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 co

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.