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Comment by throwaway290 | Hacker News Reader

It's always peculiar to encounter a Westerner who is suddenly woke to how they of all countries are being lied to by their governments.

Two questions:

1. What are the sources of information that convinced you that your authorities were always lying double-dealers?

2. What prevents you, living in a democracy, from using your freedom of political speech to convey the above to others and convince them to vote for authorities who are not always lying or for laws that punish lying? (Since you are not an anarchist, you must assume non-lying authorities are possible)

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I will answer in good faith, cautiously.

1. The fallout from the Iraq War. As to why Vietnam or Watergate did not do the same, well I wasn't alive then and children are credulous.

2. It's not about choosing the right authority. It's about first, creating a trusting culture backed by truths so the trust is well-placed, and second, about designing institutions that are fail-safe given what I now know about the nature of power and the people it attracts.

Thanks, this is reasonable. Sometimes people respond in ways that make it clear they are pushing someone's agenda or conspiracy theorizing.

Yes, the problem with power is that even in many democracies it seems too easily convertible to money and attracts greedy people.

I suspect such greed is a psychological pathology, but in addition to treating it the system could somehow make power inconvenient and unprofitable to attract "irrational" people who are crazy in the right way to want to actually make things better rather than turn a profit. This does probably sound quite un-American and I don't know how it could be implemented.

I am somewhat hazy on the politics of the Iraq war but I'll look it up.

I'm not the person you replied to, but just wanted to add something to help answer Q2. Communicating information to a large fraction of the populace is generally pretty hard because there are so many memes competing for attention, and true information doesn't necessarily spread faster than false information. Even so, it's pretty much common knowledge that the Iraq war was based on a falsehood, so communication does work well enough at least some of the time. Okay, so suppose we now collectively know that most politicians are liars and will have no issue with lying when it's convenient for them and they expect to get away with it. I think it's very common to find people who think this in western countries, actually.

Now how do we vote in such a way as to make sure we elect non-liars? Being a liar is not always visible, but maybe we can determine it by looking at whether the candidate lied while holding previous offices, and whether or not they get caught in any lies while on the campaign trail. We may also be able to make some judgment of a person's honesty based on how they make arguments, i.e. how they use statistics, and how often they omit relevant information that would look bad for them.

So suppose that everyone could perfectly identify who was a liar and who was honest. Would the electorate then vote only for honest politicians? Nope. A voter finds other things valuable in a politician besides just honesty, for example agreement on policy issues, or allocating tax money in a way that benefits the voter. Even if the candidate for party A is found out to be a no-good stinking liar, that still might not be enough to induce a party A voter to vote for the party B candidate instead. After all, party B is terrible. And there can be no party C that adopts the policy stances of party A but is staffed by honest politicians. Because of vote splitting in first-past-the-post electoral systems, two parties tend to dominate with outsiders having no chance of getting elected, even if the electorate prefers the outsiders. This is why we'd ideally want to use a more sane electoral system like score voting.

Your answer is nuanced, but the original comment said something along the lines of "authorities have been always lying" which is a blanket statement that reminded me of some conspiracy theorists I talked with so I had to ask a couple of questions that could reveal that. You offered "most politicians are liars", it is a better description but still not quite useful-- I'd go as far as to say "all humans are liars" is true as well because there's probably not a single human that hadn't lied at some point; the key is what the lies are and what's the intent. "Many politicians act in bad faith" could be a more useful statement.

> and true information doesn't necessarily spread faster than false information

It definitely doesn't. I believe there're studies that shown it to be demonstrably the case. What spreads well is a story, and a story is always a subjective and selective interpretation of facts, and as any good journalist will tell you two different interpretations of the same factual info can prompt two diametrically opposing opinions (even if they never technically lie, they can intentionally or not omit/deemphasize parts of the story, choose what to report and so on).

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