I’m wondering if the last paragraph was a mistake on my part—whether I should have picked a different example. The parent seems likely to have played a causal role in catalyzing new discussion on “A Drowning Child Is Hard to Find”, but I’m much less interested in litigating the matter of cost-effectiveness numbers (which I know very little about) than I am in the principle that we want to have (or build the capacity to have, if we don’t currently have that capacity) systematically truth-tracking intellectual discussions, rather than accepting allegedly-small distortions for instrumental marketing reasons of the form, “This argument isn’t quite right, but it’s close enough, and the correct version would scare away powerful and influential people from our very important cause.” (As it is written of the fifth virtue, “The part of yourself that distorts what you say to others also distorts your own thoughts.”)
I’m wondering if the last paragraph was a mistake on my part—whether I should have picked a different example. The parent seems likely to have played a causal role in catalyzing new discussion on “A Drowning Child Is Hard to Find”, but I’m much less interested in litigating the matter of cost-effectiveness numbers (which I know very little about) than I am in the principle that we want to have (or build the capacity to have, if we don’t currently have that capacity) systematically truth-tracking intellectual discussions, rather than accepting allegedly-small distortions for instrumental marketing reasons of the form, “This argument isn’t quite right, but it’s close enough, and the correct version would scare away powerful and influential people from our very important cause.” (As it is written of the fifth virtue, “The part of yourself that distorts what you say to others also distorts your own thoughts.”)