Comment by wrs
2 days ago
Poker players very seldom outright lie, like saying out loud "hey everybody, my hand is great!", and it's usually not just simple "deception" either.
How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?
> How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?
I'd call that lying with extra steps.
(Which to be clear, im fine with in the context of a game (and in certain contexts even in real life). Plenty of sports can be traced back to ritualized ways of practising to murder people. Take all the field sports of track and field)
I would say that to "lie" means to present information as truth when it is in fact false, and you know it's false. By this definition, you can't "lie" with behavior, only with speech.
Your definition seems like it would include the entire field of cryptography as lies, would it not?
I don't think cryptography usually results in an increased probability of your adversary making incorrect inferences relative to the base case of the adversary having no information. So no, i wouldn't say so.
Maybe you can argue steganography is lying.
Regardless, i also find the idea that lying is morally wrong reductive. Morality depends on context. There are plenty of cases where being misleading is morally ok in my opinion.
2 replies →
So you're trying to manipulate people into believing false things about you?
Is that better or worse than calling it deception?