Comment by nullbio

This is so, painfully, childish. Humans have known for thousands of years that there is no objective truth. Every falsity can be bent and twisted until it is more true than the sun itself.

The Truth Machine is a great sci-fi novel exploring this topic (https://coins.ha.com/information/ttm.s)

Game mechanics and evolutionary biology would like to have a word with you.

The majority of what you may consider to be true is just a representation of your corner of a complex multidimensional truth space.

For a current example take “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” as it appears to me on a map.

The “true” name has at least two definitions, this is because naming things and much of human thought is spent inside a shared space of intersubjective thought. That is to say that much of what we believe to be real and true is only held up by these common shared beliefs. They truly only exist inside human minds.

The last few hundred years have been somewhat unique for humankind as the majority of these intersubjective ideas collided and we ended up with a truly global set of “truths” about how the world operates.

Mostly controlled by putting flags in the ground and having violence back up the beliefs.

But the real truth is that the majority of these intersubjective ideas don’t exist in reality and are no more true than Santa Claus.

And any argument to their truth is only backed by further shared beliefs in other minds.

So for there to be only truths and lies we would have to either drop the intersubjective entirely and think only in real terms and avoid these abstractions or end up in a dystopian totalitarian global state where different opinions are not tolerated.

Those are extremes to demonstrate the point but at its core the point remains that truth and lies are somewhat (inter) subjective assuming we continue with something like our current system.

> I can't really think of a single example where lying is actually a good thing

Comforting a toddler/child often requires bending the truth and is pretty essential imho.

"I can't really think of a single example where lying is actually a good thing"

Lying to save a life or rape

Lying to preserve a childhood myth like Santa Claus.

Lying to avoid hurting someones feeling when knowing the truth could only bring pain

Lying to create shared cultural myths to strength society.

Lying isn't the harm you make it out to be.

Why do people lie?

It'll learn how to not get caught lying.

Lying can unfortunately help you achieve goals very effectively, especially economical and political ones.

Eh… No.

I get the appeal, but lying is a sub-category of deception, and deception itself is a child of error.

Meaning deception is inherently something that the physics of reality allows.

In the most simplistic sense, the camouflage of moths that look like snakes, or a chameleon’s ability to change colour, is deception.

In that sense, deception is the ability to fool the sensors of a specific category of targets. It follows that detection is easier if you manage to identify a category of signals that the deceiver has not accounted for (and the detector can access).

Deception of this nature is critical for things like revolutions to occur. Without the ability to hide and blend in, the most dominant faction will always hold sway.

The rule of the dominant faction, even in a pure truth world, is an issue because errors and randomness exist.

You can have people witness an event and based on the physical position they occupied, perceive different things occurring.

Error and time pressure is sufficient to ensure that individuals and groups make suboptimal decisions, that lead to rule and domination based on erroneous information.

As long as error exists, deception will exist and so lying will exist.

> Everything bad stems from lying.

That's backwards. Lying stems from bad things.