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Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others

scientificamerican.com

1–10 of 36 posts

Re: Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others

#3
I always knew that lying to oneself is a good planned strategy for lying.

But never thought that our natural tendency to deceive ourselves might have the ultimate purpose of helping us deceive others.

This is why I love hacker news. I get a different perspective every day that (whether it's right or wrong) forces me to re-consider my mental models of the world.

Re: Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others

#5
This is especially poisonous in computer science and research and I see it every single day. I think it's because we don't share a global system that sort of guarantees the same general settings for everybody.

The older sciences basically try to reverse engineer the physical system that is our universe but we in CS just build anything we think is cool and then write a paper about it.

Therefore reproducability in CS is at all time low. Nobody reconstructs any experiment. But everybody thinks he's the next Lamport, or the next .

We deceive ourselves into thinking that what we're doing is science (and then convince everyone around us) when in reality all we do is emulate progress by busy waiting and burning resources.

:/

Re: Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others

#9
Slightly off-topic, but it is worth noting how unusual Robert Trivers acted in this case. Can anyone think of another interesting hypothesis that was put forward in the Foreword of someone else's book? In his own introduction, Dawkins remarks on how unusual this is, and his tone can be read as amusement, but also perhaps a little bit of annoyance.

Re: Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others

#10
post #4

From the wisdom of George in Seinfeld, when Jerry is seeking advice before sitting a lie detector test: "Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it."

Also, the saying, "Fake it 'til you make it".

The study looked at perceived athleticism. I wonder if the same could be said about entrepreneurship?

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