...but his positions...His making up shit (or buying in to others' made-up shit) to justify them does, as does his ignoring contradictory evidence and record..
Which questions about what work?
The problem is one of an unreliable narrator. If you cannot trust someone's judgement, and they spew crap, repeatedly, then the odds that they're blowing smoke elsewhere increase.
It's the same reason that lawyers seek to impugn witnesses or call into question credibility. Or, to pick another hobby horse of mine, there are news and media organizations which spew crap. Fox News gets a lot of much-deserved scorn for this, but they're not the only one. Bullshit in media (in the most general meaning of the word: any information delivery system) is something I've been paying a lot of attention to, and I'm rather sensitive to it.
Case in point recently involves a 123 year old quote I'd seen attributed to J. P. Morgan, the Gilded Age banker. It struck me as curious, and I dug into it. My conclusion: it's a hoax.
The item in question is referred to as the Banker's Manifesto of 1892, or as the Wall Street Manifesto. Almost certainly the fabrication of one Thomas Westlake Gilruth, lawyer, real estate agent, community activist, and some-time speaker and writer for People's Party causes in the 1890s and 1900s. (Pardon the digression: there is a point, it happens to be both fresh in my mind and sufficiently detached from contemporary affairs to be a fair foil.)
Among the evidence I turned up, several contemporaneous newspapermen who'd drawn the same conclusion. Mind that this was a time of highly partisan press, but these were editors of People's Party papers in various locales.
From The advocate and Topeka tribune. (Topeka, Kan.), 7 & 14 Sept. 1892:
The Great West and one or two other exchanges reproduce the Chicago Daily Press fake purporting to be a Wall street circular. The thing originated in the fertile brain of F. W. Gilmore [sic: should be T. W. Gilruth], who held a position for a time at the Press. He has been challenged time and again to produce the original if it is genuine, and has failed to do so. The thing is a fraud and so is its author, and neither of them is worthy of the confidence of the people.
The following week's issue corected the typo with a emphasis on why naming and shaming mattered:
We desire to make this correction lest there be somebody named Gilmore who might object to the charge, and because the fraud should be placed where it belongs. Gilruth is a snide, and if anyone who knows him has not yet found it out, he is liable to do so to his sorrow.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-07...
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-14...
From the Barbour County index., July 06, 1892, p. 1
If the genuineness of this dispatch cannot be established, it should be taken in at once. If reform writers put it alongside the Huscard and Buell circulars and various other documents of like character, the public faith in the genuineness of all may be shaken. We cannot afford to father any fakes.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015080/1892-07-06...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...
(My own analysis turned up other internal inconsistencies within the documents as well, detailed at the reddit link above.)
Much as those late 19th century editors, a hueristic I've increasingly taken to applying is looking at what sources (publications, companies, politicians, authors, online commentators, monitoring systems) do and don't provide reliable information. There's also a distinction I draw between occasionally being wrong (errors happen), and systematic bias. As the Tribune and Index called out, Gilruth was being systematically misleading. And apparently intentionally.
My issue with ESR isn't that I know he's bullshitting on any one point or antoher, it's that I don't know when he is, and, as with other unreliable data streams, sussing out the truth is a lot of work for low reward. He's like an unreliable gauage or monitoring system that sends off false alerts when it shouldn't ,stays silent when it should alert, and highlights the wrong areas of trouble when it does manage to go off at the right time. You simply start to lose your faith in it.
ESR's problem is he believes his own bullshit.
I've decided I don't need that problem.