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Yesterday's news was, "NASA reveals astronauts’ return 'would not have happened' without Trump’s intervention"
By "NASA" here, we mean "Press Secretary Bethany Stevens, appointed a couple weeks ago", so hopefully I'm not indicting our top space-administration minds when I point out that this is a obvious bold-faced lie. The decision to bring back the Starliner astronauts in the Crew-9 capsule, as finally happened a week or so ago, was made last August, months before Trump was elected, much less took office. The Crew-9 launch was performed with two empty seats, reserved for their return as part of this plan, last September.
How can someone appointed to the job of "understand and explain what NASA is doing" be such an utter, unbelievable failure at understanding and explaining what NASA is doing? Well, that's probably why she was appointed.
Exactly! Imagine if, in Stevens' previous job as Ted Cruz's press secretary, she had been very assiduous about explaining that the Crew-9 return had been all planned out during Biden's term, and that the only change in plans during Trump's second term was that SpaceX took a little longer than planned to get the Crew-10 capsule ready and so the rotation was delayed a bit. Does she get praised for her commitment to truth and accuracy, and get her promotion more promptly? Or does NASA instead end up with a different press secretary who isn't such a killjoy?
The interesting thing about Brodski's story, that makes it not another case of "believing lies can be strategically useful", is that he is one of those few people who specifically and deliberately tries to avoid that, and yet one of the "useful" lies still bit him. When people like Stevens or the Boston Globe tell obvious falsehoods, it's good to wonder which of them fell for a dumb idea vs which of them are just being strategically deceptive, but Brodski would have to be playing the long game indeed to post a deep dive into how dumb he was. In his case, I'd like to hope that @pigeonburger had the right idea, that "if it had been a big issue for him I would assume he would have ended up on the correct opinion faster". Indeed the easiest way to fail to answer a question is to fail to truly ask the question, so you'd think Occam's Razor says we're done here. But maybe now I'm the one not paying attention to evidence? E.g. questions of politics and religion have no shortage of dedicated investigators, and yet many major questions don't see those investigators converge toward a single answer, or into a set of different-but-compatible-answers, or even to a state of humble explicit uncertainty.
Perhaps the key phrase there is "politics and religion"? Our ancestors may have all been through too many generations wherein anyone who announced "My epistemic credence is 90% on your side but still 10% on the other" had a good chance of ending up with their bodies 90% on one side of a blade and 10% on the other. The strategically deceptive thing to do in such cases is to keep your solid Bayesian reasoning private and just express false certainty publicly, but humans aren't as good at tricking each other unless we first trick ourselves, and either way why bother hanging on to good reasoning habits you can hardly ever use? Just be part of the tribe. You might get a promotion out of it, and if you were smart enough to ditch those good reasoning habits beforehand then you don't even have to feel ashamed afterwards.
I sense disapproval in your tone, but this is just how we are. And why we developed institutions to make sure that the sort of weirdo that hangs around these parts and cares about what is literally true to an unhealthy degree can be made socially useful.
We used to be more aware of the fact that the masses are rubes who lie all the time to everyone starting with themselves.
The corruption of those mitigating institutions has forced us to engage in a project of uplifting everybody into rationalism (this is what the Enlightenment is really about ultimately). But that was silly and hubristic. There is no way for society to work without useful lies.
You can say a lot of things about The Invention of Lying but the core proposition of the film it demonstrates quite aptly: without lies, society would be brutal and abject to everyone. And unlike the movie characters who get to be deadpan for comedic purposes, we'd be at each other's throats.
Now this is not to discard the merits of truth which are of immense value, but they alone can't order any society that would be human.
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