

The Definition of Lying and Deception - infinity
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lying-definition/

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ExpiredLink
What I've seen on several fora is that US citizens use the word 'lying' when
someone expresses an opinion that contains a mistake or an error but certainly
has no "intention to deceive".

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pixelglow
It's probably an informal use of the word "lying" prevalent in tech culture.
When I was working in a moderately sized software company in Australia,
engineers would often say, "xyz. Oops, I lied. It was abc." It's a shorthand
for "I made a mistake, what I said before was false, although I believed it
true at the time." No actual intention to deceive here.

I suspect this originated with autistic individuals finding it hard to
actually lie, i.e deceive. This relates to their shallow theory of mind, or
difficulty believing other people have different thoughts and ideas from them
or the absolute "truth". This idea has subtly spread through science and tech
culture since many practitioners are on the spectrum, where some absolute
truth is held up for admiration and significant deviation is uncomfortable.

For example, "code never lies." So if I say "xyz" about the code and it is
false, I am "lying".

