In GD and Elections, that is. Over in this thread, a poster accused another poster of “trying to create a false narrative”. I’m not seeing how that’s different from accusing a poster of lying.
Note the difference between:
You have created a false narrative
You are trying to create a false narrative.
The first example does not speak to intent, but the second one does. That seems to satisfy the rule:
"to be considered an accusation of lying a post must contain the following two elements: 1) deliberately saying something that the person knows is untrue, and 2) doing so with the intent to deceive. "
This is especially confusing since we’ve been told that saying “you just made that up” is an accusation of lying, when done in that same context.
The posters are each interpreting the maps differently. No accusation of lying here. Little Nemo could simply have meant that DSYoungEsq was mistaken and had created a false narrative unintentionally.
There’s a certain element of nitpicking here, just a titch, but that’s kind of the point of the board. Anyway, I don’t see how a person can unintentionally try to do something.
Exactly. Which is why I tried to head that argument off at the pass with the two examples I gave in the OP. One does not indicates intent and one does (which is required but the rule). We are considering here only the latter.
In the context of that usage, yes I think accusing someone of trying to create a false narrative is permissible in that it doesn’t violate the ‘no accusation of lying’ rule. This is not a comment on the quality of any statement.
As an example, let’s say some event X happened and we thnk the reasons it happened were numbered 1 -5. We can argue the weight of 1 - 5, and because that is subjective, there’s no one right answer.
I say, Reason #1 is why X happened! Of course it is.
You say, Reason #1 is really not that important when compared to Reason # 2-5. Focusing on reason #1 is an attempt to create a false narrative about the relative causes of X.
In this sense, saying that focusing on #1 creates a false narrative is not saying that doing so is lying, it’s arguing about the relative values of the reasons. I don’t see it as containing either of the required elements.
This is a bit of an aside (I have no strong opinion on the subject of the OP) but I would certainly hope that it hasn’t been ruled, as an absolute regardless of context, that “you made that up” is automatically an accusation of lying. I don’t think that’s what Tom is saying there, and if he is, then I vehemently disagree.
This came up when I told someone he was just making it up when he put forward a well-known philosopher (IIRC) as evidence of support for a certain argument he was making, and he actually agreed that yes, he was making it up in the sense that it was his interpretation, but it seemed to him a reasonable one. No insult was intended and none was taken. Or someone might say “fewer than 10% of the posters on this board would believe that” and I might say “10%? How do you know that it’s 10% and not 5% or 20%? Sounds like you just made that up”.
Saying that someone just made something up is in many cases just saying that someone is stating as definitive fact something that is really just conjecture – something that may or may not be true but has not been proven – which is a vast world of difference from accusing someone of lying which is an insult because it’s an attack on the poster’s character and an accusation of blatant dishonesty.
Sorry for the digression but this is a hot button with me because if a potentially innocent comment like “making stuff up” is going to be re-interpreted as a hostile attack against someone’s character, then we’ve lost one more communication tool among the many that are being whittled away. Of course if someone is using that or anything else as an obvious deliberate veiled attempt at an insult, then fine, issue a warning. I trust the mods can keep context in mind, as always.
a) making a bad argument, and
b) creating a false narrative.
But it’s a pretty subtle one. (Too subtle for me to waste energy on describing, right now.) And IMHO, an accusation of creating a false narrative is much more akin to an accusation of making a fallacious argument than an accusation of lying. ETA: And it’s perfectly legit at the Dope to accuse someone of making an argument with a hole in it.
Yes, fair enough, but if I seem to have jumped the gun it’s because there was this prior occurrence where it did seem to be deemed unconditional and not context dependent at all. And since there is such a myriad of interpretations possible for “making it up”, I’m trying to push back against any precedent where it’s generally agreed that this can no longer be said and will always be interpreted as an accusation of lying. That’s just not realistic, IMHO.
Again, sorry for the digression. But I suppose if this is considered to be a broader discussion of what does or does not constitute an accusation of lying, then I guess it’s on topic.
Oh, no worries. I agree with you. I used to post “you just made that up” all the time without giving it a second thought. I guess I’m lucky none of those posts even got a mod note. I still don’t see how that equates to “you are lying”, and I would prefer to be able to continue using it in GD.
