People fucking love lieing and gossiping. There is a a guy named paul ekman, he has several books on the subject of spotting lies, he has been called a truth wizard and I read a quote from him where he said that everyone lies so often for such innocuous reasons that he has to cut friends and family slack when he spots their lies or else he would spend most of his time fussing over nothing lies.

There are two major technological innovations designed to be efficient mediums of gossip, Twitter and Facebook, both insanely popular. Further, there are several fields of gossip, e.g. political scientific social etc. You can spot gossip because it is short on first-hand experience and heavy with adjectives. In the past, I have hated gossip because it's how arguments are won and stories are sold. For example, "five participants lost 1.6kg after not eating a fructose solution prepared for them by the team", is a lot less conclusive and lot less interesting than "is fruit making you fat? find out what researchers at the university of Illinois say in their gtound breaking study at ten." Another example, "women make 75 cents on the dollar for every dollar men make, this is unfair", this statement hardly lives up to scrutiny (no citation, no methodology, the underlying study isn't even broadly known, and "unfair" wtf does that even mean), its just gossip, but it gets thrown around by everyone because most people think it's a fun thing to talk about. Further, I just read an article, in a magazine called The Rake, that described Warren Beatty's love life (estimated at 13,000 women) and besides showering and wearing clothes he was also a big gossiper. You can watch Beatty in Dick Tracy where you can see him at 55 looking like nothing special, but he still bagged his costar, a young Madonna. For those of you too young to remember, Madonna used to be a good looking sex symbol. And, after I thought about it, most "naturals" I've known were really comfortable with gossip.

Why the fuck do we care? Because I had the idea that people might be so entertained by gossip and lies that you could get anyone into a conversation all the way into the physical escalation phase with just gossip and lies. This is good news because I think gossip and lies are amoral and harmless if used for non strategic purposes. So, I tried it on my wife, not the most rigorous proof because we get along really well, but there is a lot of times I will cut her off midsentince because she will start a sentence with "they say" or "researchers have found". This level of scrutiny would not be tolerated by a lot of women that aren't worth marrying. She is into science gossip, so I made up some bullshit about the NIH finding that 4000 participants complaining about body image issues had weight problems due to their caloric intake, not certain psychological markers that were tested for, like self consciousness. This lie/science gossip is good because it's not too farfetched and it is not immediately disprovable, plus who fucking cares it's the NIH. Anyway, it was effective, she was engaged in the conversation, her eyes lit up thinking about the tidbit of misinformation and it filled a gap in the conversation with inconsequential chatter, also it's just chit chat cuz we were bored. I am now ok with gossip and lies in conversation because it's what people like and as long as I don't start believing my own bullshit no one is harmed. Lastly, to illustrate my point, I didn't try to lie but this whole post is pretty much gossip and if you were interested while reading it then I think it bolsters my position that gossip is entertaining.

TLDR gossip and lies are a great conversation piece.