Most common reason why i lie: Working around other people's thinking.

A common lie is that I'm in a relationship with my "girlfriend". In truth we just live together in a flat, spend some time together for some needs, but are otherwise independent persons. If i say we are together, people draw wrong conclusions. If i say we are just flatmates, people draw wrong conclusions.

With people projecting their own ideas of the world onto everything, truthful talking stops being useful. So i fall back to replaying some common stereotypes so people don't bother me anymore and let me do my own stuff.

I'm confused. There are terms for what you are describing. If the relationship is also sexual then you're friends with benefits. If it is not than you are friends/roommates.

I guess its a bit strange to say, "They are not my girlfriend, we're friends with benefits" but if your goal isnt to lie then... That comes with a price of being awkward at times. Like OP's example of when their sig other asks if X looks good on them.

The honest answer is not always the easiest one.

I also don't understand GP's comment and am curious about this non-girlfriend flatmate situation.

Then you get their reasoning perfectly! I use "SO" online, but we're financially independent cohabitating partners because our state doesn't recognize domestic partnerships. If I say "fiance" then I have to answer when we're getting married (we aren't), and if I say "girlfriend" or "roommate", it doesn't convey that we are each other's beneficiaries, emergency contacts, requests for power of attorney, etc, so I just use her name and leave out the relationship in conversations altogether.

I was surprised to discover how common this was after I tried to explain and found out many of the couples we knew and worked with who are "married" aren't.

I hear partner often to describe this sort of relationship. Sure that work?

I guess that's exactly what the GGP wants to avoid explaining by pretending the roommate is the girlfriend :P

Problem is, people want simple answers, and i don't always have simple answers worked out for them, nor do i want to spend much time doing that.

> when their sig other asks if X looks good on them

This is some stereotype, which doesn't happen for me. This is what i meant with "drawing wrong conclusions".

I don't feel like this is lying ir false speech or anything. I am from the suburbs of a medium sized city but distinctly not from that city, as my home is across across the river and in a different state. Still when I travel and people ask "where are you from?" answering that I'm from that city is the easiest way to give the correct picture. Someone making polite conversation doesn't want to hear this explanation, if I'm chatting with an Uber driver I'll just say the city because it's easier, if I'm making new friends I would explain. I don't think there is any lie in either explanation it's just different shades of a communication in a world full of non-binary situations.

Are you from Cincinnati / Covington area?. That's the first place that came to mind based on "across the river and in a another state"

There are tons of these places: New York, Portland, Memphis, St Louis. Major rivers tend to be state lines as well as population centers.

There's also the entire rest of the world, of which the US is ~ 5% of ;).

That's true, I'm probably just betraying my bias from my own home state by what comes to mind first :)

Actually you were right, I am talking about NKY/Cincinnati

Hah! My Ohio bias pays off for a change!

This can be compatible with my approach of not lying. I think as long as it's the least misleading way to answer the question then it's ok in most casual cases.

I've been having this myself just having moved to Texas. People ask where we're from and we most recently moved from California but my wife and I both have a long history of living in many places. I feel people want a simple answer but it's hard to give one that gives them the right idea.

“We’ve moved a lot, so not really anywhere — but most recently California.”

People can then take the easy fact, ask more about California, or ask about other places if they genuinely care.

Individually, words are very crude low resolution descriptors. English is actually pretty nuanced because we've inherited so many words for the same things form different languages, and assigned them slightly different meanings, but it's still a big problem. I notice this particularly in discussions relating to philosophy, people very often talk right past each other because they're assuming different meanings of the words they're using.

I wouldn’t say that’s lying, just an somewhat inaccurate simplification… language is always spoken in a shared context that, like Huffman encoding, assigns short terms to common situations (wife, girlfriend, flatmate) and things outside those common situations may require more tokens to express accurately.

[Redacted: please practice self control, lay down your screens, walk barefoot on the grass, you need to disengage]

You only need to be around kids for a few minutes to realize why we are so flawed as human beings and why some of us fail to learn even the most basic life lessons.

There's a whole spectrum of speech, even without immoral intentions.

too heavy truth, cold truth, harsh truth, slightly delayed truth, silence hinting at truth, maybe truth, minuscule bit of truth, coated truth, swerving around truth, empathetic balanced truth

you don't tell your kids "we're all dying" you adapt life around their spirit, and when they enjoyed enough semi ignorant bliss you can let the whole thing in plain sight

> you don't tell your kids "we're all dying"

I don't see any problem with being honest about life and death. And having hangups about this is not helpful in my opinion. It's one of the areas where not lying is most important. What you need to be careful with is your approach, because if you just say "we're all dying" a 4 year old might panic because you haven't been very clear. It sounds immediate.

My boy that recently turned five has known about death for quite some time already. It’s not complicated, and not traumatic. We walked through a graveyard, and he started asking what the place and all the stones were for, and one question led to another. He clearly thought about, and asked about it for a little while, but hardly any longer.

Unless she is a terror, telling your wife that her shirt doesn't look great isn't exactly a profile in courage.

It's only when the stakes get much higher (e.g. life-time earning potential, self-esteem) that you will lie completely and earnestly without a second thought. And because the stakes are real and it is essential that the audience for your lie believes you, you will first have to lie to yourself, to get rid of those subtle tells that the human brain has evolved to detect.

So, when you say that there is no possibility that the disparate social outcomes of various ethnic groups has a genetic basis despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you will be lying, but it won't feel like lying because the first person you fooled was you.

So I wouldn't over-think the lying stuff.

