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Trump's medical doctor was clearly evasive and obfuscating the actual diagnosis. That much is clear and was clear at the time, but the author goes a step furthe

Trump's medical doctor was clearly evasive and obfuscating the actual diagnosis. That much is clear and was clear at the time, but the author goes a step further and starts playing doctor and diagnosing (in hindsight) the condition ... that's not critical thinking. That's bad reasoning and it's inline with conspiratorial thinking with a good mix of confirmation bias. An alien conspiracy theorist when presented with a particular phenomena would follow a chain of argument that look like this: "This isn't Venus. This isn't a weather balloon. This isn't anything I can imagine, therefore it must be aliens". It's also very typical of the media reporting on Trump throughout his term with more and more outlandish claims and conclusions. Also, there is something distasteful about the author writing an entire blog post about how he is a critical thinker ... Uh huh. Sure you are.

selimthegrim 6y ago
Zeynep is female name (Turkish spelled) of Arabic origin.
Upvoter33 6y ago
https://sils.unc.edu/people/faculty/profiles/Zeynep-Tufekci https://sils.unc.edu/people/faculty/profiles/Zeynep-Tufekci
jacobolus 6y ago
"The doctor conspicuously said that the oxygen saturation was 'not in the low 80s' but carefully refused to say it never dipped below 90, and was uncomfortable and evasive answering other basic questions about the president's condition, therefore we can reasonably infer that oxygen saturation was in the high 80s and his condition was worse than the doctor wanted to admit" is pretty different from "this unidentified thing in the sky is not a balloon so it must be an alien spaceship".
- macspoofing 6y ago
  Not by much. You can certainly speculate, but this is akin to reading the tea leaves to trying to derive patterns. Very common for media to do this on a slow news day. It reminds me of Alan Greenspan's briefcase being an indicator of the Fed's upcoming rate cut [1]. Again, at the time of the press conference it was very obvious the doctor was evasive. His evasiveness being a result of Trump going through a tough recovery was a very reasonable speculation. Most reporters guessed that Trump was on oxygen at one point or another and it isn't a far fetched idea to suggest there was reason for concern (he is, after all, in the at-risk group being a senior and overweight) - but let's not try to claim, as the author did, that it was a forgone conclusion what his blood oxygen level by carefully parsing the words the doctor was using and using that as a example of the author's great 'critical thinking' skills, all done in hindsight. Come one. Give me a break. That's quackery. [1] https://money.cnn.com/1998/09/29/bizbuzz/briefcase https://money.cnn.com/1998/09/29/bizbuzz/briefcase
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    It wasn't any extraordinary critical thinking skill. As Tufekci points out, this is a common and expected skill for people who pay attention in authoritarian countries. (And for various other groups of people, e.g. those who grow up with manipulative parents or who study political rhetoric.) I watched Dr Conley's remarks in real time and thought exactly the same thing without hearing any external analysis or discussion. I assume many others did as well. But that doesn't make us special geniuses. When you get a little bit of experience paying attention to people who are motivated to be intentionally misleading/obfuscatory but don't want to expose themselves to ethical complaints or legal liability, it isn't too hard to learn to read between the lines and parse language carefully. > forgone conclusion I don't know that it was "forgone", but it was a straight-forward inference from careful parsing of the statement which turned out to be correct.
mannykannot 6y ago
Instead of addressing the specific arguments made in the article, this post offers some unsubstantiated ad-hominem claims and an irrelevant and overblown analogy. So now we have another piece of evidence suggesting that critical thinking is not straightforward.
mistermann 6y ago
> An alien conspiracy theorist when presented with a particular phenomena would follow a chain of argument that look like this: "This isn't Venus. This isn't a weather balloon. This isn't anything I can imagine, therefore it must be aliens". > Also, there is something distasteful about the author writing an entire blog post about how he is a critical thinker ... Uh huh. Sure you are. An interesting combo.

selimthegrim 6y ago

Zeynep is female name (Turkish spelled) of Arabic origin.

Upvoter33 6y ago

https://sils.unc.edu/people/faculty/profiles/Zeynep-Tufekci https://sils.unc.edu/people/faculty/profiles/Zeynep-Tufekci

jacobolus 6y ago

"The doctor conspicuously said that the oxygen saturation was 'not in the low 80s' but carefully refused to say it never dipped below 90, and was uncomfortable and evasive answering other basic questions about the president's condition, therefore we can reasonably infer that oxygen saturation was in the high 80s and his condition was worse than the doctor wanted to admit" is pretty different from "this unidentified thing in the sky is not a balloon so it must be an alien spaceship".

macspoofing 6y ago
Not by much. You can certainly speculate, but this is akin to reading the tea leaves to trying to derive patterns. Very common for media to do this on a slow news day. It reminds me of Alan Greenspan's briefcase being an indicator of the Fed's upcoming rate cut [1]. Again, at the time of the press conference it was very obvious the doctor was evasive. His evasiveness being a result of Trump going through a tough recovery was a very reasonable speculation. Most reporters guessed that Trump was on oxygen at one point or another and it isn't a far fetched idea to suggest there was reason for concern (he is, after all, in the at-risk group being a senior and overweight) - but let's not try to claim, as the author did, that it was a forgone conclusion what his blood oxygen level by carefully parsing the words the doctor was using and using that as a example of the author's great 'critical thinking' skills, all done in hindsight. Come one. Give me a break. That's quackery. [1] https://money.cnn.com/1998/09/29/bizbuzz/briefcase https://money.cnn.com/1998/09/29/bizbuzz/briefcase
- jacobolus 6y ago
  It wasn't any extraordinary critical thinking skill. As Tufekci points out, this is a common and expected skill for people who pay attention in authoritarian countries. (And for various other groups of people, e.g. those who grow up with manipulative parents or who study political rhetoric.) I watched Dr Conley's remarks in real time and thought exactly the same thing without hearing any external analysis or discussion. I assume many others did as well. But that doesn't make us special geniuses. When you get a little bit of experience paying attention to people who are motivated to be intentionally misleading/obfuscatory but don't want to expose themselves to ethical complaints or legal liability, it isn't too hard to learn to read between the lines and parse language carefully. > forgone conclusion I don't know that it was "forgone", but it was a straight-forward inference from careful parsing of the statement which turned out to be correct.

mannykannot 6y ago

Instead of addressing the specific arguments made in the article, this post offers some unsubstantiated ad-hominem claims and an irrelevant and overblown analogy. So now we have another piece of evidence suggesting that critical thinking is not straightforward.

mistermann 6y ago

> An alien conspiracy theorist when presented with a particular phenomena would follow a chain of argument that look like this: "This isn't Venus. This isn't a weather balloon. This isn't anything I can imagine, therefore it must be aliens". > Also, there is something distasteful about the author writing an entire blog post about how he is a critical thinker ... Uh huh. Sure you are. An interesting combo.