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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

The best way to lie is not presenting false facts, it's curating facts to suit your narrative. It's also often that you accidentally lie to yourself or others in this way. See a great many news stories.

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The act of curating facts itself is required to communicate anything because there are an infinite number of facts. You have to include some and exclude others, and you arrange them in a hierarchy of value that matches your sensibilities. This is necessary in order to perceive the world at all, because there are too many facts and most of them need to be filtered. Everyone does this by necessity. Your entire perceptual system and senses are undergirded by this framework.

There is no such thing as "objective" because it would include all things, which means it could not be perceived by anyone.

The subjective/objective split is useful. What good is raising the bar for objectivity such that it can never be achieved? Better to have objective just mean that nobody in the current audience cares to suggest contradictory evidence.

It's for indicating what's in scope for debate, and what's settled. No need to invoke "Truth". Being too stringent about objectivity means that everything is always in scope for debate, which is a terrible place to be if you want to get anything done.

I often put it this way: you can lie with the truth. I feel like most people don't get this.

Another very good way to lie is to set up the framing such that any interpretation of any fact skews in your desired direction. Including which things are to be considered important/relevant, what kind of argument is considered valid/not. Done well, people might not even pick up that there is lying/misdirection involved. Rig the game.

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