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Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others
- lngnmn 10y agoSure. How else one could get married?
- rustynails 10y agoAs someone who is married, I truly do not understand your comment. The exact opposite seems true to me. Honesty and integrity are paramount (at least to me). Find somebody you respect. Find somebody who is compatible with you. Hope you find someone who thinks and feels the same as you do. If I struggled on my journey, it was to find a woman who did not want to dominate me or be dominated who was worthy of my respect. I consider myself very lucky. Been married for a long time to an amazing women who is an engineer in heart and soul. So, nothing about self doubt, deceit for me.
- ardit33 10y agoCongrats you hit the jackpot. Many people are not so lucky, well at least half or more* (depending on the percentage of marriages are actually happy).
- cm2012 10y agoIf you are college educated divorce rates plummets. Same for marrying later in life. +the 50% stat is quite weighted by people with multiple divorces. The average HN reader probably has an 80% shot at lifelong marriage.
- thedevil 10y agoI always knew that lying to oneself is a good planned strategy for lying. But never thought that our natural tendency to deceive ourselves might have the ultimate purpose of helping us deceive others. This is why I love hacker news. I get a different perspective every day that (whether it's right or wrong) forces me to re-consider my mental models of the world.
- kartan 10y ago> This is why I love hacker news. I get a different perspective every day that (whether it's right or wrong) forces me to re-consider my mental models of the world. I almost believed you there. Don't lie to yourself, we like Hacker News for its entertainment value. :P
- apapli 10y agoFrom the wisdom of George in Seinfeld, when Jerry is seeking advice before sitting a lie detector test: "Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it."
- archvile 10y agoThe Phantom Pain taught me this as well.
- aluminussoma 10y agoAlso, the saying, "Fake it 'til you make it". The study looked at perceived athleticism. I wonder if the same could be said about entrepreneurship?
- rustynails 10y agoI drew a similar conclusion. In order to lie to someone else, you need to believe it yourself. Steve Jobs' reality distortion field is an example. I found for myself that if I had self doubt, I could become paralysed with fear. If I didn't ask myself if I could, then I made it happen. This isn't quite the same, but it's very similar. This attitude required some deceit as I rarely said I couldn't do something. This could be linked to be the Peter principle.
- creed0r 10y agoThis is especially poisonous in computer science and research and I see it every single day. I think it's because we don't share a global system that sort of guarantees the same general settings for everybody. The older sciences basically try to reverse engineer the physical system that is our universe but we in CS just build anything we think is cool and then write a paper about it. Therefore reproducability in CS is at all time low. Nobody reconstructs any experiment. But everybody thinks he's the next Lamport, or the next <insert famous CS guy>. We deceive ourselves into thinking that what we're doing is science (and then convince everyone around us) when in reality all we do is emulate progress by busy waiting and burning resources. :/
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoWell, this sure explains why I suck so hard at lying.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lkrubner 10y agoSlightly off-topic, but it is worth noting how unusual Robert Trivers acted in this case. Can anyone think of another interesting hypothesis that was put forward in the Foreword of someone else's book? In his own introduction, Dawkins remarks on how unusual this is, and his tone can be read as amusement, but also perhaps a little bit of annoyance.
- HillaryBriss 10y agoThere was an NPR story about how our current president listened to a lot "Power of Positive Thinking" lectures/sermons early in his life. He really embraced those ideas. Seems he's almost always trying to convince the world that a certain narrative about himself, the voters, and reality in general is true. But this research adds an interesting wrinkle to that story. By making so many questionable statements publicly, maybe he's really just trying to convince himself. And that's why, when outsiders try to tell him that his "facts" are not facts at all, it doesn't matter to him. He just repeats his original statement even louder. His public statements aren't for the rest of us. We're just the audience that adds some emotional intensity for him and the process in his own brain.
- dhimes 10y agoI also find anecdotally that people like that only surround themselves with people who repeat (or at least don't challenge) the lie. If you throw in some reality that is at odds with their belief then you don't get a seat at the table any more.
- NumberCruncher 10y agoHave you ever read discussions on HN about climate change?
- 1_2__3 10y agoThat's a tacky and pointless comment.
- NumberCruncher 10y agoI just tried to use a non-anecdotally counterexample.
- dhimes 10y agoI have absolutely no clue what you mean by it.
- josephpmay 10y agoI lie to myself that I don't lie to myself
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- awarer 10y ago"whether you think you can, or you think you can't - you're right.” ― Henry Ford
- arca_vorago 10y agoWelcome to intelligence 101, if you don't believe it, you won't be able to convincingly lie to others as well. There is a reason intel bubbas have amazing cross training with acting, particularly Method.
- jannotti 10y agoThis seems like a junk experiment. They asked people to perform a task that would be easier if you had some information. Then they started showing them videos. The subjects stopped watching when they had enough inspiration for their story. That's it. It's as if the authors of the study think the subjects have ESP and know that evidence contrary to their goal is coming up, and therefore decide to stop watching.
- jbscpa 10y agoBernard L. Madoff From Wikipeda "In his plea allocution, Madoff stated he began his Ponzi scheme in 1991. He admitted he had never made any legitimate investments with his clients' money during this time. Instead, he said, he simply deposited the money into his personal business account at Chase Manhattan Bank. When his customers asked for withdrawals, he paid them out of the Chase account — a classic "robbing Peter to pay Paul" scenario. Chase and its successor, JPMorgan Chase, may have earned as much as $483 million from his bank account.[107][108] He was committed to satisfying his clients' expectations of high returns, despite an economic recession. He admitted to false trading activities masked by foreign transfers and false SEC filings. He stated that he always intended to resume legitimate trading activity, but it proved "difficult, and ultimately impossible" to reconcile his client accounts. In the end, Madoff said, he realized that his scam would eventually be exposed.[75][109] let me emphasize from above: "He stated that he always intended to resume legitimate trading activity, but it proved "difficult, and ultimately impossible" to reconcile his client accounts"
- bch 10y agoThis is excellent. Describes moral bankruptcy as well. Maybe perhaps not entirely malicious, but ultimately wrong and unmaintainable.
- woodandsteel 10y ago>He stated that he always intended to resume legitimate trading activity, but it proved "difficult, and ultimately impossible" to reconcile his client accounts. My guess is he is a sociopath, and his statement about intending to switch to legitimate trading is a lie intended to make him look less guilty.
- mrcactu5 10y agoTelling the truth can be costly. Overwhelmingly we massage the facts to get the point across without causing too much damage. Textbook simplify a complicated facts for students, that is not lying. Commercials aren't lying because they aren't saying anything with a basis in fact. While the majority of statements are neither true nor false, maybe we can quantify if a statement is closer to one or the other.
- losteverything 10y agoThe one I can totally understand is Contending that his statement that "there's nothing going on between us" had been truthful because he had no ongoing relationship with Lewinsky at the time he was questioned, Clinton said, "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is." Words matter in a useless way for my math mind. Especially the words "maybe" or "might have" - both are correct in almost any instance, question or situation. So clinton's "is" is his way to lie but not lie. Maybe.
- mirimir 10y agoThis is method acting. We all do it. It's the major self-help strategy. And it's very useful in developing personas for compartmentalization.