Duped

Communicating is hard. Even when all parties are well-intentioned, even one-on-one and face-to-face within one's tribe, conveying and receiving our thoughts can be unreliable. The older I get the more I consider communicating the single biggest challenge we face as humans. Adding lies to the problem does not help—except in making the problem more interesting.

I'm really conflicted about this book. I picked it up as a followup to Malcolm Gladwell's [b:Talking to Strangers|43848929|Talking to Strangers What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know|Malcolm Gladwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1549393502l/43848929.SX50.jpg|68174561], in large part because lying has been such a clusterfucking part of our 2016-2020 lives; one that will not magically cease in 2021 but we're all hoping for a big damper. I got a lot more than I bargained for and really feel like talking this whole book through with someone. Unfortunately for you, dear reader who can't converse with me in real time, what you're going to get is a monologue.

Levine gets a lot of it right; at least "right" by my standards as someone who is old and has lived among humans. Deception research to date has been asking the wrong questions: lies told by/to college students in a lab setting are not representative nor even interesting. Lies are only useful in the context of patterns, of relationships (of all types). He gets this; also gets that lying is rare, that there are no universal tells, no magic signal like "wiggling the nose three times means subject is lying". He gets (and proves) that there are good liars, slick con artists and the like, and there are awful flustery ones, and the huge majority of us somewhere in between. More interestingly, he makes a strong case that individual affect/demeanor skew an observer's interpretation of the person's honesty: this is what Gladwell focuses on in his book. Levine shows that—as the majority of us already know—lies are seldom caught in the act: that we need fact checkers.

Unfortunately, there's much that Levine doesn't address: the fact that, for a significant portion of the U.S. population, lies simply don't matter. That tens of millions of shitty citizens simply don't care about truth or facts. He doesn't address religion, nor how one can expect people to understand facts when they're told from childhood that an invisible sky-god is obsessively and unhealthily watching them and particularly what they do with their genitalia. (Then again, he teaches at U. Alabama. He probably can't even come close to that topic). He never once cites [b:Fukuyama|57980|Trust The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity|Francis Fukuyama|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1409522132l/57980.SY75.jpg|56475] nor [b:Harari|23692271|Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind|Yuval Noah Harari|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1595674533l/23692271.SY75.jpg|18962767], nor does he even mention game theory or Bayesian probability except indirectly and briefly. In fact his whole treatment of probability made me uncomfortable: he uses the word "average" often, and IMHO that word should never appear in a scientific publication. (Near the end of the book he admits that his statistics background is limited).

More unfortunately, he comes off as a dick. The first third of the book is devoted to addressing the state of deception research, which would be fine if he didn't get snarky and defensive. Not always, not even often, but enough for me to find unpleasant. He also lauds his own research as "groundbreaking", "transformative", with "huge implications". Let someone else say that, dude. He misspells Danny Kahneman's name (only once, but still). Absolutely worst of all, completely unforgivable in my book: he introduces a "Believability Quotient", relating to a subject's demeanor, then (in a footnote) asserts it as "proprietary", "copyrighted", and usable by others "only with prior written permission". That's not how science works: that's a greedy scam artist move. I have to admit that after that, I read the rest of the book with some scorn and much less interest, which is a shame because there were still good aspects to it.

I think Truth Default Theory has much going for it. I think Levine has valuable insights and research. I even liked many aspects of this book: I just can't recommend it to anyone. We'll need to be patient. If the science pans out, others will write (presumably less obnoxious) books about it. Or, even better, it will become a taken-for-granted part of our lives. And if the science doesn't pan out, we'll hear no more. That's how science works.