As a prelude to my upcoming deep dive into academic rot from an outsider's perspective (I have not stepped on a university campus in over ten years), I figured it time to go back to basics and talk about lying. Ideologues of all stripes, left, right, centre or sideways, do not care about being factually correct as long as they are perceived as morally correct. Therefore, it is insufficient to point out that their claims are simply wrong, one must instead point out that they are lying.
Samuel Clemens, better known by his nom de plume of Mark Twain, famously said "there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Considering that statistical deception was the topic of the very first lecture of my college statistics class (and something I was already familiar with thanks to a children's book titled The Ten Things All Future Mathematicians and Scientists Must Know), I could elaborate on that subject alone, but allow me to provide an alternative with a higher degree of probity: there are four types of lies.
First, let us define a lie. A lie is any statement made with the intent to deceive. It may take any of four different forms: a false statement, reverse psychology, lie by omission, and lie by structure. I will be providing some examples of each type as well.
Let's get the simplest one out of the way first. False statements are not necessarily lies, they could be honest mistakes. However, if the person making the false statement knows that statement to be false, that person is lying. Even if the person making the false statement doesn't know it to be a lie, the statement itself may still be a lie, particularly if it is a widely-circulated claim that was originally made with the intent to deceive. Most of the claims circulated by gun control advocates fall in this category, hence why I have a habit of saying "I have never seen an honest argument for gun control, though most of the people calling for it seem to honestly believe what they say." I say this because I know a thing or two about guns, and most of the comedically bizarre things I have heard over the years simply had to have been made up. On the other hand, the claim "one in five American children are starving" didn't start out as a lie, it started out as a misinterpretation of food security data. That claim is only a lie when made by the charity money laundering operation called Feeding America, because the perpetuation of this myth keeps them in business; they don't actually care about malnourished children, and because there aren't really 13 million (or whatever number they're throwing out this week) starving children in the United States, they are able to simply pocket most of the donations while pretending to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist. Apologists for both positions will default to moral brow-beating when fact-checked, claiming that anyone who fact-checks their claims "just wants people to die." The appeal to emotion isn't just a logical fallacy (I'd argue it shouldn't be, because it doesn't contain flawed logic, it contains no logic), it's a deliberate manipulation tactic that psychological abusers constantly resort to; turn it back on them.
The second, reverse psychology, is the category of "true lies." These are statements that are true, but that the person making them knows they will not be believed, possibly because that person knows that they have no credibility, and therefore people are more likely to believe the exact opposite of whatever they say. Flat Earth falls into this category. The establishment says the Earth is round, the establishment constantly lies, therefore the Earth isn't round. The Flat Earth Society is a government psyop; change my mind. The same is true of central planning. Central planning doesn't work for the common people, it serves only the ruling class by keeping the common people servile. However, as more and more market regulations make life difficult for the commoners, the political class says "that's the free market for you," the intelligentsia pushes for central planning, pretending that they are fighting for the common people against the ruling class. More regulations are introduced, the rich stay rich, the middle class disappears, the poor grow more numerous, the intelligentsia blames the free market, and economically illiterate people keep falling for the grift kept alive by this insane feedback loop. Appeals to emotion can be found in these arguments as well, and as before, they should be turned back on the people making them.
The third is the lie by omission. This is very similar to the logical fallacy of cherry picking, but executed a bit differently. Where cherry-picking, or painting bulls-eyes around arrows, is the practise of selecting a few outlying data points to support a conclusion that is debunked by the majority of the data, a lie by omission is the opposite. A few details that seem insignificant but are actually quite important are deliberately left out of a particular data-set in order to manipulate the conclusion. This is probably the most common method of narrative distortion in the "news" media, because it is easy to do and extremely subtle. Rarely is any story so complete that more cannot be found, but the "news" media intentionally stops its investigation into any given matter once it has the narrative it wants. I provided a few examples in my article on false balance, including a perfect example of someone defending the practise by saying, in a rather dismissive manner, "you can always find more to the story." There are people out there who will unironically say that "nuance is bad" and "we don't need to hear both sides." Anyone who says either must be assumed to have malicious intentions. That being said, don't be too quick to assume malice in the case of a short summary; sometimes, it simply is not possible to include all of a story's subtleties within the span of a thousand words, so be careful with the use of "you didn't say [blank], therefore bias."
The final and most subtle type of lie is the lie by structure. It is also the most difficult to define, and while I could cover most lies by structure as "any deceptive statement based on fallacious reasoning not under the umbrella of cherry picking," that wouldn't really work, especially since I have previously made the argument that every logical fallacy can be derived from cherry picking. The only two fallacies that could stand on their own are circular reasoning and the unfalsifiable claim, and the latter is usually a derivative of the former; if a claim is structured such that any refutation of the claim can be twisted round to confirm the claim, then that unfalsifiable claim is inherently circular. The claim that "atheists secretly believe in God," supported by a handful of cherry-picked Bible verses, is one such example, and "libertarians are secretly fascists," supported by a handful of cherry-picked quotes from dictators talking about freedom, is another. By themselves, these statements are compound fallacies, and if made in bad faith, which they almost always are, they are lies by structure. There is one other type of bad argument that can be considered a lie by structure, and that is a type of intellectual cop-out call a non-sequitur. I don't like to call the non-sequitur a logical fallacy for the same reason I don't like to call the appeal to emotion a logical fallacy, i.e. there is no logic to it whatsoever, it is simply "fact, fact, unrelated assertion." Another type is the dishonest re-definition. I have an entire series called Deceptive Rebranding where I go over multiple examples, and I will have more in the future. A great deal of lies by structure can simply be categorised as "arguing semantics," i.e. re-defining key terms so that one's interlocutor has no means with which to express a contrary position. The simplest example of this practise that I can think of is a relatively inconsequential claim; it is the comedically bizarre assertion by my new favourite punching bag that Prohibition didn't ban alcoholic beverages. No, no, you read that correctly, he really did say that, and I replied to his reasoning by calling it what it is: a distinction without a difference. You can read the whole response here, just in case he deletes my comment, deletes the article, or deletes his entire website.
For those of you who are new here, one of the things I like to do is write response articles, sometimes friendly, sometimes not. In the case of the more unfriendly ones, I may find an occasion to link back to this one if I find myself rattling off different types of lies and/or logical fallacies. I don't plan on re-visiting the logical fallacies themselves, since everyone and their grandmother has written articles on the subject by now, including yours truly. Anyway, I'll be back on Sunday. Na shledanou!