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Comment by 9wzYQbTYsAIc | Hacker News Reader

After negative news, it’s pretty safe to assume thr opposite when PR / Marketing says something like “we wont be shutting down” or when a CEO says “there wont be any layoffs”.

If you read between the lines, those kind of announcements can usually be a good indicator of the appropriate “time to adapt”, whether that be to prepare for a layoff or to start buying IP on a survivable platform.

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Companies, governments, and politicians do not say things to inform you about what is happening or what they are doing. They say things to produce in the listener the state they desire, whatever that may be, and they have few limitations as to what they will say to do that. (Not quite "zero", but definitely "few".)

The sooner you learn this, the more information you can get from this sort of release. It doesn't mean you can perfectly decode it, it just means you can get more information. And the amount of time that "more information" outright contradicts the nominal content of the statement... it's not terribly uncommon. It's certainly the normal case that the decoded content heavily shades the nominal content.

I hope this becomes common knowledge and starts being taught in elementary schools.

I wish. People talk big about "critical thinking" but critical thinking curricula still tend to focus on the nominal content of claims. Motivation of the speaker and their desired goals is not an incidental concern to be briefly covered, it's the core of the skillset.

Of course asking people teaching "critical thinking" to arm the students with a toolset that can be turned against the teachers is a pretty tall ask. I've had teachers who could take that level of heat, and props to them, but I've certainly had teachers that simply couldn't.

Excellent point!. I agree typical critical thinking courses seems to be about logical/mathematical consistency. I find a follow the money approach works much better in real life situations.

This gets confusing when you consider public companies, whose shareholders are also the targets of public statements (like tweets saying "no we won't shut X down"), and there are (well, supposedly) legal limits on misleading public statements by public companies.

Unfortunately, many people let their political beliefs interfere with their use of this principle; if one institution('s representative) lies, then it's just an isolated incident or there was a good reason, but if another institution does, it's because that institution (possibly including all institutions in that class) are "evil".

> Companies, governments, and politicians

More broadly, this applies to any hierarchical authority system. The amount of agitprop is proportional to the number of levels between you and the person speaking, and the amount of truthful and not misleading information is inversely proportional.

A company I worked for moved from the Suburbs to downtown in the city I live in. Local news broke the story right when the deal was signed with the building contractor. For weeks on end they denied it, until they didn’t. Surprise we were always lying to you!

They usually couch it in weasel words such as "we have no plans to conduct layoffs at this time" rather than an outright lie.

That is an outright lie if they do have plans for layoffs.

Oh no, they have a plan to create a plan for layoffs, but as of right now there is no plan to layoff employees.

More realistically, "We don't have a plan for laying off employees at this time. Our plan is for laying off employees next month."

"at this time" just needs to refer to when the layoffs are happening rather than the existence of a plan.

No, that is also lying.

As a general rule, I tend to invert any sentence any manager ever gives me.

How many times has MS said "Xbox is not shutting down."?

The corpo doth protest too much. If they have to say it, it has to be a lie.

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