Scott Alexander

Here's a comic strip.

Coworker with the afro wearing COVID mask says, Is it lying if I leave out important context from my project updates?

Dogbit replies, Dogbit replies, That's called business lying, and it is totally acceptable.

The worker replies, But it makes me feel sick.

Dogbit says, That's how you know you're doing it right.

Scott writes, I have a post called, If it's worth your time to lie, it's worth my time to correct it.

My thesis is that tolerating claims of directional correctness, the thing where someone asks to get a pass because even if what they said wasn't literally true, it points to an emotionally correct thing, is eventually totally corrosive.

It means everyone ratchets up their claims to the highest level they think they can get away with, that is, walk back later if challenged, as a Mott and Bailey.

And then you end up with this miasma where maybe 5% of people totally believe you and 50% of people sort of absorb the connotation and think that something like that is true.

And then people get terrified of the Democrats and think of them as monsters and treat politics as an existential struggle where they will genuinely get arrested or murdered unless they do it to the Democrats first.

And then you get a civil war or something.

I think Adams and Pollack's milieu has in fact reached this point, and their love for these kinds of exaggerations is a big part of the cause.

Adams was one of the funniest people in the world.

If he was actually telling a joke, you could tell by the fact that you were laughing hysterically.

Democrats will hunt and kill you isn't funny.

I'll refrain from judgement about whether it was Adams' sincerely held belief, some kind of annoying manipulation attempt, or whether Adams even recognised a difference between the two.

But I think judging him on the fact that it didn't happen is completely within bounds.

3.

Comments on the substance of the piece.

Zanzibar Buckbuck McFate writes, This business where boomers are tolerant of contradictions and find them amusing, whereas millennials are horrified, is a dynamic I've noticed as well.