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.)

But, the social signalling game is exhausting.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that you can just avoid it and its consequences. Like war, you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you. And if you can't avoid sometimes messing up, you can at least avoid making it worse than it has to be (such as by gratuitously wearing inappropriate clothes).

They have actually just genuinely had enough with the hall of mirrors game and have declared themselves to no longer be playing.

Yes, but he's acting like it's a triumphant success. Voluntarily deciding "I don't want social skills" is a surrender that seriously harms you. If you can't get social skills perfect, at least do what you can. And he certainly can avoid wearing inappropriate suits, even if he might mess up deciding when to buy drinks.

As a political comparison, Donald Trump didn’t propose putting a “Rivera of the Middle East” in Gaza because he is politically clueless, he did so because he doesn’t care about being politically clued-in and he wants everyone to know it.

Genuinely communicating "I don't care and I want you to know it" without communicating bad things at the same time is countersignalling. Not just anyone can countersignal. Trump can do this because he's in a powerful position that implies a certain amount of cluefulness (and even then, his opponents are happy to jump on this sort of stuff as evidence of cluelessness).

Spend your weirdness points wisely.

Wearing a suit in an inappropriate context is like wearing a fedora. It says "I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things". The fact that people will eventually stop asking you about the suit does not mean that you are no longer saying this message, nor does it mean that people will stop listening to it.

And if your reaction is "I'm just not conforming. I'm not harming anyone, why do they care?", it's sending a message. Messages don't need to cause harm for people to react to them.

That’s because if you wear a suit in a casual culture, then you want to be sending the subconscious message It’s no big deal that I’m wearing a suit.

You have a limited ability to choose the message that your action sends. It may not be possible to wear the suit and avoid sending the message that you are socially clueless. You also have a limited ability to make people believe your message. You can send the message "I think the suit is no big deal", but nobody is forced to agree that the suit is no big deal.

Because 1) they would be able to trade with (or threaten) humans and 2) even ignoring that, humans behave differently towards obvious sentients--anti-slavery movements and anti-whale-oil movements are not comparable.