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Comment by v7n | Hacker News Reader

I do not think you're incorrect, but wouldn't this incentivize confidently guessing (making stuff up) if it's less favorable to publicly admit you don't know something? Since you can use the executive excuse of simply being misinformed. Edit: meanwhile, this was discussed in a sibling comment.

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> wouldn't this incentivize confidently guessing (making stuff up)

Making stuff up is not the same as honestly making statements that you believe are correct, but which are actually wrong. In the latter case, the person (Pichai in this case) could give reasons why he held that belief (for example, so and so gave him a briefing on the feature and he understood them to be telling him X). In the former case (guessing), he wouldn't; he would have to admit under oath that he just made the stuff up. I don't know if that technically counts as perjury, but it certainly doesn't seem to be consistent with giving testimony under oath.

> I don't know if that technically counts as perjury

I believe that it does. Making stuff up is lying.

Yes, it does incentivize this. But it disincentivizes something even worse (attaching penalties to honest testimony). There is no perfect answer here. All we can do is choose what sort of adverse outcome to want to minimize. US law tends to lean toward it being better to fail to penalize wrongdoing than to penalize innocent people.

That said, if someone is giving testimony that is intentionally deceptive such as lying and saying it was a mistake, making stuff up -- which is lying -- or even being deceptive without uttering an untruth, that is something that can be penalized.

The pros engage in perjury by just saying "I don't remember". It may be a lie, but good luck proving that.

I would argue, from a layman's perspective, that "I do not know" and "I do not remember" have significant differences, and drawing those parallels would only serve to muddy the waters. In this case it could be possible to show that the testimony was given - even if without other deceit or malice - without competence and "any reasonable person" would be aware of their lack of expertise. Just like it could be possible to show, through evidence such as correspondence, that X had knowledge of Y. I wonder if the system is resilient against such speculated abuse.

Edit: these logical inversions made my ESL head spin a bit. The point was that "I do (not) know" is more readily falsifiable than "I do (not) remember".

In a trial for perjury, the person would be asked, under oath, how they came to believe the information they claim they believed when they gave the testimony that is under dispute. If they actually just made it up or guessed, they would either have to say so, or commit perjury by lying about it. And if the lie was, for example, that so and so gave them a briefing and they understood them to be saying X, then so and so would be called as a witness and their testimony about whether such a briefing took place, and what was said if it did, would be given in evidence.

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