(I was tempted to tag that as "epistemic status: low-confidence speculation", but that's _frequentist_ thinking—as if "Jews and gentiles are equally sneaky" were a "null hypothesis" that could only be rejected by data that would be sufficiently unlikely assuming that the null was true. Ha ha, that would be _crazy!_ Obviously, I should have a _prior_ on the effect size difference between the Jew and gentile sneakiness distributions, that can be updated as sneakiness data comes in. I think the mean of my prior distribution is at, like, _d_ ≈ 0.1? So it's not "low confidence"; it's "low confidence of the effect size being large enough to be of much practical significance".)
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For context on why I have no sense of humor about this, on Earth (which _actually exists_, unlike dath ilan), when someone says "it's not lying, because no one _expected_ me to tell the truth in that situation", what's usually going on (as Zvi Mowshowitz explains: <https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/>) is that is that conspirators benefit from deceiving outsiders, and the claim that "everyone knows" is them lying to _themselves_ about the fact that they're lying.
(If _you_ got hurt by not knowing, well, it's not like anyone got hurt, because if you didn't know, then you weren't anyone.)
-It's very striking to me that one of the corrupt executives in _Moral Mazes_ uses very similar language to the narrator of the Merrin thread: "We lie all the time, but if everyone knows that we're lying, is a lie really a lie?"
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Okay, but if it were _actually true_ that everyone knew, what would be _function_ of saying the false thing? On dath ilan (if not in Earth boardrooms), I suppose the answer is "Because it's fun"? Okay, but what is the function of your brain giving out a "fun" reward in this context? It seems like at _some_ point, there has to be the expectation of _some_ cognitive system (although possibly not an entire "person") taking the signals literally.
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