Telling lies and being incorrect

From Politicians and lies by Neo. She makes many of the same points I dwell on. Principally that people love to make the accusation that someone is lying without actually understanding what they are saying. They are choosing to make an ad hominem accusation rather than make a reasoned argument.

Opinions are not lies, as long as the speaker really believes what he or she says (which is not always the case in politics or in life). Opinions can be incorrect, they can be based on faulty reasoning or faulty information, but as long as they are sincere you can’t call them lies. And yet so-called “fact checkers” do so on a daily basis.

Facts are facts, but sometimes competing information (Kellyanne Conway’s much-maligned “alternative facts”) is out there and it can be very difficult to ascertain what’s correct and what’s incorrect. So politicians constantly argue by citing one fact or another, or one statistic or another, that bolsters their own point of view. That’s only a lie if the facts are obviously wrong or made up.

Some politicians lie to brag—that’s one of Trump’s favorite types of lie. Some lie to fool the American people about policy, its motives or its effects—that’s Obama’s favorite kind of lie, and he did it very smoothly. I consider the latter type of lie far more pernicious for a politician to tell than the former type.

And some politicians lie about themselves—not just to brag, but about something much deeper: their aims and their plans for the country. Obama again.

One of the most famous supposed lies in recent years was the “Bush lied about WMDs” accusation. But there has never been any convincing evidence that he actually lied, although there is very convincing evidence that he was mistaken and/or misled. But that doesn’t stop the meme that he lied, which is in itself a lie if and only if the person who is espousing it thinks it’s actually highly unlikely to be true.

To accuse someone of lying you must know their state of mind. Something they say may be incorrect but it is not a lie if they genuinely believe it to be true. However, when you look at when the accusation of lying is made, more than nine times out of ten, the accuser is not in a position to know the accused's state of mind. Indeed, they are often ill-placed to know that state of mind.

My belief that you are lying is contingent on my understanding of what I think you know and believe. The work of Jonathan Haidt has revealed that there is a pretty sharp asymmetry between left and right about their comprehension of their counterpart's world view. People on the right have a much clearer understanding of left positions than the left has an understanding of the right. If people on the left don't understand a person on the right's position, they the person on the left is far more prone to assume the person on the right is lying. Not because they know but because of the asymmetry of knowledge.

One of the Achiles heel of the mainstream media is that they are so uniformly left leaning. The consequence of the asymmetry is that press keeps mischaracterizing positions on the right because they do not understand them and people on the right think the press is lying. imply because of that asymmetry of comprehension combined with the need for knowledge to assess whether someone in lying.

It would be far more accurate, and constructive, whenever someone makes an accusation that someone else is lying, to recast that statement as that they are incorrect.

From all the documentary record, it does appear that Bush was not lying about Hussein's WMD. He believed that his claim was correct. As did the intelligence services of Britain, France, and Germany at the time. As did Hussein's own generals. They were all wrong.

A discussion of whether Bush was lying is simply an exercise in political positioning and point scoring. It is a zero sum game, unproductive and not infrequently destructive.

On the other hand, the argument that Bush was incorrect can be very productive. Why was he incorrect? Was it confirmation bias? Why was their dissent with the US intelligence community suppressed? Why were the British, French and German intelligence agencies similarly convinced? Why did Hussein's own generals believe the claim?

Answering thee questions moves us forward. If we know what allowed an incorrect decision last time, perhaps we can avoid getting ourselves into the same jam again in the future.

From this perspective, any accusation of lying is a signal that the accuser is not making a good-faith accusation but is playing the zero sum game of grabbing power.