I came across the following by Kairosfocus while wasting time reading comments at uncommon descent:
FP, do you not see many who gain much by lies and fraud, and die in full benefit of ill gotten gains? Is that not a commonplace? In short, VB is right to highlight that without the eternal reckoning, it is simply not the case that truth telling is to one’s advantage, short or long term. More to the point, kids have to be taught is a fallacy in this context, as was noted. KF
is he correct?
Acartia, quoting Kairosfocus:
KF says the stupidest things.
Suppose he adopts a policy of habitually lying to his spouse. Does he really think he will benefit from the resulting home atmosphere (assuming his wife doesn’t kick him out of their home altogether)?
Lying obviously has negative consequences in the here and now. You pay a heavy price if the people you interact with all come to know that you’re a lying scumbag.
I believe not. In Western society (the US remains a bit of an outlier) religious belief is on a decline and the sky is yet to fall in.
To consistently benefit from lying, you would need to consistently get away with lying, and that’s a tall order when you consider all of the ways in which lying can backfire.
Even if you could consistently get away with lying, there’s this thing called ‘conscience’ that could spoil your fun, assuming you’re not a sociopath.
I’m not saying that no one ever benefits from a policy of habitually lying, but KF’s categorical statement that “it is simply not the case that truth telling is to one’s advantage, short or long term” is ridiculous.
Alan:
Acartia is asking a different question, which is whether KF is correct to say that there are no advantages to truth-telling in the absence of a threat of punishment in the afterlife.
I said I believe not. Gordon’s loaded bit (whether there is an afterlife including some kind of payback) is unanswerable.
One other advantage of not lying is you have less to remember. Evolutionarily speaking, any society will only support a minority of cheaters.
Alan,
I’m just pointing out that Acartia is asking a different question from the one you answered. He isn’t asking about the existence of an afterlife, either.
He wants to know if we agree when KF says “without the eternal reckoning, it is simply not the case that truth telling is to one’s advantage, short or long term.”
I was responding to:
And my answer is no, or so I believe.
And I’m referring to evolutionary stable strategies, where a social group will only support a minority of cheats.
I think psychopathy is largely genetic and exists on a continuum.
I am a terrible liar, and rarely do it, because I’m so bad at it.
I’m bad at it because the imagined consequences of being caught are extremely painful.
An those imaginings are just disapproval, nothing serious like jail.
I had a high school friend who enjoyed lying. He practiced, and he talked to me about practicing. He appeared to experience no discomfort at being caught.
petrushka:
I think you’re right. I remember reading about twin studies that pointed to a genetic component.
Was he just telling tall tales, or did his lies actually do harm?
I wonder if KF would seriously argue that George Santos is benefitting from his web of lies.
He became a lawyer.
Not sure if that answers your question.
keiths:
petrushka:
Say no more. 😄
(Apologies to my lawyer friends. I’m sure they’re used to it, though.)
Well, Trump regards this as a zero-sum game. Which means, lies cannot help unless someone else is harmed. And sure enough, the office this liar won by lying was LOST by someone who didn’t lie.
Tall tales not told with the intent to deceive (and benefit from deception) probably don’t qualify as lies. Otherwise, what are authors of fiction?
Flint:
I agree. I was thinking of tall tales that the teller wants their audience to believe, and may even succeed in getting their audience to believe, but which don’t actually cause any real harm.
Kinda makes you wonder whether holding false beliefs is a harm all by itself. Probably depends on the belief, but offhand I can’t think of any beneficial false beliefs. Perhaps some of our more religious contributors have a different perspective?
Flint:
Holding false beliefs can definitely be harmful, as most of the Darwin Award winners could tell you if they were still alive.
But I guess you’re probably asking if the mere fact of holding a false belief is harmful in and of itself, independent of any downstream effects. Off the top of my head, it seems like there is still harm in holding a false belief, assuming you want your beliefs to be true. Your false belief harms you by being an obstacle between you and your desired state of holding true beliefs.
If you don’t care whether your beliefs are true, I suppose there’s no harm. And if you do care about whether some of your beliefs are true, but not that one, then I guess there’s no harm.
I can think of some. Here’s one:
You’re hopelessly lost in the desert, without water. Your physical condition is deteriorating rapidly and you’re losing hope. You spot a landmark of some kind and you consult your map, and by matching the landmark to the map you think you’ve figured out where you are. To your immense relief you see that there is an oasis only a few miles away, in a different direction from the one in which you are currently traveling. With renewed hope, you change course and set out in the direction of the oasis.
