Lying is a good way to hide your intentions. That way, it allows the listener to guess and doubt what your intentions are. As the liar, it allows you to effectively gauge statistically what tendencies people seem to demonstrate when it comes to sensitive ambiguous situations. For instance, if you want to find out what percentage of the population are truly racist, you can lie about things that would give racists excuses to be racist against you.
Everyone single racist in this world will lie about being racist, whether they are aware of it themselves or not. Less than a hundred years ago, it may not have been the case since overt racism is accepted. Now we’ve moved on to “Just don’t say racist words.” That’s something very easy to do. Not saying a few words doesn’t mean your actions are not going to be racist. Racists are defined through their actions. If you want to see those racist actions in action, you have to give them a very good reason to act racist against you. For hardcore racists, you don’t even need good reasons, just being born of the wrong nationality will get you there. But for borderline racists, they need a bit more to nudge toward certain tendencies. The test is to see whether they have the awareness of knowing what those tendencies are and their moral implications. Nationalism is a close cousin of racism. A lot of the underlying tendencies in both areas overlap. The behaviors are the same but spelt under different pretense, just a matter of whether geopolitics are involved which can complicate the relations of the entities involved. Both are just a form of tribalism. Every conflict in history is a marker of how far we have come as a single human race. It’s hard to plan for the future when you don’t even understand the present.
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned is that upon learning about the process or having their own behaviors revealed to them, some people just double down even harder. It seems that their ego wouldn’t allow them to do anything else otherwise. I used to not like these people, but I’ve since developed empathy for them seeing just how many people are affected by this, which it’s really difficult to say that they have any control over this innate process because this is neither beneficial to themselves or others in modern society where co-dependency rules over our entire lives. You need healthcare when you are born, and you need healthcare when you die. You need people to produce the food that you eat everyday. You need people to produce all the content you consume everyday. Maybe a couple of centuries ago it would’ve been because of actual resource scarcity. It is essentially a form of coping mechanism. Part of what they are trying to cope is the lack of understanding. By dismissing it, they give themselves an excuse to not put in the work to understand. Coping with the implications of not understanding through simplification. In the end, you still don’t understand but at least you have successfully fooled yourself into either understanding it or not needing to understand, whichever simplification ends up working for you specifically. If don’t make it open ended, you may never get the correct distribution of the simplifications as you introduce bias into the variables you are testing.
Yeah, in other words, if you know people are going to lie when you ask them “Are you racist?” You have to lie to them to find out whether they are racist or not by asking them indirectly. I mean you don’t necessarily have to lie to get your answers indirectly, but sometimes there are no other options. That’s why you see psychology tests do these weird little experiment where they try to hide the intention of what hypothesis they are trying to test from the subjects. I learned everything I know about this stuff from things that were done to me. They made me jump through these hoops, and I thought why not make them jump through hoops too?
Lying is a good way to hide your intentions. That way, it allows the listener to guess and doubt what your intentions are. As the liar, it allows you to effectively gauge statistically what tendencies people seem to demonstrate when it comes to sensitive ambiguous situations. For instance, if you want to find out what percentage of the population are truly racist, you can lie about things that would give racists excuses to be racist against you.
Everyone single racist in this world will lie about being racist, whether they are aware of it themselves or not. Less than a hundred years ago, it may not have been the case since overt racism is accepted. Now we’ve moved on to “Just don’t say racist words.” That’s something very easy to do. Not saying a few words doesn’t mean your actions are not going to be racist. Racists are defined through their actions. If you want to see those racist actions in action, you have to give them a very good reason to act racist against you. For hardcore racists, you don’t even need good reasons, just being born of the wrong nationality will get you there. But for borderline racists, they need a bit more to nudge toward certain tendencies. The test is to see whether they have the awareness of knowing what those tendencies are and their moral implications. Nationalism is a close cousin of racism. A lot of the underlying tendencies in both areas overlap. The behaviors are the same but spelt under different pretense, just a matter of whether geopolitics are involved which can complicate the relations of the entities involved. Both are just a form of tribalism. Every conflict in history is a marker of how far we have come as a single human race. It’s hard to plan for the future when you don’t even understand the present.
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned is that upon learning about the process or having their own behaviors revealed to them, some people just double down even harder. It seems that their ego wouldn’t allow them to do anything else otherwise. I used to not like these people, but I’ve since developed empathy for them seeing just how many people are affected by this, which it’s really difficult to say that they have any control over this innate process because this is neither beneficial to themselves or others in modern society where co-dependency rules over our entire lives. You need healthcare when you are born, and you need healthcare when you die. You need people to produce the food that you eat everyday. You need people to produce all the content you consume everyday. Maybe a couple of centuries ago it would’ve been because of actual resource scarcity. It is essentially a form of coping mechanism. Part of what they are trying to cope is the lack of understanding. By dismissing it, they give themselves an excuse to not put in the work to understand. Coping with the implications of not understanding through simplification. In the end, you still don’t understand but at least you have successfully fooled yourself into either understanding it or not needing to understand, whichever simplification ends up working for you specifically. If don’t make it open ended, you may never get the correct distribution of the simplifications as you introduce bias into the variables you are testing.
Very good point. If we want to build a better model of an individual’s behaviour or the dynamics of a social group, lying can be an invaluable tool.
Yeah, in other words, if you know people are going to lie when you ask them “Are you racist?” You have to lie to them to find out whether they are racist or not by asking them indirectly. I mean you don’t necessarily have to lie to get your answers indirectly, but sometimes there are no other options. That’s why you see psychology tests do these weird little experiment where they try to hide the intention of what hypothesis they are trying to test from the subjects. I learned everything I know about this stuff from things that were done to me. They made me jump through these hoops, and I thought why not make them jump through hoops too?