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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It is not, in fact, "unambiguously a lie" to relate to others deBoer's grave (and admitted, and unambiguously real) misconduct without the full context of his mental illness.

People are entitled to form their own opinions about deBoer's credibility, and he is not entitled to set conditions on how they do that.

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I don't know deBoer from Adam, mind you, so I'm only going off the article as written. That said, while it's not strictly a lie to communicate deBoer's actions without conveying how psychosis played a role, it seems to leave out important context in favor of the presumption that he's simply an asshole. My assignment of credibility to deBoer could be substantially colored by learning of his psychosis and current efforts to remain treated.

I agree completely. As the parent says, people are entitled to form their own opinion of his credibility, but I don't see how you could possibly form an accurate opinion without knowledge of his mental state, and if you don't care to form an accurate opinion, then why bother?

Lies are more than untruth.

A lie is "[leaving] out the important context"

The most effective way to lie is to use facts. Selectively

When DeBoer calls it a lie, he is doing what he complains about - does not care about motivation or context in which that statement was given.

What context are you accusing him of leaving out?

I think from the author's shoes it is a lie, but only because the author has a better model of the mind than most. The accurate view of the mind is that there is not just one consciousness in there, but many. The lie is that there is an "I". He seems angry when people oversimplify and say "people have one consciousness and DeBoer's is bad", rather than "people have many consciousnesses, and DeBoer has at least one that is bad".

But I also wouldn't rule out the idea that even if our speaking about people as a single consciousness is a gross over-simplification it might be a better strategy for society at large.

(Disclosure: currently reading A Thousand Brains and Society of Mind and very much under the influence of the many minds idea at present)

As somebody in a family with bipolar I have to disagree. Someone's schizophrenic episodes should be taken into account in judging their actions, just as one's manic episodes should be as well. This in no way excuses their behavior. Whether or not you want to continue associating with that person is a different matter.

Why should it matter? I mean, if somebody tells me that they are intimate with the president, if they want to con me, or are troubled with mental illness, shouldn’t make a difference on the judgment of how trustable are their statements.

Are there medications you can take to make you drastically less likely to try to con people?

Because we as a society have determined that intent matters -- which is why we have the concept of manslaughter vs murder.

It's a hard thing to accept, but if you're wronged by someone in a state of psychosis, there is no true malice.

Does it change everything? Certainly not.

Change in trust in particular is a hard thing to determine here. You should trust that they're experiencing what they say they are. You should not trust that their statements are factual.

Change in response? It's the difference between if you should seek to get them help or muster some compassion versus whatever you might do if it was a healthy person acting out of malice.

That being said, mentally ill people can still be assholes, and can still act out of malice. So there's that. And that makes situations even more difficult to figure out.

I’m not talking about behavior nor judgment of him as a person, I know morality tends to equate this, but I don’t consider it to be the case. I just mean that I wouldn’t trust somebody who tends to lie because of mental illness, the same way I wouldn’t trust somebody without preparation to talk about theoretical physics.

The lies of a con man or an uninformed person are generally pretty distinguishable from the lies of a psychotic or manic person, especially in long form writing (isolated tweets are another matter). And for the type of writing deBoer does, which is quite well-sourced whenever he is making factual claims, I think dismissing it because he has a mental illness is kind of silly. Honestly I’ll take a bias of disorganized thought that is likely to be easier to detect over an ideologically motivated bias any day, and we certainly don’t prevent anyone from being published for the latter.

Generally, people are judged based on the "facts of the case". If I stole an iPhone from the Apple Store, you can call me a thief and demand I spend 6 months in jail. But if a single mother stole a loaf of bread from a store because their kids were starving and going to die without food, that same punishment might be considered unjust.

Context matters. The facts matter. Not just, "did you do this or not".

He's entitled to share his mitigating context. It may well be persuasively exculpatory for a lot of reasonable people. He goes far beyond that in this argument, suggesting that he would find dishonest any description of his misconduct that doesn't capture his full state of mind; for instance, any claim that he attempted to "cancel" Malcolm Harris.

I would agree that any description of his misconduct not including reference to his literal bipolar manic state to be not painting the true picture. If we swapped “bipolar” for “schizophrenic” would you have the same opinion?

I don't have to consider that counterfactual, since deBoer himself stated clearly that he knew the accusations he was making were false at the time he made them.

I think you’re woefully uninformed about the nature of psychosis. Schizophrenic people are fully capable of telling intentional lies to combat a perceived threat, even when they are imagining that threat due to psychosis. Even for someone schizophrenic, not all psychosis is so dissociative as to not have a goal-oriented thought process at all.

deBoer isn't schizophrenic. Again: the counterfactual proposed here isn't useful.

