A debate about honesty

[Dean Leysen]

Honest communication is a very simple concept: you say something truthful to another person, the other person receives truthful information from you, and you're communicating honestly (I know, this is deep, wait for it.)

What's interesting is that when people talk about honesty, they rarely seem to take into account the other person's interpretation. If you say A and another person hears B, your intention and even the content of what you said may have been honest, but the communication wasn't.
For example, you could point out a flaw in a friend of yours with the intention of helping him/her in overcoming it and they might perceive what you said as a personal attack or an insult, a way of degrading or humiliating him/her. You say A, they hear B. You honestly wanted to help, they think you're being malicious. This is just one example of how honesty can be misinterpreted, but you get the point.

So what's your view on honesty? Do you find there is value in being honest to people even if you know their interpretation will be different? When do you think honesty is invaluable, and when is it impractical or even useless? Let loose your thoughts, I Power Rangers!

[Daniel]

honesty is always invaluable ^^ how a person perceives your honesty is down to your approach to communicating that message, exactly as you said. i don't think honesty should be dismissed in the case of a person taking your words badly ^^ i think... if you believe a person could take your honest words badly, make sure to give a little more thought into HOW you convey.
i also see attitude to be an extremely important influence as to how people will perceive a message. it's not really what you say ^^ but how you say it / what you accompany it with, imo anyway.

in the situation you described above though ^^ i'd say... it's fairly important to keep "change" in mind... "brutal honesty" is only really appropriate when a person specifically asks, no matter the case though :) seeking a silver lining / solution is sure to keep clear of conflict most of the time.
whenever it's possible a person could take your reply offensively, i guess it's important to consider what they're really trying to gain through the discussion. a person will usually know full well of the "honest answer"... = what they might really looking for are support and acceptance ^^ which may make an ideal goal be to include both in on your reply... though tbh ^^ with their intentions in mind, i think it's more important to question how accepting they are of themselves.

"do i look fat in this?"
the blunt, honest reply as to what would be on my mind = "why are you asking?... are you happy with your body?? ^^"
i think following that :) what with breaking into a short conversation of their self-image, it becomes a whole bunch easier to seriously discuss their body, and talk of solutions to whatever problems they feel they have. i guess asking how they feel about themselves not only throws a twist on things, making it clearer that... their opinion of themselves is far more important than my own ^^ but it also shows you're actually interested in their well-being... dismissing the judgement you might have as being anything important, and in a way shows they're "accepted" regardless / the whole "nobody's perfect" talk ^^

i think... honesty is... something a person should try to be comfortable with. before being honest with the world about themselves, i guess it's important to be comfortable with yourself ^^ can't help but wonder if that's where most of the dishonesty stems :) aside avoiding responsibility. "wanting to be something more than you are" = recipe for dishonesty?? the awesomest alternative is to be proud of striving for what you want ^^ regardless of however far away it might be <3
(veering off-topic agaaaaaain :P)

when honesty has the possibility of damaging a person ^^ i feel you should alter your attitude, to make sure they know your intentions are good... and also :P at all costs... avoid the trap of diving into any emotional storm they brew if displeased with your response :x the worst thing to do is lose track of the goal. sympathise with them, show understanding... but stick to the original honest reply, else the discussion didn't really solve the problem :x
(perhaps... as one last note of curiosity :P ask them what they would have liked to hear ^^)

[Garrett Fuls]

. "wanting to be something more than you are = recipe for dishonesty?"

I think its probably more a case of, feeling inadequate in relation to those goals, and being dishonest about them helps, (even if only in the extremely short term) people deal with their perceived inadequacy.

All in all I agree with almost everything you said. Honesty being misinterpreted is almost entirely about how you communicate the message you're trying to send. Being mindful of how ones words can be interpreted is the key to avoiding these types of conflicts.

I think in situations where people are asking questions where they don't want the honest answer or they already know the answer but are looking for support, really they are being dishonest.

[This Is An Alias]

Hey, I totally hear what you're saying. That whole silly feud that's been going on between pirates and ninjas started out because we ninjas were just trying to be honest with the pirates. We never really had anything against them, they are pretty tough and have some skills worth admiring, but they've never been refined and we just wanted to pass on some pointers on how they could become a little more ninja. This didn't go over very well because ninjas don't speak pirate, mostly because we are, well, educated. It was all a miscommunication. Personally I'd still like to help out the pirates, but as a time honored tradition I have to kill any pirate that I see. Just a part of the job.

Honesty in communication is great, but, unfortunately, it doesn't mean anything unless you understand how to communicate on the level of your audience.

[circonG]

Damn you ninja! Not educated enough to see the global warming your causing clearly!

[Dan]

Even if someone misinterprets your honesty and takes it as an insult, you are still giving them the opportunity to self-develop. If you tell someone that you think they are lazy, they may feel you are insulting them, but either way they will probably try to be less lazy, or at least less lazy when you are around.

[Ewan]

Or they will try to be especially lazy when you are around to show you that they don't care what you think and they can do what they like.

(Although they obviously do care what you think or they wouldn't change their behaviour because of something you'd said)

[Maxim Ustinin]

I think some people can't take the truth, eg: something bad happens = that person get's stressed = suicide by that person,

Also what I think is, goverments should either say completely honest things or just shut up, I heard on BBC yesterday how an Australian prime minister said something about one policy but his views change after a while, meaning what he said earlier is not true now (and that that policy is changed), so if he didn't say anything then no one would blame him for anything and people won't be mad at him.

