I would like people to make arguments for what I assume is their position, which is that “It is not the case that the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is a kind of defunct shibboleth that is nonetheless a critical coordination point for the healthcare industry”. My guess is that the fact that the post veers into fantasy is an entertaining stylistic choice that perhaps caused some people to think that the whole thing is fabricated, or that critical details are, but I don’t currently believe this.
The fact that the post veers into fantasy caused me to assume that the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference doesn’t even exist, so nothing interesting can be learned about it. It is this comment that made me learn otherwise so yes, that definitely did happen and I argue that it is a problem with the post.
Now that I understand the post to ostensibly be making factual claims, I object to some of those too. For instance, there are plenty of photographs of the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, which I found in seconds by typing J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference into Google Images. The author is just wrong here, and given how trivial it was for me to find these photos, I suspect he was making things up in service of his fantastic thesis.
Or the line “when I do find them, they are shot from angles that reveal nothing, that could be anywhere, that could be a Marriott ballroom in Cleveland”: yes? We’ve got photos of the outside, we’ve got photos of people in front of the signs, we’ve got photos of people in the conference rooms, what do you even think is missing here? Do we need to see a thousand people sitting in J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference branded chairs holding a copy of today’s newspaper? This feels like a conspiracy theorist trying to stir up a cloud of suspicion, and I don’t even get what’s suspicious.
I think that veering into schizophrenic fantasy at the end is indicative of a playful attitude towards the truth which pervades even the more grounded parts of the post, rendering it unsuitable for understanding anything about the real world. And as a piece of fiction, it should be illegal to tell us all about a mysterious conference that kind of doesn’t exist and proceed only to muse about it from first principles instead of visiting the conference.
I would like people to make arguments for what I assume is their position, which is that “It is not the case that the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is a kind of defunct shibboleth that is nonetheless a critical coordination point for the healthcare industry”. My guess is that the fact that the post veers into fantasy is an entertaining stylistic choice that perhaps caused some people to think that the whole thing is fabricated, or that critical details are, but I don’t currently believe this.
The fact that the post veers into fantasy caused me to assume that the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference doesn’t even exist, so nothing interesting can be learned about it. It is this comment that made me learn otherwise so yes, that definitely did happen and I argue that it is a problem with the post.
Now that I understand the post to ostensibly be making factual claims, I object to some of those too. For instance, there are plenty of photographs of the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, which I found in seconds by typing J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference into Google Images. The author is just wrong here, and given how trivial it was for me to find these photos, I suspect he was making things up in service of his fantastic thesis.
Or the line “when I do find them, they are shot from angles that reveal nothing, that could be anywhere, that could be a Marriott ballroom in Cleveland”: yes? We’ve got photos of the outside, we’ve got photos of people in front of the signs, we’ve got photos of people in the conference rooms, what do you even think is missing here? Do we need to see a thousand people sitting in J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference branded chairs holding a copy of today’s newspaper? This feels like a conspiracy theorist trying to stir up a cloud of suspicion, and I don’t even get what’s suspicious.
I think that veering into schizophrenic fantasy at the end is indicative of a playful attitude towards the truth which pervades even the more grounded parts of the post, rendering it unsuitable for understanding anything about the real world. And as a piece of fiction, it should be illegal to tell us all about a mysterious conference that kind of doesn’t exist and proceed only to muse about it from first principles instead of visiting the conference.