Everybody needs a short list of rules for deciding what to believe, because properly checking everything is not available to anyone with a job.
Here are ours. They are deliberately unserious, and each one is, annoyingly, about eighty percent reliable.
Trust Nothing Orange
A sound general principle, and the one we liked enough to name the store after. Naturally occurring orange is fine: fruit, sunsets, autumn. Orange that has been applied on purpose is usually covering something.
This applies to tan lines, warning signs, roadworks, and most political branding. Hold it lightly. It performs better than it has any right to.
Anybody Who Says "Trust Me" Is Doing Something Else
Trustworthy people never need to ask. Trust is a thing an audience extends, not a thing a speaker requests.
The phrase is an attempt to skip a step that has not been earned. Note the request, file it, and keep listening.
The Length Of The Denial Tells You Everything
A person who did not do something needs about four words to say so.
The four-paragraph denial, complete with historical context, an account of how the question came to be asked, and a meditation on the character of the accuser, is doing considerably more work than innocence requires.
Confidence And Correctness Are Unrelated
No relationship whatsoever, and everybody keeps forgetting.
The most certain person in the room is frequently the least informed, because learning more about a subject reliably uncovers more that is uncertain. Anybody with zero doubts has not looked very hard.
Watch What They Do About Small Things
The most reliable rule on this list. Big commitments happen 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 operates as a refusal to explain.
Somebody who understands a thing can summarise it in two sentences. Somebody who cannot will suggest you go 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 run through every rule above (including this one).
They are cheap heuristics ~ not always right, and considerably better than nothing while you wait for actual information. If one of them has ever saved you an argument at a family dinner, we print that sort of thing on tees and mugs, and you know where to find us.
Written by Orange Liar. Thanks for reading.
