> 'truth-adjacent' I'll have to remember that one. There is something about politicians and journalists in particular that makes them especially prone to such

> 'truth-adjacent' I'll have to remember that one. There is something about politicians and journalists in particular that makes them especially prone to such semi-deliberate lies. My hunch is that being overly socialized, hyper-socialized, causes people to do this. Suppose you have to interact with a large number of people, at least some of which could affect your future deleteriously. You can't plausibly remember the specific details for each person to know what will or won't cause offense, especially when you must also gauge people telling their friends about something you said. As a rule people remember a negative feeling e.g. an irritating remark much more so than a positive one e.g. caused by a compliment. The heuristic here is to gauge the general atmosphere in a room or discussion and then play to the crowd. The act of this averaging results in satisficing* which could also be described by this truth adjacent quality. I wouldn't even be sure it's intentional. They probably don't even realize that in most domains outside of social interaction this is maladaptive. There's an expression to the effect of "reversed stupidity is not intelligence". If you reverse autism you don't get normality, you get people barely able to cognite outside of the social realm. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing