Posts Tagged ‘lying’
“Never trust people who promise to make you rich in a day. They are generally crazy swindlers”*…
Scheduling note: as a consequence of visitors and attendant obligations, (R)D will be off tomorrow and Sunday. Regular service will resume on Monday.
Last month we lost Om Malick. The journalist, investor, and blogger who chronicled Silicon Valley was a collector of fine pens. In one of his final posts, he mused on one of his last acquisitions and on its inspiration…
I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one. I grew up reading the tales of Pinocchio, but only read the non-Disneyfied version as a grown-up. The book left an indelible impression on me. It is a great parable for modern times.
In case you were wondering, I did get the pen. It is one of the most beautiful and underrated pens in the Montblanc Writers Series. I have been mildly obsessed with it for a long time.It is not overwhelming, gaudy, or over the top. It tells the full story, not just of the pen but the story behind it. And it starts with the clip, that subtly hints at Pinocchio’s nose.
The cap is where Montblanc’s craftsmen did their most serious work. It is cylindrical, dark resin, topped by the Montblanc snowflake, wrapped in a silver and platinum skeletal overlay, a filigree of characters and scenes from the story, the dark resin visible beneath through the cutouts. The effect is like looking at a shadow puppet theater contained in your hand. The barrel is restrained by comparison, dark resin with horizontal platinum ring banding, letting the cap hold the eye. The nib carries its own engraving tied to the story.
Holding it in my hands recently, I found myself thinking about the story of Pinocchio, and how it throws the names that dominate our headlines into sharp relief — the ones who shape our zeitgeist of half-truths…
… The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests.
I can only imagine the outrage and horror over this story should it have been published today. I am old enough to have been smacked for my stupid mistakes as a kid. So this was actually not a bad story to read. Still, I can understand how much anxiety it might cause today’s parents.
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
The Fox and the Cat are the novel’s most modern characters. They persuade Pinocchio to bury his coins in the Field of Miracles on the promise that they will multiply overnight. Exploit impatience, exploit greed, frame skepticism as a failure of imagination, and dismiss skeptics as lacking vision. Remind you of someone? Space Cowboy for example?
That structure is so familiar I barely need to name it. But let me name it anyway.
Everyone from Jensen Huang to Sam Altman to Elon Musk spent a decade accumulating what I have called symbolic capital, the reputation, the prestige, the weight of being seen as someone who understands the future better than the rest of us. Now each of them seems to be running some version of the Field of Miracles, with promises that keep not arriving, timelines that dissolve, products that exist primarily as announcements, and platforms run as machines for generating more reputation regardless of what they actually do. They don’t need to be right. They need to be believed. Velocity is the new authority, and no one has weaponized that more effectively.
We are living, as I wrote years ago, in the golden age of half-truths.
Your average influencer flogging a supplement, a course, a skin cream, or a crypto token on TikTok and Instagram is running the same operation, just cheaper. The confidence is the product. The audience wants to believe. The Field of Miracles is open for business everywhere you look.
Collodi in 1881 was writing about all this at a point of major societal inflection. So perhaps now you understand why I am drawn to this story. Pinocchio is a story about a society organized around deception.
The Land of Toys is the sequence that haunts me most, especially now. Children abandon school and responsibility for a place of permanent amusement. They play. And then, gradually, they begin to change. They grow ears. They grow tails. They become donkeys, beasts of labor and exploitation, stripped of language, used until they break.
This is a parable of who we have become, a BNPL-fueled spectacle in itself.
Collodi was writing during rapid industrialization and the early emergence of mass entertainment. He understood, earlier than most, that distraction offered as pleasure can be a leash. The children who choose the Land of Toys over school are not liberated. They are owned more completely than any schoolroom could manage.
The algorithmic feed is the Land of Toys. It is built to keep you there past the point of nourishment, past the point where you are even enjoying it. Outrage travels faster than understanding. Spectacle beats judgment. The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true. It cares whether it moves. And it keeps you scrolling, reacting, and returning in ways that benefit the platform, not you.
The political system has learned the same lesson. Governance is slow and grinding and unsatisfying. Performance is fast and shareable. We have built media and political economies that reward entertainers over administrators, and the clean story over the complicated truth.
Collodi refuses to assign blame only upward. That is what keeps the novel from collapsing into moralism. Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.
The Fox and the Cat is how the whole thing works.
Pinocchio becomes real, becomes human, only after he accepts obligation. Collodi is saying that it is important to have self-governance. It is necessary to choose the difficult truth over the easy satisfying one. That doesn’t jibe with everything the attention economy is selling, dopamine hits delivered so frequently that it becomes hard to distinguish stimulation from autonomy.
There is an obvious irony in a luxury pen commemorating a story about the seductions of wanting things you have not earned. The Montblanc Collodi is made to be admired, displayed, collected. And it honors a puppet who had to lose everything, friends, coins, his own body, before he understood what was actually worth having.
I am not sure Collodi would find that irony disqualifying. A beautiful object that makes you think seriously about the spectacle we are living in. It makes you think about what is the cost of being real. It is a more interesting pen to own than one that simply confirms your taste.
The clip is shaped like Pinocchio’s nose because the nose is the one honest thing in a world built on performance. It grows because the body keeps the score even when the mouth doesn’t.
When I hold this pen, I try to remember what that means…
A story for our times: “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World.”
* Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio
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As we know that the nose knows, we might remark that today Rhys Frake-Waterfield‘s horror film reimagining of Collodi’s tale, Pinocchio: Unstrung— featuring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund as the voice of “Cricket” (Jiminy!)– opens in theaters around the U.S.
The trailer is here.
“Lying is done with words, and also with silence”*…
The redoubtable John Bayley deconstructs deceit in his 1990 review of Philip Kerr‘s The Penguin Book of Lies…
Kipling’s unspoken criterion, that if a thing is well done enough it must be the case, has caught on in a big way. It is all made up by the media, and by those faithful camp-followers of art who tell us on radio or TV what they were ‘trying to do’ when they wrote, painted or composed. The fashionably perceptive novel, like Julian Barnes’s memorable Flaubert’s Parrot, cannot find out what it is looking for, or what is going on inside itself. The fashionable thriller does not know the answers, or which side is which. These reactions against realism discard, often to great effect, the idea of truth as solution. So, fortuitously, did Henry James in The Turn of the Screw, and Stendhal’s Fabrice when he could not find the battle of Waterloo, or be sure that he had taken part in it. That truth is a lie shows that life is stupid: once art could fix that, but now this is not so certain, even of the best art.
As Philip Kerr has perceived, and embodied in his choice of extracts, a self-consciousness about truth goes with scepticism about it to produce the modern science of propaganda. Truth is the first casualty in war, whether hot or cold; when Churchill remarked that truth in wartime was ‘so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’ he was not just being cynical, like Bacon’s jesting Pilate, but assuming that truth, like right, must be on one’s own side: enemy truth, attended by her SS bodyguard, must be a false creature. As Orwell saw, faith in the truth leads to lying. Since the Party is always right, the concoction of deliberate lies is a moral duty. The victims of the show-trials in Moscow and Prague found relief in the lies they were made to utter. In 1940 Orwell supposed – which is interesting in the light of what happened later in the Soviet Union, and indeed in 1984 – that ‘already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying a historical fact.’ Today science can appear just as much ‘the father of lies’ as Herodotus himself: not because of our appetite for wonders, but because the scientist has become much more aware of the possibilities of propaganda, whether personally or ideologically motivated…
More on the forms of fabrication: “Art’ll fix it,” in @LRB
(Image above: source)
* Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying
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As we ponder prevarication, we might rejoice in the naively and nobly inventive: it was on this date in 1605 that El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (or The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha— aka Don Quixote), the masterwork of Miguel de Cervantes (and of the Spanish Golden Age) and a founding work of Western literature was first published. Widely considered the first modern novel (published in the Western world), it is also considered by many (still) to be the best; it is in any case the second most translated work in the world (after the Bible).
“Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies”*…
Police thought that 17-year-old Marty Tankleff seemed too calm after finding his mother stabbed to death and his father mortally bludgeoned in the family’s sprawling Long Island home. Authorities didn’t believe his claims of innocence, and he spent 17 years in prison for the murders.
Yet in another case, detectives thought that 16-year-old Jeffrey Deskovic seemed too distraught and too eager to help detectives after his high school classmate was found strangled. He, too, was judged to be lying and served nearly 16 years for the crime.
One man was not upset enough. The other was too upset. How can such opposite feelings both be telltale clues of hidden guilt?
They’re not, says psychologist Maria Hartwig, a deception researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. The men, both later exonerated, were victims of a pervasive misconception: that you can spot a liar by the way they act. Across cultures, people believe that behaviors such as averted gaze, fidgeting and stuttering betray deceivers.
In fact, researchers have found little evidence to support this belief despite decades of searching. “One of the problems we face as scholars of lying is that everybody thinks they know how lying works,” says Hartwig, who coauthored a study of nonverbal cues to lying in the Annual Review of Psychology. Such overconfidence has led to serious miscarriages of justice, as Tankleff and Deskovic know all too well. “The mistakes of lie detection are costly to society and people victimized by misjudgments,” says Hartwig. “The stakes are really high.”
…
Science-based reforms have yet to make significant inroads among police and other security officials. The US Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration, for example, still uses nonverbal deception clues to screen airport passengers for questioning. The agency’s secretive behavioral screening checklist instructs agents to look for supposed liars’ tells such as averted gaze — considered a sign of respect in some cultures — and prolonged stare, rapid blinking, complaining, whistling, exaggerated yawning, covering the mouth while speaking and excessive fidgeting or personal grooming. All have been thoroughly debunked by researchers.
With agents relying on such vague, contradictory grounds for suspicion, it’s perhaps not surprising that passengers lodged 2,251 formal complaints between 2015 and 2018 claiming that they’d been profiled based on nationality, race, ethnicity or other reasons. Congressional scrutiny of TSA airport screening methods goes back to 2013, when the US Government Accountability Office — an arm of Congress that audits, evaluates and advises on government programs — reviewed the scientific evidence for behavioral detection and found it lacking, recommending that the TSA limit funding and curtail its use. In response, the TSA eliminated the use of stand-alone behavior detection officers and reduced the checklist from 94 to 36 indicators, but retained many scientifically unsupported elements like heavy sweating…
In a statement to Knowable, TSA media relations manager R. Carter Langston said that “TSA believes behavioral detection provides a critical and effective layer of security within the nation’s transportation system.” The TSA points to two separate behavioral detection successes in the last 11 years that prevented three passengers from boarding airplanes with explosive or incendiary devices.
But, says [Samantha Mann], without knowing how many would-be terrorists slipped through security undetected, the success of such a program cannot be measured. And, in fact, in 2015 the acting head of the TSA was reassigned after Homeland Security undercover agents in an internal investigation successfully smuggled fake explosive devices and real weapons through airport security 95 percent of the time…
You can’t spot a liar just by looking — but psychologists are zeroing in on methods that might actually work: “The truth about lying,” from @knowablemag.
[Image at the top: source]
* James Joyce, Ulysses (barmaid Miss Douce, in “Sirens,” 11.219)
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As we deliberate with Diogenes, we might recall that this date in 1954 was, according to the True Knowledge Answer Engine, the most boring day since 1900. The site analyzed more than 300 million historical facts and discovered that April 11, 1954 was the most uneventful news day of the 20th century. No typically newsworthy events occurred at all… though of course now the day has become a bit more newsworthy, because it has the distinction of being so completely uneventful.
“There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics”*…
“Hiding in Plain Sight”
A chart’s purpose is usually to help you properly interpret data. But sometimes, it does just the opposite. In the right (or wrong) hands, bar graphs and pie charts can become powerful agents of deception, tricking you into inferring trends that don’t exist, mistaking less for more, and missing alarming facts. The best measure of a chart’s honesty is the amount of time it takes to interpret it, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology perceptual scientist Ruth Rosenholtz: “A bad chart requires more cognitive processes and more reasoning about what you’ve seen.”…
Five examples (like the one above) of the kinds of tricks that charts can try to pull, explained: “Five Ways to Lie with Charts.”
* Benjamin Disraeli
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As we stack the deck, we might recall that it was on this date in 2010, at 2:32p EDT, that the U.S. stock markets suffered a “Flash Crash”– in a period of just 36 minutes, the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Nasdaq Composite collapsed and rebounded (the Dow, e.g., lost 9% of its value, then recovered most of it).
Nearly five years later, the SEC charged a 36-year-old small-time trader who worked from his parents’ modest stucco house in suburban west London with having caused the collapse (using spoofing and layering, along with a form of front-running– all now explicitly outlawed). But many experts are not convinced; to this day, there are numerous theories– but no consensus– as to the cause(s) of the crash.
The DJIA on May 6, 2010 (11:00 AM – 4:00 PM EDT)
“What’s old is new again”*…
Photo: April L. Sanders
Toward the end of the 1800s, an insane asylum physician in Zurich discovered a surprising tendency among his patients. One, an Austrian maid, had spent years wandering the countryside, claiming to be royalty. A second, an hysterical epileptic, habitually convinced strangers that she was their distant relative. A third, a chronic masturbator, posed as Catholic (he was in fact Protestant), and compulsively pilfered items which he then discarded unused. In 1891, Anton Delbrück summarized his discovery in Die pathologische Lüge, christening the condition pseudologia phantastica, or, as we now say in English, pathological lying. And with that came the emergence of a public health issue requiring large-scale study, and somewhat improbably, widespread concern about an epidemic of dishonesty and even fake news…
As Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”– the tale of the late 19th century “pathological” lying and fake news that plagued the nation: “Shameless Liars.”
See also: “The Great ‘Fake News’ Scare of 1530.”
* proverbial gloss on Ecclesiastes 1:9
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As we deliberate with Diogenes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1764 that English radical, journalist, and politician John Wilkes was declared an outlaw and expelled from the British House of Lords. Wilkes and Thomas Potter had written a pornographic poem dedicated to the courtesan Fanny Murray entitled “An Essay on Woman,” a parody of Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man.” Wilkes’s political enemies– foremost among them our old friend John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich— obtained the parody. Sandwich had a personal vendetta against Wilkes that stemmed in large part from embarrassment caused by a prank of Wilkes involving the Earl at one of the Hellfire Club‘s meetings; he was delighted at the chance for revenge. Sandwich read the poem to the House of Lords, which declared the poem obscene and blasphemous. The Lords moved to expel Wilkes. He fled to Paris to avoid a hearing, but was tried and found guilty, in absentia, of obscene and seditious libel.
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