“This claim leans heavily into anthropomorphizing non-human things, and that is very rare in rigorous science. Therefore I suspect this is not an accurate representation of rigorous science.”

1. Is clear and valid reasoning

2. Is clearly conveyed by the part you mentioned

3. Presents a straightforward reasoning tool people can apply more generally to help them identify cases where scientific results are likely being misrepresented. Exactly the kind of tool that someone can adopt to become better at applying critical thinking in their life.

4. Is much more useful in a broader set of circumstances than the more specific arguments that appear later in the comment to further deconstruct this specific case.

I mean, he’s walking through his very solid reasoning for why the headline fails the sniff test, despite being a factoid that is frequently repeated through many channels by many people.

People talk all the time about how we need to strengthen critical thinking skills in the general public. Outside of formal training, this is what that looks like: a culture of publicly explaining the thought process that leads you to question something that many others have accepted without question. The knee jerk reaction of criticizing such statements as rude or overly negative is a big part of why these skills have such a hard time spreading, since people who have the skills feel it’s not socially acceptable to share their conclusions.

So the person you first replied to said:

“I’d argue a pedophile ring isn’t as important as stopping an environmental collapse or making sure the entire population has access to Healthcare. The irony being the 1% a responsible for all of them”

Again, they don’t say that it’s a bad thing that this is gaining traction, just that they agree it would be nice if it happened for something more important. They even make a point to note, just as you did in this last message, that many of the same people are behind all of these problems.

And the key thing to note is that they are themselves responding to someone jumping down the throat of the OP which is why I felt it necessary to address the issue from the top since that forms the foundation of everything that followed.

The comment that sparked this line of discussion was:

“I am all for it… but I wish people would get this passionate about healthcare, the environment, education, housing, and all the other things that are suffering in our society.”

Not deflection, not discouraging the pursuit of this issue, just wishing for a better world where we could get this kind of traction on issues that actually materially affect most people.

“… expecting them to care about others is a losing game.”

Ignoring the fact that many of them are personally impacted by the issues mentioned, I agree, but someone taking a moment to mourn a better world that could have been is pretty normal and human, and just doesn’t seem to warrant the backlash in this thread.

I’m glad that the MAGAs finally found something that made them start to question if they’re being conned, and I relish seeing so many people pouring gas on that fire. But I also agree that it would have been nice if it could have been something more impactful that sparked that reaction.

Establishing clear priorities doesn’t mean that you can only do one thing, it means that if circumstances require you to choose one thing over the other, you have a well reasoned framework to make that decision even if you really want both things.

Also no one was saying, “we need to stop being mad about Epstein so we can focus on healthcare” they were saying “it’s a shame that people didn’t get as mad about healthcare as they did about Epstein when it’s clearly the higher priority problem”. It’s actually them advocating that we should do more than one thing, and that the fact that we’re only doing one thing is made even worse because it’s the thing that’s lower priority.