1) Narcissistic deceivers: they don’t track or even consider whether what they are saying is true; they say what feels good to them. This relates to what philosophers call “bullshitting” (as opposed to “lying”).

Some well-known politicians fall into this camp.

2) Psychopathic deceivers: they know they are saying false things but don’t care and are just saying whatever best serves their own agenda. They don’t experience guilt about lying.

Some popular media personalities fall into this camp.

3) Motivated deceivers: they know they are lying and feel bad about it (when they think about it), but they think it’s worth lying because the cause is too important or there is too much to be lost if they don’t lie, or there’s something important to them to gain by lying.

Some leaders of organizations fall into this camp.

4) Delusional deceivers: they have lost touch with reality, usually due to mental health problems (such as psychosis) or extremely heavy drug use. They are often paranoid.

Some famous authors fall into this camp.

5) Believing deceivers: they’ve been convinced of false information through propaganda, idealism, cognitive dissonance, trusting unreliable sources, or social forces/pressures and genuinely believe it’s the truth. They aren’t delusional or evil, just (potentially very) misled.

Many people on all political sides are like this. This is, in my view, by far the most common reason individuals spread misinformation, though it may not be the most common reason that public figures spread misinformation.

Whether you are working to combat misinformation or just trying to understand it, it’s useful to know what you’re dealing with. Spreaders of misinformation come in very different forms and have very different reasons for doing so.

This piece was first written on March 22, 2025, and first appeared on my website on April 22, 2025.

I know of 8 approaches to interpreting the U.S. Constitution (and its amendments). None is obviously correct; some are more popular than others, but all are, in some unsatisfying sense, an arbitrary choice we could make:

(1) What the authors believed their words were literally saying (for instance, by studying what is known about how James Madison interpreted his writing). Because that tells us what the documents were intended to say.

(2) What the authors were trying to achieve on behalf of our country by writing those words (for instance, by studying what is known about why Alexander Hamilton thought certain things should be in the Constitution). Because this takes into account the spirit, rather than just the letter, of the law.

(3) What did the ratifiers / those who voted to approve the amendments interpret the words as meaning? Because that takes into account the reasons why the documents were actually accepted as law.

(4) What those who first enforced each of the different terms of these documents interpreted them to mean. Because that tells us what the documents first actually meant in practice.

(5) What decisions in our courts most recently interpreted the words to mean? Because that represents the current theoretical state of the law (even though it sometimes changes). There are, of course, good reasons to think we should implement the law as court decisions indicate. What I’m referring to here is something different, namely, when one says that the “correct” interpretations of the Constitution are automatically what the courts have most recently decided they are.

(6) What most people today would interpret the words to mean, if the words are taken at their face value in modern English. Because this is what those words actually mean to us when we read them.

(7) Whichever method of interpretation listed above causes an interpretation most like what we wish the documents said, accompanied by us then arguing that this is always the correct approach to interpretation. This one is especially popular.

(8) Decide what we think the Constitution should have said, then try to find some interpretation of the words that at least sort of makes it sound like it’s saying those things.

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It would be nice if the Constitution told us which of these methods to use to interpret its pages (though I imagine we’d end up just debating what THOSE words mean too).

It would be even better if we could decide which of these methods would actually produce better outcomes for our society. That’s unfortunately very hard to do.

To some extent, the choice for how to interpret the Constitution hinges on how much we value stability of interpretation (which makes the law more understandable and consistent) vs. achieving certain outcomes we desire (e.g., making sure there are strong protections for things that society feels should be protected). But this dichotomy is not sufficient to allow us to choose between all the different interpretative methods, in my opinion.

Usually, we either seem to treat the Constitution as though it is not ambiguous (a theory that’s unfortunately been falsified) or as though one of these approaches is the “right” way to do it, as though there could be such a thing as one “right” way to interpret an ambiguous document.

This piece was first written on March 20, 2018, and first appeared on my website on September 4, 2025.