Editing Hypocrisy is the Worst Crime

A frequent thing you'll hear from people is that they respect someone that does what they say, even if it's not what they want done. The person who says one thing and does another is beloved to few, unless they're explicitly in on the con.

Often this means that [[Blog/2024-10-16/Watch Out For Purists|people are purists]] about subjects and will subscribe to the strongest interpretation of [[The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics]]. Now, [[wikipedia:Homo economicus|a rational human]] would choose the following ordering from most desirable to least desirable:

# Someone <math>100%</math> aligned and honest about it
# Someone <math>0<x<100%</math> aligned who claims to be aligned <math>x < y \le 100%</math>
# Someone who is unaligned and honest about it

But most people act as if they prefer to flip the last two. In pure isolation, with no repeated interactions, and full comprehension of the amount of alignment, one should prefer the somewhat aligned person just to get a better result. But those are artificial conditions.

In practice, since almost all action in any war is along the frontier, the most dangerous people are those you allow past the frontier since they can hurt you from behind. It makes sense, in a moral disagreement, therefore that straightforwardness is rewarded. After all, you hope that this means that the dishonest can more easily be detected, and the dishonest are the most dangerous.

[[Category:Concepts]]