Who downvoted you? You're right. That's not to say lies are inherently good, but you got flattened down without anybody debating you, and it's an idea worth a conversation.
Lies are a bad thing and a big deal. Reality is all we have; lying to people means taking that away from them. So in that sense, lying seems to be up there with depriving someone of their freedom, or physically harming them.
Fortunately, it's pretty hard to figure out what the exact damages are, so the combination of cultural norms against lying, plus penalties for fraud ("fraud" being, basically, "a lie whose cost you can quantify,") will have to do.
All of which applies very neatly to the other examples of generally evil stuff:
You send your kids to their room if they've misbehaved, which doesn't mean it's acceptable to lock a stranger up in their home.
You can injure or robber (or not particularly care if he gets injured), which doesn't mean you should feel justified in clobbering a stranger.
You pull the plug on a relative in an irreversible coma, even though starving her to death under normal circumstances would be frowned on.
These are all cases in which violence -- a bad thing -- is used to prevent worse things. The fact that you give specific examples of when lying is a good plan should be evidence to you that it often isn't. Which doesn't prove that it's evil, just that it could be.
There's definitely a sliding scale for lies, and everybody positions themselves differently on that scale.
Here's an example.. I've been receiving a lot of forwarded mails from certain family members. Everything from anti-Obama hate to kitten pictures to chain letters, etc. I have told these family members that I don't want to receive these kinds of emails, but they don't seem to get the message.
So over the weekend I configured postfix to bounce them back to the sender. Easy fix, and I included a note in the bounceback with some fake legalease about noncompliance with the CAN SPAM act.
Problem solved, I thought. But when I told my wife about it, she was kind of upset. She considers what I did 'lying' to my family. So everybody draws the line in a different place.
Still, I think the fake legalease is much kinder and faster way to solve the problem than a strongly worded "stop sending me this crap" message.
Put your hand back down if you require more than the statistics and conclusions of a so-called expert in his blog. A little supporting data sure would have been nice.
It might be plausible. If the sessions were brief, the researcher could probably conduct 16 interviews per day. At that rate, it would only take 114 working days dedicated to that task per year to hit the 40,000 mark. That's roughly equivalent to a part-time job dedicated to interviewing subjects, which doesn't seem terribly unreasonable, especially when the author's states that a significant portion of his work is dedicated to just that: "In my job I listen to (and look at) a lot of people."
