Debasing the Currency of Communication
by Kernon Gibes
There is the famous saying credited to Sir Thomas Gresham, advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, that bad money drives out good. The basic idea is that a few bad applies can, in fact, spoil the whole bunch. If it becomes known that there is worthless money floating around, all money will become suspect. The bad money won't have a big, bold "bad" stamped on it. It won't be easy to distinguish. The bad money creates a natural suspicion of all money. But money -- though certainly an interesting subject! -- is not my topic today.
A television broadcast a while back included a piece on lying. In the program, they covered the usual stuff on "white lies" that people tell each other to smooth over daily interactions. But they also showed just how pervasive lying has become. A phenomenal proportion of teenagers and young adults not only stretch the truth to impress potential dates and new friends, they invent wildly false personas for themselves. The show also pointed out that people are not very good at spotting liars. Police, prosecutors, and psychologists -- people who you'd imagine would have professionally honed abilities -- do only slightly better than chance at spotting prevaricators on controlled tests. Nevertheless, you'd think that the teenagers would learn the hard way, and no longer take each other's stories at face value.
A while back, my son (aka, the rocket boy) brought home an evaluation form from a class. The form was a rating of how he did. My wife was complementing him on his performance, when he informed her that it didn't mean anything. "Why not?" asked my wife. His response was that the teacher gives all of the students high marks so that the parents will feel good about how the class went and be more likely to enroll their children in the next section.
High marks do indeed lose their meaning if everyone automatically gets them. Like money, it's a case of bad rating schemes driving out good ones. If some scores are artificially raised for whatever "higher" goal (say, to make everyone feel good), then scoring systems per se begin to lose their value -- even for the alleged end benefits. Fabricating false praise does nothing for anyone. In some imaginary "static" world, maybe it would work. But in the real world, it only creates its own brand of inflation. Soon, hyper-inflation kicks in, so that -- quite literally -- the marks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Lowering standards and other forms of lying debases the currency of communication. This may be a hard concept for statists, leftists, and those who never saw an unintended consequence they couldn't rationalize to grasp, but it's obvious enough to a seven-year-old. Yes my son, I'm sorry, but you're right -- we really don't know how well you did in that class.
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