Had an argument with a guy on twitter dot com the other day about an article he wrote that missed some key facts and I told him I wanted to believe it, because his conclusion was comforting and I would have liked for it to be true, but those omissions and doing follow up reading which pointed them out made it clear that he had not done all the necessary reading to come to the conclusion he had.

Anyhow, over a few back and forths I explained that was my position on his work and his stance was that people had made this stuff up to discredit his article and its subject when in fact he had missed it in the initial body of work he was critiquing.

Which like, all of this isn't that interesting on its own, an acedemic got kinda defensive about an article they wrote is a fair thing to have happened, and happens regularly even when they are wrong cause one doesn't advance a stance publicly without thinking they're right at least a little. But what absolutely drove me up a wall was the point in the conversation where he was like "I think it is good that you don't believe me instinctively and double checked my work, but if you truly double checked my work you would have come to the conclusion I was right" (I am rephrasing but I do not think I have failed to interpret the intent of the statements he made) and like you can't have it both ways!! Either you believe in examining evidence when you find it even if that's inconvenient or you don't believe in examining evidence! A failure to examine major pieces should result in a retraction if that piece of evidence means you were wrong or at least an update but nope!