[Karandash]

Please keep in mind however, that it is a direct duty of a politician to talk constantly. That's part of his job. That's what makes him a politician after all. That's what politician usually do: they talk, and talk, and talk. . . Kind of an amusing picture to think of a silent politician. Don't you think?

[Paladin]

Not as amusing as an honest politician

[Maxim Ustinin]

They don't need the media when they are talking.

[Karandash]

I think that honesty implies that truth can be put perfectly into words of a natural language. Well, that's exactly the problem. More often than not it is simply not the case. On the way from the truthful reality to a linguistic representation there are many points of disturbance. One example of this, you have already given A becomes B after transmitting to the other person. However there are even more points where the information can be misinterpreted. And if can be, it probably will.

Let's say that 'truth' is something that has happened -- an event in space and time. Let's further assume that a person experiences this event with their senses. For example, let's say a girl sees, hears, smells, and touches something. I hope, I did not forget any sense organs. Basically, the amount of information that a person can gather of an event is limited with the number sensors and their resolution: eyes, ears, and so forth.

Here we have the first limitation. What the girl perceives is not the true event any more, at least not in its full richness. Human ears can only physically detect a certain bandwidth of frequencies. Likewise the eyes and other human sense organs are physically limited. For certain physical phenomena, we do not have any sensors at all, e.g. we cannot detect an electromagnetic field or radiation. Still the amount of information collected in this first step is huge.

In fact the amount of information is so enormous that it is essential to reduce it as soon as possible in order to be able to meaningfully process and maybe even store a something of it. Here is where the second loss of information occurs. We all have filters built in that allow us only to perceive important information. Of course, what's important depends on the person. Something that the girl sees as impotent you might not even notice at all. If you ask her, "what happened" and she keeps talking about unimportant things instead of telling you the 'truth', would you call her a liar?

After information is collected, and filtered, it is being processed according to the experience of that one specific girl. Basically, she thinks about it. Remember, not about what really happened, rather than about what's left after filtering. She correlates this information with what she's already got in her head. Maybe she saw something before, that seems suspiciously similar, or maybe she recalls an event that she experienced in her childhood. According to that she contemplates on that for a little bit, and stores it in her brain in form of neurological connections. In this third step a lot of compression and generalisation takes place. "This looks like that, only bigger. That's a kind of this, but feels like that." Of course all this has something to do with the initial even, but It's most certainly not 'the truth'. What is stored is not even the data from the sensors, it is the result of the thinking process.

Now, Dean's example comes in. However I would actually prefer to split it even further. Let's assuming the girl is to disclose to us the truth about what she experienced. Now the forth loss of information comes in. She is to transform that, what she has stored in her brain, into some sort of external representation. In our case to mold it into language. Yet we could just as well ask her to draw a picture about what she saw. You agree that unless she is a painter or a professional drawer, the picture would be of different quality. It will be closer or further away of the 'truth' depending on her skills. Remember peoples skills vary not only in painting but also in using a language. A professional writer would probably describe a situation most vivid, a mathematician might prefer a more precise and logical description, and so forth. Clearly such factors as the plain size of vocabulary and the ability to end long-winded sentences will have an effect on the process of transformation from brain to an external medium.

Let's say the girl did it. She told us her story. We listen. However beware! What we listen to now cannot be the truth. What we listen to is only the external representation of the brain representation of the filtered information that her sensors were able to perceive. We listen and hear. As we hearing, we ourselves go through the perception process similar to the one the girl went through experiencing the event. Even if we assume that we hear every word she says clearly and loudly without any caustic interference, we still pay attention to such side effects as tone of her voice, her gesticulation, her facial expressions. All this factors play a role in how we get the story into our brain, how we filter the story, how we distinguish interesting from unimportant. As Dean said: the girl says A, we might hear B. This is because we have made our own experiences as well. They might have been different from those of that one girl.

It's not even 'truthful' what we hear, our understanding is yet even further away from what has really happened. The problem is that the world is too big and complex to fit into the small volume of our head. The language is too limited to express all the richness and complexity of our the reality. You can play with language too. A natural language is designed to be playful, with all its word puns sayings and proverbs. You have to actually think to understand them. And if you don't, bad luck, lack of necessary experience. Try to understand Chinese proverbs. Alternatively look at salespeople to get a taste of what you can do with language -- without explicitly lying. There are all sorts of different ways of expressing the same thing: positive or negative, emotional or rational, logical or metaphorical, profane or sophisticated, confusing or simple. They all imply some kind of lie, because they do not give you the whole picture.

So far it was a glimpse of how I see the notion of honesty. Now I personally find that there are no value in being honest if you absolutely know for sure that they'll get it wrong. What's the point of telling them the 'truth' if they're not going to understand it anyway. By the way, the 'truth' cannot be told anyway, it only can be found out.

So, you should rather try and help people you care about to find out that truth. If you know that just by telling it's not going to happen, maybe try something else to make them see. You should also neither see yourself as the carrier of 'the absolute truth' nor impose your own personal interpretation of the truth on other people. Just live your life, be happy, see what you can do, and don't be upset if you cannot do everything, or know anything.

[Olga]

Very interesting, you made a good point.