The conclusion to draw from 4 years of post-truth is that the crackpots are occasionally right, people with axes to grind overstate the ‘occasionally’ into ‘almost always’ and people who insist too hard that experts should suffer no loss of trust are likely habitual Noble Liars
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Learn to suspect people of the appropriate kinds of failure. It’s a start. Blanket suspicion and blanket trust are both equally lazy. You can get even more refined. Engineers and biologists don’t fail the same way for eg. It’s more a detective story than inquisition.
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Conspiracy theories have a clear tell: they don’t have targeted suspicions. Instead it’s a red string theory implicating everybody. That indiscriminate pattern of suspicion tells me you don’t understand enough to suspect specific people of specific things.
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Hercule Poirot used to scold Hastings for indiscriminately suspecting everybody in turn for no rhyme or reason, but also praise his imagination in doing so. He himself would systematically zoom in on narrower, justified suspicions.
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It’s like when poor people rush to defend billionaires.