Unbeknownst to you, however, you misidentified the landmark and your true location is completely different from what you think it is. However, it turns out that by walking in the particular direction you have chosen based on your false belief, you actually stumble upon an oasis.
Your false belief has saved your life.
FWIW, I think the next book I will review in the hornbook reviews section of 3:16 AM will be this: https://www.routledge.com/The-Right-to-Know-Epistemic-Rights-and-Why-We-Need-Them/Watson/p/book/9781032039107
I suppose if there is some “right” to truths held by those we speak to, there must be a duty not to lie, unless some more pressing duty overrides it. And that would be the case whether or not lying is beneficial to the liar.
I have my doubts about rights generally–but I haven’t read the book yet.
walto:
Like you, I would hesitate to call it a right. And as you note, there are times when we actually have a duty to lie, the classic instance being the “Nazis at the door hunting for the Jews hidden in your attic” case. The real question is whether there is a duty not to lie in an idealized case, one in which the lie has no downstream consequences whatsoever other than the implantation of a false belief in the listener’s mind. I would say that there is such a duty unless we know that the listener is willing to be lied to on that topic.
It’s related to the comment I made earlier:
Since holding a false belief can be harmful in and of itself, and lying to someone can cause them to hold a false belief, it follows that you harm them (even if there are no downstream consequences) by lying to them, assuming that they wish to hold true beliefs and are not willing to be lied to.
Little lies, like butterflies
Flitter to and fro
Whether they cause weather
We may never know.
I’ll see myself out.
In the real world, I think everyone does a sort of offhand calculus here: Who am I lying TO? What am I lying ABOUT? What is the probability of being caught? What do I stand to gain if I’m not caught? What might I lose if I am caught? Is it possible to gain even if I’m caught? Does it matter how frequently I lie? If I tell the truth, how likely am I be to be believed? How beneficial have my past lies been (am I any good at this)?
In this context, there is no one-size-fits-all general policy. Lying is like betting against the house – the house wins in the long run, but individual bets win all the time.
keiths,
I don’t think KF is saying that nobody pays a price for any lies, just that there’s a lot of lying going unpunished in terms of negative consequences. Do you believe all lies are paid for with some kind of negative price?
Flint,
I’m not even sure the house wins in the long run. I mean, that’s definitely not the case in many individual lives, and I don’t know how you’d even assess that for the population of the world over time. It sounds a little like a kind of faith.
Flint,
Aren’t beliefs supposed to be the product of evolution from the perspective of this blog? Wouldn’t a belief be akin to an evolutionary mutation? Isn’t the truth value of a belief secondary to its value towards reproductive success? Why sort beliefs into the categories of “true or false” when the only thing that matters is whether or not they produce more reproductive success?
“Everybody lies!”
— Dr Gregory House
Hi, WJM. It’s been a while.
He’s saying that there’s never an advantage to telling the truth, which is ridiculous:
That’s unambiguous, and it’s clearly wrong. That shouldn’t surprise you, though. KF isn’t much of a thinker.
WJM:
No, of course not. I just disagree when KF says that there’s no advantage to truth-telling, short- or long-term, unless the threat of eternal damnation looms over you.
The more I watch Trump skate past a lifetime of lies without any consequences, the more I’m inclined to agree with you.
With the caveat that I’m talking about the propensity to believe, rather than any particular set of beliefs, I think you are probably correct. It seems highly likely that an innate talent for belief really was a survival factor for small groups in the distant past. Tribal cohesiveness and all that, I suppose.
Sounds like a way to get us into game theory, which is pretty fascinating. The implication is that there is some ratio of truth to lies which is optimal in the short or long term, or within classes of situations, or depending on consequences and risk trade-offs.
keiths,
Fair enough.
BTW, it’s been a while because I thought this place had shut down. Someone said something about TSZ on UD and I came over to find it still running and my login still working 🙂
Flint,
That’s a pretty good summary of my position too. As I said… 🙂
PS Hi William.
Never thought about it in this way, but looking back, my kids never asked me about Santa Claus, or even talked about it. Possibly because I did my best never to lie to them about anything. Maybe they knew or suspected what I’d say, and didn’t want to hear it.
WJM:
I was gone for a long time too. Came back toward the end of last year looking for toilet paper and decided to start commenting and posting again.
I know Alan has floated the idea of shutting TSZ down a couple of times, but Lizzie has always been willing to continue to pay the hosting fees, which I gather aren’t exorbitant. There’s been a surge of activity lately, so things have gotten more interesting.
