The fact that Michael Vassar is willing to advocate “increased comfort with lying” in a public forum suggests to me that we are not talking about a literal Secret a la intelligence work, but something more along the lines of little white lies like “You’re looking good today” where the listener as well as the speaker knows to apply a discounting factor. I might be willing to tolerate that in people I associate with—in fact, I do so all the time—so long as the overall system is one where it’s okay if I give only true answers when I’m questioned myself.
However, the fact that Michael Vassar can’t think of a better word than “lie” for this, for the sake of PR purposes, suggests to me that he’s not going to be very good at shading the truth—that he’s still trying to approach things the nerd way. Non-nerds lie easily and they’d never think of calling the process “increased comfort with lying”, either—at least I’ve never read a non-nerd using those words outright, whatever it is they’re actually advocating. But now I’m getting into the details of our current strategic debates, which isn’t really on-topic for this post.
The fact that Michael Vassar is willing to advocate “increased comfort with lying” in a public forum suggests to me that we are not talking about a literal Secret a la intelligence work, but something more along the lines of little white lies like “You’re looking good today” where the listener as well as the speaker knows to apply a discounting factor. I might be willing to tolerate that in people I associate with—in fact, I do so all the time—so long as the overall system is one where it’s okay if I give only true answers when I’m questioned myself.
However, the fact that Michael Vassar can’t think of a better word than “lie” for this, for the sake of PR purposes, suggests to me that he’s not going to be very good at shading the truth—that he’s still trying to approach things the nerd way. Non-nerds lie easily and they’d never think of calling the process “increased comfort with lying”, either—at least I’ve never read a non-nerd using those words outright, whatever it is they’re actually advocating. But now I’m getting into the details of our current strategic debates, which isn’t really on-topic for this post.