It's Really Hard to Lie Convincingly

You know how ads for dietary supplements show up on your Facebook feed, and they're so convincing that you feel utterly compelled to buy them? You know how politicians plug their favorite policies, and you are utterly powerless to disbelieve what they are saying? Or have you noticed that whenever celebrities appear in commercials, you automatically believe everything they say about the product?

Insert Homer Simpson saying, "Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen."

Of course you don't actually fall for any of these tricks. It's not that you automatically assume that everything you're told from these sources is false. It's just that you discount the claims. I'm using "discount" in the economist's sense of "decrease by some factor", not "utterly disregard." You treat the truth of these claims as something between 0% and 100% accurate, but probably not close to 100% until you do a more thorough vetting. If the claim seems especially intriguing or credible, you might do some research to get more confident in the claim. But people who don't have the time or sophistication to look into marketing propaganda don't just automatically believe these claims. Mostly, they ignore them. Bryan Caplan puts it well in The Myth of the Rational Voter. On the notion that the public is easily misled by propaganda, he writes:

Ignorant does not mean impressionable. When you walk onto a used car lot, you may be highly ignorant, but you can still discount or ignore the words of the salesmen who shout, “You won’t get a better deal anywhere else!”

Scott Alexander made a similar point here about Ted Cruz, who was very good on the college debate team. Does this make him especially believable? Or should we, in fact, discount everything he says to an even greater degree given that he’s superficially convincing? 

You were on your college debate team, and you were good at it. Really good. You won the national championships and you were pretty widely believed to be the best debater in the country. Quite an achievement. But my worry is – which is more likely? That the best debater in the country would also be the best choice for President? Or that he would be really really really good at making us think that he would be?
…
Senator Cruz, you may not quite be at the superintelligence level, but given that you’ve been recognized as the most convincing person out of all three hundred million Americans, shouldn’t we institute similar precautions with you? Shouldn’t your supporters, even if they agree with everything you are saying, precommit to ignore you as a matter of principle?

Do read the part I skipped over with an ellipse; it’s a very amusing hypothetical about an ultra-persuasive artificial intelligence. (In fact, read the entire piece, which is great.) There is no good way to be superficially convincing or to specialize in being convincing. People simply discount your claims to offset whatever points you gain from being convincing. 

My attempt to say the same thing here:

Even if they do make a good-faith effort to follow along, if you lead them to a conclusion they don’t like, they’ll assume you “tricked” them somehow. After all, you had time to prepare and plan, and they’re seeing your argument for the first time. Keep that in mind when you think you've just presented a killer argument and people don't instantly bow down to your awesomeness. The psychology here is, "That's too easy, so it must be some kind of trap or trick." This puts an upper limit on how convincing any argument can be: the more inherently convincing the argument, the greater the instinctive recoil, and the greater the effort to explain it away.

To take another example, Bill Clinton was an accomplished liar, but he had a tell. Supposedly Paul Ekman (the micro-expressions guy, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and the TV series Lie to Me) noticed that he had a facial tick, his tell, that gave away when he was lying. He offered to coach him on it, but the Clinton staffer Ekman dealt with decided that it was imprudent for Clinton to meet with an expert on lie detection. This staffer realized that it would be damaging to Clinton's reputation if the public found out he'd met with a "lying coach." This staffer, whoever s/he was, showed tremendously good judgment. Had Clinton invested in his lying skills, that information would impugn the truth of everything he said. Bad optics, to say the least. This story is very much contrary to the narrative of a deep and secretive state with a sophisticated propaganda machine. The staffer assumed, probably correctly, that no information is truly secret, even a private appointment of a sitting president. If you have employed tactics that make you more superficially convincing, the information that you've done so makes you less convincing. It makes people doubt your claims even more.

There is a certain type of pundit who thinks that the public is generally quite powerless and easily mislead by clever advertisements and propaganda. Sophisticated operators with lots of resources can simply bend public opinion toward their product or their political machine. Thus we hear so many complaints about misleading advertising, or propaganda machines like the Koch brothers or George Soros. I think this is all bunk. A dietary supplement making pseudo-scientific claims about the effectiveness of its products will mostly be ignored. Those individuals who are actually motivated enough to read their Facebook post or watch a short ad video will be motivated enough to do a quick Google search and turn up some skeptical reviews. Lazy shoppers will attempt to buy on Amazon, where their credit card is already on file and one-click-shopping is available, and where merely scrolling to the bottom of the page will reveal negative 1-star and 2-star reviews. We likewise discount the claims of politicians and pundits. We lazily decline to question our priors, so we reflexively assume that the Soros' and Koch's of the world are somehow out to get us. Mix this with the intellectual laziness of the average person, who barely reads anything at all and who can barely be bothered to challenge their Bayesian priors, and the Soros/Koch message fails to even get a hearing.

