Some thoughts on lying, and why I (somewhat) trust the mainstream media

     I've written elsewhere that lying is the strategy of the stupid. That's not to say that everyone who ever lies is stupid, or that there can never be a time when lying can be done intelligently. Just that, as a general rule, it's better to tell the truth than to lie, and not just for moral reasons. I have two arguments here.

    First, I want to suggest that intelligence generally is in some sense about truth. That is, if we define intelligence as an overall problem-solving ability based in the acquisition and application of information, the solutions that intelligence comes up with for problems will tend to be better when the information it uses is true. That's not to say that intelligent people are those who know the truth, or that they don't deal in  hypotheticals. Quite the contrary, because being able to entertain and explore counterfactuals is itself an important and useful way to discover more truths. Rather, I'm saying that the enterprise of intelligence is largely about evaluating what things are or are likely to be true, and making decisions or choices that take considerations of truth or falsehood into account. An intelligent solution to the problem "Should I bring an umbrella?" will be one that considers (among other things) the likelihood that "it will rain" is a true statement.

     Now, there is a difference between wanting to know the truth yourself and lying, which is wanting someone else to believe a falsehood, so it doesn't necessarily follow from any of this that smart people would not lie. I'm making a softer claim here, namely, that as intelligence consists in large part of habits of truth-seeking, there is necessarily going to be a certain amount of conflict between one's inner dialog of truth-speaking and an outward practice of lying. The habits interfere with each other, and while that doesn't mean an intelligent person cannot lie (after all, intelligence is about solving problems, including the problem of lying), it does mean it's more work.

     And that leads into my second argument: it really is more work. Any meaningful lie you might tell has some way it might be revealed as a lie. If I say that it is raining, and you look outside and see it's not, you know I'm an unreliable witness. But most lies are about things that are a little harder to disprove, and the best lies are the ones that go completely undetected as lies, which is more likely if they are nearly impossible to disprove.

     Recall that we're talking about intelligence as an overall problem-solving ability, and note that confirming a statement as true or disproving it as a lie is itself a problem calling for an exercise of that intelligence. When you craft a lie and decide whether or not to tell it, you will want to consider how easy it is to disprove it, but here you are limited by your own intelligence. Just because you think disproving your lie would be prohibitively difficult doesn't mean someone else might not find it trivially easy. 

     The problem is compounded for people who, in addition to not being particularly bright to begin with, wrongly think they are significantly smarter than average, because they will tend to believe that a difficult problem for them (unmasking a lie) would be downright impossible for lesser minds. But it's important to recognize that intelligence isn't a simple linear quantity, and smart people recognize that there's a lot even they don't know; some absolute moron might just happen to know the one crucial fact that shatters an otherwise impenetrable lie. An intelligent person knows that for every way they can imagine their lie being discovered, there are a thousand ways they haven't thought of.

     That's why I say that lying is the strategy of the stupid. The stupid tend to think that it's easy to lie, and of course superficially it is: all you have to do is say something that's not true. But that's the shortcut. Telling a robust, consistent lie that will withstand concerted and intelligent scrutiny? That is ferociously hard.

     And here it's important to point out that the same superficial shortcut applies to the business of rejecting a falsehood. It is also trivially easy to dismiss some claim as a lie or "fake news"; you don't need to consider a shred of evidence. Boom. "Liar!" and you're done. Of course, since you can do this equally well with any claim regardless of its truth or falsehood, it has zero probative value.

     So why do I tend to (somewhat) trust the mainstream media when they report that, for example, Covid-19 is a pandemic that's killed over a million people worldwide in the past year (1.49 million as of this writing)?

     It's not because I think media companies have our best interests at heart or that they somehow find the idea of lying morally repugnant and would never ever dream of doing such an evil thing. True, I tend to think that the majority of people employed in reporting and publishing the news, or in almost any industry, are probably decent human beings who aren't completely diabolical and might balk at the more obvious sins asked of them, but I'm well aware of how decent human beings can be gradually and subtly corrupted by an unjust system, so I have little doubt that mainstream news sources would lie like crazy if they thought it were in their interests to do so and they could get away with it. 

     But that's just it. It isn't in their interests to be caught flagrantly lying. There are, of course, powerful economic interests behind most every news outlet, and there's definitely a bias in what gets covered and what doesn't, and pretty strong spin in how any particular issue is reported, but when it comes to straight up lies? Those can and usually will be revealed somehow, especially given that there are multiple competing news outlets who would just love to discredit each other. If they could. 

     And some "news" outlets do take shortcuts discrediting their competitors, of course. They boast to their viewers that only they can be trusted, that their competitors are just full of lies. Such a lazy shortcut really just discredits them, because it is so lazy and so independent of the truth or falsehood of the claim. 

     I don't buy the claim that mainstream media is just full of lies, because the overall coherence of the stories is just too damned hard to fake. Yeah, there's going to be lots of stuff in the papers that's wrong, misreported or spun, and sometimes just plain lies. That's so with all sources of information (including and perhaps especially the ones decrying everyone else as "fake news"), and there's no getting around the hard work of evaluating and assessing and integrating all the data into a coherent world view. Just tossing the bulk of the data into the box marked "lies" is a lazy shortcut.