Matthew Allen Fisher @ ICML Seoul

Different subspecies lie quite distinctly: Jews find it viscerally painful to say things that are literally false, but they happily troll with disingenuous technicalities & loopholes; Anglos learn to earnestly believe the lies they’re forced to tell for selfless propriety; Indians will just straightforwardly lie for petty personal or tribal gain without any seeming discomfort, but not in political or coalitional ways (they’re quite blunt about their beliefs, even when it’s not to their advantage); the Han put all their dishonesty into playing dumb, & they’ll aggressively gaslight you into agreeing that they’re stupid or ignorant, just so long as you pretend that they didn’t forget about or give up or cheat on some assignment; Russians will just lie for seemingly no reason; Germans will just go quiet instead; Arabs want you to think they’re intimidating; blacks want you to think they’re cool; Irish will ignore the object-level & explicitly just assert their personal or professional duties to believe some claim; etc. Lying seems like it’s probably some distinct module of the brain that other subsystems then play with quite distinctly. Fits with the Sperber idea that our brains grew big from arguing for fellow tribesmen to turn against alphas.