The psychosis that schizophrenic people experience and that of bipolar people is not treated as two separate “kinds” of psychosis by medical professionals. They are treated with exact same medications. We even have a specific disorder name for people whose mental illness includes the overlapping features of both (schizoaffective). So I don’t think you can move the goalposts away from “schizophrenic people can’t intentionally lie due to psychosis” and pretend the counterfactual is totally irrelevant so easily.

I didn't say anything about what people with schizophrenia can or can't do. Please don't put quotes around things I didn't say when responding to me.

Perhaps I misunderstood you, but I think the claims you made were quite clear. In response to the suggestion of the schizophrenia counterfactual, you wrote precisely:

> I don't have to consider that counterfactual, since deBoer himself stated clearly that he knew the accusations he was making were false at the time he made them

My understanding of that was that you saw the fact that “ clearly that he knew the accusations he was making were false at the time he made them” as a reason to disregard the counterfactual. Can you explain what you meant by that other than the suggestion that the latter half of that sentence was sufficiently inconsistent with schizophrenia as to render the comparison meaningless?

I apologize for using quotes to distinguish the view I was referring to from the rest of the sentence. I thought it would be clear that I wasn’t quoting you since the comment I responded too was so short.

I used to get caught up by the same thing with quotation marks here. Not everyone loves the HN norm about it, but I've internalized it.

Thanks a lot for clarifying this. The meds a bipolar will take are identical to the meds a schizophrenic will take for handling psychosis and paranoia.

Bipolar mania often comes with psychosis. The paranoia the author writes about is a classic symptom of both mania and schizophrenia.

You're making the assumption that him knowing they were false meant he had a choice in saying them.

When it comes to psychosis, your knowledge and your actions can become completely disconnected. For my manic episodes, I'm fully conscious and aware of what I'm doing, with no ability to stop what I'm doing. I'm in the passenger seat of a car driving off the cliff.

Claiming he attempted to “cancel” Malcom Harris doesn’t just not “capture his full state of mind”, it ignores material facts to allege he was in a different state of mind.

And I have to admit I’m curious about what line you’d draw with other situations of omitting information to make one’s argument more persuasive. Do you feel writers are honest when they emphasize the increased rate of myocarditis cases in teens who take the COVID vaccine, while not including the fact that teens who get infected with COVID have even higher rates? I think you’re setting a pretty high bar for considering something misinformation in a way that is highly detrimental for forming accurate world views.

I'm not sure we read the same article. I didn't get a "you have to know the full contents of my mind" vibe, but I definitely did feel like he's making an appeal to know the full truth of what he did before you decide how bad he is. And asking people who would publicly write about / condemn him for what he did to at least tell the entire story.

Since a claim that he attempted to cancel Harris is a pretty strong claim about his state of mind, it would seem that omitting relevant information about his state of mind would indeed be dishonest with regard to that particular claim. Claiming that he attempted to cancel Harris is a stronger claim than just claiming that he falsely accused Harris; the latter claim does not carry any implications about his state of mind. It's even a stronger claim than claiming that he knew the accusations were false at the time he made them; that's a claim about his state of mind, yes, but it's a state of mind he's admitted to, as you point out. He has not only not admitted to attempting to cancel Harris, he has explicitly denied it and explained why that wasn't his state of mind at the time.

Whether or not you want to continue associating with that person is a different matter.

Sometimes you have no choice.

> People are entitled

All of them? Every single one? Wow, harsh.

I kid, of course; my point in taking your words of context is to say that context always matters. People may be "entitled" to form a negative opinion of you based on my misleading out-of-context quotation of your words, but it seems pretty unambiguous that they'd be wrong to do so.

That said, it would be nice if Freddie had been responding to a specific person, whom he quoted, so that we could tell whether he was taking them out of context.

Lies of omission are generally accepted as lies. Of course people are entitled to form their own opinions - the discussion is about others (who already have their opinion formed) trying to form the opinions of even more people, by presenting what the author views as not-the-full-story.

I don't know the background, but I do think that saying or implying that he was conniving or strategically malicious would be a lie.

Are you suggesting that he may not even be bipolar?

"unambiguously" a lie?

>> It is not, in fact, "unambiguously a lie" to relate to others deBoer's grave (and admitted, and unambiguously real) misconduct without the full context of his mental illness.

Coincidentally I've been discussing this very issue the past week. I asked the question "when is it lying to say something that is true?"

