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I didn't listen to the podcast, but let me play devil's advocate for a second. For most people, tweets are fire and forget, and they can't remember everything t

I didn't listen to the podcast, but let me play devil's advocate for a second. For most people, tweets are fire and forget, and they can't remember everything they've ever posted. If a lawyer hands me a binder with 38 pages of tweets, I don't know where he got them. If it turns out a tweet on page 15 was doctored, and I say "yes these tweets are mine", then I just confessed under oath to something I didn't do. In that position I would answer questions in good faith, but I would also never confirm anything under oath unless I was damn sure it was the truth. I'm sure this attitude would piss off a lot of lawyers, but lucky for you I'm not a white collar criminal, so you don't need to worry about meeting me in a courtroom.

smcl 5y ago
I totally agree with you
ghaff 5y ago
Even longer articles/blogs/research notes/etc. I've probably written thousands of them. If someone asks me if I wrote one, especially one that I didn't have final editorial approval over, the best I could probably say in many cases is that I vaguely recall writing something like that and it seems to reflect what I believed to be true at the time. Ditto for verbal communications. I had a call with a lawyer at a vendor once asking me about a conversation I had with a reporter. (Not a deposition.) As I recall :-), my answer was along the lines of I know the journalist in question and have spoken to them many times and I vaguely remember being briefed at some point by the $VENDOR in question on $TOPIC but I have no idea who I spoke with or exactly when it was.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  I used to run a blog where I just posted helpful articles because my article would be better than whatever else was out there. Think: "Renewing your passport" or the like, but for my country. I'd sometimes Google an issue and end up back on my own website reading an article I forgot I already wrote.
  - bink 5y ago
    I used to work for a software company known for it's militant transparency. I'd often come across a technical problem that I wanted to solve so I'd open a public issue on the problem and plan to come back to it a week or two later. Inevitably when I did get around to starting work and ran a search the top hit would be my own public issue.
joe_the_user 5y ago
Yeah, All the things that article describes as "evasiveness" are what I'd describe as taking into account the messiness of the world. I mean, I might remember being at a restaurant with people and deciding to go to a show with them. Did I actually go to the show? I don't know, maybe I changed my mind on the way if I have no memory of the show or maybe I did go. A lot of the article seems about ways to bully people into making "obvious" conclusions, stating things definitely when they are not, in fact sure of their answers and so-forth. And a lot of tactics are about the common sense of language. "Surely you'd remember X if you in fact did it" "Come on, either the situation had X quality or it didn't" etc. In contrast to this intuition, I think there are quite a few studies on memory and language having some inherent fuzziness to them. Edit: in defense of the parent article, it's writing in an assumed context of professionals operating according to standards. In this context, people have both an obligation and a series of reminders to be exact in their memory of events and the events themselves should be more cut-and-dried. The real problem is someone expects this standard of exactness to carry over to casual human activity (writing, tweeting or socializing).

smcl 5y ago

I totally agree with you

ghaff 5y ago

Even longer articles/blogs/research notes/etc. I've probably written thousands of them. If someone asks me if I wrote one, especially one that I didn't have final editorial approval over, the best I could probably say in many cases is that I vaguely recall writing something like that and it seems to reflect what I believed to be true at the time. Ditto for verbal communications. I had a call with a lawyer at a vendor once asking me about a conversation I had with a reporter. (Not a deposition.) As I recall :-), my answer was along the lines of I know the journalist in question and have spoken to them many times and I vaguely remember being briefed at some point by the $VENDOR in question on $TOPIC but I have no idea who I spoke with or exactly when it was.

Scoundreller 5y ago
I used to run a blog where I just posted helpful articles because my article would be better than whatever else was out there. Think: "Renewing your passport" or the like, but for my country. I'd sometimes Google an issue and end up back on my own website reading an article I forgot I already wrote.
- bink 5y ago
  I used to work for a software company known for it's militant transparency. I'd often come across a technical problem that I wanted to solve so I'd open a public issue on the problem and plan to come back to it a week or two later. Inevitably when I did get around to starting work and ran a search the top hit would be my own public issue.

joe_the_user 5y ago

Yeah, All the things that article describes as "evasiveness" are what I'd describe as taking into account the messiness of the world. I mean, I might remember being at a restaurant with people and deciding to go to a show with them. Did I actually go to the show? I don't know, maybe I changed my mind on the way if I have no memory of the show or maybe I did go. A lot of the article seems about ways to bully people into making "obvious" conclusions, stating things definitely when they are not, in fact sure of their answers and so-forth. And a lot of tactics are about the common sense of language. "Surely you'd remember X if you in fact did it" "Come on, either the situation had X quality or it didn't" etc. In contrast to this intuition, I think there are quite a few studies on memory and language having some inherent fuzziness to them. Edit: in defense of the parent article, it's writing in an assumed context of professionals operating according to standards. In this context, people have both an obligation and a series of reminders to be exact in their memory of events and the events themselves should be more cut-and-dried. The real problem is someone expects this standard of exactness to carry over to casual human activity (writing, tweeting or socializing).