But if the mods declare that “you are trying to create a false narrative” is A-OK, then I’m happy to use that phrase instead. It just seems to me that it’s more akin to “you are lying” than is “you made that up”. However, I do recognize that sometimes we have words that seem to be magically OK and some that seem to be magically not OK. It just helps to know which is which.
For what it is worth, I did not take the statement about “trying to create a false narrative” to imply intent. I took it as meaning that, while I was making what I thought were valid arguments, Little Nemo thought what I was doing was going to create a false narrative, not because I intended it, but because that’s what the outcome was going to be.
Now, I can understand why John Mace reads that as implying intent, because taken literally, if I’m attempting (“trying”) to create something that is false, then either I’m intentionally stating falsehoods, or I’m being intentionally deceptive in some other way. But I think (certainly hope) that was not the intent of what Little Nemo was saying. I think he/she was just inartfully arguing that I was doing a bang up job of trying to make an argument that was going to result in creating a false narrative.
Maybe I was wrong. But I won’t impute that implication to the poster, absent stronger evidence.
Let me repeat that a false narrative is not a codeword for a lie. A false narrative is not a lie.
This is an example of a false narrative:
Witnesses saw John Smith entering the room where the murder occurred.
Witnesses saw John Smith with the murder weapon in his hand.
Witnesses can testify that John Smith and the victim were alone in the room together.
Witnesses heard a shot and heard the victim scream.
Witnesses saw John Smith leaving the room after the murder occurred.
The murder weapon was found in the room next to the body.
The murder weapon had John Smith’s fingerprints on it.
Based on these statements, all of which are factually accurate, would you agree that I have created a narrative that John Smith murdered the victim?
But while all these statements are factually accurate, I distorted the narrative by presenting them out of order.
For example, I left out these additional facts:
Witnesses say the victim was alone in the room when the shot and the scream were heard.
Witnesses say that John Smith was out in the room with everyone else when the shot and the scream were heard.
Witnesses say that John Smith was the first person to enter the room. Other people followed him into the room and saw him check the victim and pick up the weapon, which he then carried out of the room.
The victim had been talking about killing himself and there was a suicide note in his handwriting next to his body.
By adding these additional facts, the narrative is changed. What had appeared to be a murder now looks like a suicide.
This is an example of how you can create a false narrative without telling any lies. You create a false narrative, not by telling lies, but by giving the facts which support a conclusion while not giving any facts which would contradict that conclusion or support an alternative conclusion.
Careful. If your hypothetical person does that because they don’t impute importance to the left out facts, or because they don’t know they exist, or create that narrative for some other reason, then they aren’t “lying”. But if you are accusing someone of intentionally distorting the narrative to get someone to reach a false conclusion, then you are, indeed, accusing them of telling an intentional falsehood. Is that what you were saying I was doing in the thread in question?
No, a creating false narrative doesn’t mean you are lying. You may not realize the narrative is false.
Trying to create a false narrative, on the other hand, requires you to know that the narrative was false. Hence you are saying something you know is false. That would be lying.
Sure, the guy may have understood what you meant. And the rule itself is a dumb one anyways, because it allows anyone to come in and assert things they are know are untrue without any way to combat it. It allows for dishonest debate, which ruins debate. It’s why I get so frustrated by that forum and criticize the most fragrant abusers in the Pit (to the point that at least one put me on ignore, when they’d not put anyone else on ignore before).
As I have said, I disagree with calling this an accusation of lying. I’ve pointed out the difference between creating a false narrative and lying and have given examples. But I acknowledge the administration of this board may decide that saying somebody created a false narrative is also unacceptable.
Thanks for the input. Just to be clear, I’m not asking that the post in question be moderated. At this point, it’s water under the bridge. I do, however, want to know that going forward it’s OK to use that phrasing in light of the fact that we are generally told not to say “you made that up”. I think the “don’t say other posters are lying” is a tricky rule to follow once you stray from using the word “lie”, so guidance would be helpful here.
Did you miss post #6? This type of thing, even more than our other rules, lends itself to a case by case judgment. We’ve laid out the criteria used to evaluate potential rule violations. I think that’s about all the guidance I can give.
I’m not sure that post really addresses OP’s argument, which is that “trying” implies knowledge that the narrative is false.
If you know that factor #1 is less important than you are stating, and you say otherwise in your post, that is indistinguishable from lying or trolling IMO.
