I appreciate the review! For what it's worth, you precisely described the exact reasons why I wrote this.

If you are curious about how I handle confidentiality, I wrote a companion post called How I Lie to You

I think it's funny that this title is referred to as click-baity because the title directly and transparently advertises exactly what's contained within the essay!

The examples outlined were pulled from a highly selective sample, and were not meant to be a representative sample of lying overall. Part of the thesis was to remind everyone of the willingness some liars pursue their craft — as in, the lack of deterrence even when they are incompetent and doing so from a highly disadvantaged position.

On second thought, I should've been more precise. I changed it to "Weight can be such an extreme determinative factor...". Thanks for the note.

I'm transparent about using LLMs as an editorial assistant (Claude 4.1 for this essay) but that last parenthetical just now came to me naturally, as I suspect almost all the ones in this essay did.

Interestingly enough, another reader asked me the same question on another essay but ended up citing a bunch of false positives: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/beware-the-moral-homophone/comment/120595749

True but I made sure to qualify my claim as pertaining to boxing specifically.

I wrote a whole essay on proper & effective protest tactics: How to Protest Well

The basic template to follow is to keep all these questions in mind:

1. What exactly do we want?
2. Who has the power to give it to us?
3. How do we pressure them effectively?
4. When do we admit our tactics aren't working?

You're correct that I did not intend to convey that this phenomenon is motivated by cynical self-interest. I don't understand the Jordan Peterson connection.

I already said I don't consider alternative explanations on their own to be indicative of lying. I don't know where you're getting this notion that speculation is evasion, here's what I said on the matter:

If a client is either factually innocent or guilty-but-sober-minded, there’s no difficulty getting them to admit the incriminating nature of incriminating evidence. If a client is lying — whether to me, themselves, or just desperately trying to manifest a reality which doesn’t exist — it’s like pulling teeth.

If they have no idea what's going on then there's no need for this exercise. There's other ways to cooperate in truth-seeking.

I don't consider alternative explanations on their own to be indicative of lying, especially if the alternative theory as a whole more accurately comports with reality. This is why there are two parts to this exercise: surviving the gauntlet of facts and dethroning the other survivor (if any).