The Sudden Importance of Truth

Out of Context and Out of Line

It is disingenuous and preposterous to nitpick Tim Walz over remarks that weren't even about him but about gun availability. It's doubtful he intentionally lied, hoping to mislead folks unchecked—he's a teacher. He knows that would never stand. But we all say things that don't come out exactly right, and if it's not our focus, we press on.

He did, after all, carry weapons. And there was a war going on. And his remarks here are not trying to suggest he's a war hero, they're trying to say he has sufficient experience and perspective to understand the difference between military need for assault rifles and civilian needs.

It's legitimate to debate the correct interpretation of the Constitution. Some people think that the Second Amendment is a right of the people to have sufficient firepower that they can take down an out-of-control government. I don't happen to agree with that. Taken seriously, it would amount to a right of private citizens to have nuclear weaponry, so I think the idea that citizens can keep parity with the government, if that's what it ever meant, was lost long ago. But it's a legitimate policy debate we could have. Debate Walz on that, if you want to, because that's what he was speaking to. This was not a discussion about his military record. It merely mentioned it in passing, in shorthand, to give context.

Likewise on the issue of when he retired, plenty of people retire at 20 years. It was his right to retire. He received an honorable discharge. That's really all that needs to be said.

No one's decision to retire after 24 years needs to be questioned. Full credit to Walz for answering graciously pointing this out.

Rules of Engagement

And, just to be clear on the debate rules here, what is the standard for misstatements? How many times does a candidate have to repeat a single ill-shaped, questionably worded, or not-quite-true statement, much less a Big Lie, in order that their honor is put in doubt or their campaign be disqualified?

Asking for a few friends (the US).

Because if there's a sudden renewed interest in the truth here, that is the real story. I was starting to think truth had atrophied from disuse.

Due Diligence

You know where I'm going. The Washington Post estimated 30,573 false or misleading statements by Trump while in office. Is that disqualifying? Is anything like that alleged of Walz?

Are we just talking military issues, JV? Should we talk bone spurs?

Exceptional Vision

Perhaps we should revisit Trump's later remarks about 9/11, as described in an ABC News article (bold mine for emphasis):

Trump Tower is located on 5th Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, a little more than four miles away from ground zero.
…
“I have a window in my apartment that specifically was aimed at the World Trade Center, because of the beauty of the whole downtown Manhattan. And I watched as people jumped, and I watched the second plane come in,” he said then. “Many people jumped, and I witnessed that. I watched that.”

And from that same article (again, bold mine):

At the time, he noted “many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders,” and then claimed, “and I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

And from an article linked by that one (bold mine):

Trump's claim that he saw television reports of people in New Jersey celebrating the attacks has been discredited. He stood by that claim on the campaign trail last year.

There is probably more I could say if The Washington Post’s “30,573” number is even remotely right. (Will we be holding them to the same precision as you want to hold Walz to, or the relaxed precision you reserve for your boss?)

But maybe we could pause here for a response.

 

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Author's Notes:

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This essay originated as a thread on the ex-bird site. It has been edited to fit the richer format of this venue, and expanded to include additional content not in the original thread.

Lying to Ourselves

My friend David Levitt posted this hypothesis on Facebook:

Theory:
Humans are so mentally lazy and emotionally
dishonest about what they know, soon AI will
be much better leaders.

I responded as follows. Approximately. By which I mean I've done some light editing. (Does that mean I lied when I say this is how I responded?)

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I think the notion of honesty here is a red herring. There are a lot of human behaviors that do actually serve a purpose and if you're looking for intellectual honesty, it's as much missing in how we conventionally summarize our society as in how we administer it or ourselves.

Of course we lie sometimes.

• We lie because not all answers are possible to obtain.
  What is an approximation to pi but a lie?
• We lie because it comforts children who are scared.
• We lie because it's more likely to cause success when you tell people your company is going to succeed than if you say "well, maybe" in your pitch to rally excitement.
• We lie because it saves face for people who tried very hard or never had a realistic chance of affecting things to tell them they are blameless.
• We lie because some things are multiple-choice and don't have the right choice.
• We lie because it protects people from danger.
• We lie because some things happen so fast that abstractions like "now" are impossible to hold precise.
• We lie because we are imprecise computationally and could not compute a correct truth.
• We lie because not all correct truth is worth the price of finding out.
• We lie because papering over uninteresting differences is the foundation of abstraction, which has allowed us to reason above mere detail.
• We lie because—art.

So when we talk of machines being more intellectually honest, we'd better be ready for what happens when all this nuance that society has built up for so long gets run over.

Yes, people lie for bad reasons. Yes, that's bad and important not to do.

But it is naive in the extreme to say that all lies are those bad ones, or that of course computers will do a better job, most especially computers running programs like ChatGPT that have no model whatsoever of what they're doing and that are simply paraphrasing things they've heard, adding structural flourishes and dropping attribution at Olympic rates in order to hide those facts.

Any one of those acts which have bootstrapped ChatGPT, by the way, could be called a lie.

