Re: The Nature of a Falsehood
I talked this over with a LEO friend of mine and he suggested that the police use absolute agreement on a story as a sign of prior collusion and discounted sets of eyewitness reports unless they showed a degree of variance.
Historians use the same standard. Two people who give identical accounts of the same events are not necessarily considered independent witnesses, and two people who give minorly differing accounts are not assumed -- one or both -- to be lying. Further, two accounts of the same event given by the same person separated by a long period of time are not necessarily considered false if there is minor disagreement.
Its also very, very important not to "lead" the child into making statements they didn't mean to say. My ACI friend says that interviewing children is a very specialized art that should only be undertaken by experts.
I believe that. I read about the hysteria a few years back associated with some child sexual abuse case in which a large number of people were convicted on the testimony of children and were later set free when the case was re-examined. It seemed people were operating under the delusion that "children never lie." As I recall, the investigators had asked leading questions and had proposed scenarios which the children "confirmed".
This is exactly why conspiracism is bad and why there is a compelling social value in combatting it and the uncritical mindset that engenders it. Hysteria in this case obviously led to the imprisonment of innocent people, but it goes beyond that. Child abuse is an actual phenomenon. Raising a hue and cry over it on an unfounded basis taints our ability to identify and punish it by diluting the strength of legitimate claims. Similarly, we know that the U.S. government requires constant vigilance in order to keep its officers and agents honest. Vigilance based on poorly formulated arguments and selectively chosen data, and arguably deriving from malicious motives, taints the idea of vigilance itself. Conspiracy theorists are not helping by "keeping the government honest". They're making the problem worse.
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