The example I gave someone was this: You sleep in and arrive late to work. When asked "why are you late" you respond with "traffic was terrible, there was a crash and a backup" which is actually true on that day. The statement is true, but it may in fact be a lie. If you overslept so much that you would have been late regardless of traffic then what you've said is "I'm late because of traffic" which is a lie because you would have been late regardless of traffic. Excuses are often this kind of lie. Sometimes a true statement is a partial truth, but not the larger one that is being concealed while saying it.

Another example: A friend is a therapist and someone in his office died and they're sending all the deceased clients (patients) to others in the office. They've been instructed to tell the patients that their therapist no longer works there as a reason for the change. Is that a lie? I think so even though it's technically true. They fear some people will be too upset at the truth. But IMHO therapists lie too much already and when this "lie" comes to light the clients will be even more devastated than just telling them the truth. My recommendation of course is not to follow those instructions - have some integrity.

TLDR: When is it a lie to say something that is true?

When it becomes not true if you explicitly add the words that the speaker knows the listener inferred in the communication context. In your example, those implied words are "The reason I was late is".

The difficulty is in agreeing on or proving what those words were in that specific context, and whether the speaker knew it. It could instead of a case of mismatched assumptions based on different cultural backgrounds, which you see addressed in a lot of advice about working in other countries.

> People are entitled to form their own opinions about deBoer's credibility, and he is not entitled to set conditions on how they do that.

I don't know what conditions he's set, he's just asking people to include context. Context which completely changes how most people would view that incident.

Maybe "unambiguously a lie" is a too strong and you can't tell a lie by taking an action out of context, but if you can this is it.

> Maybe "unambiguously a lie" is a too strong

In many cases it is simply a lie - of the exact kind he complains about here.

His position is that “If you don’t support my extensive writing about race science, you’re a bigot and a liar because of an incident unrelated to my extensive writing about race science, which has singularly made me a victim of the mob - not my actual writing or opinions. Any criticism of me personally is by definition predicated on the thing I said in 2017 and not my body of work since then.”

That’s the condition that he set!

You put quotes around that, but I read the article and searched through the article and he never wrote that.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paraphrase

Intentional omissions of relevant facts constitute lies. Do you disagree with that or do you disagree that the facts are relevant? Or what?

A lie is intentional. Regardless of the falsehood, it is not a lie if you believe it when you say it.

But it is certainly misleading to make these claims about deBoer's actions without context. If this is intentional, then it is intentionally misleading. I wonder if there's a word for that.

Whatever it is, we should all be able to agree that it's not "unambiguous".

If someone suffers from a psychotic episode, and you accuse him of something he does during that psychotic episode without mentioning anything about the fact that he was suffering from a psychotic episode, then that is unambiguously a lie by omission.

People who suffer from psychosis do not behave in a reasonable manner. A psychosis is a medical emergency. It's like complaining that someone caused a traffic accident without mentioning they had a heart attack.

(Disclaimer: I have never heard of deBoer before, and for the sake of discusion I am going to assume he did in fact suffer from a psychotic episode)

No, it's not unambiguously a lie by omission. You're just restating deBoer's premise. I don't agree with him; he doesn't get to set these terms. He's entitled to try to persuade people in a different direction; he's not entitled to call people who state basic facts about his past conduct "liars".

In my opinion people are absolutely entitled to call other people who state basic facts about their past while knowingly omitting relevant context a liar.

Is it unambiguously a lie if I were to say “Based off what I’ve read of this guy’s writing, this guy is a piece of shit racist who has openly admitted to being randomly abusive to strangers.”? Or am I morally obligated to say “He also appears from my perspective to leverage the language of mental illness to excuse himself and attack his critics.”?

What if I don’t believe his narrative _AT ALL_? Am I a liar then? All I’ve read here is a guy insisting that it’s unfair to dislike him. I certainly don’t trust his intellectual honesty, why on earth would I be compelled to believe his narrative simply because he insists that it’s hurting him that I don’t?

Love how nobody has interacted with this post at all.

What DeBoer describes is unambiguously a lie.

Whether some individual is actually doing what he describes has a lot more room for ambiguity.

Are you agreeing or disagreeing that someone who knowingly omits the context in this situation is being intentionally misleading?

>we should all be able to agree

If we were all able to agree, this conversation wouldn't be here.

No, if one does not know the full context, it is not lying to omit it. If they do know it, then leaving out known relevant information is pretty unambiguously a lie of omission. As you said yourself:

> People are ..not entitled to... do that.

A lie of omission is still a lie.

You softened "condemn" to "relate misconduct."

I'm going to rankly speculate you did this because, "I am a Hacker News and I can condemn anyone for any reason I goddamned please," while a valid counterargument, would have been a bad look.

I can and will condemn deBoer for any reason I goddamned please. I don't feel like that's a "look" of any sort. I don't need his permission to find him odious.

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