Why do you say that?

I’d like to propose a maxim which may sound tongue-in-cheek, but is not:

Maxim: There is a strong tendency for ALL statements made by people to be false.

The idea is essentially that there is no reason to MAKE a true statement – it would be redundant and unnecessary. One ONLY bothers to say something when it is actually false, so that it is therefore necessary to try to persuade someone that it is true.

By the way, it is of course necessary to state this maxim as “a strong tendency” – claiming that ALL statements are false would be demonstrably false, and paradoxical besides. :-)

Let me give a couple of examples:

Comedy. It is a commonplace, first stated by Andre Maurois, I believe, that a statement is funny when it exposes the truth; when it releases tension by popping the balloon of artifice that usually masks reality. Clearly, this type of tension-releasing honesty is RARE… it is an insight and a relief when someone exposes a truth that we recognize, but had deceived ourselves into ignoring. So comedy is “the exception that proves the rule”.

Politics. It is another commonplace that politicians lie and dissemble – but exposure of political lies always provokes a kind of disappointment and anger, as if we think that politicians are SUPPOSED to tell the truth, even though we know they don’t. We are always trying to put policies and rules in place to force transparency. So it can be VERY liberating to change one’s perspective on this: to recognize that the very nature of politics is to tell lies – that politicians have no reason to say anything which is not a lie. When one listens to political expression from this perspective – viewing their words simply as the “tools” of lying, which is their business – it is much easier to discern what is true, and to act accordingly.

Corporate-speak, i.e. mission statements, sales materials, investor briefings, and the like. These are all of a type – carefully crafted lies, deliberately and cynically constructed precisely to obfuscate the truth, and make claims that are better than the reality. Take any corporate mission statement and discuss it with someone in a bar – “We strive to be the best blah blah blah leveraging our world class capabilities in blah blah blah…” Complete nonsense in EVERY case – the truth is ALWAYS something like “we are trying to foist our mediocre stuff off on a gullible target market by limiting their options, making exclusive deals with key channels, creating false perceptions about our stuff, and tricking people into buying our stuff along with some other stuff they really want, and so on.” And interestingly, it is in fact CRITICAL that corporate decision-makers and actors understand that they are lying – otherwise they will make really poor decisions and be very ineffective.

AI. There’s a lot of debate about whether computers and other technology can ever achieve human intelligence, and the Turing test is cited as the key milestone – if they can ape human behavior perfectly, then they’ve passed the test. I contend that the fundamental reason computers have a hard time with this is that they tell the bald, unvarnished truth, rather than the complex lies upon lies that humans express (usually quite unconsciously). The difference is one of motivation, not capability – humans are self-centered and selfish, and thus their speech is primarily a tool to achieve their personal ends, not to follow any categorical imperative (per Kant). Of course, we have some work to do to get computers up to our massively parallel, complex “thinking architecture” but this is a relatively trivial hardware and software problem, the solutions to which are on the horizon. So I think we’ll have “real AI” long before it can pass the Turing test.

Interpersonal expressions – from “I love you, honey” to “you were the best one there, sweetie” and so on :-) Enough said. I mean, of course we mean these things, but that’s what makes human expression so complex and hard to decompose, right?

Anyway – I find my maxim to be critical in understanding what people and organizations DO with knowledge, as opposed to what COULD be done with the trove of knowledge that they contain. Any knowledge management strategy has to take this perversity into account, or it is doomed to founder on the ubiquitous rocks of “believing one’s own BS”.