Against Lie Inflation

An argument against broadening 'lie' to cover honestly-reported biased beliefs (trigger: someone calling a hype-caught entrepreneur's optimism 'lies'). Parallel to 'abuse' inflation (a friend who counted crying as abuse). The core: 'when everyone is an abuser, nobody is' — inflating a category until ~100% qualify destroys its information value, and because connotations lag, bad actors invoke the old strong meaning with the new broad definition (The Worst Argument In The World). Applied to 'lie': everyone becomes a liar, so the accusation loses force and the biggest beneficiaries are actual liars; the rebranding is a 'parasitic process' exploiting trust in language. Part III formalizes it as a sensitivity/specificity threshold problem — a useful category applies to >0% and <100% of cases; setting the threshold outside the distribution conveys no information (the city-center fable callback).

Quality 75 · Excellent. A clean, well-formalized, frequently-applicable epistemics/language essay — the category-inflation-destroys-information point plus the sensitivity/specificity formalization is sharp and memorable, extending his Worst-Argument / motte-and-bailey work. Excellent-low.

Claude’s paradigm shift 60 · Notable shift. The formalization (definitional inflation as a threshold problem; 'never set the line outside the distribution') is a fresh, clarifying framing. Notable.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A within-discourse epistemics essay; the framing circulates but isn't materially adopted. Within-blog influence.