Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others

From Wikipeda

"In his plea allocution, Madoff stated he began his Ponzi scheme in 1991. He admitted he had never made any legitimate investments with his clients' money during this time. Instead, he said, he simply deposited the money into his personal business account at Chase Manhattan Bank. When his customers asked for withdrawals, he paid them out of the Chase account — a classic "robbing Peter to pay Paul" scenario. Chase and its successor, JPMorgan Chase, may have earned as much as $483 million from his bank account.[107][108] He was committed to satisfying his clients' expectations of high returns, despite an economic recession. He admitted to false trading activities masked by foreign transfers and false SEC filings. He stated that he always intended to resume legitimate trading activity, but it proved "difficult, and ultimately impossible" to reconcile his client accounts. In the end, Madoff said, he realized that his scam would eventually be exposed.[75][109]

let me emphasize from above:

"He stated that he always intended to resume legitimate trading activity, but it proved "difficult, and ultimately impossible" to reconcile his client accounts"

But never thought that our natural tendency to deceive ourselves might have the ultimate purpose of helping us deceive others.

This is why I love hacker news. I get a different perspective every day that (whether it's right or wrong) forces me to re-consider my mental models of the world.

Seems he's almost always trying to convince the world that a certain narrative about himself, the voters, and reality in general is true.

But this research adds an interesting wrinkle to that story. By making so many questionable statements publicly, maybe he's really just trying to convince himself.

And that's why, when outsiders try to tell him that his "facts" are not facts at all, it doesn't matter to him. He just repeats his original statement even louder. His public statements aren't for the rest of us. We're just the audience that adds some emotional intensity for him and the process in his own brain.

It's as if the authors of the study think the subjects have ESP and know that evidence contrary to their goal is coming up, and therefore decide to stop watching.

Contending that his statement that "there's nothing going on between us" had been truthful because he had no ongoing relationship with Lewinsky at the time he was questioned, Clinton said, "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

Words matter in a useless way for my math mind.

Especially the words "maybe" or "might have" - both are correct in almost any instance, question or situation.

So clinton's "is" is his way to lie but not lie. Maybe.

While the majority of statements are neither true nor false, maybe we can quantify if a statement is closer to one or the other.