Perhaps Raymond Smullyan’s dichotomy has more basis in reality than we thought. Here comes the Science: psychology researchers scanned people’s brains as they were giving their predictions for coin flips (having told the subjects they were researching psychic powers), in situations where they had the opportunity to lie and when they didn’t. The purpose was to test competing theories of honesty: whether the honest are able to muster up the will (aka executive function) to resist temptation, or if they are blessed with undeserved grace from such temptation. Turns out its the latter. If you feel bad for having lust in your heart for what ain’t yours to have, it is rightly so for you are not one of the elect, you bad person you. We can then deduce that Jesus was never actually tempted, although that’s possibly overdetermined as he might never have existed in the first place. Bryan Caplan will be happy to hear another swipe at the so-called fundamental attribution error.
July 14, 2009
Entitled to an Opinion 
July 15, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I don’t think you’re accurately and adequately conveying the findings of the study.
The researchers found that people who tended to be dishonest DID show signs of specific frontal-lobe activation in the cases when they were honest. It’s just that people who were characteristically honest (on this topic) did not show such signs of a struggle with conscience.
The virtue of honesty exists only in the presence of temptation.
July 15, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Dishonest people also showed high activity when they won in Opportunity trials. Though it was lower than when they lost in such trials, it was higher than in the No Opportunity trials. “The fact that they fail more often than they succeed explains why the network is active in trials where they end up lying as well as those few where they successfully resist.”
Are you saying that characteristically honest people do not possess the virtue of honesty? Sounds odd to me.
July 16, 2009 at 10:54 am
I strongly suspect that, if you could sort challenges and challengers so that people would be exposed only to situations where they were seriously tempted to lie, you’d find that frontal activation was the key signature of those conditions.
People who are characteristically honest likely do not feel that lying is in their interests most of the time. That is not the same thing as choosing to be honest even when lying would be in at least some of your interests.
July 18, 2009 at 11:10 am
sounds in line with the big five trait of agreeableness–people are distributed along a bell curve for this trait, the very disagreeable being cynical and the very agreeable being idealistic, and its apparently pretty hard to change your personality.
July 18, 2009 at 12:52 pm
I think it is the conscientious trait rather than agreeableness.
July 20, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Unfortunately for my aesthetically favorite theory of christianity, it seems Jesus never existed, based on the weak Nth derivative source of Bill Maher’s religulous, where at one point he runs down the hodge podge of preexisting myths Jesus seems to be derived from. I’m curious what the primary sources are, because if the background information is as clear in them, there seems to me to be very little chance Jesus or many of the other key contemporary characters in his narrative existed in the time and place they’re situated.
July 20, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Nice to hear from you again. I know you’re into Goffman, so here’s a post at The Sociological Imagination on him. I don’t hang out at Less Wrong much, but I did recently steal one of your ideas on existential risk minimization there. I don’t think they cared for it much.
What is your aesthetic favorite? Personally, I like the one found in Koenraad Elst’s Psychology of Prophetism. It tries to use psychology and literary analysis to distinguish standard mythical tropes from real witness accounts. Eliezer implicitly recommended that of Hyam Maccoby, which also presumes that the “real Jesus” has been misrepresented. Funny enough, I just left off Pinker’s Stuff of Thought right after he discussed what we mean by “Who was the real Shakespeare?”.
Eliezer discussed the incorrect history in the book of Exodus here.
July 24, 2009 at 7:38 am
“You speak excellent Russian,”remarked Bezdomny.
“Oh, I’m something of a polyglot. I know a great number of languages,” replied the professor.
“And what is your particular field of work?” asked Berlioz.
“I specialise in black magic.”
“Like hell you do!…” thought Mikhail Alexandrovich.
“And…and you’ve been invited here to give advice on that?” he
asked with a gulp.
“Yes,” the professor assured him, and went on: “Apparently your National Library has unearthed some original manuscripts of the ninth-century necromancer Herbert Aurilachs. I have been asked to decipher them. I am the only specialist in the world.”
“Aha! So you’re a historian?” asked Berlioz in a tone of considerable
relief and respect.
“Yes, I am a historian,” adding with apparently complete inconsequence,”this evening a historic event is going to take place here at Patriarch’s Ponds.’
Again the editor and the poet showed signs of utter amazement, but the professor beckoned to them and when both had bent their heads towards him he whispered :
“Jesus did exist, you know.”
– Mikhail Bulgakov, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA
October 4, 2009 at 2:57 am
Hi boardies,,