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>That offers a way to get at the truth by trying to detect a picture, and looking at the parts that have been obscured, to make out the actual shape.
Like Mormon Bubble Porn:
What a very accurate visual metaphor! Cover up the BS to see the bare facts more clearly.
Interesting read, but I'm not sure the analysis of the following exchange is correct.
> Q: But was it ever below 90, here or at the White House?
> CONLEY: No, it was below 94 percent. It wasn't down in the low 80s or anything.
When Conley answer's "No," that implies it was not below 90 "here" or at the White House. And "it was below 94 percent" implies it was somewhere in the range of 90 to 94. Assuming Conley told the truth, the only way you can interpret the oxygen levels as being below 90 is if you ignore the presence of the word "no."
I've noticed when speaking with physicians that they tend to give very precise answers (unless they believe the precise answer will lead to worse health outcomes for a patient). This exchange sounded pretty typical to me. Doesn't seem like Conley intended anything nefarious.
> CONLEY: [...] It wasn't down in the low 80s or anything.
I read this last part in several ways:
1. He is telling the truth: he wants to assure reporters that T’s oxygen level didn’t reach critical levels
2. He is telling a lie: he already mentioned that the oxygen level was below 94. Why mentioning the low 80s?
3. He is just nervous or tired, and he doesn’t want to have his words twisted
Trumps O2 stat was between 84 and 94.
I think you're misunderstanding. The point isn't about the ability to infer objective truth from a dissembling source, nor about how to prove an objective lie from that source.
It's about cultivating an ability to detect when you are probably being lied to by an otherwise authoritative source. And it's something americans have traditionally been very bad at.
(Including, I have to be honest, you. In fact it was reported just last week that Trump was sicker than the public was informed and that his blood oxygen did indeed drop into the low 80's. Your desire to believe the authority figures you trust led you to buy the spin. But people with this kind of "Autoritarian Muscle Memory" described were clued in much earlier.)
I used the qualifier "assuming Conley told the truth" to establish an axiom, since the author did that implicitly. Everything else was pure deductive reasoning.
That aside, I personally believe that the entire media and all public figures will lie on behalf of what they believe to be "the greater good." Their goal is not "truth." For that reason, I don't believe this interview communicated any meaningful information; I also don't believe the follow-up last week communicated any meaningful information. I don't assume Conley told the truth. My comment intended only to point out a flaw in the deductive reasoning of the article.
(Regarding your assumption about me, this is the exact problem with trying to develop opinions by reading between the lines. It's easy to develop strong, unfounded opinions without any evidence.)
>And it's something americans have traditionally been very bad at.
As this comment thread is proving :p
That "No" could mean that it was below 90, but not "here" - "here" could mean literally in this room, or even exactly where the speaker is standing right now.
But the writer has a New York Times quote suggesting that:
> Mr. Trump’s blood oxygen level alone was cause for extreme concern, dipping into the 80s, according to the people familiar with his evaluation. The disease is considered severe when the blood oxygen level falls to the low 90s.
So now there's evidence that the oxygen % went below 90, despite what Conley said that day.
Honestly, where is the evidence? You’re trusting the NYT sources to tell the truth. I trust NYT to deliver accurate news - but only true evidence removes any doubt.
There are reports coming out the past week that seem to suggest Trump was in a very bad way with COVID-19.
Parsing official statements to detect the misleading omissions is something I've been doing for 30 years. Lies of omission are a fundamental skill of those who cant or wont tell the truth, and has been for several thousand years now.
What line of work are you in, if you don't mind me asking?
This is the explanation for why the deeper you are in a bubble, the less likely you will be to detect it - yet will be utterly convinced you aren't.
Similar to why teenagers are convinced they are smarter than everyone older than they are. You don't know what you don't know. The more time you spend on this planet, the more you realize just how little of the world in general you do fully understand. Ultimate culmination of this is when Einstein is engaged in discussions about god. Want to have some fun honing critical thinking skills? Read up on his thoughts there. Fun stuff!
Why does the example stop at critically thinking about the NYT source? I'm not saying they're lying, but "someone I kind of trust, said someone they kind of trust, said so, in a way that doesn't contradict itself" isn't really a satisfactory conclusion.
Most of the article demonstrates its author's point by coming to a tentative conclusion through a critical analysis of the doctor's statements. The NYT article is presented as additional support, from other sources, for the same conclusion.
Progress in science and history is often like that: a hypothesis is strengthened through having multiple lines of support, such as when the cosmic microwave background and the cosmic abundance of helium were added to the red shift of galaxies as evidence for the big bang.
Being eternally skeptical to the extent of dismissing anything not proven is not effective critical thinking, either.
TL;DR "Fault Tolerance" Capabilities are better for people who regularly face faults
Exactly.
Another way to put it - don't add armor to the parts of the plane returning from battle that have holes, add armor to the parts of the plane that don't have any holes!
Is there any research on whether critical thinking is actually something that can be taught at all?
So he was pretty safe.
Just like me and some of my friends who got it almost a year ago. We only had a few days of fever. Almost like one dose of the vaccine. Not really worth to make a fuzz about.
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.
Zeynep is female name (Turkish spelled) of Arabic origin.
"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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.