Given my Axiomatic Deontology and Ethics I value truth highly. My lack of Social Salience means I have no Shame and my identity is not tied to facts about me. I am willing to accept non-flattering true statements without any stress. I will reject untrue statements about me (good or bad).

I can be blunt: I will say things that I believe are true without regard for the receiver’s feelings – without social saliency I don’t know what their feelings are. To me a lie is data corruption. I will not willingly say it.

Lies of Omission

I don’t feel a need to tell every fact to everyone. If I think not knowing a fact would cause harm to somebody I will tell them.

I have some heuristics that I manually apply to avoid some social friction, e.g. don’t tell somebody they are fat. These do not have anywhere close to full coverage and their manual application means I do slip up (and not know it).

I would rather not say something that say something false.

White Lies

NT people tell white lies for social lubrication – it isn’t even perceived as a lie.

I do not use white lies. I might not say anything at all, but if I do say it, it will be true or at the very least not false. Sometimes in social situations I can say “I am going to finish my walk now” or “I am going in to have tea” when the truth is “I want to leave now”. In those cases I will finish my walk or have tea, but it is a bit of misdirection for social friction reasons.

Secrets

In my ethics Rule 2: Ownership is higher priority than Rule 3: Truth. If I do not own the data I will not reveal it.

In fact, I may lie to conceal it and I don’t feel this is wrong. For example, if there is a fact X about my work and somebody asks me if X is true I could say:

• I can’t talk about that
• I don’t know anything about that

If I actually do know about X then the first statement confirms that X is a thing and I have revealed part of the secret. I would prefer to use the second statement, which is false, to not leak information.

If the data was something I owned, say my SSN, and somebody who doesn’t need it asked me for it I would say “I won’t tell you that”. This is perhaps more the realm of Privacy than Secrecy, but I don’t need to conceal the fact that I know what my SSN is.

Facts

“Facts” are any piece of data. They are usually associated with something: a thing, a system, or a person. In the real world facts tend to be a bit fuzzy – they might be true, they might be false, and you might not know. This is a bit about Memory and mostly about how I think I organize information in my brain. This is probably different than how NT people organize their brain because we have different ways of using the information.

Some researchers suggest that people with literal viewpoints would be unable to process false facts. That is untrue, or at least I am able to process them.

Facts that I consume are graded as to their veracity, perhaps with:

• false
• probably false
• unknown (50/50)
• probably true
• true

Even true is really “believed to be true”. When I consume facts I associate them with entities and whatever metadata I can remember. For example:

• X told me that they believe there are UFOs (probably false – but wish was true!)
• I observed Y consuming cheese (true)
• Y likes cheese (probably true)
• Z stated (true) that the world is flat (false)

It doesn’t have to be “facts” per se, knowing opinions (likes and dislikes) are also facts in the sense that they are pieces of data.

I will not accept facts for my own viewpoint with less than unknown status:

• there might be such a thing as ghosts (unknown)
• I like cheese (true, provably)
• avoiding a lot of carbs is a good idea (probably true – diet information seems to change every year!)

I can handle negative facts:

• the world is not flat (true)

If I were to find out that a fact in my own viewpoint is false I would discard it or switch it to a negative fact. These facts are not tied to my identity and I feel no Shame in discovering they are wrong – I prefer knowing the truth, even when it isn’t a truth I like and it is about me.

Hard Truths

A concrete example: if an NT person told me that I am cold-hearted and have no empathy I would evaluate that for truth. At the very least that person believes it. Upon self reflection I would likely decide that:

• I appear cold-hearted to NT observers (likely true)
• I have no affective empathy (true)
• unknown to NT observers I have no capacity for preventing either of these (likely true)
• I don’t feel cold-hearted (true)
• I do Care about people but perhaps not in a recognizable way (true)

These are hard truths and do not paint me in a good light (though the third point indicates why it is so). I have no problem ingesting this – indeed it is useful for me to know it. There may be cases where I have to explain to another person why I am behaving this way.

Handling Opinions and Fuzzy Facts

I process information literally. I am typically careful about how I state things to indicate their veracity. For example:

• X (true) -> “X”
• X (probably true) -> “I think X”, “maybe we should X”
• X (unknown 50/50) -> “maybe X”, “I wonder if X?”
• X (probably false) -> “possibly X”

If I need to state something that is false I would be very clear on why I am saying it and what I actually believe. For example, sometimes it is easier to get a point across if you exaggerate the magnitude. I might say “I am exaggerating for effect to make my point clearer: X” (X is being misrepresented, not necessarily false).

This is sort of code review wording – some of programming is absolute but a lot is opinion or “best” practices. You need to be careful when giving feedback to indicate if it is something they must do or that they should do or even just think about it. I use a similar approach in real life.

There are cases where I might use these softening phrases to reduce social friction. For example, in a meeting with a lot of people it is often counterproductive to correct somebody with a direct and forceful statement (you are wrong, it is X not Y) even if X is known true. Instead, you can ask a question: “I wonder if X might be the case?” You can state it as an opinion: “I think X might fit better here.” You need to weigh the immediate feedback against correcting it later in a 1:1 situation as well. I don’t have any instinct here, it is just learned heuristics from having made the forceful statement too many times.

Sometimes I am sloppy with my qualifying statements. If the stakes are low I may present something as true (no softening) when it is only likely true. I will also omit the softening language if what is being stated is an opinion and I believe it is clear that it is the case, e.g. “cheese is very tasty” can’t be mistaken for an absolute fact.

NT Experience

NT people typically do not use softening language to indicate that they are unsure of a fact. They are more concerned with social cohesion than the details. There are situations where it is important of course.

For NT people softening language is a social tool indicating intellectual humility. If they phrase things as a question they are trying to build consensus.