The line between truth and lies is becoming ever murkier, finds Melissa Hogenboom. There's even a new word for a very different form of lying.
Yep, gotcha covered :
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2017/06/on-bullshit.html
It is no secret that politicians often lie, but consider this – they can do so simply by telling the truth. Confused?
No. You obviously didn't read my article. Silly BBC !
Misleading by "telling the truth" is so pervasive in daily life that a new term has recently been coined to describe it: paltering. That it is so widespread in society now gives us more insight into the grey area between truth and lies, and perhaps even why we lie at all.
Well... I suppose I will concede the need for the term since it's a) acceptable in polite society and b) a specific subset of the greater realm of bullshit.
When Todd Rogers and his colleagues were looking at how often politicians dodge questions during debates they realised something else was going on. By stating another truthful fact, they could get out of answering a question. They could even imply something was truthful when it was not. Politicians do this all the time, says Rogers, a behavioural scientist at Harvard Kennedy School. He and colleagues therefore set out to understand more about it.
He found that paltering was an extremely common tactic of negotiation. Over half the 184 business executives in his study admitted to using the tactic. The research also found that the person doing the paltering believed it was more ethical than lying outright. The individuals who had been deceived, however, did not distinguish between lying and paltering. "It probably leads to too much paltering as communicators think that when disclosed, it will be somewhat ethical, whereas listeners see it as a lie," says Rogers.
It is also difficult to spot a misleading "fact" when we hear something that on the face of it, sounds true. For instance, the UK's Labour Party campaign video to lower the voting age said: "You're 16. Now you can get married, join the Army, work full-time." The BBC's reality check team discovered that these facts do not tell the whole truth.
Well, here we enter a very murky grey area between legitimate simplification and wilful deception. Technically, the BBC's caveats are correct. But are they actually relevant to the point being made ? I don't think so.
Lying can and does clearly serve a devious social purpose. It can help someone paint a better picture than the truth, or help a politician dodge an uncomfortable question. "It's unethical and it makes our democracy worse. But it's how human cognition works," says Rogers.
Unfortunately, the prevalence of lies might stem from the way we are brought up. Lies play a role in our social interactions from a very young age. We tell young children about tooth fairies and Santa, or encourage a child to be grateful for an unwanted present. "We give our kids very mixed messages," says Feldman. "What they ultimately learn is that even though honesty is the best policy, it's also at times fine and preferable to lie about things."
To an extent. But my parents brought me up to believe in Santa et al. and it didn't led me to mistrust them. And I haven't become the proverbial used car salesman either. It's not telling lies/paltering or whatever that's bad, it's the intent behind them.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171114-the-disturbing-art-of-lying-by-telling-the-truth
indeed...but adding the terms truth and lie is itself paltering :P.
ReplyDeleteIn reality we have two different approaches to communication that the language binds together. The first one is emotional- in this case one addresses the emotions of the peers mostly by providing one-sided arguments or incomplete(from rethorical point of view) statements. This is directly derived from the "data" you are transmitting. Emotion is not multi-faceted. It is impulsive, single sided and extremely powerful. Emotions enable the individual by twisting the environment. You can look at it as shifting the point of balance by manipulating the lever which if we are in a physically coherent context(non mentally ill person) automatically transitions into a bigger weight(on your end). This happens because the lever manipulation is fictional, an input that most of the people do not reassess, while reality is factual. The latter leads to behavioral drifts where the sequential iterations on a topic are used to realize/factualise the initial input which at same time resolving the obvious conflict.
People that are mature enough to deal with their emotions are mostly immune to that type of exchanges since they have personalities that are both complex and experienced enough to doubt themselves and not go full throttle on confirmation bias as a way to fit a socially acceptable image of themselves.
The other type of communication is factual- in this case one focuses of on causation and functionality and not that much on the outcome. Such exchanges are mostly enabled in contexts where most of the people agree about the desired outcomes(the plane must be able to fly for example). The latter does not serve as a fundamental for an uniform group exchange, but provides more factual and balanced arguments which are not disputed on emotional/moral grounds.
Both approaches have their constructive and destructive parts in regards of the end outcome. They are both interchangeable since we can not separate people from their emotions both as individuals and groups. We observe however a prevailing emotional exchange with larger groups(even in technical domains where factual exchanges are both encouraged and desired). The smaller groups tend to focus on factual exchanges.
Approaching group dynamics from that point of view, it is interesting to observed the growth of groups in both non-contested and contested environments. I lack the proper background to dig into details, but there is definitely a trend that can be interpolated to the initial constrains internal for observed groups. We see how with the time growth tends to synthesize the core constrains(or values) of a group transforming hidden intentions to dogmatic restrictions.
