 The one and only Max Maven is next. He has a talk which is called Truth Lies Here. The fact that Max can say this. Orson Welles once said this about Max. Max has the most creative mind and magic. Orson Welles said that about Max Maven. Pretty freaking cool. He did a show here in 2011 at TAM that was unbelievable. Here's your haiku. Truth Lies Here said Max. So that's all well and good. But where are my car keys? Please welcome Max Maven. Thank you very much. Thank you and good morning. I can answer the question as to where my car keys are because I don't know how to drive. So the answer is they're nowhere. But hopefully we'll get somewhere this morning. There's a segue for you. I'm delighted to be back at TAM. I'm delighted to see a bunch of old friends and hopefully make some new ones. The general topic I'd like to talk about for the next few minutes is a few words in praise of deception. Don't throw anything yet. There's a wonderful pitch for this convention, the great picture of Randy in the martial arts ring, sort of tying into the terrific panel discussion we just had. And I'm in favor of most of what's on that display. I'm not in favor of quacks. I'm assuming we're not talking about the audio expression of the antennae family of birds, but rather medical frauds against those. Scams, a word whose origins are unclear, but it may go back as much as 700 years and it suggests a larceness swindle. I'm not in favor of those. And shams, hoaxes with an implicitly malevolent intent. I'm not particularly fond of those. The word fake on the other hand, which is a relative newcomer as it's only about 250 years old, implies not only a false imitation of something, but one that upgrades. In other words, a fake in the way the word is most often used suggests we're duplicating something but making it seem better than it actually is. And that's not as cut and dried, I think, as the other words. And I'm going to come back to that. My friend Jamie Ian Swiss is fond of quoting the early 20th century magician Carl Germain, who once said, the magician is the most honest of all professionals. First, he promises to deceive you, and then he does. It's a wonderful quote. I think it's, however, a bit narrow in its range. I don't think this is something that is limited to the profession of theatrical conjuring. I prefer the notion of a contemporary of Germain's, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, who in 1923 said, art is a lie that tells the truth. And I think, in fact, we can expand this basic concept that all art by definition is fake. Because if it wasn't fake, it wouldn't be art. What makes a painting of a tree art, at least potentially, is that it isn't a tree in the first place. Now we're getting into McGree territory. But this sentiment has been echoed by people in a variety of artistic fields. Almost identical quotes to the Picasso quote have been attributed to Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, Ralph Ellison, Alan Moore, Stephen King, and John Waters. There's a combination. And I like the summation from Claude Debussy, the French composer who wrote, art is the most beautiful deception of all. And the notion that there can be something in the way of deception that is beautiful seems to run contrary to the premise of this weekend. But I don't think that's really the case. And I want to talk about that just for a few moments. I think just about everyone here could be defined as a consequentialist when it comes to the ethics and morality of truth and lying, which is to say, we understand that there is a certain flexible scale, that lying is not simply a black and white situation where it's always right or always wrong, but rather it has to do with both the intent and the outcome, or at least the intended outcome. However, in the heat of debate, I find that skeptics often become knee-jerk Kantians. And I think that runs the risk of throwing out the baby with the homeopathic bathwater. When I say that everyone is a consequentialist, I base this on my own empirical experience. I once had a great conversation with perhaps my favorite day ontologist, Jerry Andrus. And with very delicate care, I was able to walk Jerry step by step to the logical conclusion that it would be morally OK to tell your aunt that her ugly hat looked OK. And if Jerry Andrus could be led to that conclusion, anyone can. But the ugly hat is a fairly well-known example of a morally acceptable deception. And most of the examples that come up in conversations of this sort tend to be fairly soft exchanges, such as the ugly hat, or rather extreme ethical cases. We won't tell the Nazis about the Jews hiding in the attic. Hard to argue against that because you've loaded it with so much cultural, political, and martial arts aspect. But I think there is value in mentioning some less blunt examples. For example, back in the 1960s, the great sociologist Irving Goffman wrote about a study regarding students in high school who were doing mediocre work. And so they were all called into their guidance counselors. And half of them were given honest assessments. You're barely hitting a C minus level. You have to try harder. And the other half were given a deliberately false assessment. You're hitting a C plus level. And with a bit more effort, you could raise your great average to a B. And at the end of the semester, when they looked at the results, the students who were lied to had improved their work much more than the students who were legitimately told about their actual level of accomplishment. This is a deception. But I think it can be argued that it is not only morally good, but proactively so. And we have a tendency to marginalize deception as if it is something that is external to our own lives. And yet, even among skeptics, as we interact with others of our species, we employ deliberate deception to our own advantage. And we do this virtually nonstop. As Goplin once wrote, all the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify. Goplin is the one who coined the term impression management. It covers almost every person in this room. Simple example, if you wear contact lenses as your form of vision correction, which, as we age, most of us need, at least part of the motivation is because it deceives the people you meet into thinking that you are healthier than your actual condition, and hence, a better prospect in the marketplace, whether in terms of business, sociality, or mating. We do the same thing when we dye our hair to conceal gray or employ any of the other countless techniques for making ourselves appear more robust. These are forms of fakery. We are fakers. And I do not disparage the motives for this. I simply acknowledge that they exist, even if we often train ourselves to pretend that they don't. Now, of course, I have a vested interest in deception because it's the basic foundation on which my own work has been built, and I'm happy to say