Honesty is quite powerful in many cases -- if you have a reputation for being honest, people will trust you more and your words will have more weight (or so the argument goes).

Unfortunately, being extremely honest all the time is also pretty difficult -- what happens when the Nazis come knocking and ask if you have jews in the basement? Or when your girlfriend asks you if this dress makes her look fat? (Or so the argument goes)

Meta-honesty is a proposed solution to these problems. The gist is you act very honestly, but can lie when it's very important to do so. The catch is you have to always be completely honest about what kinds of situations you’d lie in. In theory this lets you have all the benefits of being very honest without the worst of the drawbacks (some of the “drawbacks” are irreducible errors of course -- you can’t betray or trick people as easily when you’re honest and that's the point). But the arguments for meta-honesty are largely theoretical.

I started trying to rigorously abide by meta-honesty a little over four years ago. Here are some musings on the benefits and drawbacks I’ve observed [...]

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Outline:

(01:19) The good

(01:22) 1: I've become a more honest person.

(01:56) 2: I've become much more honest and clear about things to myself.

(02:46) 3: It's a (credible?) signal about the kind of person I am.

(03:14) 4: On rare occasions, the system straightforwardly works.

(04:36) The bad

(04:39) Mental overhead

(04:56) Sounding weird

(05:19) Its easy to mess up

(07:00) I err conservative in ways that can make it harder to say anything about when Id lie

(07:27) Observations

(07:31) I have almost never been asked questions about which situations I'd lie in.

(09:04) I have never really felt bottlenecked on people trusting my honesty/integrity

(09:42) I've never found meta-honesty very useful for interacting with people outside my weird bay-area bubble

(10:27) Conclusions

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First published:
November 2nd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySFj6PiyHhjyaspvo/reflections-on-4-years-of-meta-honesty

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Reflections on 4 years of meta-honesty” by GradientDissenter

LessWrong (30+ Karma)