Hacker News Reader

Radical honesty is considered abuse, especially when your observations are 100% empirically true and spot-on and everyone can see it including the person targeted.

They wrote about this problem 3000 years ago. "Correct a fool and he will hate you, correct a wise man and he will love you".

View on HN

Also Kant wrote about it quite a bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant#Moral_philosophy

I think you have come up with a great criteria for deciding when to be honest.

As someone who has lived a very honest life I can say with confidence, it doesn't work. It's made my life less happy, not more. I still do it out of habit, and also for the feeling of moral superiority I get, but if anything I am thinking about being less honest rather than more so. It just creates too many problems, especially if you are an entrepreneur or business person.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com