I’m transparent about using LLMs as an editorial assistant (Claude 4.1 for this essay) but that last parenthetical just now came to me naturally, as I suspect almost all the ones in this essay did.
Interestingly enough, another reader asked me the same question on another essay but ended up citing a bunch of false positives: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/beware-the-moral-homophone/comment/120595749
True but I made sure to qualify my claim as pertaining to boxing specifically.
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?
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.
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.
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On second thought, I should’ve been more precise. I changed it to “Weight can be such an extreme determinative factor...”. Thanks for the note.