[zamadatix]

Deep distrust in this context is more like "lizard people are running the government as a tool to control us" where the entity secretly exists for a nefarious purpose rather than the stated one and there can be no level of trust with anything from it as a result. It's not the same as general distrust which would be more like "I don't trust all politicians inherently have our best interests at heart or that they will never abuse their power" where you don't blindly take everything at face value but you also don't blindly dismiss everything as outright untrustworthy either.

[aodonnell2536]

No, I don’t believe it is. There’s much wiggle room between the two scenarios you painted.

Of course one can have a deep distrust of the government without believing it’s run by lizard people from another planet.

[zamadatix]

Neither example is meant to be implied as the only possible way of for forming that kind of distrust rather examples of logic used and types of conclusions reached. I could just have easily said "people who think lizard people want to hold us back from discovering advanced math" as a reason some deeply distrust all formal math and your response would be focusing on how there are other ways (besides lizard people) to deeply distrust all existing math - completely sidestepping the actual point point around the absurdity and unfalsifiability of the type of conclusion about deep distrust of all of math itself vs the types of conclusions normal distrust reaches (e.g. "I know not everything in a maths textbook will always be right but I can try to think about each consideration independent of a central conspiracy on all of math".

Put another way without specific example or analogy: if there is some organization as large as a nation's government (thousands upon thousands of organizations, possibly millions of people) and you can't weigh things done by said government without always invoking a single nefarious/secretive plot or group being behind it every time then you've left the realm of standard or reasonable distrust and entered the realm of unfalsifiable, unhinged thinking the article is meaning by deep distrust. Even the worst governments in our world's history aren't reasonably measured that way. The alternative to this is not blind trust, it's normal distrust GP was arguing for.

[aodonnell2536]

With due respect, I reused your own example to highlight its absurdity.

That being said, you still haven’t convinced me. I claim I t’s very possible to hold deep distrust without attributing intentions/motivations to conspiratorial actions.

The act of distrusting does not require an assumption of motivations (or a nefarious/secretive plot, as you put it).

[zamadatix]

I'm still not sure I follow on what you mean about its absurdity. If the point is deep distrust is supposed to result from some absurd reasoning then of course the example is an instance of absurdity. Highlighting that does not bring a new point of view or show how non-absurd reasoning is also supposed to lead to deep distrust in context of the article. It's one thing to say you're unconvinced, nobody can really respond take away anything from that, but it's another to explain why people should agree with your different take instead.

I think we both agree distrust doesn't require a universal underlying motivation but you're continuing to use "distrust" and "deep distrust" interchangeably without explaining why people should consider them interchangeable in context of the article.

[aodonnell2536]

There really isn’t much to be explained. I’m using the terms somewhat interchangeably because they are essentially the same thing - deep distrust is just high magnitude distrust.

One may distrust their state, but in some regards can still trust. One with deep distrust will likely never trust, their level of distrust is much higher. This does not require a conspiratorial mindset.