How to Corner Liars: A Miasma-Clearing Protocol

post by ymeskhout · 2025-02-27T17:18:36.028Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

This is a link post for https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/how-to-corner-liars-a-miasma-clearing

Contents

    A framework for quashing deflection and plausibility mirages
  How to Lie
  How To Lie Not
  How?
None
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A framework for quashing deflection and plausibility mirages

The truth is people lie. Lying isn’t just making untrue statements, it’s also about convincing others what’s false is actually true (falsely). It’s bad that lies are untrue, because truth is good. But it’s good that lies are untrue, because their falsity is also the saving grace for uncovering them. Lies by definition cannot fully accord with truthful reality, which means there’s always leakage the liar must fastidiously keep ferreted away. But if that’s true, how can anyone successfully lie?

Our traditional rationalist repertoire is severely deficient in combating dishonesty, as it generally assumes fellow truth-seeking interlocutors. I happen to have extensive professional experience working with professional liars [LW · GW], and have gotten intimately familiar with the art of sophistry. As a defense attorney, detecting lies serves both my duty and my clients’ interests. Chasing false leads waste everyone’s time and risks backfiring spectacularly, and it’s myopic to forget that persuasion is best paired with corroborating evidence rather than just naked assertions.

A liar’s repertoire necessarily has to be robust and adaptable to an ever-changing battlefield. Obfuscation is the main character here, which is why their tactics are primarily geared towards generating a miasma of confusion. All this is buttressed by an array of emotional manipulation techniques. Anger, feigning offense, pity appeals (“How could you say that about me?”) are all fog machines drafted into the war effort.

Even skilled deceivers (read: any level above ‘nuh-uh’) will inevitably snap against reality’s tether. There will always be a delta between lies and reality, and this is the liar’s fatal vulnerability.

In response to the tireless efforts of my clients (along with their distant cousins, online grifters), I’ve developed a rubric that has been very effective at cutting through the bullshit. It’s a method I call the Miasma-Clearing Protocol. This process doesn’t rely on gut feelings or endlessly tedious debates over plausibility; instead, it systematically evaluates competing theories against all known facts. By forcing each theory to run through this gauntlet, we can separate solid ground from inflatable life rafts and expose the mirages for what they are.

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How to Lie

I’ll walk you through how these common tactics manifest. One of my responsibilities is going over all the evidence with my clients, step by step. 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.

For this cohort, perpetual deflection is a favorite. When confronted with evidence like “Your phone location shows you were at the crime scene” a liar might claim someone had stolen their phone that day. Deflections are effective smokescreens because while they might be implausible, none are strictly impossible. Phones do get stolen after all.

Deflections do have a fatal vulnerability however. They can only retain their plausible deniability when exploiting a pinhole aperture, viewing one fact at a time in isolation. Let’s say the phone location that day was also at every location that my client regularly frequents. When viewed in isolation, there is nothing incriminating about this fact, but it cannot sustain the stolen phone explanation.

The easiest way out of this conundrum is confetti — a liar will throw it up in the air and pivot to another point, hoping you don’t notice. The more time between the two confrontations, the easier it is to pull off the pirouette. A less desirable way out is the contortionist act. Sometimes liars will swallow the paradox and ask to amend their theory; not only was their phone stolen but also this mystery thief was stalking them and thus went to the same places they normally would. This new theory is still not strictly impossible, but if you stick to a relentless schedule of other facts, each new barrage will require ever more acrobatic contortions. There’s always a breaking point.

Liars can only twist themselves into so many knots before they snap — best to tighten the rope early. Deflection pairs very well with another common tactic, what I call the “plausibility mirage.” Liars conflate possibility with exclusivity, as if their theory’s mere feasibility rules out all others. It’s as if they’re saying “I’m floating on a life raft, therefore the solid pier you claim to be standing on must not exist.” Through mere fiat and assertions, grounded explanations can just disappear. When laid out so transparently, it’s bizarre that this tactic could work on anyone — but work it does.

So while islands of plausibility might exist in isolation, they cannot form a coherent, traversable path across the ocean of available evidence. And while the plausibility mirage might be effective distraction, it struggles with unseating a theory that is untarnished by any contradictory evidence. Cutting through all this dense fog requires more of a systemic approach.

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How To Lie Not

Now that we’ve explored the liar’s playbook, let’s turn the tables and examine how to systematically dismantle their house of cards.

Here’s how the Miasma-Clearing Protocol works. You take the dueling theories and pit them against each other, side by side. Then you run both through a gauntlet of all relevant facts, a quick and dirty determination on whether each fact is congruent or not under each theory. We don’t get bogged down with likelihood, plausibility, or burden of proof, or anything else; we stay within stark binary territory for the sake of simplicity.

