Radical honesty

Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires, because they’re Nazis or whatever.

—Black Belt Bayesian

Radical honesty is a communication technique proposed by Brad Blanton in which discussion partners are not permitted to lie or deceive at all. Rather than being designed to enhance group epistemic rationality, radical honesty is designed to reduce stress and remove the layers of deceit that burden much of discourse.

The Radical Honesty technique includes having practitioners state their feelings bluntly and directly, even if it may be in a way typically considered impolite. Avoiding all "white lying" is said to lead to a more truthful relationship with themselves and others.

Blog posts

• Radical Honesty
• Meta Honesty by Robin Hanson
• We Don't Really Want Your Participation
• Prices or Bindings?
• Degrees of Radical Honesty by MBlume
• Honesty: Beyond Internal Truth

External links

• I Think You're Fat, a story essay about radical honesty

See also

• Crocker's rules
• Signaling
• Offense
• Corrupted hardware
• Modesty