Good point, “untrustworthy” wasn’t the best term to use there. Maybe something like “malicious” would be better? Since lying makes you untrustworthy kind of by definition, as you point out, but it doesn’t necessarily make you malicious (lying to the Gestapo about the Jews in your attic and so on—though I guess that from the Gestapo’s point of view, this is also being malicious).
There’s something here about how mistakes get treated, though I don’t know if I can articulate it well at the moment.
Like, if I quote two or three sentences of a report, did I pick a reasonable piece of the concluding paragraph or did I cherry pick the best possible sentences for my argument? If one column got left out of the dataset and it turned out that column made my case weaker, was that a data parsing mishap or a deliberate attempt to suppress information?
People often remember best the parts of information that agree with them. (That’s an assertion I don’t have citations for at the moment, but I think it’s true.) So a little bit of that kind of thing doesn’t mean they’re doing it deliberately. But if I pick up on a lot of it, more than usual, then I get more suspicious.
Good point, “untrustworthy” wasn’t the best term to use there. Maybe something like “malicious” would be better? Since lying makes you untrustworthy kind of by definition, as you point out, but it doesn’t necessarily make you malicious (lying to the Gestapo about the Jews in your attic and so on—though I guess that from the Gestapo’s point of view, this is also being malicious).
There’s something here about how mistakes get treated, though I don’t know if I can articulate it well at the moment.
Like, if I quote two or three sentences of a report, did I pick a reasonable piece of the concluding paragraph or did I cherry pick the best possible sentences for my argument? If one column got left out of the dataset and it turned out that column made my case weaker, was that a data parsing mishap or a deliberate attempt to suppress information?
People often remember best the parts of information that agree with them. (That’s an assertion I don’t have citations for at the moment, but I think it’s true.) So a little bit of that kind of thing doesn’t mean they’re doing it deliberately. But if I pick up on a lot of it, more than usual, then I get more suspicious.