One of my favorite quotes goes like this: Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's co

One of my favorite quotes goes like this: Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies... [0] If you haven't read "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" I highly recommend it. I've gone through the chapters that are online twice now and will probably read them all once more when the final story arch is released toward the end of the year. [0] http://hpmor.com/chapter/65 http://hpmor.com/chapter/65