Food gets used up quickly, but it takes a long while to use up housing, so banning new housing really isn't comparable to banning making food.

I don’t know where you’re getting this notion that speculation is evasion

The liar faces a conundrum. He can ask to modify the theory again, which is perfectly fine, but whatever he comes up with to accommodate “dog isn’t sick” fact will directly contradict the preceding “Gillian stole cookies but didn’t eat them” theory.

You've described this kind of speculation as specific to liars, yet innocent people will end up having to do it too.

If a client is either factually innocent or guilty-but-sober-minded, there’s no difficulty getting them to admit the incriminating nature of incriminating evidence.

If an innocent person was shown evidence, of course he's going to try to explain why the evidence is consistent with his innocence. Why do you think he wouldn't do this?

If they have no idea what is going on, but have been accused, they need to do what they can to maximize the chance of being believed. Sometimes this means responding with a theory. And such responses will look like evasion by your standards.

There aren't (useful) "other ways" for an innocent person with no direct knowledge to act, unless he gets lucky, like by catching the culprit.

But if the innocent person doesn't know what's going on (other than his own innocence), his alternative theory might not comport with reality--because he has no idea what's going on. All he can do is make hypotheses and try to confirm them. It may take several hypotheses before he gets it right. If you're going to "force liars to commit to a single alternative theory", you've put the innocent person in a position where unless he gets lucky and picks the right answer the first time, he can't defend himself because he committed to the theory and it turned out not to be true, and he doesn't get to change it.

There's no way for anyone to know that you didn't write the essay unless they already know that your username isn't an alias of the writer. You didn't write "here is a post by someone else" or anything else which makes clear that the post is not yours, let alone that you don't endorse it. In fact the essay starts with "In this essay, I will", making the normal assumption that the only person whose username is attached to the post is who "I" refers to.

If you're sharing it, but don't endorse it, you should say that you don't endorse it. If not, readers have a right to assume that you endorse it.

(And you seem to be in this limbo where you're sort of endorsing it but sort of not.)

The response wouldn't actually be lying, but it would be indistinguishable by an outsider from the kind of deflection that you describe here and that you consider part of lying.

And I don't think "this example is unrealistically convenient" lets you handwave this away. The exact response "maybe a friend of Gillian's stopped over" is specific to your example, but that type of response is not. If Jake is innocent in this scenario but accused of lying, the only possible response is to try to come up with ways to explain the available information. That's the exact same thing that would be deflection when done by a guilty person.

The same goes for wearing a suit. I don’t imply that anyone else should wear a suit, and the people around me don’t imply that I shouldn’t wear a suit. Telling other people what to do isn’t socially expensive because it costs “weirdness points”. It is socially expensive because people don’t like it when you tell them to do things they don’t want to do.

By that reasoning you could refuse to ever say "please" and "thank you". After all, you're not telling anyone else not to say "please" and "thank you".

There are two things going on in the vegan example that you haven't noticed. First, it's possible for something to be bad for more than one reason. Something can be pushy, and weird even ignoring the pushiness, at the same time. Second, being vegan by itself doesn't cost you that many weirdness points, because being vegan is a thing that people are familiar with as part of our society, not just as something that one strange guy does.

Wearing a suit when people don't expect a suit is more like refusing to eat round foods, or taking all your meals on green plates, than it is like veganism. If you just made up the weird action (not the thing you're basing it on--suits already exist, but round foods already exist too), it's going to be seen as a lot weirder than something seen occasionally in society.

Refusing to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ would fall squarely in the category that people would have a reason to feel negative about.

It's not like wearing a suit in a swimming pool. Never saying "thank you" doesn't physically damage things. It just makes people upset because of the social inappropriateness, like the inappropriate suit.

This reasoning would justify violating any social convention whatsoever. "Refusing to say 'please' and 'thank you' signals confidence and self-esteem".

Yes, it does, but signalling those things and signalling social cluelessness are entwined. "My self esteem is more important than these petty rules" can mean that you think you are really important compared to the rules, or that the rules are unimportant compared to you. You're also overrating self-esteem. Signalling self-esteem is often a bad thing.

(Remember how fedoras became a sign of cluelessness? It's not very different from out of context suits.)