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Comment by JI00912 | Hacker News Reader

Lies of omission are lies just as much as lies of commission because they communicate something that is incorrect.

And yet, they are also true if they are statement of fact:

"More than 80% of people who drank water even once in their lifetime have died!" is a true statement of fact (if you follow the accepted estimate of ~100 billion humans ever). Does it communicate something incorrect? That very much depends on the reader.

Truth vs. Lie, especially by omission, is so context dependent that there's no objective measure one can use.

> And yet, they are also true if they are statement of fact:

The whole point of lying by omission is that the statement is true -- even when what is communicated isn't.

I don't agree. There is a big difference between "there will always be some grey areas" and "it's all a more or less uniform grey". Your warning of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide reads more like a joke than serious attempt to misinform, because the reader will presumably know that everyone drinks water and most people who have lived are now dead. But it isn't too hard to come up with similar statements where anyone who knows the actual facts will realize the statement is intentionally misleading, whereas people who don't might be mislead.

TL;DR: I think the uniformly gray area is vastly larger than the "black and white or almost so" area.

Truth in this context is not well defined.

"Dietary cholesterol increase associated with increased mortality" and "Dietary cholesterol increase not associated with increased mortality" are, in fact, both true depending on context. A well written and researched article may elucidate the context in which the headline is true, or (as is more often the case) will just assume that context.

Is it fake news? Depends on the reader's context, but for 99% of the readers at least one of them is fake news, because they are not familiar with the context in which the other is true.

In my experience, the things reported where people -- if they actually looked at the evidence -- would have consensus about "true" or "fake" are actually a small fraction of the things which are - in widely accepted contexts - false.

Let's say I publish an article saying "oxycontin is addictive even if used as prescribed" - today it is considered true, five years ago it was considered fake. The facts did not change, and quite a few people claimed that was the case and had facts to back them up five years ago. This one is easy to talk about because it's essentially been "resolved". There are thousands of examples that have not been resolved, and depend on your context and sources about whether they are "fake" or "not fake".

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