The HBS hosts try to get to the truth of untruths.
Mark Twain famously claimed that there are three kinds of untruth: lies, damned lies, and statistics. In an age of widespread misinformation, where it has become considerably more difficult to distinguish between truths and lies, the HBS hosts make an impassioned plea for us to think seriously about what a lie is, what it is not, and why it matters. We consider the whole menagerie of falsehoods: from trifling fibs (“you look great in those pants!”) to catastrophic lies (“the only the thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”) to seemingly antiseptic, but no less dissimulating, statistical misrepresentations.
This is our last episode of Season 4 and we want to send out a huge THANK YOU to all of our listeners! We’ll be taking a couple of weeks off to detox, but Charles, Rick, and Leigh will be back with an exciting new slate of topics and guests for Season 5 starting on July 8!
If you have ideas for topics you’d like to hear us discuss in future episodes, or if you’d like to appear on the podcast as a guest, just email us at hotelbarpodcast@gmail.com or interact with us on Facebook or Twitter!
In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/texts/events/etc:
- History of the phrase “lies, damned lies, and statistics”
- The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump’s Presidency
- Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
- Thomas L. Carson, The Oxford Handbook of Lying
- Stephen Colbert on “truthiness”
- Timeline of the shooting at Cobb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas
- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
- Immanuel Kant, “On the Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Reasons”
- Wayne Lapierre (CEO of the National Rifle Association) and the “good guy with a gun” lie
- CDC maps send mixed messages on COVID safety
- Frontline’s “The Power of Big Oil” documentary series
- Big Tobacco found guilty of lying to the public
- 10 Climate Change Lies, and How To Catch Them
- Marx’s surplus value theory
- Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1
- Film producer Irwin Allen
- Jason L. Salemi’s (@JasnSalemi) Twitter thread on changing CDC maps
- How do we know statistics can be trusted?
- Our episode on Algorithms (Season 4, Episode 54)