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Laziness is also misunderstood and maligned, but that is topic for another day. For now, I refer the ambitious reader to an old Garfield cartoon that I used to have physically taped to my door at my office, back when offices were physical things one went to.

Capitalism's Dominion

I've seen a lot of news reports explaining why even though the Dominion law suit was settled out of court, we in the public should still see this as a victory.

I just want to say this is bunk.

The problem here is one of reductionism, by which I mean taking a hard problem that's hard to think about and reducing it to some other proxy problem that appears to represent the original problem so that the problem is easier to think about. This is a common and sometimes defensible practice, but one must always double-check when solutions start to arise in the proxy space that the original problem is being solved.

Just as an example, we hear proposals to address carbon in the atmosphere by taxation. This is because people think that taxation will create economic pressure to spend in ways that will fix the problem. But if you look at how the rich do their taxes, they mostly do not in fact spend in ways taxation is trying to make them. Rather, they invest in accountants who find loopholes, or they invest in regulatory capture to create loopholes. And then they smugly claim they did their part on the original problem, when they didn't.

Too often in recent years, media has gotten to the place where we have serious societal problems for which they have on-hand experts they can call in when something happens. When something happens for the first time, sometimes it's good to call in an expert to hear how they think about it. But finding a way to understand technical detail is not always a substitute for good journalism. If one becomes too practiced at calling up an expert on speed dial, one stops asking the question "What really happened?" and "What does the public need to know?"

Because here's the thing: What the Dominion settlement really exposes is the stranglehold capitalism exerts on society by insisting on reducing civil disputes to money. While clearly Dominion suffered enumerable economic harm, just as clearly the real damage was non-monetary, to our democracy, our society, and civilization. And none of the news outlets are saying that. They're so focused on how we have experts in law that they aren't focused on the question of whether our system of law is serving us at all in this case. It simply is not. It may serve Dominion. They may take home quite a payday. But that is not why this was a big story. And the big media places have lost this point.

We as a society have no standing to sue. We hoped in vain this would proxy for us, yielding results as non-monetary as the damage. Of course that was fantasy. But it explains the crushing sadness many of us feel. Pundits too practiced with procedural expertise keep missing this.

We as a public are sad, but this sadness is not a failure to understand process, so stop trying to tell us what a historic win this is. The public understands acutely that even a historic win is not helping them. This was not a success for society no matter what career policy wonks say. Ordinary folk know.

What we as a society need is a recognition that there is both process due and none to be had. We need to be allowed to express our pain. That pain needs to be acknowledged. If you want to call in experts, call in grief counsellors or experts in how to change government because from where we sit, the problem is that only the rich can change government, and that's why we are in collective pain.

Not only will it be busines as usual for Fox, but they will write off a big piece of their payment as a tax deduction (meaning the public will pay for some of this), and the rest will be passed along as costs to subscribers (which means viewers will pay more). Some will tell us that increased costs to viewers will hurt Fox and that this will ultimately do well. But meanwhile they will go on lying and issuing propaganda in exactly the way they did, and the real, non-monetary damages will continue to mount without recourse.

Prosecuting Political Fraud

There are lots of things democracy can't survive, not all of them enumerated as illegal. Some used to be protected by just shame. But Donald Trump has shown evil politicians everywhere that shame can be shrugged off, and this has emboldened a new crop of worse evil.

That George Santos could lie freely and still be elected is a direct consequence of the shift Trump created. It cannot be allowed to stand, to be normal.

Democracy requires more than just voting. It requires information. If you have a right to vote, but you don't have a right to know what's true, then you won't be voting in ways that react to the past and plan for the future. You'll just be playing Russian roulette.

So what's to be done? Do we have a law against politicians lying? No, not exactly. But these guys are selling their services to us. And let's just say it. It's not pretty, but it's true. Politics is a business. People profit from it. I wish it were not so, but let's at least apply the laws that apply to commerce.

George Santos profited by selling the public something that wasn't what it seemed. It'd be nice if we had a law against politicians lying to us to get into office, but let's just charge him with commercial fraud.

And let's not hear that this is a radical proposal. I'm tired of hearing radical thrown in to dampen common sense action. What's radical is that he did what he did. The response I'm proposing is “merely proportionate.”

I see prosecutors delaying where I think no delay should be needed. I guess they want to make sure they've gotten all their ducks in a row, but taking more than just a few minutes to do that sends the message that this is somehow more complicated than it is, that there are hidden factors that might excuse him. There are no such factors.

It is simply bad when someone lies to get into office. (The Supreme Court would tell us this if more than one of them had not lied to get appointed. Alas.)

Santos sold voters snake oil to get a job he didn't merit. If left to stand, it makes a mockery of democratic process. We must address this and soon before it becomes the norm.

Every bit of delay suggests there is some other rational point of view, in which he should be allowed to lie to get into office, in which we should have no recourse if someone successfully tricks us into letting them into office on false pretenses.

We must not accept that. It must not be the case that someone can lie to get into office. It must not be the case that if someone is found to have lied to get in, we no longer have recourse.

This is not complicated. He cheated. There is law that makes sense to apply.
Prosecute him. Now.

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