Let’s say one theory is “Jake ate the cookies from the jar” squaring up against “Gillian ate the cookies from the jar” (left and right below, respectively). Two basic relevant facts might look like this:

1. Jake was home when the cookies went missing: ✅✅
2. Gillian was home when the cookies went missing: ✅✅

Regardless of which one ate the cookies, the fact that the other person was home at the same time is not a contradiction. Being under the same roof does not preclude someone else from stuffing their face with illicit pastries. We know nothing so far.

The real fun begins as soon as we encounter a vexing fact for the liar, say for example “Gillian has a debilitating chocolate allergy”. The liar will ask to modify their theory, because whatever could live comfortably among Fact #1 & #2 suddenly has to account for inconvenient Fact #3. This, on its own, is neither a problem nor is it an indicator for dishonesty. Even bona fide truth-seekers sometimes realize they’ve overlooked important details or made faulty assumptions in their reasoning. Modifications are welcome! However, the two rules are: 1) We start all over again from the very beginning and 2) everyone is allowed to add (never subtract) new relevant facts to the evaluation gauntlet.

To account for the allergy, the Gillian theory is now amended to “Gillian stole the cookies, but gave them to something or someone else”, then we go through the gauntlet again:

1. Jake was home when the cookies went missing: ✅✅
2. Gillian was home when the cookies went missing: ✅✅
3. Gillian has a debilitating chocolate allergy: ✅✅

Again, we don’t get dragged into a tedious debate about plausibility, we stay on stark binary ground. Right now, both theories are still congruent with all the evaluated facts. Based solely on this quick and dirty rubric, there’s no reason to favor one over the other.

If a liar is forward-thinking enough, now is the ideal time to pull a plausibility mirage (“Gillian could’ve given the cookies away, therefore it wasn’t Jake that stole them!”) because the vice will only get tighter. Remember, there’s always a delta between lies and truthful reality, by definition. If you haven’t found an incongruent fact yet, you’re either not dealing with a lie, or you haven’t looked hard enough. Let’s introduce a fourth fact:

4. The only other entity that could’ve been fed cookies was a dog, and it shows no signs of illness from eating chocolate: ✅❌

The liar faces a conundrum. He can ask to modify the theory again, which is perfectly fine, but whatever he comes up with to accommodate “dog isn’t sick” fact will directly contradict the preceding “Gillian stole cookies but didn’t eat them” theory. Deflection that may have worked in isolated bursts often looks idiotic when displayed in its full solar glory.

Or maybe the liar can just swallow the demerit but nevertheless argue the veracity of their theory. It’s fine for them to try, but they face an uphill slog trying to dethrone the truthful theory that has remained untarnished by the muck. What’s wrong with accepting that Jake was the one who ate the cookies?

In conversations with lying clients, it’s around this point that I ask them to specifically point out which part of the theory they’re challenging is contradicted or otherwise incongruent with reality. Stop trying to come up with new excuses, just tell me why this theory is specifically wrong. They can’t. Or maybe they just tell me to fuck off and threaten to fire me.

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How?

Why is this framework so effective? It clamps down on the eternal deflection pivot by forcing liars to commit to a single “alternative” theory, rather than an funhouse mirror’s array of deflection. Even if they propose a decent alternative theory with only a few dings, forcing it through the entire gauntlet will still expose just how deficient that theory is compared to the truthful one.

This exercise is never meant to be definitive, it remains strictly provisional. If a theory survives this gauntlet unscathed, it does not mean it’s the last word! Rather, this rubric is intended to be a ruthlessly efficient method of cutting through the chaff. First we clear the fog — only then does nuance have room to breathe.

What are some problems with this approach? Surprisingly, disagreements about in/congruent are very rare. If any particular fact starts to get bogged down in debate, there’s nothing wrong with just skipping it until the end, because it might not even be determinative. The whole point is to avoid the perpetual deflection miasma, and so the glib starkness is an intended feature of sorts.

What about cherry-picked facts? This is a problem easily remedied, and calls back to how this exercise is provisional rather than conclusive. If both sides are encouraged to bring their best facts forward, this will not be an issue. What about incomplete or unknowable facts? This is indeed an unavoidable limitation. Some lies are simply impossible to uncover, because they leave no traceable evidence. The only solace is that these undetectable lies are bound to be rare in the grand scheme of things.

Can this exercise still be gamed by dishonest actors? I tried, but cannot think of any ways. This rubric works explicitly because lies are untrue. If you’re dealing with an actual liar, you're bound to unearth a vexing fact somewhere out there. Of course, liars can always choose to go down the confetti road and refuse to engage with the exercise, but that’s its own tell.

This is a broadly applicable method, but it’s specifically designed for confronting dishonesty — whether from evasive clients or political spin doctors. Outside of that arena, this method is unnecessary and potentially counterproductive for most situations where all parties are earnestly seeking the truth. If you’re arguing whether to build a bridge out of steel or wood, there are far more robust methods from the traditional rationalist toolbox that don’t involve assuming your engineer is trying to pull a fast one.

This protocol is the lie detector test for conversations — you don't break it out unless you smell something fishy.

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