If people were honest with themselves, they'd find that there's not a fine line between lying and telling the truth.
ReplyDeleteDo you intend to mislead with your communication? Then, you are lying. Even if you believe you are doing it for the benefit if others.
What's grey is if this is ever justified. Do you lie to children to keep them from tasting poison that might not kill them, but will make them sick?
Jordan Henderson people need to be lied. I understand your moral stand, but if we are to be honest to ourselves, morals, especially the way they are publicly promoted, are one big dream we all try to live up to- a lie about who we are for the sake of who we want to be.
ReplyDeleteAt the end our own impression about ourselves mostly reflects our relation/interpretation to the personal failure to do so.
May I make an Old Man Noise here? Thanks.
ReplyDeleteNobody learns Rhetoric anymore. In some better schools, there's a Debate Team, those are good. But I just got through Rhys' On Bullshit again and came to the same conclusions: learning to spot bullshit is a fundamental survival skill. Consider all this blethering about the Russians seeding agitprop on Facebook and Twitter. The appalling part isn't that the Russians are doing it, the appalling part is that people believe this bullshit.
True story. My cousin was coming back from Cambodia with his four children for Xmas. They'd all be staying at my parents' house, so I was dragooned into buying Xmas presents for four young children, two days before the Blessed Event of the Birth of our Lord and Saviour the Bebby Jeezus.
So I'm standing in this very long line at Walmart, behind a tiresome little boy and his harried mother. The boy is hectoring his mother: "What's Santa gonna get me for Xmas this year? He'd better get me [insert several very expensive toys here] " Nasty little prat.
Finally the woman leaves her cart and the boy in line with us.
"You know, young man," I told the boy, "I've gotten word that Santa may not come at all this year."
"Of course Santa's gonna come." snarled the boy, "He always comes at Xmas."
"You haven't heard?" I said "Last year, Santa was coming down a chimney in Detroit and someone mistook him for a burglar and shot him."
At this the boy became alarmed.
"Oh, but he survived. He spent several months in hospital and Mrs. Claus had to drive down from the North Pole and get him. And in the meantime, he'd developed a bad attitude as people so often do when they've been in hospital...."
By this time, everyone in line was listening to this, some laughing, as this doughy little boy stood there, his jaw gaped open in despair....
"So finally they got Santa back up to the North Pole but the elves hadn't been doing anything. And Santa took up drinking schnapps with the Chief Elf in the afternoon and production went all to hell. And Mrs. Claus left him over his drinking. Then the RCMP caught Santa driving drunk and took his licence away. His lawyer says he might get it back in time for Xmas, but I have my doubts, the Canadian courts are very strict...."
The mother finally got back from finding whatever it was Young Hellion wanted, rushed up to me and yelled "You horrible, horrible man!" Everyone else in line is laughing.
Then Young Hellion asks his mother "If Santa got a DUI he's not coming, is he?"
Terry Pratchett put forward the concept of "lies to children" in another context : education. You don't start off by teaching children about general relativity or the quantum model of the atom because they wouldn't understand it - they'd learn nothing, or possibly even gain negative knowledge. The lies aren't about engendering behaviour in that context, they're about teaching. And in that field, at least, I think they are not merely justified but absolutely essential.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor I had my own theory about Lies to Children, modified from Pratchett.
ReplyDeleteMy children reached their Why Stage and never left it. They'd ask a question, in the car, going somewhere - I'd answer it. Sometimes it took a half an hour, between all the intermediate questions. And this is what I'd said about quantum theory:
What's the smallest thing in the world? It's a hydrogen atom. It's the smallest thing you can point to and say "It's here and not there". There are smaller particles which make up atoms, but this Here-and-not-There thing is very important and very weird. And the more you study it the weirder it gets because things don't work the same way at smaller scales than the atom and it has bugged the scientists for a very long time now. Furthermore, there are ways of describing these things but they all involve lots of math.
With a kid, if you're not sure of how much the kid knows, turn the question around: "Tell me about that question." Oh they'll tell you. Then you get to fill in the blanks. And always ask "Was that enough explanation?" Persistent little buggers.
Rhys Taylor if your intent in teaching is to get the student to understand, then it's not lying.
ReplyDeleteYou must have intent to lie.
People are all too ready to accuse religious texts of lying when they appear to give cosmological or developmental models that are in variance with present understanding, but think nothing of telling their children stories that are strictly speaking untrue, but seen as necessary to their development.
