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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that there is a "high ground" for complicated issues like this. Everyone comes to the issue with preexisting opinions and will use measurement methods that conform to those opinions. So it is in a sense a reasonable shortcut to just ignore distractions like "truth".

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That's just giving oneself an excuse for lying. "It's ok if I lie, because everyone else does it, even unconsciously".

Lying is one of the most insidious form of harm one can inflict on another human being - poisoning their ability to reason about the world. Lies add up, and also deal recursive damage - people spread them believing they've been told the truth, and spread inferences based on them.

Lies should never be treated lightly and excused with trivialities.

As I get older I realise how much of the world runs on bullshit. Not outright lying, but getting close to that end of the scale.

A baseball bat to the head is far more harmful than most lying.

> A baseball bat to the head is far more harmful than most lying.

Only in the short term. In the long term, lies undermine your confidence, destroy your relationships, ruin your reputation, and can make you completely cynical about the world around you.

There's certainly a set of lies that each culture has deemed acceptable, but acceptable is not the same as harmless.

A baseball bat to the head makes your head hurt for a while. Lying makes hundreds of thousands of people refuse to vaccinate, which puts millions in more danger of diseases. Lying makes people die from refusing cures that owrk and going for glorified sugar pills.

And I mean lies from both sides - from those who will sell you the sugar pill and from those who represent the medical world and by lying and bullshitting made it hard to trust it.

Lies are toxic and accumulates in society. In an increasingly complex world that depends on mutual trust between people and organizations, this is an existential threat. I think that what's most likely to end our civilization is not war or disease, but this bullshit 'the world runs on' spilling over and drowning us all.

I did say most lying, and you are choosing some pretty extreme examples to counter. I do agree with much of what you say though.

I agree that lots of lies will probably die out without causing direct harm, though honestly, IMO it's akin to most bullets shot in battle missing their targets. But people today have a habit of spraying lies on full-auto, and some of them (you don't know which ones) actually do hit something and start recursively propagating. Maybe if people had a much stronger reaction to being lied to, we could reduce the occurences of lying to only those cases where it doesn't matter in the long run.

I mean, look at the current state of science. At this point I think it's safe to assume that most (like 90%+ most) of recent soft science results is bullshit, and probably most of medical research is wrong too. And it all starts with some scientists fudging results, and then other believing them and building on wrong research. Pretty scary thing - it seems like we have so much, but in fact we have very little reliable results, and it's getting harder to tell the right from the wrong apart.

> I'm not sure that there is a "high ground" for complicated issues like this.

Well... yes, there is? In a situation where the facts are reasonably clear, such as this one, the "high ground" would be the one that's most in alignment with those facts.

Global poverty is both complicated, and isn't as bad as it used to be. There's no need to pick one or the other.

Other threads here are talking about "accounting tricks". Even if we could exclude that sort of thing, there are still questions of why press releases are issued, who issues them, when they are issued, etc. If politics are involved (and they are whenever taxes or donations come from one place and go to another) truth is a mirage.

My response to this is not to lie myself, or to myself... too often. b^) My response is to assume that everything I hear from everyone is bullshit, unless the source has obvious interests in telling the truth, and until I can confirm the story through other means. What choice do I have? I'm from Missouri.

Also it seems that many fans of "truth" have a hard time dealing with any truth that happens to be somewhat subtle.

Nah, systematic dishonesty is always detrimental in the long run. You should always make sure your lies are trivial.

Once you start lying, you have no way of knowing if your goal is even worth pursuing. You are creating an institution which will have the primary goal of perpetuating itself.