## Embarrassment and Innocence
-Sometimes we say things that we think are true—perhaps even things that _are_ true—which end up causing reasonable people to conclude something false. It's tempting to relate to such a situation primarily in terms of maintaining the innocence of one's soul—to say, fine, my readers became more wrong, but I'm not to be [judged](/blog/2025/Oct/the-relationship-between-social-punishment-and-shared-maps/) for it because I believed what I was saying; I wasn't _being misleading_ just because the people who believed me were thereby led into falsehood.
+Sometimes we say things that we think are true—perhaps even things that _are_ true—which end up causing reasonable people to conclude something false. It's tempting to relate to such a situation primarily in terms of maintaining the innocence of one's soul—to say, fine, my readers became more wrong, but I'm not to be judged for it because I believed what I was saying; I wasn't _being misleading_ just because the people who believed me were thereby led into falsehood.
The temptation reflects a confusion as to the nature of the judgment. Mostly, people don't care about judging the innocence of your soul; they care about whether they'll be led into falsehood the next time they take the risk of believing what you say—if there is a next time. If you want there to be a next time and you're going to have social emotions about it, the most productive emotion is _embarrassment_ rather than defensiveness.
The function of embarrassment as a social emotion is as a signal of appeasement and social repair: embarrassment says, "I'm aware that I've become visible in a socially undesirable way; please don't take it as representative of me."
-The socially undesirable appearance can come apart from any intended or actual wrongdoing. Jewish law has a concept of [_marit ayin_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marit_ayin), "appearance to the eye": the law prohibits actions that would themselves be permissible if they didn't create the appearance of a prohibited act. Hanging up wet clothes on the sabbath is prohibited, because it looks like you were doing laundry (even if the clothes actually got wet for some other reason). The purpose of the _marit ayin_ doctrine is at least twofold: we want to avoid creating confusion about what the norms are (as someone who sees others hanging wet clothes on the sabbath might infer that it's OK to do laundry), and we want to deny plausible deniability to norm-violators (as someone might try to do laundry on the sabbath if they felt secure that no one would punish them for merely hanging up the wet clothes).
+The socially undesirable appearance can come apart from any intended or actual wrongdoing. Jewish law has a concept of [_marit ayin_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marit_ayin), "appearance to the eye": the law prohibits actions that would themselves be permissible if they didn't create the appearance of a prohibited act. Hanging up wet clothes to dry on the sabbath is prohibited, because it looks like you were doing laundry on the sabbath (even if the clothes actually got wet for some other reason). One of the purposes of the _marit ayin_ doctrine is to deny plausible deniability to norm-violators (as someone might try to do laundry on the sabbath if they felt secure that no one would punish them for merely hanging up the wet clothes). Those who want to be known for keeping the sabbath [need to pay a price that's more expensive for sabbath-violators to pay](/blog/2026/Aug/so-you-dont-trust-me/); if you care about maintaining the norm itself, it shouldn't be much extra trouble for you to furthermore care about maintaining the appearance of the norm.
-One time, I accidentally joined a work call unmuted while my housemate was playing a loud video game. I was deeply embarrassed, because it _looked like_ I was playing video games during work hours. I think my _marit ayin_-like embarrassment was serving a useful socio-psychological function, even though it was my housemate's game and I was in fact totally innocent in my soul. If I were the sort of person who wasn't embarrassed by that, I think my manager and coworkers would have good reason to doubt my committment to productively working from home.
+One time, I accidentally joined a work call unmuted while my housemate was playing a loud video game. I was deeply embarrassed, because it _looked like_ I was playing video games during work hours. I think my _marit ayin_-like embarrassment was serving a useful socio-psychological function, even though it was my housemate's game and I was in fact totally innocent in my soul. If I were the sort of person who wasn't embarrassed by that, I think my manager and coworkers would have good reason to doubt my commitment to productively working from home.
Similarly, people who are visibly embarrassed after having accidentally misled people can be counted on to work hard to make sure that people won't regret believing them next time. Defensive people won't, because, well, why would they? They didn't do anything wrong.
(Recounting this seven years later, I went back and downloaded the PDF. Excluding the title page and the endnotes, it was six pages.)