Jordan Henderson As one of those goddish people who sent his children to Sunday School and turned one of them into a mathematician, I explained the religious texts angle like this:
ReplyDeleteThe Bible isn't one book, it's 66 smaller books. Many of these stories come to us from the late Bronze Age. Some of these stories appear in other religions, too, for instance, Noah and the Flood. It's not a cosmology textbook.
If God is a God of Truth, we should be constantly seeking better explanations than the ones we were given. Any God who demands belief in things which aren't true is not worth worshipping, in any event. And there are some odd bits the author of Genesis guessed at, the creation of light, life began in the sea, moved to the land, that man was created very late in the story.
So we had a friend over from Germany, Gisela, nice girl, one of these New Age types, astrology and suchlike. My son, I guess he was eight at the time, scornfully told her "Magic tries to control the world. Science tries to understand the world. That's why science will always win." I'm pretty sure he was quoting Simon Schama, we had recently watched one of this things on television a few weeks before.
It's okay to preface any explanation you tell a child - or anyone else for that matter - with this statement. "The short explanation I'm about to give you is simplistic to the point of error." Pratchett, Cohen and Stuart's Lies to Children aren't really lies, nor is a simplistic explanation. All the simple answers to life's questions are wrong. Telling a child that God created the world in seven days is more than wrong. It isn't true at any level.
Pratchett has a great bit in Hogfather about how we teach the Little Lies so as to prepare our children to believe the Big Lies, about Justice and Mercy and Duty and how there's sposta be some fundamental rightness and order in the universe - Justice and Mercy is what the Bible teaches, or we're supposed to teach our children out of the Bible. Not cosmology.
Dan Weese I guess that besides getting cynical, which sometimes gets too hard even for my sarcastic and ironic stand, I have never grown up. I tend to spiral the question-answer exchanges that start with the "Tell me about that question" into rhetorical behemoths. Sometimes I see the sparks of despair in the person that tries to explain, which forces me to end the game, but sometimes when I do not it can get really nasty(especially on some topics I am traversing recently).
ReplyDeleteIt takes a lot of experience to keep up with a grown up that got raised in the way you described above.
Tim Stoev I have this little jokey aside I've used times without number. Kid turns in a book report. "This book told me more about penguins than I ever wanted to know."
ReplyDeleteWith a kid, keep it conversational. They thrive on conversation and will glaze over at lecture.
yep agile is the way..the problem is to hold the stack of open ends...it can get really hairy if you get into yourself and not the exchange.
ReplyDeleteTim Stoev ... and there comes a point somewhere along the line, where I always say "My brain hurts." If the kid wants to talk, that's great. My old man was a preacher. He said if you can't get a sermon out in 15 minutes, prune it back or turn it into two sermons. Nobody's built to put up with Extended Soliloquies.
ReplyDeletePeople get all twisted around the axle on Being Right. Most of the time, that sort of drama is more annoying that some poor uninformed jamoke being wrong.
Dan Weese
ReplyDelete"Justice and Mercy is what the Bible teaches.."
nope this is what social experience and population size and complexity evolution teaches..the Bible simply summarizes the experience and then re-brands it to make some other statements more credible.
As mentioned in the OP, you never lie about everything- that will make you look like a narcissistic maniac, you tell the small truths so that you can make the bug lies digestible.
The Pratchett's approach is a bit more cynical since he envisions a system built entirely of lies as a way for self-definition which is true in the context of an individual.
When we try to address a social trend however, small lies tend compile and build up, but due to their dependence on a context rarely build into a coherent structure. Going for small truths however is far more effective. They are also context depending and when scaled end in contradictions, but as long as you(as storyteller) manage that scaling. The story gets virtually impossible to penetrate.
The binder used back then and now is emotional highs and lows, which create a low carbon steel alike nano structure. It can melt, but not break, it can bend, but not shatter.
Tim Stoev Religious ethics are tough to separate from Social Experience. Some truths have to wear the clunky old armour of Myth to survive the long centuries. I genially view every attempt to dissect Religion away from Culture as a lost cause.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely agree. Religion as an informational construct is a social-cultural phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteWith the time it had however transformed in a culture on its own, moving away from moral and social accountability while replacing those with dogma and compliance.
That to be said I am not a anti-theist. Belief is a fundamental human right, institutionalizing it however...well we all know the stories :(
Tim Stoev I question even that assertion. Religion asks some exceedingly tough questions and is constantly morphing.
ReplyDeleteThe Bible does teach us about Justice and Mercy and Duty. All this pseudo-metaphysical-cosmogoogological hooey about Social Experience and Complexity Evolution, trying to reduce religion to a parody of itself is just a brazen donkey wearing a mangy old lion skin. Might convince some people at a distance, but let it open its mouth and try to roar, it gives itself away.
