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Well, part of my argument (or, well, my suspicion, anyway) was that there was something like a class or place-in-the-hierarchy aspect to how different groups of people respond to the used-car-salesman-style lie vs the lawyer-style lie... and further, that that place-in-the-hierarchy aspect was potentially dangerous or destabilizing for the broader system, long term, and even further, elite groups have a lot of short-term incentives not to see the fact that it was potentially dangerous and destabilizing, because the social validity of their forms of lying (and only their forms) props up their place in the hierarchy.
Lawyers don't get offended if they see other lawyers absolutely shading and abusing the truth well, because they have internalized a value system that sees that as at least plausibly virtuous behavior. Like, we live in an adversarial system where everyone deserves representation, and therefore every lawyer, MORALLY, should be doing everything possible inside the bounds of the law to advocate for their clients - and this is fine, because other parties ought to have their own lawyers advocating similarly for them. And further, they see those moves as just the inevitable, legitimate moves given our set of incentives and institutions. It's like expert game fans watching a good speed runner - yes, reprogramming Mario 64 in real time on the controller via a buffer overflow glitch arguably violates the spirit of the game design of Mario 64 and makes for a lousy show, but wow is that being good at the actual, existing Mario 64! That's what being a good speed runner looks like! And so it is with being a good lawyer - this is certainly my experience with knowing a few lawyers, anyway. Don't hate the player, adjust the game (eventually).
Meanwhile, what do you call a hundred lawyers on the bottom of the ocean? A good start! Har har! The reality is, lawyer jokes don't come from nowhere.
Similarly, good politicians who actually know things about political rhetoric (and diplomacy for that matter) have a moral story about how, to knit together a giant, disparate coalition of low information voters and special interest activists who all have tons of unspoken assumptions and values that clash, you have to rely on certain kinds of misleading and ambiguous abstractions and narratives to pull people together for the greater good, even if it leaves individuals with highly incorrect impressions of what you say and mean and will do. It's not lying in some profane sense; rather, it's all strictly utilitarian, with those technically-just-inside-the-bounds-of-law statements being primarily viewed entirely by what effect they have in the broader social world. Plato named the Noble Lie more than 2000 years ago, and despite technological changes since, that core idea remains true and unavoidable.
Meanwhile, how do you know that a politician is lying? Their lips are moving! Har Har! Once again, the reality is, politician stereotypes don't come from nowhere.
Part of why I, personally, have found the replication crisis so jarring of my own worldview (after following it pretty closely) is that I had, previously, assumed that anybody doing something with "science" in its name had, as an ultimate value, pursuit of "disinterested, objective, universal truth" in exactly the way that politicians and lawyers didn't. That faith and trust in "science" was a huge motivator in pulling me out of the more conservative religious background I grew up in. So it's been extremely disruptive to me (on a personal, emotional level) to realize that many of the people in those fields are much closer to the politicians and lawyers than I had been led to believe and, frankly, had wanted to believe. And, similarly, I think such people themselves overwhelmingly have their own moral stories about why what they're doing is, ultimately, virtuous - power poses could help women gain equality, and microaggression research is on the right side of history, so finnicky details about study design and p-hacking and the garden of forking paths (or whatever the details were) are secondary to the greater moral purpose, and it's more important that we not undermine social solidarity in addressing those vital moral issues than that we get every single detail right about how things actually work....
And by the way, have you seen the absolutely cratering of trust in the academy that happened over the last decade? It didn't come from nowhere, either.
I think this is the nub of it. A used car salesman lying, in its ugliest form, is very low status, because its so nakedly venal. "I want money, and I don't mind hurting strangers to get it, because if I lie to you and you believe it, you are a sucker and that's proof you deserve to be taken advantage of." But because it's so venal, and often so crass, I think it's easy for normal people to understand. They can mostly trust their instincts and have their guards up. NOBODY will justify the lying of a used car salesman. And by the way, have you heard about Trump university and Trump steaks?
But the moral cases I just made for what lawyers and politicians and academics do (and I say this as someone who has a few lawyers and many academics in my social circles) are not just much easier to make, they're actually kind of foundational to our entire system. It's what justifies people's behavior and recognition of social power. And status differences play a huge role in it all of this. And a lot of normal people, I think, understand this power difference on a gut level, even if they are unclear on the details and know that they can't actually understand or refute (or even always recognize) the styles of truth abusing being used on them.
In a way, it reminds me a lot of Scott Alexander's essay on getting Eulered, or Paul Graham's old essay that includes the idea of the Blub Paradox. Both essays emphasize the problems of a person encountering arguments or techniques that they can't evaluate because the arguments rely on knowledge or concepts that they can't understand, and yet they are forced to make weighty choices in the face of those arguments... and they recognize the larger, contested social context those arguments or techniques are in, too, and that there are certain zero sum aspects underlying everything.
The lawyer metaphor reminds me a bit of the discussion ymeskhout brought up comparing TWA Flight 800 as compared to certain sanctionable lawsuits, and what I contrasted with the Subway Tuna lawsuit allegations.
From a lot of points of view, all of these lawsuits had what a serious literal reader would consider were made 'recklessly or in bad faith'. And I don't just say that given what's happened since in Krick: even at the time, it was clear that several core claims, including one that ymeskhout highlighted, were presented with either ignorance of their context or willful misrepresentation, and that a good many others were paraphrased commentary from randos taken as gospel truth.
Some of that difference in treatment is politics, and the electioneers are treated as a dire threat while Krick is a tragic sob story. But I think there's something deeper.
There Are Rules, some explicit and some the sort of thing that are like describing water to a fish. It matters if your phooney balooney claims are things that would be in the possession of a specific named other party you've sued in this case, or if they're something that would require 'discovery' of an unrelated third party. It matters if you've got an affidavit from one rando with credentials or a dozen without. These change the extent courts can interact with matters, and also the extent that they'll treat you seriously.
But these norms aren't about what's 'real' or not, or even if they're not-intentional-lies.
That's not even limited to things like lying or not. I've got an effortpost brewing on how some politicians are Nice and some aren't, and how little it has to do with them actually being kind, even to the people around them, and it has a lot of overlap.
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