that I'm rather good at it. Some years ago, I participated in a study that was put together by Richard Wiseman, no stranger to this event, and Peter Lamont, over in Scotland, in conjunction with the prestigious British magazine Nature. On magazine's website, they posted two video clips of me. And in each one, I told an anecdote. They were similar in topics, similar in length, but only one of them was true. And then people were asked to vote on the website as to whether A or B was the truthful clip. And the results, which were later replicated with other groups, came in as a statistical tie. And in other words, from this empirical research, we can state with confidence that I am essentially a perfect liar. And this experiment garnered the largest number of hits in the history of Nature magazine's website. Or maybe I'm just making the whole thing up. But enough about me. Granted, a topic of endless fascination. But how does this fit into your life? Well, as indicated a moment ago, the answer is probably more than you realize. So although I think the goal of fighting the fakers is exceedingly worthwhile, I must insist that it is valuable and important for us to acknowledge that, as with so many things in life, it doesn't split neatly into us and them. As the punchline to the classic joke observes, we've already established what you are. Now we're just dickering price. Oh, half of you know the joke. You can tell it to the other half. And I think these are important things to keep in mind. Because I think it is too easy in our context when we are establishing ourselves as skeptics and fighting against nonsense. Sometimes the targets are so easy that I think at times that if there were a family crest for groups like J-Ref, it would be a barrel filled with fish with a pair of machine guns crossed above it. And that makes it very easy to, again, get into this division of us and them and aren't they silly for believing easily refuted things. And we hold on to the truth. And yet our own grasp on the truth can be sometimes slippery. There's this woman in England. Is it psychic Sally? Was that the one? Yeah. And as many of you know, she was recently involved in a court case against an English newspaper because they had talked with a rather foolish magician in England named Paul Zenon. And Paul Zenon had gone to one of her shows and had come back and had said, well, she's doing the Peter Popov deal. She's got a little earpiece. And she has stage hands backstage who are collecting information and then feeding it to her. And so the newspaper in the name of truth published this false information. She took them to court and she won because even creepy people get legal protection against libel. So the eagerness with which we will grasp onto what appears on the surface to be truth can be a liability. And there were people on the Twitterverse from the skeptical community who were very upset that she'd won this because they were saying, well, that may not have been what she did, but she was cheating in some way. There's a faith-based argument. Now, let me be clear. I have no reason to think that psychic Sally is a legitimate person in any way. Anyone who uses the stage name psychic Sally loses points for me just by that. But I think it is important that we stop with this division which leads us to jump to false versions of the truth. So I'm here to, the classic question is, who watches the watchers? I say, who's skeptical about the skeptics? And God knows it shouldn't just be me. And in front of a group like this, I shouldn't be using expressions like God knows. You know that this is cultural and not actually metaphysical. About eight years ago, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion in New York at the new school that was sponsored by CFI. And among the panelists were Susan Jacoby, who is going to be keynoting here. DJ Grothy was the moderator. And it was a really interesting conversation about the ethics of deception. That was our stated topic. And at the end of this conversation, which involved several interesting people, a microphone was passed around the audience for people to both make comments and ask questions. And it was a productive and fun thing. And when the microphone reached the final person, it happened to be an older woman, a feisty woman, who was seated directly opposite me. I was sitting on a podium that was facing the audience. And she was exactly at eye level facing me. And she received the mic. And she said, I think this has been a wonderful event. I think we've had a lot of practical and insightful information. And I think it was really great, except for you, Max Maven. I think you wasted our time with your trivial ideas about eyeglasses and contact lenses. And I felt wonderful at that moment. Because in the portion of the event where I'd actually gotten up to speak for a few minutes, I had left out something. I'd accidentally jumped over something on my notes. And here she was delivering the opportunity to me on a platter. And I said to her, I'm sorry that you were not pleased with my contribution to this afternoon. I'm glad you liked the rest of it, but we don't always have to agree. But as far as whether or not the wearing of eyeglasses is supposed to contact, as to whether that's trivial, I'll bring up a gentleman named Bill Hemmer. Now eight years ago, Bill Hemmer was the morning news anchor on CNN. And in this audience of several hundred people at the new school, a remarkable number of them apparently watched CNN in the morning when they were having their pre-work coffee. Because the whole room perked out. They all knew Bill Hemmer. And I pointed out that Bill Hemmer, a good-looking young man, wore horn-rimmed glasses. And that the lenses of the glasses had no prescription. They were just playing glass, at which point the guy sitting next to me on the panel, who was the television critic for Newsday, was nodding vigorously, thus verifying what I was saying. The point was he wore the glasses not because he needed vision correction, but rather because they conveyed to his audience the idea that he was smarter than he actually was. It gave him a certain intellectual cachet, and therefore made the viewers believe his news reporting more than they otherwise might. Now I don't know about the rest of you. I think that's something that isn't trivial. I think that type of fakerism, if you will, has a pretty major effect on people's lives. Happily enough, the people in that room, other than the feisty old lady, seem to agree. And I'm going to wrap this early, because we've been running late on everything else. So I will leave you just with the following code up, which is that Bill Hemmer is still on television, but he's moved over to the Fox network, and he no longer wears glasses. And with that, I'm going to turn you back to George, and we'll get back on schedule. Thank you very much, and see you during the rest of the weekend.