Everybody needs a small set of rules for deciding what to believe, because checking everything properly is not available to anybody with a job.
Here are some. They are deliberately unserious and they are all, annoyingly, about eighty percent reliable.
Trust Nothing Orange
A useful general principle. Naturally occurring orange is fine ~ fruit, sunsets, autumn. Orange that has been applied on purpose is usually covering something.
Applies to tan lines, warning signs, roadworks and most political branding. Hold it lightly. It performs better than it should.
Anybody Who Says "Trust Me" Is Doing Something Else
Trustworthy people do not need to request it, because trust is something an audience extends rather than something a speaker asks for.
The phrase is an attempt to skip a step that has not been earned. Note the request and carry on listening.
The Length Of The Denial Tells You Everything
A person who did not do something takes about four words to say so.
The four-paragraph denial with historical context, an explanation of how the question came to be asked, and a passage about the character of the accuser is doing considerably more work than a denial requires.
Confidence And Correctness Are Unrelated
Genuinely no relationship whatsoever, and everybody keeps forgetting.
The most certain person in a room is frequently the least informed, because knowing more about a subject reliably reveals more that is uncertain. Anybody with no doubts has not looked very hard.
Watch What They Do About Small Things
The most reliable rule on this list. Big commitments are made in public and are difficult to verify.
How somebody treats a queue, a waiter, a form they could ignore, or a rule that inconveniences only them ~ that is the actual data, and nobody performs for it.
"Do Your Own Research" Means Nothing
It sounds like an invitation to think and functions as a refusal to explain.
Somebody who understands a thing can summarise it in two sentences. Somebody who cannot will suggest you look into it yourself.
Apply Loosely
None of these is a system, and anybody offering you a complete system for what to believe should be evaluated using every rule above.
They are just useful in the way that most cheap heuristics are useful ~ not always right, and considerably better than nothing while you are waiting for actual information.
Written by ORANGE LIAR. Thanks for reading.
