You’re correct that I did not intend to convey that this phenomenon is motivated by cynical self-interest. I don’t understand the Jordan Peterson connection.
ymeskhout
Karma: 1,580
Slicing the (Kosher) Hate Salami
Beware the Moral Homophone
I already said I don’t consider alternative explanations on their own to be indicative of lying. I don’t know where you’re getting this notion that speculation is evasion, here’s what I said on the matter:
If a client is either factually innocent or guilty-but-sober-minded, there’s no difficulty getting them to admit the incriminating nature of incriminating evidence. If a client is lying — whether to me, themselves, or just desperately trying to manifest a reality which doesn’t exist — it’s like pulling teeth.
If they have no idea what’s going on then there’s no need for this exercise. There’s other ways to cooperate in truth-seeking.
I don’t consider alternative explanations on their own to be indicative of lying, especially if the alternative theory as a whole more accurately comports with reality. This is why there are two parts to this exercise: surviving the gauntlet of facts and dethroning the other survivor (if any).
Why would lying be a natural response for a non-liar falsely accused of lying?
I’ve never encountered this framework before but I’m curious. What do you find useful about it?
It’s certainly possible to just constantly amend a theory and keep it technically cohesive, but I’ve found that even dedicated liars eventually throw in the gauntlet after their contortions become too much to bear. Even if a liar refuses to give up, they still have to grapple with trying to unseat the truthful (and much less convoluted) theory. That’s why there’s two parts to this exercise: surviving the gauntlet and dethroning the other survivor.
I didn’t take a position on what balance between convenience vs ambiguity we should strike, it’s always context-dependent. That said, second-person pronouns like “you” tend to be significantly less ambiguous than third-person pronouns. Because you generally know who is talking to you directly (see what I did there?) whereas “they” can potentially refer to anyone in the world.
I mentioned this in another comment, I used an unrealistically convenient example for illustrative purposes. A real-life application of my rubric on a real-life lie would be much more complicated and take multiple detours.
I’m unclear on what the distinction is exactly. This is a tutorial that works for catching a talented liar but also creating common knowledge between yourself and a bad liar.
The example was intended to be unrealistically convenient, since the goal there was just an illustrative example. Had I used an actual lie narrative from one of my clients (for example) it would’ve gotten very convoluted and wordy, and more likely to confuse the reader.
I acknowledge there are limitations when you’re dealing with unknowable lies. Beyond that, it was really hard to figure out how rare “lies with convenient flaws” really are. I don’t know what denominator I’d use (how many lies are in the universe? which ones count?) or how I’d calculate the numerator.
How to Corner Liars: A Miasma-Clearing Protocol
Meme Talking Points
The whole point of the sentence was to demonstrate how bad ambiguity can get with pronouns, and this exchange is demonstrating my point exactly. The issue might be that you’re making some (very reasonable) assumptions without noticing it narrows the range of possible interpretations. The only unambiguous part of the sentence is “John told Mark”, but every other he can be either John or Mark.
Edit: my apologies for any rude tone, it was not intentional. All of us necessarily make reasonable assumptions to narrow ambiguity in our day to day conversations and it can be hard to completely jettison the habit.
No, because John could be speaking about himself administering the medication. It’s also possible to refuse to do something you’ve already acknowledged you should do, so the 3rd he could still be John regardless of who is being told what.
That’s the thing, I generally present as very masculine and if anyone referred to me as ‘she’ I would find it more confusing than anything else. If I actually cared, maybe I’d look for what effeminate signals I gave off, but I can’t imagine a scenario where I would find it offensive or get mad at the person.
Yes, and there were areas I could’ve gotten into in terms of how other languages rely on pronouns. One that I am most familiar with is French and its distinction between singular and plural ‘you’ (tu & vous), and vous also can be singular if used formally. So if anyone is translating from French, you have to make a judgment call regarding whether each vous is plural or formal singular. Some information is inevitably lost in the transfer.
I wrote a whole essay on proper & effective protest tactics: How to Protest Well
The basic template to follow is to keep all these questions in mind:
What exactly do we want?
Who has the power to give it to us?
How do we pressure them effectively?
When do we admit our tactics aren’t working?