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I am not a native English speaker, so my cultural priors might be way off, but I think those two things are quite different. Lying is making statements that the
by ptero 4y ago
I am not a native English speaker, so my cultural priors might be way off, but I think those two things are quite different. Lying is making statements that the speaker knows are false.
An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the actual information and omitting or obfuscating other parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually making false statements. This is literally what most of the layers do much of the time in court.
To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is what the judge and opposing lawyers work on.
Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to expose through rational exploration. Possible, but requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is likely to doom the case. My 2c.
- denton-scratch 4y ago> those two things are quite different. Your grasp of English seems fine, to me. I think your "quite different" distinction is incorrect. The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one. There's a gradation from plain lying your face off, through mixing in a few truths with your lies, through lying by omission, through presenting true facts in such a way as to make the reader believe falsehoods. The tactic most-used by newspapers is lying by omission. Newspapers routinely "spike" stories that aren't aligned with the paper's political agenda. You can search the paper's output, and you won't find a direct lie; but a parallel search for truth will also fail. Truth is to be found in the gaps.
- giantg2 4y ago"The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one." There is if you look up definitions. Lying involves falsehoods. You can mislead someone using selective truths without using falsehoods. That's why the article etc was about misleading, persuading, etc and not mentioning lying (aside from the commentor I originally responded to).
- autoexec 4y agoYep. Lies are not the same thing as being dishonest. You can use lies to be misleading, or manipulative, or dishonest but you don't need to, and it's usually more effective if you don't (or at least don't entirely). If someone can't see how a person could be misleading without lying they're going to fall for a lot of bullshit.