Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts

A formally inventive three-act essay on the ivermectin / Oklahoma-hospital story (the McElyea/Rolling Stone 'gunshot victims left waiting because of ivermectin overdoses' report), each act ending 'Did you believe that?'. Act I: the media ran the story uncritically because it confirmed their anti-ivermectin bias — 'too good to check.' Act II: the Sequoyah Hospital denial that supposedly debunked it was itself misleading (the original never named Sequoyah), and the right-wing gotcha was equally too-good-to-check. Act III: the messy truth (a few real ivermectin cases; hospitals overcrowded for unrelated COVID reasons; someone conflated them; ~500 mostly-mild poison-control incidents nationwide; the AP's 70%-vs-2% correction), reached via the 'Law of Rationalist Irony' (the smugger you feel about catching someone's bias, the likelier you're falling for it). Ends by showing how Democrats and Republicans each extract a self-flattering narrative — and then catches the ACX reader in the same trap: 'Only you... are getting the full story. Did you believe that?'

Quality 77 · Excellent. Strong-Excellent. The recursive three-act device is a genuine formal achievement — the form performs the content, repeatedly catching the reader (and finally the rationalist-in-group) in motivated credulity — and the 'Law of Rationalist Irony' is a memorable, exportable formulation. A standout among the strong epistemics pieces (No-Evidence 74, Media-Very-Rarely-Lies 76), below the standout Bounded-Distrust (82). Held at 77 by its brevity and single-incident hook. 77.

Claude’s paradigm shift 50 · Moderate. Moderate. The underlying scout-mindset / motivated-reasoning content is Galef's and the rationalist canon's; the original contributions are the recursive demonstration-form and the 'Law of Rationalist Irony' coinage. 50.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A formally inventive three-act essay on the ivermectin/Oklahoma-hospital story whose recursive structure performs its content (catching the reader in motivated credulity) and yields the exportable 'Law of Rationalist Irony.' Conceptual influence within epistemics discourse, no material change — low RWI.