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pedanterrific comments on How to understand people better - Less Wrong
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Well he's certainly not telling the truth, and he's (probably) not honestly mistaken, so sure.
I'm not exactly sure I'm qualified to answer that, but if I had to speculate... because it's easier to accidentally mislead people by assuming they know you're not telling the truth than the opposite, and because it's valuable to society to pretend rigorous truth-telling is more laudable than it really is (i.e. "honest" has an unreservedly positive connotation, despite the fact that there are common social situations in which it is terribly impolite to actually be honest). Does that make sense?
Role playing can hardly be considered lying, as the latter usually implies an intent to deceive.
I am aware that this is the common understanding, yes. Apparently my definition is rather idiosyncratic.
This sounds vaguely like the idea once prevalent in legal proceedings that actors were not trustworthy as witnesses because their skill acting in plays showed that they could commit perjury undetected by the jury.
That theory is no longer accepted in law. And I think the modern understanding - that actors are no more or less likely to be dishonest than any other citizen - is the more rational position. Is society's modern view wrong?
Uh... well first of all, I don't see what any of those things have to do with each other. To put my objections in some kind of order:
The idea that actors' skill at lying is a reason to distrust their testimony is ridiculous. Juries, and people in general, are much worse lie detectors than they believe themselves to be. The bar is set so low that probably only really, unusually bad liars are ever caught by that method.
That said, experience and skill at acting probably does generalize into skill at other forms of lying - that seems intuitively true, and it's certainly been the case in my experience, so I have no reason to doubt it.
The unrelated claim of whether actors are equally likely to be dishonest as anyone else is also a terrible indicator of their reliability under oath. Presumably people who perjure themselves have a compelling reason, such that a constitutional tendency toward honesty wouldn't do what the threat of jailtime did not.
That said, I have no idea whether actors are more, equally or less likely to be dishonest than the general population. I'm not sure how you'd go about testing that hypothesis, either.
Does that about clear it up?