Religion is a big nothing, it's just a framework upon which we hang all that is sacred to us. Doesn't bother me that others don't believe, call it a weakness, I can't get past faith. But if I ran this planet, Emperor Dan would only have atheists on his staff. Keep the Dogmatic Bullshit to a bare minimum.
That last comment was really confusing, so I may be responding to myself here, so excuse me in advance if I overshot the topic.
ReplyDeleteI am approaching religion in a different way. I do not believe that things exist without good reasons.
Those reasons may have changed over time making the existence an empty shell kept as a posture, but this is really difficult to judge for me. One of the biggest mistakes one can make addressing history is failing to put him/herself in the correct time frame(with the construction of the pyramids being a nice example...if you do not have a crane, it must have been the aliens)
I can try and use my understanding to analyse the past while using the relevant time frame as a context, I can use those analyses to assess the future while assuming alternative time frames and drifts as a solution space, but in the present I can only decide which possible future I will trace, and how I will render the inconsistencies coming with the assumptions. Given that addressing religion as "big nothing" comes too harsh, too nihilistic for me.
People are complicated, beyond the point of understanding. People forming groups seem less complicated, but this is just an illusion. An individual retains and carries a unique core which can be addressed over a simple interface, while retaining its complexity.
Given that I do not like the axe approach to society(or to system refactoring in general). It feels simple, it may look feasible, but society as a construct is a strange beast- it is big, and it exists in its own dimensions. The latter makes it somewhat predictable in the short turn, but at the cost of delegating consequences in the long run. Mathematics and modelling has made a huge progress in the past couple decades, but doing multi-dimensional analyses is kind of stuck with Einstein's relativity.
I dislike radical extremists since their take on reality is too simplified...they are like weapons, which once served their purpose can be trashed, people that really believe(be it god, be it market economy, be it socialism) in something however are different story. Such people can enable exchanges, such people build bridges.
Now one needs to differentiate here, since most of the controversial topics that normally attract believers tend to introduce hooliganism as a standard for exchange, rendering such people both extremely annoying and destructive, but then nobody said it would be simple Emperor Dan :P
Tim Stoev My brain hurts.
ReplyDeleteI guess it kind of goes with the title :DDD
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor My nephews recently coined the term “mumsplaining” because when they ask a science question their mum will “explain and explain and explain and explain until you know everything or are really bored.”
ReplyDeleteAs Dan Weese said, it depends on the kid. When the boys asked how electricity works, they really wanted the explanation that began “Right. So everything is made up of atoms...” but when it came to “tree monsters” a simple “I guess they could be trees that move around, what do you think?” was actually what was needed because Mr 4 had just created a new species of monster and wanted to share the world building. Now we have a family mythos about the tree monsters that live in a local patch of wilderness (mostly friendly, but don’t annoy them at night or they will throw drop bears at you).
I don’t have a lot of patience for people who lie because the truth is too hard or complicated. Glossing over the details is different from spouting bullshit or deflecting or paltering or whatever, or it should be.
Jordan Henderson I think one most have intent to lie only insofar as one intends to tell a falsehood. I would call any time someone knowingly tells a falsehood a lie, regardless of motive. Thus lying can be moral or immoral, under that definition, but accidentally getting things wrong doesn't count as lying.
ReplyDeleteThe intent to (usually temporarily) deceive for the purposes of teaching or prevention of harm would definitely be of the moral variety.
I think if one has the intent of causing harm by deception, that's a certainly a different category of lie, but I think it would become quite complicated to try and define lying itself as having harmful intent.
"causing harm by deception" is called fraud.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor are those writing fiction liars?
ReplyDeleteHow about sarcasm? That usually involves saying something that's not true. Is that lying?
I don't see how applying the label "lie" to the fiction writer or joker helps us at all. It just tends to stigmatized unnecessarily.
If you want to say that knowingly telling any untruth is lying, fine, but it only muddies important distinctions.
It also doesn't cover "paltering" very well, which, by the way is not in any way new. It's covered under lying by evasion and lying by omission, well know categories to ethicists. These involve not saying untruths at all, but are known to be lies by their intent, if intent is revealed.
Jordan Henderson A fair point. I may have misunderstood your original comments. I had the impression that you were trying to say that it's only a lie if the intention is immoral, which I would disagree with. I'd accept that a falsehood is only a lie if the intent is for it to be believed. But within that definition, I think the point about good and bad lies stands.
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