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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

So a large part is to lie? I don't know. I mean, yes, I get angry by my children, and I don't know any parent that does not. Probably I get angry too often too early. But I really try hard never to lie to my kids. I even show them that I am angry because I think that's part of the game. Kids need to learn that other people have emotions.

But telling stories about horrific creatures to avoid dangerous places? I don't know. I mean yes, I guess it works, but why not tell them the (horrific) truth?

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In the Western culture, lying is primarily connected to deception. In cultures where Semitic religions have not influenced, lying and deception are not same: one can lie, without intending to deceive. That's how one has to look at.

One can lie for multiple reasons. For instance, to avoid conflict; or because one is not in a mood. Deception is one among many reasons.

Why the western culture focuses so much on the unity between lying/falsehood and deception? This has to do with the secularization of Christianity: Christian ideas becoming less Christian, more 'universal'. Satan, falsity, lying, deception--all form the unity in Christianity; in secular thinking, Satan is pushed out, but the unity between lying, falsehood and deception is present. This unity does not exist for Inuits or Chinese or even east Indians. It is part of child rearing practices in China and in India, to teach kids to lie.

> One can lie for multiple reasons. For instance, to avoid conflict; or because one is not in a mood. Deception is one among many reasons.

In all of those cases deception is the purpose of lying, the other purposes described aren't alternatives to deception, they are the purposes for which one seeks to deceive.

It's true that focussing on this has a nexus with Christian moral theory and it's influence on secular morality, since Christian moral theory distinguishes between bad ends sought deliberately as intermediate means to permissible ends and bad ends which are incidental to acts seeking permissible ends.

>In all of those cases deception is the purpose of lying, the other purposes described aren't alternatives to deception, they are the purposes for which one seeks to deceive.

That's what Christian morality says. There are other cultures which don't see the way you see. Western philosophy doesn't even answer the question "Why truth?"; only Nietzsche raises that question.

In Christianity, truth doesn't need any further justification; truth is its own foundation, because God is the Truth. Here the dispute is about how different ways of being in the world; how different cultures are different in different way, not as a variant of the West. Of course, the west thinks that every other culture is a variant of itself; in that sense, your answer is 'acceptable' to the people belonging to the Western culture.

> That's what Christian morality says.

No, it's a simple fact: each of the examples provided is a further end that relies on deception in order for lying to further it, not an alternative end which lying can serve independent of producing deception. Christian (and Christian-derived) morality assigns particular moral significance to that fact, which other cultures might well disagree with.

FWIW, I agree with you completely.

I think the conversation gets muddled when we start introducing value-laden words like "truth." The crux of the matter for me is, am I lying in order that someone will behave in a way that they wouldn't behave if I told the truth. There are, I believe, good reasons to do this, and undoubtedly, moralities that believe there are never good reasons to do this.

But it is clear (to me anyway) that it is definitely deception, regardless of the justification.

If I'm not trying to get someone to act differently, then there is no deception (and perhaps this is what the other commenter is referring to), though it's hard to imagine a situation where you'd lie without intending to affect someone's behavior, even trivially, like to avoid a conversation with a passerby in the street...

What you say is true, but stating the fact this way is already framing the conversation. To see this just reflect how you feel when you hear the "deception", it's already a loaded term. Given most of us here grew up indoctrinated in western thought, we're now fighting up-hill to demonstrate a meaningful distinction which eastern cultures take for granted.

To deceive someone is to tell them an untruth for personal gain. There are cases where an untruth is told for the greater good, or for the good of the listener. In those cases, there is a divergence between lie and deception.

I never got that connotation from the word 'deceive', I thought it just meant misleading someone, not necessarily for your own gain. Furthermore, I grew up christian and was never told all lying was for personal gain.

To me there is a difference between mislead and deceive. Deceive has a stronger negative intention behind it. Consider someone saying "I was misled" versus "I was deceived".

I made no connotations between what I wrote and Christianity / all lying is for personal gain, so we can skip that part of the discussion.

> To deceive someone is to tell them an untruth for personal gain.

No, it's to cause someone to believe something that is not true.

Personal gain is a common goal served by deceit, not part of it's essential character.

