Terry Jones

OK, this has nothing to do with calculus, but I wanted a short title. Better would have been On the monotonically decreasing incentive to keep secrets, etc.

If you have a secret and you tell someone, it makes no sense to tell them they can’t tell anyone else.

Let’s say there are 2 kinds of secrets you might be tempted to pass along: a) those that are more important to the receiver than they are to you (e.g., you just found out that X is sleeping with your friend Y’s partner and you’re considering telling Y), and b) those that are less important to the receiver than they are to you.

Clearly it doesn’t make much sense to tell the receiver in class (a) that they can’t tell anyone. They probably have less incentive to be telling people than you do, they’re closer to the source than you are, and perhaps the information is “theirs” more than it is “yours”. Things like that.

But it doesn’t make sense to tell the receiver in class (b) that they can’t tell anyone either. That’s because it’s unreasonable to expect them to keep something secret that you’re not keeping secret when it’s even less important to them than it is to you. Even if you swear them to secrecy, as you may have been sworn to secrecy, you can’t rationally expect them to keep the secret.

Most secrets fall into class (b).

The rational and responsible conclusion is that either you decide that the buck stops with you and you don’t pass it on, OR you decide to pass it on, in the full knowledge that you are actively spreading the secret, and in fact lowering the barrier to it spreading more widely. At the very least, have the intellectual honesty not to preface the secret telling with “you can’t tell anyone about this…”

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