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Comment by ceres | Hacker News Reader

Not commenting on this guy in particular but sometimes when people use long-winded stories to explain themselves, it's usually to hide something. Like hiding the truth in between embellishments. I don't know anything about this guy though so he maybe innocent of whatever thing he did? I skimmed over the article but still don't know what happened.

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"I don't trust his writing style" is a fallacy of mammoth proportions.

Being a writer, he probably comes from a culture where people write lots of words and has many friends who respect people who write verbosely.

Someone's level of articulateness provides no information whatsoever of how truthful their writing is. There are countless extremely articulate lies told by people with mastery over their medium.

I also suspect that being an older journalist, he's accustomed to writing long-form content. There's a level of fluff and narrative crafting that is not at all appreciated in today's information saturated landscape.

You don't know what happened because you skimmed over it. Brilliant.

I think this is true when someone is speaking--liars often try to hide behind details which they think makes their stories believable and explains the discrepancies that they see in their own fabricated story. But I have the opposite perception of this narrative, I think it was written with the intention of being precise, and either his background as a journalist or the public nature of the issue are reasons enough to explain why he wrote with the detail that he did. I often try to write with precision and detail too, and it certainly doesn't mean I'm lying when I do.

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