Flint:
WJM:
It’s a lot more complicated than that. Beliefs aren’t the direct product of evolution, but our cognitive machinery is. That complicated machinery evolved because it aided our survival and reproduction. Along with that complexity came the ability to form and hold beliefs, both true and false. The net effect was positive, and we have an overall tendency to form true beliefs, but we are certainly capable of holding beliefs that are false or even harmful.
Sometimes false beliefs benefit us. This comment describes a scenario, admittedly unusual, in which that happens. Another oft-cited case is our tendency to overattribute agency to things and events in our environment. When you hear that rustling in the bushes, it’s probably just the wind, but it could also be a predator. If you falsely believe it’s a predator and flee, you’ve wasted some energy, but you’re still alive. If you falsely believe that it’s just the wind, you’re dead. Thus there’s evolutionary pressure to err on the “it’s a predator” side of things, and in general, to err on the side of perceiving agency where there is none, because that’s safer.
That tendency toward overattributing agency could be behind a lot of false beliefs about angels, spirits, demons, and gods.
Evolution shaped us to care about whether beliefs are true or false because the ability to distinguish between the two contributes to reproductive success. Overall, true beliefs are more beneficial than false ones, so our ability to sort true from false is important.
Our desire to understand what happened at the Big Bang doesn’t contribute to reproductive success, at least not directly, but we’re still curious about it because we’ve evolved to be curious. since curiosity (despite killing the cat) tends to promote survival, and survival is necessary in order for us to reproduce.
keiths,
I really don’t understand the personal usefulness of believing what you wrote, but I’m sure it has value to you. That’s what makes people so different and interesting.
WJM,
It doesn’t have to be useful. That was my point here:
Can you see the value of curiosity, and why there would be selective pressure toward developing and maintaining it?
Once you’ve developed curiosity, you can be curious about all sorts of things, including things that don’t contribute to reproductive success. Once you’ve developed brains as complicated as ours, you can think and believe all sorts of things, including things that don’t contribute to reproductive success. Our brains and our curiosity are very useful in evolutionary terms, but that doesn’t mean that every thought or belief has to be useful in that way.
This site, and many others, was started to discuss evolution vs various alternatives.
The argument against evolution has taken a beating recently.
I’m afraid I have almost no interest in philosophical questions, such as free will vs determinism.
Oddly enough there’s some actual scientific speculation at the periphery of this debate, namely the question of whether physics is the same with time reversed.
keiths,
I didn’t mean useful in terms of evolution. I meant personally useful. I was talking specifically about what you wrote in that preceding comment where you outlined your beliefs about where evolution begins and ends, etc. You replied by repeating your evolutionary narrative almost word for word. I’m not sure what “curiosity” has to do with whether or not a belief is personally useful.
I select beliefs based on their apparent usefulness towards my enjoyment of life and mold my internal narrative around that perspective accordingly. Maybe the sense of curiosity carries with it an assumption that there is some truth to be found? Perhaps we just have different internal drives. My wife always said I was about as curious as a dead cat.
WJM:
Curiosity extends well beyond what is useful. I may never get any practical use out of my knowledge of cosmology or of evolution, but I still spend time on those subjects because I enjoy learning and I value the knowledge in and of itself. There is satisfaction in gaining a better understanding of reality.
We’ve had this conversation before, more than once. If I recall correctly, you have an odd belief about being able to shape reality with your thoughts alone, while I think reality is what it is independent of our thoughts. You also believe (or claim to believe) that you can will yourself into enjoying any situation, while I’m sure that’s false. I think I mentioned being tortured as a counterexample, and lying in bed, having wet yourself, as another. You wouldn’t be able to will yourself into enjoying those.
That’s a big part of it, though it doesn’t always depend on that assumption. We can be curious about how a movie ends even though we realize it’s fictional. But yes, there is truth to be found. It’s true that we are having a conversation on the internet, for instance.
Judging by past discussions, we’re undoubtedly wired differently. Curiosity is a major motivator for me, and it’s among the first adjectives that come to mind when I am asked to describe myself.
If you truly didn’t believe there was truth to be found, I could see why your curiosity might be limited. I don’t buy it, though. I think you do believe there is truth to be found, and that you set about finding it many times a day. As just one example, I’ll bet that when you want to sit down, you determine the truth of whether there’s a chair there and whether or not you are positioned correctly to land squarely on the seat.