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Yes, I would agree with this point wholeheartedly. We do need to maintain a critical eye when evaluating anyone who sets the agenda and policies. I guess my main intention is to draw more attention to the fact that, as Alan himself suggests—though he only made this point when discussing RFKJ’s worldview—we are all running on heuristics and default assumptions about the world. I would, at bottom, appreciate if this was acknowledged across the board. “I trust scientific consensus by default because the benefits of unrestrained innovation outweigh the harms” is as heuristic, as is “I distrust individuals with a conspiratorial frame of mind because they’re prone to amplify false positives in their search for corruption.” We didn’t vote to sign off on the most naively idealistic and sometimes absurd comments RFKJ made over the last 10 years, we voted on the belief that a heuristic which will inevitably lead to false positives will ultimately serve us better at this moment in time than the one that has produced so many false negatives in recent years.

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