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Little lies make people dismiss your point

A while back, I saw this video recommended, and gave it a peek. The speaker's thesis is that alcohol offers absolutely zero advantages. 

All-or-nothing perspectives are common on this and many other topics. It's much harder to deal with  sophisticated pros and cons. It's easier to tell an alcoholic to never set foot in a bar again than it is to teach them how to properly evaluate the cost and benefit of each opportunity to drink. Imagine how simple it would be to program a robot to do the first versus the second.

And yet, how successful are the all-or-nothing lessons? 

Here's the problem with oversimplifying sophisticated problems into simple problems: you have to lie to do it. And when anyone figures out that you are, they aren't going to bother to listen carefully to everything else you say in order to extract out what value might be therein. And that's a shame, because you might have some really good points. 

I scanned the comments out of curiosity for how it was received. It seems like a substantial number of people were calling out the thesis as an obvious lie. Of course there are benefits to drinking alcohol. No one would do it otherwise. The problem is that the costs frequently outweigh those benefits, but you aren't going to help people understand that by making a lie your central argument.

Oversimplification frequently does more harm than good.