On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, Alex Smith wrote: > On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 11:05 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: >> I've already brought forward the theory that a deliberate inaccuracy >> published by an official or eir deputy as part of an official's duty >> should be taken, prima facie, as an intent to mislead; something >> spoken from a position of authority is inherently given more weight as >> being the truth, so deliberate inaccuracies are inherently misleading >> as to the truth. The only mitigating circumstances would be where the >> inaccuracy is necessary and noted (e.g. the game state is uncertain >> and noted as such). > > The problem, I think, is that something is also prima facie incapable of > being misleading if it's so ridiculous that no sane person can believe > it; something is not, by definition, misleading if it's incapable of > misleading anyone. (By the same argument, people with a history of lying > are less likely to mislead people than truthful people. Personally, I > think this is a large problem with the truthfulness rule.)
Um, that's not prima facie. Prima facie is assuming something external to a statement sets the assumption (e.g. "guilty until innocent"). Deciding the message is too ridiculous is not prima facie, it's looking at the message and context. Setting a precedent that "speaking from position of authority lends truth and therefore is more able to mislead" is prima facie and considered primarily, and then a second consideration (non-prima-facie) would be whether the statement was too ridiculous to believe. Anyway, I agree it's not absolute. I'm sane, I would question a report that someone's points were "a blue cow" but I'd say that anything in a finite range of numbers within a couple orders of magnitude of what we've seen isn't ridiculous enough to be obviously wrong in that sense. Another example: when comex posted the silly rule as part of the SLR, I wasn't misled to believe that the particular text was part of a rule, but I was misled into thinking that the deleted text was no longer part of the rules (as it didn't turn up in a search). There's also a secondary misleading (meta-misleading) to consider: did someone mislead us to think that an error that was put in on purpose was accidental? -G.
