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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 ne

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.

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.