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ACX: Seems Like Targeting

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I don’t recognize this guy anymore. He thinks people should refrain from searching for the truth because the search is not fair/random enough for him. Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately. Whether you personally dislike Gay or politically oppose Ackman or just want clicks, I am thankful for any skeleton you happen to find in their closets. Scott is willing to let lies fester until such a time when they can all be revealed impartially, or something.

I suspect that he's always been like this he just kept it on the DL. See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community. "Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.

It may sound flippant, but I kind of blame the autism, in that I don't think he ever truly grokked that "the other-side can read your book" until the whole NYT fiasco, and by then he'd already said too much.

"Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.

I suspected this was an inaccurate summary so I reread Bounded Distrust and he doesn't mention Fauci once. Also he doesn't defend anyone else either (besides defending conspiracy theorists as being understandably suspicious of mainstream sources), it's about extracting information from misleading/untrustworthy sources, not saying it is good for them to be misleading. It's so far from your description that I am wondering if this a distorted description of some other post but then you also remembered the wrong title.

He talks about Fauci here. Hlynka may have been getting these posts up, given that this post largely reads as apologia for Fauci being less-than-maximally honest.

I agree with Hlynka’s interpretation. Scott might as well have called it ‘In defense of liars’ – letting lies fester is his thing now.

In Bounded Distrust, he wants us to consider information in a vaccuum, possessing a certain deracinated signal-to-noise ratio. He wants us to ignore the liar status of the speaker, softly whispering that it's not that bad if he is. But there is a bright line here, between the speaker (journalist, sociologist, authority figure) who inadvertently tells a falsehood, and the one who knowingly does so.

The only reason why the latter still sometimes tells the truth, is because he doesn’t think he can get away with bigger lies. Morally, as far as I’m concerned, he’s done. As a source of information, we’re always better off asking another man, since the liar’s statements, at best, merely reflect what others can prove.