Because talking takes time. And how much time it takes to talk depends in large part on how much time it takes to think of what you are going to say. The time spent reveals how much thinking you did. Here’s where truthtelling distinguishes itself. The time it takes to tell the truth is just the time it takes to remember what actually happened.
The time it takes to lie is the time it takes to invent a lie, check that its consistent with the facts, and invent all of the subsequent lies you are going to have to tell in order for your whole story to hang together.
Cheap Talk 
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
December 4, 2012 at 7:56 am
hb
It sort of depends what you mean by “telling the truth”.
Organizing and structuring facts, constructing arguments, conveying nuance is tricky – at least it seems to take me a while to put together lectures and talks. I suspect things would run easier if at certain points I said “the proof is trivial and left as an exercise”!