verything we need to know about the universe. All right, so the item is that Virginia's governor was on video talking about a law that's been struck down, an abortion law that's been struck down. When I saw the video I tweeted that it was fake news and then the universe opened up on me and started to pee on my head. And they said, Scott, you are always so right about things. But you were wrong about this one. You are so wrong. And then of course the governor's office clarified that I was right. It was fake news. But then what did people say? Did they say, well you're right, damn it, you're right, that he didn't say what he meant to say and that he clarified it later. You called that exactly. Did people say that to me? No, they didn't. I think they accused me of being a baby killer mostly.

So let me give you some context here. And people are saying it wasn't fake. So to those of you who are saying it wasn't fake, we're gonna talk about what I meant and what you are experiencing. All right, so here are several rules that I want you to keep in mind for how to look at any situation.

Rule number one, and there's a name for this. It's named after a person. I forget the person, but the idea is that when you are the one in the news, if you were the subject of the news in other words, if there's an article or a story about you personally, you get to see how wrong the news is in a way that other people don't. So in other words, when I see a story written about me I know what the fake parts are because it's about me. But you can't tell. As far as you can tell it all looks real. So when you're the subject of a story you can see how amazingly unreal they are. So it changes your perspective about how real other stories are. So if you see other people's stories you're automatically on alert if you've been the subject of your own stories.

All right, so the first rule is if you see a story about a famous person, a governor, a cartoonist, a president, there's a good chance, maybe 60 percent, that the story is misleading and out of context or just wrong. Most of you are... the Gell-Mann effect. Thank you, yes, the Gell-Mann effect. He's the one who came up with it. So I used a physicist, I believe, and when he saw stories about physics because that was the one thing he understood he could tell that the news was often wrong because that just happened to be one thing he understood so well. So there you go.

Rule number one: about 60 percent of everything you see in the news about a person and their thoughts is wrong.

Let me give you an example. So here's somebody replying to my comments yesterday. So this is just a fresh tweet and this gentleman who may be on the Periscope right now said to me, because I have no idea why you're willing to apply charitable intentions in this case. That didn't happen. I did not apply any charitable intentions. In fact I thought everybody in this case probably worthy of criticism for one thing or another. So there were no charitable intentions. But this person sees them clearly. In other words he's imagining he can read my mind because I never said anything like I have charitable intentions. That was just a misinterpretation.

And then all morning and all last night I was reading comments to my comment that it was fake news and almost universally people were complaining about something they imagined I thought or they imagined I said. Almost nobody was actually criticizing me for something I actually said and actually believed. Now actually said in this context means interpreted correctly.

So let's get to the situation itself. So Virginia had this proposed law which apparently was a terrible law. So terrible it's already been rejected. So rule number one of this conversation: we all agree it was a bad law, right? Okay, we all agree it was a bad law. Is there anybody here who thought that was a good law? We're all on the same side, right? Right? If anybody here thinks that was a good law just say so. Are we in 100 percent agreement that the law was a bad law? We're all on the same side right now.

Even though we're all on the same side that the law was bad, watch how people imagine I'm thinking otherwise and start criticizing me. And it's even gonna happen in the feed here. You're gonna watch people say, why are you defending this? I'm not. As far as I can tell we all think it was a bad law.

Here's the fake part. When the video of the governor speaking first dropped, and I'm gonna read it to you, so the key part here, here's the key part. This is what the governor said. He's been described as a moderate and he said about this, talking about what types of situations this would incorporate or encapsulate I guess or include, he said quote, "It's done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that is non-viable." So in this particular example if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. So far so good. The infant would be resuscitated. So far so good. If that's what the mother and family desire. And now it's getting a little sketchy. And that a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

Wait a minute. Did this governor just say, in the clearest possible terms, that they would deliver a healthy baby and then decide whether they would kill it? That's fake news. All right, it's fake news that they were deciding that they would kill a healthy baby after delivery. So that's the fake news part and that's the part that of course was clarified.

So was I correct that it was fake news? Well it wasn't fake news in the sense that he said those words because it was on video. It was fake in the way that people interpreted it. They interpreted it as him saying that you'd have a perfectly fine baby and then for any reason whatsoever if the mother said yeah let's kill it the doctor would say okay, well that's the law. If you'd like to kill this perfectly healthy baby I'll do that for you.

Now 20 percent of you watching this just mistakenly thought I came out in favor of killing babies. So let me stop again because this is one of those topics where misinterpreting is the norm. I'm not in favor of killing any babies. I'm not in favor of killing healthy ones. I'm not in favor of killing unhealthy ones. I'm not in favor of killing babies under any condition. All right? So don't confuse my talking about how clear the video was and how clear the message was. Whoever accuses me of being an apologist is not listening closely enough. So I'm just blocking those people.

All right, so I'm talking about the clarity of the message. I'm not talking about the proposed bill which we all agree was bad, right? Nobody here wants to kill a baby. We're all on the same side, right? But watch how even though we're all on the same side nobody wants to kill a baby, nobody thought that that law was good, we're all on the same side. And at the same point people are gonna say, damn it Scott I disagree with you while agreeing with you completely.

All right, now was the bill poorly written? Apparently yes. And the insane part of the bill as it's been reported, and I'm not sure this is as accurate as it could be, but if this is true it's just crazy, that one of the reasons that a healthy baby could be terminated is if it was causing the mother mental problems after birth, after it was born. You know if the bill said something like that of course nobody's in favor of that.

