Except that the conspiratorially minded reporter overlooked that the luncheon was a year and a day before the decision was handed down, stripping the report of virtually all of its possible significance.
We all have our biases, and interpret signals, patterns and information through the lens of own experiences and prejudices. This reporter wanted to see something nefarious in the actions of two individuals who don't share his ideological convictions and thought he had found evidence of that which he was already convinced.
He seems to have been genuinely embarrassed and apologetic for making so basic and transparent an error.
We all are prone to this type of mistake. There is a pleasant, though reprehensible, schadenfreude when we see those with whom we disagree make this mistake. But we are all prone to the same error.
In perhaps my junior or senior year at Georgetown I was taking a class along the lines of Economics of the Energy Industry or Oil and Economics or some such. It was a small class. One of the students was an early herald of the much later Occupy Wall Street radical. Anti-capitalist and prone to conspiracy theories.
While the professor worked his lectures and syllabus evenhandedly based on the evidence, this student was convinced that there was a massive conspiracy among oil company executives to collude to maximize profits and to handicap any alternative energy competitors from reaching market. Themes which informed every contribution he made to any classroom discussion.
He was, in effect, a monomaniacal ideologue and an intellectual boor. He never surprised us with additional credible information or jarred us with a contributive credible insight. Just the same ideological cant delivered with quivering conviction in a profoundly predictable fashion.
The substance of one exchange has stuck with me all these decades later. The details escape me but it was something along the lines of.
Professor: On October 15th, 1974, producers and government regulators met to discuss future oil supplies given the recent oil embargo by OPEC the year before.Anti-Capitalist student: Yes, and the day before the meeting, executives X, Y, and Z met for a day of bird hunting and agreed on prices for the coming year.Professor: Well, there was a hunt. All these executives are from the oil patch and enjoy hunting. It is a common activity amongst those in the industry. But there is no evidence or testimony that there was any price fixing.Anti-Capitalist student: Prices rose over the next twelve months.Professor: Because of the embargo.Anti-capitalist student: Or because of the pricing collusion.
I only later learned to identify this as an argument based on the logical fallacies of begging the question (argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion) and post hoc ergo propter hoc (the predicate event must have caused the subsequent outcome).
At the time I merely recognized that student was creating an argument based on a belief system which could not be refuted by evidence. He wanted to believe that oil industry executives colluded to control energy prices and prevent energy alternatives arising and there was nothing the professor could say or evidence he could show which would change the mind of the true believer.
While he was making a plausible argument, there was no actual argument to be had. It was a charade. His was a belief based on conviction, not evidence. And evidence was only admitted into discussion which could support the belief, and none which might threaten it.
A model of discussion which is distressingly common today, especially among journalists.
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