Causing someone to believe something that is not true is too weak of a definition for deceive. Consider the difference between telling someone a falsehood versus deceiving someone. There is a malicious intent behind deception, which is not present in falsehood.

> Causing someone to believe something that is not true is too weak of a definition for deceive

No, it's literally the definition of the word.

> Consider the difference between telling someone a falsehood versus deceiving someone.

The difference is intent; if you don't know that it's false, or you don't intend it to be believed, it's not deception.

> There is a malicious intent behind deception,

It certainly is a matter of intent, but aside from the sense in which a false belief itself is a harm, and any intentional element of harm even if not a net harm is “malice”, I wouldn't say it is necessary malicious.

If you are referring to the dictionary definition of the word, then let me refer you to my experience learning different languages. The dictionary never fully captures the nuances of a word. I've had to get detailed explanations of different words where they all have the same definition, but are all used in different contexts. So technically deception means telling an untruth, if you limit yourself to dictionary definitions. But we live in a world where the nuances make or break kingdoms, and nobody reads text with only the dictionary definitions in mind.

Of course, based on your exposure to various literature, you might have a different feel for what the nuances of the word deception are, and maybe it matches exactly with the dictionary definition. But based on my experience, deception is a heavily negative word with malicious intent behind it.

There are no such things as facts; that's the consensus of the debates in 1960s from history and philosophy of sciences, philosophy of language. Facts are facts of a theory: or, facts are theory-laden. Or observations are theory-laden.

When two parties engage in an argument, some theory-laden facts become facts (for instance, propositional logic in this context is seen as fact), other facts become theoretical claims.

That's the issue here: you call it a 'fact', I call it a theoretical claim. The dispute is at the level of describing the phenomenon itself. If one follows the best theory of argumentation in the market (that of pragma-dialectical school), this way of transforming theory-laden descriptions into facts violates one of the rules of dialogue.

> There are no such things as facts; that's the consensus of the debates in 1960s from history and philosophy of sciences, philosophy of language.

That is itself a fact claim—not just that that is the consensus of the debates in those fields, but even that such debate has occurred is such a claim. So either there are facts (and the conclusion of the debates to the contrary is false) or there are no facts and it makes no sense to cite the supposed debates or their supposed consensus. In either case, the claim about the debates is of no value.

Beautiful. Use the claim recursively on itself to destroy it. (And I suspect that all "there is no truth" positions are vulnerable to the same argument.)

That’s untrue. Kids in western cultures are taught to lie. It’s white lies, for example your mom baked your a cake and it didn’t taste good. Parents still say you need to say it was good no matter what.

A white lie is told to “avoid “conflict” as you stated above.

I wouldn't generalize that to all western cultures. America, for sure -- that goes along with the superficial "How are you?" questions where nobody actually even wants an answer. Superficial politeness for the sake of superficial politeness, even if that means deceit, lies, and laying down groundwork for later disappointment.

But many places that would be considered poor form because you are setting up for disappointment later (when the truth comes out), and the thinking is "why would you do that to someone?". In those places, kids might be forced to say thank you, but not that they enjoyed it.

This isn't a lie- it's mythology. The information is stored in the emotion and values presented in the story, not the literal details.

Most native american cultures have a complex mythology that explains the worldview, values, and philosophy of the culture. This is how the culture is transmitted, and even young children in these societies are used to mythology, and understand how to use it without interpreting it as a simple literal explanation of 'fact.'

The 'literal truth' doesn't work in place of mythology, it is hard to remember and interest kids with unless they've experienced it directly... unlike mythology, it fails to serve as a stable and effective way of transmitting cultural values over long time spans. The emotional content is critical for memorization, and attention... and also serves as a sort of 'checksum' where erroneous changes to the story generally reduce the emotional content, thereby causing the original 'correct' version to remain dominant.

Humans are really bad at estimating certain kinds of dangers.

Invisible and slow acting dangers are consistently under-estimated, immediate & physical dangers are recognized easily.

Teaching a very young kid that even if they are warm right now (especially inside, before going outside, or in the sun) that they still need to keep their hat on because they might lose it or not put it on correctly when it becomes cold and cold can kill.

