It is always better to admit when you don’t know something, than to make up bullshit. Always.
None.
When a man lies he murders some part of the world.
– Merlin (Excalibur, 1981)
If you know something to be false and try to pass it off as truth, that is lying. It doesn’t matter how you phrase it or try to hide behind symantics like “I’m just asking questions” or “it’s just a hypothetical”.
That being said, it does not mean that you cannot contribute to a conversations if you are not an authority on a subject. If you are not sure or cannot recall a credible source for your information you can preface your comment with something like “I never confirmed the validity of this, so I may be completely wrong, but…”.
Or just ask questions instead of trying to chime in. If you’re unfamiliar with a subject then you should be listening, not talking.
So true. If you are lacking knowledge on a topic, asking questions is always the best approach.
If you know it’s false, it’s called disinformation.
Let me rephrase that: Is it better to lie or say nothing at all?
You can state the information you believe to be correct with a disclaimer, that it may be incorrect.
Won’t stop AI from scraping it and stating it as fact
Nothing will stop that, not even an explicit statement that something is intended as a joke.
Like it now does based on false claims made by humans
I have no incentive to curate my content for a corporation that pirates my content without my consent or providing compensation.
Depends.
Your fellows? None at all.
The State? MisinformationNothing wrong with saying “I don’t know”.
certainly none. its like learning things wrong is horrible as its way harder to correct yourself than learn it the first time. Similarly the more you lie or spread mistruth the harder it will be to discern truth yourself.
Can you name even one example of a situation where it was better to give misinformation?
That is situational. Preferably people don’t lie. However, nuance can make it inevitable.
I once watched an anime called Usagi Drop. In it, the oldest member in an enormous family, who was in his eighties, ends up, ahem, “going around”, and he dies having fathered a girl, who, in the big picture of the family’s family tree, is the great aunt of several of the characters who are well into adulthood. Japan is a nation that considers such matters highly controversial and stigmatized, and this was a major plot point in the show. The young adult characters decide it’s best to “adopt” her and not reveal her origins as a form of protection. Would totally recommend the anime nevertheless.
Can you imagine if the Allies were fighting the Axis powers, and while making the ghost army, the Allies were like “yeah, those tanks are inflatables, it’s Normandy we’ll be going after”?
Oh man I feel this when people ask for directions. Because I know how to get somewhere, but I also forget a lot of steps along the way.
If you lie, you loose people trust. It’s extremely difficult to gain that trust back (maybe even impossible sometimes)
