lies (Page 4)

At Christmas time, almost every parent reaches the point where their child wants to know if there really is a Santa Claus. Parents regularly lie to their kids with the best of intentions: Is this the right thing to do?

Child psychologist Charles Smith notes that while Santa may not be a flesh-and-blood person, the cultural truth of St. Nicholas is key to a child’s developing imagination. He says, “Santa Claus is a shared cultural image of benevolence and kindness and you don’t want to undermine that. With Santa Claus, you are trying to enrich the child’s life by sharing something that you both enjoy. Santa Claus embodies the whole idea of the Christmas season as the time of caring, togetherness and magic.”
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Some people can’t help telling lies, and lately, a lot of those people seem to be politicians. That’s why the government wants to know if lie detectors (polygraphs) really work.

In LiveScience.com, Christopher Wanjek writes that “good liars have little to lose and everything to gain from taking a ‘lie detector’ test. It’s the truthful people who need to worry about polygraphs [because] a polygraph not a lie detector; it never was.”
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We’ve written before about how mathematics can bring us amazing revelations. Now a mathematician in Canada says that he can use math to tell when a politician is lying. With our own election coming up in 2008, this is something we can use.

Stu Hutson writes in New Scientist that a hard-fought election for the post of prime minister is taking place in Canada right now. Mathematician David Skillicorn created an algorithm which reveals which candidate is telling the truth in his campaign speeches, and which one is using more “spin.” An algorithm is a set of step-by-step instructions which results in the solution to a specific problem.
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In Britain’s Observer newspaper, political scientist Glen Newey says that lying is an important part of politics in a modern democracy. He says, “Politicians need to be more honest about lying.” He thinks voters actually expect to be lied to and sometimes even need to hear the lies. “Politics should be regarded as less like an exercise in producing truthful statements and more like a poker game,” he says. “And there is an expectation by a poker player that you try to deceive them as part of the game.”
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