, right? To cultivate…

Robin:

Of course. You know, on the longer term we would want to train them. And we want to induce the training of them, and the development of them, the selection of them; and then how they allocate their time between learning in general and learning about a specific problem, with learning and talking with their colleagues to, you know— All of those things we want to induce, you know, the right trade-offs in those things in order to produce the best advice. Yes.

Agnes:

Do you think there’s any tension in trying to raise or grow people who are both passionately motivated to seek the truth on the one hand, and equally, independently, passionately motivated to make the world match an image of the world in their mind?

Robin:

Just think about all the other professions and all the other specialties that people have in jobs. You know, there’s just a wide variety of the ideal person for that job. And typically it doesn’t have that much to do with how committed those people are to the overall purpose of the job. But this is a fact about people and jobs.

Agnes:

Though this is a very important job, too.

Robin:

Nevertheless it’s still true about a wide range of jobs. And I’m not even sure I see a correlation between their sort of emotional attachment to the larger goal of the job, and they’re being good at the job and fitting well in the role that they are assigned in the industry or the profession they’re in. So…

Agnes:

So it’s almost really the institution that’s giving the advice, not the people.

Robin:

Yes! Exactly. Precisely! That is the way we, you know, think about institutions—the fundamental choice in the world, in some sense, a more fundamental choice is institutions, because once you have institutions, they last. They get stuck, as we talked about. It can be hard to change them. And then people come and go, you know, relationships come and go, lots of other things come and go. And that thing stays. And that’s the really high-leverage choice.
That is, so many people, what they want out of politics, say, is to get their person in charge, right? But their person won’t stay in charge that long. And so you know, we people who do analysis of local institutions, we say, No, the fundamental choice is the presidential system or a parliamentary system, or there’s six-year terms or twelve-year terms. You know, what are people are allowed to say when they advert— you know, they're soliciting people to vote for them, those are sort of the institutional features of the system that will last and have these bigger effects.
And then individual politicians will adapt to the rules of the system. And you know, getting your person in charge isn’t necessarily that big a deal. In a sense, part of the system is, How do you know who is your person? And people game that, basically, in order to win. And so, you know, the system is the fundamental choice.

Agnes:

Okay, I think we should stop. But before we stop let me ask you: Do you feel like this— Do you feel like we’ve solved this paradox? Or do you think there was just no paradox to start with?

Robin:

Well, quite often paradoxes result from some sort of discrete framing. And then if you choose a more continuous framing, then you see a trade-off. And that’s a common way we economists resolve paradoxes.

Agnes:

Good! That’s a good ending.

Robin:

All right. Until we meet again!