There is always a marginal liar.
I recently said this to someone as we were having coffee, and the statement prompted a question, then another. I realized this is a good topic for a post. Right ?
It should be interesting to explain what this concept really means and how the Dead Man Switch affects it.
Lies, deception, and even lies of omission are everywhere. In every case, the lie is a choice that someone makes, often repeatedly, because maintaining a lie sometimes requires repeating it.
There are many situations in which people turn to lying as a choice.
They may lie to protect their reputation, or to protect their jobs, to hide something they have done, or will do in the future.
They will lie to protect business secrets or lie to convince others to act.
They may even lie to themselves or lie to protect themselves.
Very often the lies compound, in the sense that more lies are required to maintain the ‘illusion’, especially once people start asking questions, prompting more lies. In other cases, the lies accumulate, as the ‘crimes’ are repeated.
Let’s look at some concrete examples:
- A parent lies to a child about their ancestry.
- A professional, lies about a mistake they have made.
- A thief lies about their identity to create an opportunity to steal.
- An employee lies about the safety of a product.
- A motorist lies to a police officer to avoid a ticket.
- An executive lies about something their corporation has done.
- A battered wife lies about their intent to disappear to seek safety.
- A soldier lies about a crime he or others committed.
- A politician opens their mouth.
In all these cases, the original lie also requires keeping a secret and will require more lies to be told if confronted. Someone already trapped in the cycle of lies will often be compelled to commit more offenses, of the same kind, or sometime of a worse kind.
In all these cases, we must say the actors are rational, even if from our point of view and understanding, the act of lying may not seem very rational. This is because we cannot know how these actors perceive the subjective value of maintaining their reputation, relationships, wealth, safety and even life, or carrying guilt, shame, remorse and regret.
But here is the first point I want you to remember from this article:
The subjective values that make lying
seem like a preferred choice, can and will change.
How they change is what can really teach us something.
In every case – we’re assuming the person knows they’re lying of course, the choice of telling the truth was always present, but for some reason, this was perceived as the second best option, because the opportunity cost of choosing truth was too great.
By definition, the opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative forgone. In this case the opportunity cost of telling the truth is high, because the second best option – lying, helps the user avoid consequences that seem hard to face, and telling the trust does not, so foregoing lying seems costly. When the choices are flipped, lying has a low opportunity cost, since it is perceived as ‘manageable’, with a cost of foregoing telling the truth that seems low, at least in the present.
Liars typically fall for the fallacy that making things right will always be easier ‘tomorrow’ or at some point in the future. It’s the root of procrastination, an avoidance of emotional pain. As we’ll see this plays an important role in many situations. But in the case of lying (as opposed to simple procrastination over doing chores) it’s doesn’t just remain as hard to fess-up ‘tomorrow’.
In fact, it gets harder, because of the compounding effect.
With this understanding, we can now see that any change in the opportunity cost of telling the truth, i.e. the reward of honesty, or to the risk and consequences of lying, may affect how someone will evaluate, or re-evaluate their decision.
For example, the cost of maintaining an illusion which requires increasing numbers of lies, may consume rising amounts of time and resources, mental energy, to produce ever more details or convince ever more people, falsify more documents, or suppress attempts to tell the truth.
Of course, it should be clear that these costs will rise even faster for any institutional lie, because of the fact that many more people are typically involved in maintaining the deception.
This allows us to finally define the meaning of marginal liar: in any group that maintains an institutional lie, there is always at least one person whose cost is the highest, and who will change their mind about lying.
This is obviously, the situation for whistle blowers, who reveal the truth either because they simply refuse to join in to a deception, or refuse to keep going along with an existing one.
But people in organizations with knowledge of conspiracies, collusion, secret dealings and internal struggles, are everywhere, feeling alone, fearful, ready to show their disapproval, ready to reveal the simple truths that help paint a broader picture for the rest of us.
Finally, this is how the BqETH Dead Man Switch will help. The mere existence of this tool raises the probability that a marginal liar might have locked up a revelation that affects all others involved in a deception.
Would a military commander order a massacre if they knew that one of their soldiers might make that revelation part of their uncensorable legacy ?
It also raises the probability that such a secret could be revealed sooner than expected. What would happen if the person who had a revelation locked up in a dead man switch were to die, accidentally, or as a result of voicing their mounting dissent ?
While it might not stop a crime from being committed, it increases the chances that it might be exposed sooner than the expected lifetime of the perpetrators, and far sooner if maintaining secrecy involves the threat of violence.
It also creates the possibility that someone will reveal a secret that implicates others, causing the cost of maintaining such a secret to rise. The larger the number of parties to a crime, the more costly it grows, and with the existence of the dead man switch, the added risk makes the cost grow exponentially.
So far we have discussed only the ‘supply’ side of deception, how the cost, risk and shelf life of such actions will change.
The demand side cost of deception also rises as a result.
From the standpoint of a politician or executive requesting their staff do ‘whatever it takes’ to hide or disguise whatever conspiracy they might have orchestrated, the increased cost of supplying the deception will be reflected in the increase reluctance of people to participate in such schemes.
Now, of course, beyond the simple existence of the dead man switch system as a deterrent, we can also look at the flow of revelations we can expect from its use. People who normally hold secrets until their death might now lock up secrets that deter from harming them. In the past, killing someone was a viable method to make sure information would remain secret, and as a deterrent for others to remain silent.
The death of Mark Middleton by a shotgun shot to the chest while tied to a tree was ruled as a suicide by a coroner and police, despite initial reports of a lack of presence of a firearm. A shotgun was later ‘found’ 30 feet away from the victim.
Solely based on the family’s request to keep evidence private, Politifact concluded it is a conspiracy theory to think it he was murdered because of his knowledge of dealings between Mr Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein.
Does his family feel safe ?
This script is now reversed.
It can also lead to a continuous flow of revelations that weave a complex picture of findings that would be very difficult to deny. Conspirators may deny the revelation of one person, but facts confirmed by another, then another, makes the denial increasingly difficult, especially as people are named or official documents are leaked.
Could this lead to a flood of fake revelations and false trails, dubious claims and unjust accusations ? Of course it could. But we should keep in mind that the cost of operating the system can and will create a barrier for the proliferation of mundane revelations or blackmail. We can circle back to the dynamic we laid out earlier about the existence of marginal liars.
The system doesn’t simply lower the cost of telling the truth to a trivial level immediately, it lowers it over time. Operating the system has a continued cost, which must be weighed against the possibility that an impostor revelation could be made sooner than the impostor intended. This is why many marginal liars have often waited until their death beds to make revelations, and why impostors might think twice about committing to a revelation that could tarnish their everlasting reputations.
Conclusion
With every new technology, there is always a risk that it may be used maliciously. But in this case, because the technology has a direct impact on the dissemination of truth, we think it is a force for good. Because in every institutional deception, there is always one person whose decision to lie is marginal, there is always a set of circumstances that will encourage them to tell the truth. The decentralized dead man switch changes the costs of lying and telling the truth.
It will alter the dynamics of the decision to lie, maintain secrets, cover up deceptions with more lies. It will alter the decision to silence truth tellers, whistleblowers and journalists. It will for the first time in the history of the world change the certainty that murder can used to silence those who know too much.