Btw, have you considered that maybe your wife -- in fact, a lot of people -- want to be lied to? So when she asks you if she looks old and tired and your reply, honestly, in the affirmative, perhaps you're improving your life, but are you sure you improved hers?

Lies to “protect people” only serve to protect yourself from a challenging but useful conversation.

Nobody wants to be lied to. My wife doesn’t have to ask “do you really like it?” because she knows if I didn’t I would say so. She can rely on me giving her an honest opinion about anything. (Of course whether or not she cares about my opinion is beside the point)

Imagine you cooked for someone and they didn’t like the food, would you rather they lied to you and say they loved it? Or were honest?

I challenge you to give me an example where you’d prefer to be deliberately misled by someone.

Lying is a natural part of Human experience and communication. It's part of the game. Do you not lie to your kids about Santa Claus (or whatever local magical creature it is)?

I rarely have to lie though because most of the time I can leave out information and be just as effective.

I’m serious when I say I do not lie. My daughter is only 2 but I plan to simply tell her Santa Claus is a story we like to pretend is real.

Frankly I don’t understand why she has to be duped into believing Santa Claus is real at all.

Of course she will lie and be lied to, but it won’t come from me.

I believe you, I just don’t think it’s realistic for the general population.

I am a very honest person (I have a terrible and fierce shame response when I lie). But, I tried to measure it once. I recorded everything that I said for several days with a truth level. I was deceptive more often than I thought I was.

For an example, do you not ever get the question, “What are you thinking about?” when your mind is off daydreaming on something potentially shameful? Maybe I just have a lot of shame. IDK.

Sam Harris did a great long form essay where he described this concept very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lying_(Harris_book)

He even goes into detail about Santa.

EDIT: I think the bit about Santa is only in the audiobook, but he talks about it in this article: https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-high-cost-of-tiny-lies

As far as a question like that, I might not answer it literally truthfully. I’d probably say something like “oh it’s nothing.” Both me and them understand I don’t mean I was literally not thinking about anything, I mean to say I don’t want to talk about it. As long as that’s understood by everyone it’s not false speech.

To practise honesty builds character, not just because of the rigour of knowing before speaking, but also because one must apply honesty maturely as it befits the situation. Character is necessary for social trust.

Unless you espouse the monetary model of trust. ^_^

I'm genuinely curious, since you claim to never lie..

How do you resolve Kant and Lying to the Murderer at the Door dilemma [0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Lying_t...

I mean, I just made the decision to quit lying years ago and haven’t encountered any situation I can recall where I felt lying would be helpful.

It’s probably possible to come up with contrived situations where lying is preferred, but I’m not convinced these situations occur in my life. (If I lived in North Korea I would not have the luxury of approaching my life in this way.)

That said: Kant’s dilemma is so contrived it’s practically useless. It assumes you can predict the future. Lying to a murderer might actually make things worse.

Sam Harris does talk about this dilemma in his essay on Lying if you’re interested in a more educated take: https://archive.org/details/pdfy-x4ByD3mMjIdTMC0H (page 13)

Does Buddhism say anything about using false speech for humor?

Misleading statements to break expectations of the person to make them laugh

The philosophy of lying is quite interesting. I like to say that a lie is truth with an expiration date. If you only knew the lie, and it never was "corrected", to you it would only be the truth. If you were a brain in a vat, and you never discovered you were a brain in a vat, then to you _your truth_ is that you are not a brain in a vat.

Because lying is a function of time (duration, expiration), there is also a relevant short-term and long-term factor. We tend to lie less to people we are in it for the long-term with because there is a greater likelihood the lie "expires". We lie more to strangers because we will never see them again and the lie never expires - the lie _is_ the truth from their perspective.

There also exist "factual truths" and "emotional truths". Factual truths, as the OP discusses, are invariant over time (for the most part, assuming we are omniscient). Logical people love factual truths. Emotional people hate them. Emotional truths vary over time as a function of one's emotional state ("it feels true to me!"). It is not always prudent to tell the factual truth when someone is in their worst or best possible emotional state. Generally speaking, it is prudent to adapt to the situation. If you are in a long-term situation (a repeating pattern), stick to the invariant truth. If you are sensitive to people's emotional states, tolerating some variable truth can be an invaluable social lubricant. I often find that programmers (as logicians) compress eveything into invariants, which encourages a non-negotiable adherence to invariant truth, but this can equally isolate them to the rest of the world which does not operate exclusively with invariants. Programmers say "it is simply the case" while everyone else says "it depends."

Finally, lying creates and magnifies divergent realities between the sender and receiver. At first glance, this is not so problematic - _everyone_ occupies divergent realities - we are different individuals after all. We want to create convergent realities with those with whom we collaborate (a non-zero-sum game) and divergent realities with those who may defect (a zero-sum game). Case in point, we mislead and misdirect the enemy during times of war. All animals do this. It is for this reason lying is often associated with self-interest: we lie (create a divergent reality) to privilege our own interests. If we were transparent about our interests, we would simply create a convergent reality (i.e. tell the truth). Often, we lie because we want to have our cake and eat it too ("I can go to this party AND comfort my parents in telling them I am staying home"). Sometimes, we lie because we are truly acting in the best interests of someone else (a compassionate lie), but it can be hard to make the case that "they really didn't want to know" (if so, why did they ask?) and that you are a better modeler of their preferences than they are (why not ask them directly?). Compassionate lies exist, but they are far less common than self-interested lies disguised as compassionate ones.

As a general heuristic, I recommend always telling the factual truth, but possessing the capability to recognize, understand and commuicate emotional truths for the right situations.