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CronoDAS comments on Is Santa Real? - Less Wrong
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Comments (71)
Mostly because it's false, and I have a very powerful aversion to knowingly telling a falsehood (and to the general practice of doing the same).
I also hate to be lied to. I don't like "white lies" and I refuse to tell them. If you ask me "Does this dress make me look fat?" I really will give you an honest answer - and I hope that other people will do me the same favor. If I didn't want an honest answer, I wouldn't have asked in the first place.
Curious, are you proud of how difficult you find lying?
Yes. (It probably comes from playing Ultima IV during my formative years.)
I do admit to being a "truth twister" though - I won't tell false statements, but I am willing to omit relevant information, imply false conclusions, or simply refuse to answer awkward questions. (And yes, I agree that there is a certain degree of hypocrisy involved in this practice, but it serves as a reasonable workaround for my inability to lie the way other people seemingly have no trouble doing.)
It seems to me that with a complicit surrounding culture, you could get the full "santa experience" without telling any explicit lies.
"Daddy, how does Santa do X?"
"Well, some people think Y -- do you think that's a good explanation?"
and then patiently wait for the day Y is rejected as nonsense.
"A wizard may have subtle ways of telling the truth, and may keep the truth to himself, but if he says a thing the thing is as he says. For that is his mastery." -- A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Leguin
And in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, no one trusts the Aes Sedai, because after they vow to always tell the truth, they learn how to twist their words to get what they want anyway.
Someone who would tell the truth in a way that they knew would not convey the truth would not hold my trust.
This is ridiculous. A "truth twister"? This isn't hypocrisy. This is lying. To yourself, mostly. Unless you live in a cave, you tell white lies every day. Ever say Good Afternoon when you didn't feel like it?
This sort of moral highhorsing gets us nowhere. Stop it, please.
I think I'm similar to CronoDAS in being a "truth twister", but I don't know the exact details of how much truth (s)he is willing to twist, so I'm not sure how similar we are.
I'd like to make a point here. When someone says "Good morning" to you and you reply "Good morning" back to them, the information you are communicating is that you are greeting them, not that you actually think this morning is a good morning or anything like that. So in this sense, I wouldn't consider it a lie to say "Good morning" even if though the morning were particularly bad.
As I understand it, ‘Good morning!’ is short for ‘I wish you a good morning.’, not ‘I'm having a good morning.’. It's not a lie if you're in a bad mood, but it may be a lie if you say it to somebody that you dislike.
More than one of my doctors has patient notes saying not to ask me "How are you doing?" which I asked them not to do, because I dislike giving the standard nonanswer "Fine", because sometimes I'm not actually fine.
Crono, stay on that moral high horse!
I stopped lying, to the best of my ability, years ago. I've found, though, that as my lying skills have degraded, I have also partially lost the ability to consider my words before I speak and I have lost the knack for social pablum (although I may never have had that to begin with; tough to say).
When someone asks me how I am, I always answer "same as always." I would like to say that I do it so that I don't need to commit to a position with which I disagree, but the truth is that the words come out before I can figure out the normal, polite response.
Overall, I think that lying is a very valuable skill. Maybe it is like self-defense; something that you hope that you don't have to use, but is always good to have available.
Saying you're "Fine" to a doctor, when you are not, would be a little foolish, would it not? As opposed to your standard workaday white lies.
"This isn't hypocrisy. This is lying."
Lying is making a false statement with the intent to deceive. Refusing to make a statement isn't lying unless silence is itself a statement.
Deception, now, is a different matter. All of the things CronoDAS mentioned are certainly deceptive, but they're not lying.