Cold is invisible, it's not immediate. Replacing it with a captivating story about a mythical monster that will come and get you should serve to stay in their mind better & they might even enjoy hearing about it.

> Invisible and slow acting dangers are consistently under-estimated, immediate & physical dangers are recognized easily.

See: 2020

This isn't a lie in the way we'd typically talk about lies. It isn't meant to deceive. It's a myth.

As a child grows and discovers that there isn't really a monster in the sea, are they going to resent their parents when they understand the explanation?

I think that's the difference here.

Perhaps these kinds of magical ideas that we teach our kids makes them more susceptible to believing various religions/cults are real. That would be a downside.

unless, to quote the late Terry Pratchett[0], we _need_ to learn the little lies so we can believe the big ones. Justice, Mercy, Duty, that sort of thing. :)

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/583655-hogfather

When you stigmatize suspension of disbelief (myths, stories), you setup the child to chronically suspend belief. You get a person who can only value what can be pointed to and measured. A gullible person is bad, but the other extreme is no better.

Do you have a citation for that last claim?

Not the OP, but in the book Impro, Keith Johnstone strongly lamented the suppression of imagination in and by grown-ups. He wrote: "Most children can operate in a creative way until they are eleven or twelve, when suddenly they lose their spontaneity, and produce imitations of 'adult art'." He cites schools suppressing imagination as a factor, saying that, "The research so far shows that imaginative children are disliked by their teachers."

I feel that suspension of disbelief and imagination are closely related, as a lack of suspension of disbelief will close you off to many avenues of imagination.

Thanks for that response. It's funny that you mention Keith Johnstone, because I'm rereading him now. The suspension of disbelief v. suspension of belief concept comes from a writing pedagogue named Peter Elbow (highly recommended if you enjoyed Keith Johnstone).

Reminds me of Luke and Obi Wan. What the parents are saying is true, from a certain point of view.

It's just reverse Santa Claus.

Besides, I think of education as a series of increasingly small lies anyway. If you can get the kids to model correct behavior, you're just helping them visualize success. Is it a self delusion to visualize success for yourself? Maybe, but so what?

That's what I took away as well. At some point all these stories have to be retracted and the truth told. It was a big deal for us as kids about Santa, the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc. What if there were hundreds more though? What if the parent only corrected a portion of these? What if the situation never arose again where the child would identify the lie and instead propagate it to offspring?

Perhaps we've just solved how religions start... /s

We used to tell children the truth. Just read the old fairy tales—Pinocchio, Little Red Riding Hood, etc.

You could compare oral cultures to mnemonics (memory aids) — the more extreme the story, the easier it is to remember / recall the underlying message. That's how our brains work. I recommend a book about oral cultures (and storytelling) called: The Spell of the Sensuous.

If you told a child "you see, when you go in the water, your lungs stop being able to absorb oxygen and your brain shuts down - after long enough - we cannot start it back up again" they aren't going to understand.

Using allegories you can put things into terms the child understands more easily. As they get older you can explain the truth behind the "lie" or story, if you like.

I remember in high school learning electrons were balls. Then, later I learn they are actually fields. Was I lied to?

Yes, but only in an educative and reductionist way, in order to help your brain being able to grasp an idea, by introducing a simplified model of it before jumping into the details...

I wouldn't expect toddlers to fully grasp the dangers of the sea either, and it seems that the Inuit's "sea monster" serves equally as a simplified model -- just simplified further for a younger mind.

It's a phenomenon known as a "lie to children". Each level of academia produces a wrong but convenient model which is then subsequently replaced with a slightly less and slightly less convenient model.

I suppose you'd count the exclamation of pain after strike that a parent asked their child make against the parent as a lie, too.

But, then I would know for sure you have missed the point.

You can just base the story on the truth, you don't have to lie.

Curious on your comment... Do you do Easter bunny, Tooth Fairy or Santa with your kids?

So you told your kids Santa Claus doesn't exist at the first possible opportunity? There are many positive reasons to lie.

You mean like how we lie about Santa Claus?

Maybe it is wrong, too?

No. . .its more like stories about Hell.

> why not tell them the (horrific) truth?

Because kids are not capable of understanding it.

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