Lies and Truth

Read this guy's blog entry.

In it, he recounts the story of a professor who said he would deliberately lie once during each of his lectures. He wanted students to discover the lie. Initially, it was blatant, but as time passed, it became harder and harder to detect the lie.

Why did he do it?

Because students are notorious for not listening in class, or being generous, for failing to question what is being said in class.

If the job of the student is to learn, they must question "truth". I put "truth" in quotes, because I don't particular believe in truth. I believe in shades of gray, and that certain statements are truer than others. But too often, we delegate to authority, be it professorial authority, religious authority, presidential authority, or legal authority.

The number one goal for students is to learn and to learn is to question. The professor created a clever idea to promote doubt, to make students think twice about what is said, and he did it in the form of a game.

Not surprisingly, this article zipped to the top of the Reddit ranks, because knowledgeable people understand that an informed public is one that questions. There are leaders who would have us trust what they do, right or wrong, because they react as many react when told what they do is wrong. They deny it.

I once heard a kid who proclaimed innocence at wrongdoing, though it was clear he had done the deed he denied. It was more important for him to avoid punishment than to utter truth. Why do we desire truth so much? That I don't have an answer for. Perhaps, most pragmatically, it's because we try to model our world, and if we have agents that have incentive to lie often, our model of the world can become corrupt, so much so that we may block any reliable information.

Being truthful helps. Of course, our perception of truth can be clouded. We may, like Othello, be shown something, and interpret it incorrectly. But we're willing to allow people to tell truth as they see it, as long as what they say, most of the times, makes sense.

Thus, the professor, in his one well-constructed lie mostly spoke truth, and spoke the lie to elicit truth seekers, to get them to ponder what would normally glaze, and that is what all teachers should strive for, to get students to think.