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jmmcd comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
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Does it? I genuinely don't know, since I haven't really studied the subject yet, but it strikes me that if lying didn't work, we wouldn't have developed this whole arms race of deception and social games. You might as well say that the Dark Arts in general don't really work, that humans are notoriously bad at them. Yet my own impression is that if you find something to say that's nice or what the other person wants to hear, regardless of whether you mean it, a lot of people will lap it up if you aren't too crude about it. As has been said elsewhere on lesswrong, it takes effort to detect falsehood, whereas acceptance is natural.
Bear in mind that the most effective lies are the ones you yourself. So people are very good at convincing themselves of positions which will turn out to be useful if others also believe them. I think it's fair to say that few people are good at conscious lying.