But my Bayesian prior is that when the doctor is trying to shoot me, s/he's trying to kill me.
And when an economist is lying to me, they're trying to defraud / manipulate me.
And I think that economist situation is pretty similar in that regard in the long term.
Since multiple people have thought my point hinges on whether the example is reasonable, let me reconstruct the argument given in the post.
1. It's always morally unacceptable for a doctor to lie to a patient, regardless of his / her reasons for doing so.
2. The economist's profession is like that of the doctor in certain important respects: "The central problem with allowing for, and consenting to, any untruthfulness is that it undermines essential trust between professionals of the field and the rest of us."
3. Therefore pro-social lying by economists is wrong (just as it's wrong in the case of the doctor).
I think the claims in the article rely quite heavily on our intuition that it's never acceptable for a doctor to lie to us, even for "prosocial" reasons. (We don't have such intuitions for economists, apparently, and that's why our intuitions about doctors are so important for the argument.)
But this claim is basically not defended, and my point is that it's very easy to come up with cases in which it's not only morally acceptable for a doctor to lie to you, but in fact might be morally obligatory. This means that the argument fails.
The fact that the argument fails doesn't mean that it is okay (in any real life situation) for a doctor (or an economist) to lie to you. But the fact that the argument fails is something worth noting, I think, in comments about the article.
Your claim it's "very easy" to come up with examples would have convinced me more if you hadn't relied on the extremely contrived example of a cancer that would kill you if and only if you knew you had it. That made me think you had really struggled a lot to come up with realistic examples.
I don't find that easy at all. That is the thing, all those doctors examples are either super unlikely to ever happen or happen due to non-medical reason. I mean, ok, if I am SS man and it is WWII and doctor is saving someone ... but I don't live in country with current genocide and the core issue is not doctor specific.
The doctors in fact used to routinely lie to patient and family to "protect" their feelings. In generation of my parents/grandparents, the doctor would not tell you about bad prognosis. And that generation do not trust doctors when they tell them it is going to be ok.
Current doctors (at least here) are routinely acting more confident then they should when they are more of guessing. Or they just don't explain. And result is predictable - people turn to internet and word of mount from friends to fill the gaps.
Markets don’t react to mere knowledge of them, like in your magical thought experiment.
Markets react to actions determined not by the knowledge itself but by discrete reactions to the knowledge called thoughts.
If economists hadn’t given up on knowledge oh about a century ago or so, we might not be so addicted to this pattern of spiraling anti-intellect.
My comparison is intentionally exaggerated. The post claims that it doesn't matter what reason the doctor has for telling you a lie, that it's just obviously wrong. I think this is ludicrous. If it's sometimes permissible for a doctor to lie, then it might also be permissible for an economist to lie.
I don't really follow the rest of what you're claiming, perhaps because you're responding to some point that I haven't made. In particular you seem to have a bone to pick with economists, and this is very vague:
> Markets react to actions determined not by the knowledge itself but by discrete reactions to the knowledge called thoughts.
You're writing this as if everybody knows what you're referring to, but I really don't. What are you referring to? What does it mean for someone to "give up on knowledge"?
Neither is an academic economist that passively permits government officials to lie using scientific language.
The issue here is not the lying. The issue is the status of economics as a science. Once that status is gone, no one is obliged to listen to them any more than astrologists.
> Just as doctors must be honest, so too must we. Deception is not always wrong – there are extraordinary cases when we understand a doctor’s need to lie. I imagine doctors overstate their confidence to children before a particularly complicated surgery. Sometimes – very rarely – it may be the best option among only very bad options. Deception should be a last resort, not the rule. As we look to the future, the field of economics must cease it’s cavalier compliance with lying – even with perceived prosocial lying.
I find this statement rather odd and clearly incompatible with the very specific claim that "we fervently and unequivocally condemn deceit of any kind in the medical field". Well, do we or don't we?
In any case, you're correct that the article taken as a whole is a bit more careful. In my comment I'm telescoping in a bit on the one claim about doctors and the role our intuitions about honesty in the medical field are supposed to play in the argument.
Yes, of course it matters! Suppose there was a rare form of brain cancer that could only kill you if you found out you had it. In that case we would rapidly rethink what medical ethics requires of doctors. Surely it would not be beyond the pale to argue that a doctor is not only ethically in the clear to not tell you that you had this form of cancer, but in fact might have a moral obligation not to tell you.
This is exactly the position some people believe that economists are in vis-à-vis markets. Markets are basically dumb amalgamations of human choices and sometimes react to information pathologically. According to the argument, certain people have an obligation to project confidence in the market if that will lead to better outcomes, even if logically the market should start ignoring you if it expects that you'd lie.
I don't know whether I buy the argument or not, but it's certainly not stupid!