But specific case, let me just say what the governor was saying and this is not me agreeing with him. This is not me defending him. This is not me being an apologist. I'm just talking about the message and how clear it was. It seemed clear to me when I saw the video that the governor was talking about a situation in which the baby was born technically alive but could not have survived. And the question then becomes more of a hospice situation. You know what hospice is, right? Hospice is when let's say there's an elderly person. They've only got maybe a week to live and at that point the people in charge, if the person is no longer let's say clear thinking, maybe there's a relative who gets to decide based on the directions that have been left, you know the directive, can they stop feeding them and stop trying to keep them alive.

So the context here was sort of a hospice-type situation for a newborn. So that was the context. So the question was should you do heroic things to keep a baby alive for another few hours or not. Now most of you would be correct in saying this bill is not written with the kind of precision that you could ever agree with it. Even people who were pro-abortion would disagree with this bill the way it's written because it just doesn't have the kinds of protections that any of us would want.

So the governor's context which to me seemed completely clear was that you're not talking about a baby that could have lived and had a normal life and that the doctor would have to be agreeing. Now that's essentially what they clarified after the fact, right? So the governor's office issued a clarification which was largely what I said. But the part about the mental health of the mother that's just a part of the bill that nobody could agree with and so it's a good thing that got killed. But that's not what the governor was saying. The governor was not talking about the context of the mother's mental health. The governor was talking about specifically a baby that was not viable, meaning it wasn't going to live under any assumptions.

Now how many of you in the comments believe that the governor was saying in that video that a live healthy baby could still be terminated for a reason? How many of you believe that? Because that's the way it was presented on the internet let's say. So the way people received it was the fake news, a little bit more than the news itself which was the video. How many of you believe that? Right on the internet a lot of people believed it.

So here's the clarification. Once again we're all on the same side. It was a bad bill. We're all on the same side you don't kill a healthy baby. We're all on the same side that if the baby could live it was some kind of a life. Nobody wants to take away that possibility. So we're all on the same side. I'm just saying that the way you received his specific message was inaccurate and then later he clarified it. You can still hate the bill. We're not arguing about that.

All right, it's probably impossible to even make the point I'm making without people hearing it as a completely different point. Since somebody's saying nice try, say it's impossible to actually even have this conversation.

Now here's some of the other things to learn from this. So we all experience the Yanny and Laurel illusion, right? So we all saw that we can look at exactly the same thing and have a different impression of what happened. We've all watched the Trump presidency and again we've seen that we can all look at the same news and have completely different impressions of what we saw. And then we saw the Covington situation in which people like me said well my eyes can't lie to me. I'm looking at something right on video. I'm definitely not wrong about that. And then you see the context and you say whoops, totally wrong about that. And so I immediately clarified and apologized.

Now I think you know that I have no compunction, no embarrassment whatsoever about apologizing when I'm wrong. But here's the thing to learn from this. The people who were most angry with me said it can't be fake news and I can't be fooled by this because I'm looking at it with my own eyes. I'm seeing the entire clip. I'm not just looking at a little clip. I'm seeing the entire context. I'm hearing it clearly. This could not be more clear. How is this fake news? If you think that you have not learned the lessons of the last few years. The last few years should have taught you that no matter how clear this looks it could still be completely wrong.

So if you haven't at least allowed for the possibility that no matter how obvious and clear this looks it could be something different, you have to at least allow that that's possible. If you don't allow that you've learned nothing in the last few years. All right? Which doesn't mean my interpretation was the right one. I'm just saying that you have to allow that or you've learned nothing.

So here's another rule. This is the Scott Alexander rule. I've talked about this a few times. If you see in the news something that's so outrageous it seems unbelievable and then it becomes headline news, chances are, and when I say chances are probably a 90 percent plus, it's not true. Keep this rule in mind all the time. When you see a news story that by its nature is so outrageous, if you think my God how could it be true that we're contemplating killing a live baby after birth, the answer is usually that it's not true.

So you should have seen this video and as clear as it was to you the most rational thing to say was yeah this very clearly this governor is saying in the clearest possible terms that they can kill a live baby after birth. Because it did look like that. The way he said it was terribly muddled, right? So no matter how clear that was you still should have said to yourself that's so outrageous there's a 90 percent chance of fake.

Now suppose you go into the future and it turns out it was completely real. Well that would be the exception. But your first instinct should have been there's a 90 percent chance it's not what you think it is. And sure enough a lot of people were calling me arrogant on this point. No I want to talk about that in a minute. So you should have had much less confidence in your opinion even though you saw the entire context on video right in front of your eyes and even though it looked to you very clear.

So here's the other hint. They should not have been so confident about your first impression. People like me saw exactly what you saw and didn't see what you saw. I was looking at exactly the same video, the whole video, and I didn't see what you saw.

So here's another rule. The hallucinations are usually positive. Meaning that if you and I are standing in a room and there's nothing else in the room and you say do you see that elephant and I say what elephant and you say the elephant right in front of you, this elephant right in front of you, do you see it? And I say no I do not see an elephant there. If that's the only thing you knew about the story, one person saw it, one person did not. And let's say it's you know there's no forest involved. You're in a small room and the elephant was either in there or not. Who is usually right? The person who doesn't see the elephant is usually right. And the reason is that a hallucination is usually adding something to a situation. Hallucination is rarely subtracting something.

So if you and I looked at the same video and you saw a guy saying that he was in favor of killing live babies for whatever reason after they're born, you know as long as you don't want them, if that's what you saw, but there's anybody else who saw the same video and said no that looks like it's out of context. He's just talking about a hospice situation where you know you're deciding whether to try to keep alive a baby that was born alive but can't possibly live for much longer. Always go with the person who doesn't see it. Doesn't mean you'd be right every time but the bad bet was that this story was true just the way you originally thought it. That was the bad bet.

It is still true and try to hold these thoughts in your head. It could still be true that you misinterpreted the video. Well it's also true that the bill was so bad that it did allow bad things to happen if it h