Progress-focused

Should salespeople be dishonest? Is cheating in commerce acceptable or even necessary to be successful? Years ago I spoke to someone who sold a product that was said to be good for health. He told me he mentioned on the packaging: “Clinically tested!” Laughing, he added: “Ha, ha, clinically tested! You can just put that on there, but that doesn't mean anything!" He pronounced it in a look-how-smart-I-am tone. Underlying such an attitude is the thought that if you want to sell something, a little deception should be allowed and may even be necessary. Seems like a dubious argument to me. I understand that the seller wants to sell, but it seems to me that the buyer does not want to be misled. 

In his 1996 book The Demon Haunted World , Carl Sagan wrote the chapter The Fine Art of Baloney Detection . A recently published book by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, Calling Bullshit. The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World , can be seen as an extension and update of that chapter. The book is about bullshit, or nonsense claims. Bullshit is as old as humanity and even older. Many other animal species also employ all kinds of deception. Some animals sound the alarm to suggest that a predator is coming to lure other animals away from food in order to get to it themselves. But besides humans, there are only a few animal species that deliberately mislead. This is because deliberately misleading others requires a fairly complex brain.