> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias where a person spots major errors in a media report on a topic they know well, yet completely forgets that unreliability and trusts the rest of the same publication on unfamiliar topics.
But if someone misrepresents deliberately on a topic of polarising importance, why would you spend any time listening to them on any other topic?
I would (still) listen to him if I did not know he wrote stupid wrong things on other topics in bad faith.
DHH or anyone else spouting opinions on social media is hardly qualified to be setting policies for countries. Social media is also hardly the place to have any sort of debate on those topics.
It tends to only be when someone is egregiously wrong or (as in the case IMO) acting in deliberate bad faith on a topic of massive public concern, like this. Because these people are a waste of psychological resources.
I totally write off proselytising antivaxxers who I think should have reason to know better, I tend to write off climate change deniers who should know better, and yes, I tend to write off educated people who mislead with statistics to create intellectual cover for xenophobic, bigoted thugs and their antisocial campaigns.
This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good one. Other people who get written off tend to have a nasty streak on a topic of some divisiveness. For example I am not religious but not anti-religious; I am anti being deliberately or loudly cruel, posturing or nasty about it either way. People who are like that can be like that, but they will not get to tell me about their professional interests as if their awful behaviour is just a quirk.
YMMV, but I am now middle aged and I don’t have the time for this anymore. Freedom of speech isn’t without consequences for loss of respect. If you think my position awful or lily-livered you are fully within your rights to let it colour your judgement of my opinions on technology.
Ignoring dhh because he's offensive is totally reasonable and if that's what you meant well that's different.
It's fully based on the substance of the point as well. DHH's view is not just wrong, it's wilfully misleading, on a topic of enormous significance, to further a bad faith point. He could have retracted or amended it when presented with the facts; he has not. So this is a problem of substance as well as person.
From there yes, I get to a point about the person. IMO it is a useful practical definition of madness to pretend that someone acting in bad faith can be trusted to do it only on a single divisive topic.
Given two people, one a manipulative antivaxxer and one not: are you saying you don't factor your view on their anti-vaxx thoughts into their recommendations on other fact-based topics?
For me, these people simply get deleted from my brain, as far as possible.
These are simple judgements about the likelihood someone's opinion on a topic I do not know about is going to be good. When I know that their other opinions are clearly wrong and held in bad faith, I am going to take that into account.
(Where religion comes into things is where it becomes mostly a question of personality.)
Manipulative is a judgement on a person. That aside, let's say the person is a NFL quarterback. No, their stance on immunology would not play a role in their authority on NFL strategy... you know, the domain they are an expert in.
The inventor of the MRI was a young earth creationist. Perhaps a rare oddity, but just an example of how someone who works in science can still be passionately wrong about something despite evidence to the contrary.