Liar

ec2-18-116-42-208.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com | ToothyWiki | RecentChanges | Login | Webcomic

If I state what I believe to be the truth, but I am actually wrong, have I told a lie?

For example, if I was to state that the sky was blue while I was indoors, only to find that a local star going supernova has actually caused the sky to become green am I a Liar?

Comments about how the sky is not actually blue, and only appears that way due to the effects of light entering the atmosphere will be considered unhelpful and disregarded.

: The sky round here is mostly grey, with a slight purple tinge anyway, not blue at all.

Nope, a lie is a deliberate attempt to mislead. You can lie by telling the strict truth, but placing different emphasis or omitting pieces.
Being genuinely mistaken is a separate axis.

Of course; whether being honest or conveying correct information is more important - that is an interesting argument. --Vitenka nails 'lying is Evil' to the door.

Are GCSE Science teachers liars?

: Depends whether simplification is considered as lying. I think that it is lying, but it is beneficial to the student. (Structuring the complexity)

: (PeterTaylor) Put it this way: my GCSE Chemistry teacher told me that it is conventional to lie to students at GCSE and then unteach them and reteach them everything correctly at A-level. He promised not to lie to us. He then taught us a load of nonsense which he had to unteach at A-level.

StuartFraser will add that he was lying to you at A-level as well, and he suspects that to at least some degree I was being lied to in Part IA. For given values of lying, of course. I don't think you can call a series of successively better (and more complex) approximations lies. If you do, you're accusing every scientist and mathematician of lying to themselves and others for their entire career, pretty much. I tend to resent this implication.

PeterTaylor assures StuartFraser that no Chemistry teachers lied to him at A-level. He also observes that "The following is an approximation: ..." is not a lie if the following really is an approximation. For example, consider a negatively charged point particle P at 0.01 on the real line, and two immovable negative point charges at +- 1 on the real line. "P executes SHM" is a lie. "P executes a re-entrant path which can be approximated by SHM" isn't.

: "P executes SHM" may be an accepted short-hand for the latter, more technically-correct statement, and so not a lie. -- Bobacus

My chemistry teacher explicitly stated to us at the beginning of the A-level course that everything we had been told so far had been lies, everything we would be told in the course would be better lies, and if we went on to do chemistry in Uni it would still be lies. Confidence-building or what? -- Admiral

: Yep, that's about right. The thing is, the convenient lies work, more or less, and what actually appears to be the case is complicated, so... --SF
: I have had that said to me by all the maths and physics teachers I consider to be good. I don't see this as a bad thing. -- TI

CategoryRandom