Everybody Lies is House's credo, and usually governs House's diagnostic technique and personal life. It is a phrase constantly used in the show in many contexts, particularly when a very unlikely diagnosis would only make sense if someone were not telling the truth.
House's credo often gives him good guidance, as in many episodes the underlying diagnosis is often lacking either because someone has lied outright without provocation, has lied when asked about a possible source of the disease directly (particularly sexual infidelity) or did not disclose a particularly important fact that they thought was unimportant or too embarrassing.
However, even House agrees that his credo has its limits. He notes that people will only lie for a good reason, and that many people will lie only in some extreme situation that they feel is incredibly important. He also has identified two individuals who almost never lie, his father and Dr. Cameron. This is not to say that House sees honesty as a weakness. Where House uses lies and manipulation to get his way with patients, Cameron uses empathy and forthrightness and can sometimes get the same results. House also trusts his ex-girlfriend Stacy implicitly, in one case preferring to believe her rather than her sick husband. When Cameron challenged him by asking "whatever happened to everybody lies?", House answered "I was lying when I said that".
House also has another important credo - the symptoms never lie. However, even he agreed that they sometimes do.
http://house.wikia.com/wiki/Everybody_lies
Everybody lies
as Dr. House said.
Maybe we are all liars
as we are said
to deceive
and modify what we perceive
to fit our expectations.
The expectations
for a Scientific Researcher
for Honesty is indeed higher
since any other
Scientist can dispute
and refute
the Experimental Data
and/ or Experimental Protocols
and/ or Experimental Controls.
Other fields of Human endeavor
do endeavor
to deceive
what we perceive
since most Religions
maybe mostly self-deception
with the exceptions
of perhaps a few
but there are too many conflicting views
on the whole
to declare one Holy
Religion
as the True Religion.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and on many websites. Feynman based the phrase on a concept in anthropology, the cargo cult, which describes how some pre-scientific cultures interpreted technologically advanced visitors as religious or supernatural figures who brought boons of cargo. Later, in an effort to call for a second visit the natives would develop and engage in complex religious rituals, mirroring the previously observed behavior of the visitors manipulating their machines but without understanding the true nature of those tasks. Just as cargo cultists create mock airports that fail to produce airplanes, cargo cult scientists conduct flawed research that superficially resembles the scientific method, but which fails to produce scientifically useful results.
Following is an excerpt from speech (taken from the book).
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Feynman cautioned that to avoid becoming cargo cult scientists, researchers must avoid fooling themselves, be willing to question and doubt their own theories and their own results, and investigate possible flaws in a theory or an experiment. He recommended that researchers adopt an unusually high level of honesty which is rarely encountered in everyday life, and gives examples from advertising, politics, and behavioral psychology to illustrate the everyday dishonesty which should be unacceptable in science. Feynman cautions,
"We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science."
An example of cargo cult science is an experiment that uses another researcher's results in lieu of an experimental control. Since the other researcher's conditions might differ from those of the present experiment in unknown ways, differences in the outcome might have no relation to the independent variable under consideration. Other examples, given by Feynman, are from educational research, psychology (particularly parapsychology), and physics. He also mentions other kinds of dishonesty, for example, falsely promoting one's research to secure funding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