It's not that people are easily fooled. It's more that some people want to be fooled. Ideology makes people believe the Koch- or Soros-funded political ad. Our ideologies are comforting to us, so we indulge them. Something similar is happening with people who believe that vaccines cause autism, or people who believe that 9/11 was an inside job or other crazy conspiracy theories. Interestingly enough, these weird beliefs tend to cluster together in a weird "listens-to-Alex-Jones" counter-culture. I've known a few people who fit that profile. Some of them are extremely intelligent, by the way, and not-necessarily-wrong-about-everything. I'm not sneering. But it's hard to escape the fact that weird beliefs are part of these people's identities. It's not that they've been snookered by sophisticated liars. (like...Alex Jones? Like Andrew Wakefield? Are these people really smooth operators?) It's more like they're engaging in a mutually agreed upon hallucination. Likewise, I think that the Theranos investors weren't "fooled" by Elizabeth Holmes, at least not in the sense that Holmes told them a story and they were compelled to utterly believe it. They all had enough information to see that something was amiss, that financial projections were wildly overoptimistic, that Theranos wasn't being totally transparent about these issues. Supposedly Henry Kissinger saw the writing on the wall and wanted out early; the book Bad Blood describes and episode in which other investors are discussing his departure. So they all had clues something was wrong. They were fooled because they decided to be fooled. They chose to believe something that would pay off big-time if true, like a Pascal's Wager. They probably all had portfolios of many Pascal's Wagers, a few of which might actually pay off big time and make all the failed ventures worthwhile. I think a similar thing is happening with Baby Einstein and those video games that claim to enhance your brainpower and stave off Alzheimer's. The FTC hit Luminocity with a $2 million fine. I don't think it's the case that these companies made sophisticated marketing claims and overpowered the judgment of their customers. I think parents wanted to believe there was an easy way to make their babies smarter, and adults wanted to believe that something so simple as playing video games could improve their brain power. These are examples of mutually agreed-upon hallucination, not outright lying or successful deception of unwilling dupes.

Another example that comes to mind is the so-called opioid epidemic. Under the standard narrative, aggressive marketing by pharmaceuticals kicked off the over-prescription of painkillers, which led to rising rates of addiction (or maybe not) and overdose deaths. Supposedly the "sophisticated" actors in this exchange were the pharmaceutical reps, and the poor dupes were the doctors who believed their marketing literature. Something is very wrong with this story. The sophisticated deceivers are marketing people, who don't necessarily have any kind of medical or scientific training, whose job is to basically memorize and recite a marketing script, and all of this is of course known by the doctor. (Yes, remind me that doctors routinely misinterpret the statistical implications of test results, or recite to me the stories of male doctors being beguiled by attractive female reps. These are still very educated people with the wherewithal to challenge an deceitful marketing attempts.) The dupes in this story are, how to put this, the most educated profession in society. Sure, the pharmaceutical reps have the resources of a big corporation to back them. But, once again, this is known to the doctors who are the targets of this marketing. The notion that they just uncritically believe all marketing claims is ludicrous. They know that someone makes a profit off them if they are successfully duped. They know the incentives faced by the reps and the pharmaceutical companies (in this case Johnson and Johnson and Purdue). They discount their claims accordingly. If they were "duped," it's because the claims made by Purdue and Johnson and Johnson were actually credible and supported by the medical literature. Chronic pain was in fact very badly under-treated before the mid-1990s. If these companies convinced doctors to treat pain more seriously and to be less afraid of opioid patients becoming addicts (which by all accounts is quite rare), then they performed an important public service. This narrative would be slightly more believable if the pharmaceutical firms were duping individual patients. But they were supposedly fooling doctors, with their FDA-reviewed marketing materials (which some reps admittedly deviated from) on FDA-approved medications.

(My take on the opioid narrative is written down here.)

A clearer example of outright dishonesty would be the makers of Vioxx basically deleting three heart attacks from their clinical trial data to make the drug appear safer than it really was. Lying with a secret cover-up or hard-to-discover sleight of hand is very different from "lying" in the light of day by exaggerating or misstating the conclusions of publicly available research. A victim of the former can legitimately claim to have been duped; a victim of the latter is deliberately swallowing the marketing hype, which everyone knows damn well is exaggerated. (An aside: If Vioxx had remained a viable alternative for pain treatment, it's possible that not quite as many people would have been prescribed opioids. Even if the marketing was deceptive, there were probably some patients for whom it was an appropriate treatment, even given the risks. Some trade-offs have multiple bad options. Taking one of them off the table hardly helps.)

I think there needs to be a space for this concept in our legal system and our moral judgments. There is such a thing as a believable but not-strictly-supported exaggeration, which in retrospect turns out not to be true. If anyone's worldview has unsophisticated consumers and voters being helplessly duped by well-financed lie machines, this requires at least a gentle correction. Maybe even a serious overhaul.

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I wasn't sure how to insert this into the flow of the post, so I'll put it here at the end. See this post by David Henderson on Obama's whopper "If you like your current health insurance plan, you can keep it." Read the comments, where some of Obama's defenders claim (paraphrasing here) "C'mon! Nobody really believed that!" It was such an obvious whopper, even at the time, that the statement must be interpreted in the narrow context in which he made it. On the one hand, I feel like this kind of reflexive lying by politicians is reprehensible. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that anyone was legitimately fooled. It's still important to hold the line and call this stuff out when it happens, but this notion that sophisticated liars rule the world with their masterful deceptions is way overblown.