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asr comments on LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: Solvent 24 February 2014 04:13AM

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Comment author: James_Miller 25 February 2014 03:48:24AM *  12 points [-]

Obamacare only became law because Obama lied by saying that under the law "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." PolitiFact made this their lie of the year.

I suspect that many on the left knew at the time Obama was lying about this but kept quiet because they really wanted the law to pass. They won.

Comment author: asr 25 February 2014 03:59:50AM *  2 points [-]

I suspect that many on the left knew at the time Obama was lying about this but kept quiet because they really wanted the law to pass. They won.

[upvoted for giving a crisp recent, and plausible example of people getting away, at least in the short term, with dishonesty. I was a little squeamish about the politicization of the topic but I think it's hard to avoid giving a real political example in a conversation about political dishonesty]

I take the point that there's a complicated collective-action problem here where if enough people repeat something they wish were true, it can become relatively accepted, at least for a while.

The catch is that, as happened here, people often get caught having been dishonest. And we will see how painful the consequences are for those people personally and politically.