[thesteamboat]

But crucially, the incentives are different than those people have in the middle of their lives.

Most people's usual incentives lead to them optimizing for the short-to-medium term future, i.e. the next couple of months or years.

People on their deathbed will optimize either for the extremely short term (finishing this conversation) or the extremely long term (the last chance to affect how they'll be remembered).

This suggests that if people lie on their death bed, they'll lie in different ways than ordinarily. Even if you can't take deathbed statements as unvarnished truth, their differences from everyday statements can be revealing.