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+⁂
Another time, a journalist wrote an article paraphrasing a source as saying that it "could be unfair" for journalists to discuss "both critics and supporters" of some controversial public figure and that they should instead "somehow prove statistically which side was right." I was familiar with the source's work, and the paraphrase didn't sound like something she would say. When I had occasion to talk to the same journalist three years later, I remembered that line from the article and asked the source about it. She told me that she recalled telling the journalist that she "wasn't a huge fan of 'both sides' journalism, where you just find someone with one opinion and someone with the other opinion" rather than trying to figure out the truth; she had gone on to give suggestions for data sources that might bear on claims about the public figure.
I still think this episode _looks bad for him_ and that he should have been _embarrassed_, because there should have been generalizable policy changes that could have prevented this class of error—perhaps, thinking more carefully about whether a paraphrase that makes a subject look unreasonable is truly a fair paraphrase before going to print with it. Potential sources deciding whether they should talk to the journalist are mostly worried about the risk that their views will end up being miscommunicated, not whose fault a miscommunication would be if it happened. Unlucky accidents do not impinge upon the innocence of one's soul under the moral law, but the moral law is unmercifully permissive about everyone else's right to _avoid unlucky people_.
+
### Higher Innocence
And that's why accidentally misleading people should be embarrassing: because the desire to avoid such embarrassment motivates a counterfactual reduction in such incidents of people being misled, notwithstanding that it was a totally unintentional accident and the speaker is perfectly innocent in their soul.
That's the conclusion of the post. Thanks for reading!
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+... or that's how I'd prefer to end the post, with a message of absolution and hope. Absolution—that those whose actions have propagated falsehood need not question what we know to be true of our souls. And hope—that we all might learn to do better in the future. There's just one little nuance that continues to haunt me, that I could not, unfortunately, end the post without explaining. (Not because I didn't try, but because my prereader Said Achmiz didn't let me get away with it.) Just a tiny subtlety, almost irrelevant, really, affecting almost none of the logic except to clarify that _souls aren't real._
+
+Souls aren't real and _accidents aren't real._ I've been writing this post to try to get through to people who are incapable of noticing when they've been misleading because they're terrified of [judgment and social punishment](/blog/2025/Oct/the-relationship-between-social-punishment-and-shared-maps/). When you point out to them that their words led reasonable readers to walk away with the wrong model, they double-triple-quadruple down on playing dumb, insisting that they weren't _lying_, and that even if readers ended up being more wrong, it wouldn't be any substantial evidence against their integrity. This post has been trying to offer these people some moral absolution (which I don't care about one way or the other) in exchange for orienting towards the problem that I actually care about (of creating accurate shared maps): to say, look, I believe that you weren't _lying_, I believe that you're innocent in your soul, but the part where reasonable readers walk way with the wrong model is _still a problem you should care about_, even if it was an accident.
-... or that's how I'd prefer to end the post, with a message of absolution and hope. Absolution—that those whose actions have propagated falsehood need not question what we know to be true of our souls. And hope—that we all might learn to do better in the future. There's just one little nuance that continues to haunt me, that I could not, unfortunately, end the post without explaining. (Not because I didn't try, but because my prereader Said Achmiz wouldn't let me get away with it.) Just a tiny subtlety, almost irrelevant, really, affecting almost none of the logic except to clarify that _souls aren't real._
+But _was_ it an accident? Was it, really? [It is written](https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Twelve-Virtues-Of-Rationality) that the one who wishes to believe asks, "Does the evidence permit me to believe?" while the one who wishes to disbelieve asks, "Does the evidence force me to believe?" If you have a [bottom line](https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Bottom-Line) that you want to believe, and you go around looking for evidence that permits you to believe it, I really have to question in what sense it's an "accident" if you end up misleading people towards your bottom line.
-Souls aren't real! [TODO: finish real ending]
+It's surely an accident in _some_ sense. The browser bug really wasn't my fault. But if I was too lazy to read six pages to check when it was my rival, but would have read the six pages if it had been my ally, that's a reason people _should_ be suspicious when I claim that my rivals did something wrong. I wasn't lying, and that's a _kind_ of innocence, but the cold light of "Six pages? Really?" makes me want to aspire to a higher form of innocence.
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff