Comment by leftyted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leftyted | Hacker News Reader

I recommend Hannah Arendt's essay Lying in Politics. Summary:

1. Lying has always been considered a valid political tool. It isn't really clear how a government can operate without lying.

2. Lying is deeply related to the human ability to act. Acting involves imagining the world as it does not exist and trying to bring it into existence. Imagining the world as it does not exist is very close to lying (if only to yourself).

3. Lies are often more plausible than reality because the liar knows what his audience wants to hear.

4. History is not composed of facts; it is about collective memory and consensus. Facts exist but history always contains a buried political philosophy that constrains the facts.

5. A significant amount of lying involves fitting reality into overly simplified models.

6. Almost all liars start with self-deception. They often don't know they're lying.

7. Ironically, the people with the most access to information are often in the worst place to determine the truth. Overclassification leads to a situation where cleared officials have far too much information to wade through. The president selects officials who filter information though their own overly simplified models before it reaches him.

8. Lying in order to hide the truth implies a truth, which means that the truth can often be deduced from the lie.

9. We should be extremely wary of highly educated technocrats who attempt to impose a "scientific" viewpoint on political events, always fail, and yet remain utterly convinced by their oversimplified models.

> 6. Almost all liars start with self-deception. They often don't know they're lying.

I disagree. Lying implies intent to deceive. Saying something that is false does not make it a "lie" unless the person who said it knew it in advance that it is false and presents it as true, or in other words, as per "The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language": "A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood."

Or https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/lie:

> to say or write something that is not true in order to deceive someone

And so forth.

A false statement is not a lie.

> 1. Lying has always been considered a valid political tool. It isn't really clear how a government can operate without lying. Could you expand on this? Why could the government not operate without lying, except for extreme situations like war?

Essentially any kind of state secrets, propaganda (in athoritorian countries is a must), promises of candidates, rallies in support of anything... list goes on.

It's been a while since I read the essay and I don't exactly remember the distinctions drawn. I'll venture my own opinions:

Lying is necessary when trying to move through the world. Governments lie for the same reason people lie. Governments restrict information just like people have internal opinions and thoughts we keep hidden.

Governments need to act, which involves imagining the world as it doesn't exist and spreading that imaginary world in order to create a consensus. This is very similar to lying and the boundaries aren't obvious.

People don't want a government that tells the truth and will not vote for a candidate who tells the truth. See McGovern vs. Nixon.

>Governments need to act, which involves imagining the world as it doesn't exist and spreading that imaginary world in order to create a consensus. This is very similar to lying and the boundaries aren't obvious.

I think that's a very stretched analogy.

Governments lie in much more obvious, and less noble, ways than "imagining a future world and spreading it"...

> Governments lie in much more obvious, and less noble, ways than "imagining a future world and spreading it"...

Perhaps but what I'm attempting to describe is something that all governments necessarily do.

Also I'm not arguing that this is "noble". Whether you think it's "noble" depends on what you think of the government's ends and means.

I think the reconciliation here might be that "imagining a future world and spreading it" isn't necessarily noble or different from blatant lying.

An example: the UK government has been playing chicken with the EU over a Brexit deal. As Johnson tells it, the goal is to prepare for and commit to a successful no-deal Brexit in order to gain leverage for a better deal. (There's some debate about whether a deal is actually being pursued, but let's assume it is.) The UK government, then, is imagining a world where it can pass and succeed at no-deal Brexit, and is consequently able to negotiate a good deal. If the real state of affairs is "it'll be a disaster and so our MPs won't let us"... well, spreading that imaginary world would require lying in a very mundane, "knowingly making false statements" manner. A move like releasing the Operation Yellowhammer documents would interfere with that consensus-building.

Of course, that's far from the only reason governments lie. Continuing the example, the Brexit process has been absolutely full of lying that was not even slightly in the public interest. But the point is that governments lie for selfish reasons by invoking the arguments and mechanisms they justify with public-interest lying. It's fundamentally the same problem as government secrecy: the intent of the system is compromised by scrutiny, so it becomes an obvious channel for abuses of power.

It's possible, I suppose, that a government could solve this by simply not ever lying. A crisis like Brexit was self-inflicted by committing to the outcome before doing the planning, and you can just not do that. But it becomes a much stickier issue with questions like "should we lie about our military readiness, or admit what we're unable to resist to our hostile neighbors?" (And saying "only lie about military stuff" still leaves you with politicians lying about war to get elected, pass kickbacks, and so on.) At the very least, it seems like you'd need military security and relative economic stability before you could try to demand total honesty.

(None of this is an endorsement of governments lying, though. To me it's mostly a justification for extremely constrained state power to minimize the threat of those lies.)

