“Gullible” is an unfortunate term because it literally describes a personality trait—believing what you hear / read without scrutiny—but it strongly connotes that the belief is wrongheaded in this particular context.
For example, it would be weird to say “Gullible Alice believes that Napier, New Zealand has apple orchards in it. By the way, that’s totally true, it has tons of apple orchards! But Gullible Alice believes it on the basis of evidence that she didn’t have strong reason to trust. She just got lucky.” It’s not wrong to say that, just weird / unexpected.
Relatedly, it’s possible for Gus to have a friend Cas (Careful Steelman) who has the same object-level beliefs as Gus, but the friend is not gullible, because the friend came to those beliefs via a more sophisticated justification / investigation than did Gus. I don’t think OP meant to deny the possibility that Cas could exist—calling Gus a strawman is clearly suggesting that OP believes better arguments exist—but I still feel like the OP comes across that way at a glance.
“Gullible” is an unfortunate term because it literally describes a personality trait—believing what you hear / read without scrutiny—but it strongly connotes that the belief is wrongheaded in this particular context.
For example, it would be weird to say “Gullible Alice believes that Napier, New Zealand has apple orchards in it. By the way, that’s totally true, it has tons of apple orchards! But Gullible Alice believes it on the basis of evidence that she didn’t have strong reason to trust. She just got lucky.” It’s not wrong to say that, just weird / unexpected.
Relatedly, it’s possible for Gus to have a friend Cas (Careful Steelman) who has the same object-level beliefs as Gus, but the friend is not gullible, because the friend came to those beliefs via a more sophisticated justification / investigation than did Gus. I don’t think OP meant to deny the possibility that Cas could exist—calling Gus a strawman is clearly suggesting that OP believes better arguments exist—but I still feel like the OP comes across that way at a glance.