On the other hand, if you assume that someone is lying (in a competent way where you can’t easily identify what are the lies), that gives you… pretty much nothing to do. You’re treating their words as containing ~zero information, so you (1) can’t use them as an excuse to run some fun analyses/projections, (2) can’t use them as an opportunity to socialize and show off.
This is not quite true, though I do think treating their words as containing ~zero information is the correct first pass approach. There does exist a trickier response where their words give you some evidence for what they want you to believe, what they want others to have heard them say, or that the kind of person they imagine themselves to be would say that. Zvi’s Simulacra Levels may be useful here.
Parsing people’s statements this way leaves me open to going off the rails and doing galaxy brained apophenia takes. I do think I have sometimes derived useful information from “They’re saying X. I don’t know if X is true or false. I do now know they want to have said X. What would they gain from having done that?” I try to be pretty precise in what I think I know and why I think I know that when trying moves like this.
(For a blatant and fictional example, imagine that you are a member of the tyrannical regime’s enforcers, and Bella, who you happen to know lies a lot, comes to you and says her boss is secretly an enemy sympathizer. Without any idea if that’s true or false, you now have a good guess that Bella would like bad things to happen to her boss. Their words had no relation to the object level truth of whether their boss is an enemy sympathizer, but still had information for you.)
This is not quite true, though I do think treating their words as containing ~zero information is the correct first pass approach. There does exist a trickier response where their words give you some evidence for what they want you to believe, what they want others to have heard them say, or that the kind of person they imagine themselves to be would say that. Zvi’s Simulacra Levels may be useful here.
Parsing people’s statements this way leaves me open to going off the rails and doing galaxy brained apophenia takes. I do think I have sometimes derived useful information from “They’re saying X. I don’t know if X is true or false. I do now know they want to have said X. What would they gain from having done that?” I try to be pretty precise in what I think I know and why I think I know that when trying moves like this.
(For a blatant and fictional example, imagine that you are a member of the tyrannical regime’s enforcers, and Bella, who you happen to know lies a lot, comes to you and says her boss is secretly an enemy sympathizer. Without any idea if that’s true or false, you now have a good guess that Bella would like bad things to happen to her boss. Their words had no relation to the object level truth of whether their boss is an enemy sympathizer, but still had information for you.)