>Why could the government not operate without lying, except for extreme situations like war?

Because the government consists of people and people have hidden motives, private interests, and ideologies...

the question was "why could it not", not "why it would end up enyway"

It can not because in the real world flawless people don't exist.

In another world (where flawless people do exist), it might be able to work, but we don't usually say "it can totally work" for things that are only feasible in an alternate reality with different attributes.

In the US, anyone, anywhere in the world can make Freedom of Information Act requests

The details may hurt

> Why could the government not operate without lying, except for extreme situations like war?

Cynically? Because if you do that, then all the lies the government wants to tell get justified with war.

Let's say you want to limit your lying to extremely narrow issues like "Ruritania wants to invade, so let's mis-state our defensive strength on the border". Now if Senator Jones wants to send some pork to his district, he can arrange to buy overpriced military radar for the border, since that part of the budget won't be scrutinized. If a presidential candidate wants to scare people, he can announce a widget gap at the border, knowing that the real number of widgets is a secret.

That's a bit extreme, but I think the reality is a slightly broader version of the same. Governments conceal or lie about who they surveil so the suspects won't find out, which creates opportunities to surveil dissidents and political enemies. Governments lie about their mechanisms of surveillance so they won't be circumvented, which lets them conceal the use of unethical methods. Governments lie about their trade positions and economic confidence to negotiate better deals and avoid market panics, which lets them lie about who they're negotiating to benefit and how strong their economic planning is.

We could probably have governments that lie less, perhaps we could decide that total economic openness is a net benefit. But the underlying problem remains: both secrecy and lying are antithetical to oversight, so any ugly intention will get channeled through whatever narrow categories we decide to allow.

That's a novel use of "lying" that doesn't match what most people use the word to mean. This makes the work hard to reason about, but easy to draw incorrect conclusions from. (Is this "lying" too?)

> We should be extremely wary of highly educated technocrats who attempt to impose a "scientific" viewpoint on political events, always fail, and yet remain utterly convinced by their oversimplified models.

Could you detail that one? Is it arguing for more emotional driven decisions over data based ones?

It sounds more like a politician who predicts a situation and backs it up with good-sounding logic. But then, when the situation doesn't happen as predicted, the politician finds an excuse that doesn't invalidate his justifications.

Or a scientist that claims all objects are pulled with equal acceleration by gravity, yet when he drops a pillow and a brick from a balcony, the brick hits the ground first.

Pardon me if you're being sardonic and I'm not detecting it, but you're pointing out the flaw is this form of criticism yes?

Yes.

One example is the Laffer curve economics theory with proponents claiming repeteadly over decades no matter how many times it fails that tax cuts will increase government revenue.

No, though I understand how you could interpret it that way.

The key part is this: "and yet remain utterly convinced by their oversimplified models."

That's emotion talking. A data driven approach would accept the data of the failure, and look to improve. It's warning of people who use science or data to enact a plan, and when that plan fails, falls back on emotion and belief rather than listening to the evidence.

No. What it's saying is that data based decisions are not always right and may in fact often be more wrong than an emotional decision.

The argument can be found in much greater detail in the book "Wrong" by David Freedman:

https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us-Scientists-relationship-cons...

and is explored from a slightly different angle in this essay by Scott Alexander:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

Here's a brief summary of the book.

The world is full of people, presented to us by the media as experts, who constantly make predictions. These predictions are not sometimes wrong, but it turns out are mostly/almost always wrong. Some data is provided to back this up.

These people usually share the same characteristics. They are wrong because they radically over-estimate their understanding of complex systems, and apply simple models as a consequence. Sometimes it may be impossible to construct a model sophisticated enough to do what they're trying to do, but this doesn't stop them. Sometimes the media garbles or exaggerates what's being predicted, or doesn't communicate uncertainty. And then when their predictions turn out to be wrong, they are isolated from any kind of accountability or reality check.

Freedman focuses quite a bit on 'experts' in health, dieting etc (e.g. does red wine cause cancer or not?) but examines other areas too, and arguably they're more important. For instance economists are always wrong unless they're predicting a continuation of the current trend line, which is pretty useless, but no economist is ever fired because their predictions turned out badly. And he argues that one reason there's no accountability is that many people refuse to downgrade their belief in these experts, even when presented with repeated evidence of their wrong beliefs.

The second link, the Alexander essay, explores why people may often be right to make an apparently emotion-driven decision. His argument boils down to evaluating arguments being really hard, and it being easy to be convinced by arguments that are wrong, and the world being full of wrong arguments that would have radically devastating outcomes on your life if you really took them seriously and tried to live by their conclusions, so it's often smarter to just ignore (apparently) rational arguments and reject anything that sounds "weird".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com