All Episodes
Previous Next
June 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
32:20
Episode 93 - Bad Pattern Recognition
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well I'm up early today and I'm hoping that some of you are up earlier at least available and with all I'm just hoping with all luck you have your coffee because if you do you you know what time it is. It's time for a coffee with Scott Adams and the simultaneous sip.
You've only got five more seconds to grab your beverage for the best sip of the day.
Here it comes. Oh, man.
You know, the audience that sips together, slips together, gips together, there's nothing that works with that.
Good morning from Wyndham, whoever said that.
So I just saw a news article that the headlines said that sex is good for your memory.
And the way that they tested this Was they had old people who are more likely to have memory problems.
And they said, you know, did you have sex?
And then the ones who had sex more frequently, they tested their memory and they had better memory.
Now, what's the first thing you think when you see that study or you hear that study?
Let me give you a habit that's good to get into.
Whenever you see a study that says, hey, we think this...
First thing you should do is flip them around and ask yourself, wait a minute, could it work the other way?
Could it be that the causation is backwards?
Because quite often you can tell yourself a story in which the causation is backwards.
Now, I doubt the researchers got this backwards, so I'm not claiming this is what happened.
But it was funny because I thought to myself, how exactly do you track whether old people had sex?
You don't watch them, right?
You're not watching them have sex.
You're asking them, hey old people, did you have sex recently?
Now, how do people answer if they have a bad memory?
No, what's this week?
Sex? No, I don't think so.
I don't think I had sex this week.
So I'm saying this humorously just to make a bigger point.
Could it be that people with bad memories are the ones who don't remember having sex recently?
Now, I would like to think that the researchers controlled for that and they had some way around it.
But the point is, you always have to ask yourself, Does it work the other way around?
Because if it does, maybe you're not seeing quite the way it's been reported.
All of a sudden, the researchers got it right in this case, but it's the right question.
Could it work in reverse? So I was looking at an article in The Hill, I believe it was, by Juan Williams, and he was making the case that the president is clearly a racist because of the pattern.
There's a pattern, and he sees a pattern, and he says, that pattern, well, that's a pattern that can't be wrong.
Thing number one on his list of reasons that fit the pattern is the tax cut.
As Juan explained, the tax cut disproportionately helps rich white people.
Now, you could argue whether that's true or false, that it disproportionately helps rich white people.
I would say it's probably true that it helps rich people, because rich people pay more, so if they get any percentage of cut, it's a bigger dollar amount.
So on that basis, it's probably a true statement.
But here's the thing.
I'm a rich white guy.
I think my taxes, because of my specific situation, are going to go up.
You don't need to know the details, but in my specific case, I probably am not going to benefit.
But, suppose I did.
Suppose I was one of those rich people who got a tax break.
How much does that help the poor white people?
So if you're a poor white person, Do you look at the rich people who are not you and say to yourself, yes!
White people. White people got a tax break.
Do you say that if you're not one of them?
Or do you say to yourself, I think I'm one of the 99% of the people who are not rich who did not get a tax break.
But, oh, good news, good news.
People with my same pigmentation...
Got a tax break! Yes!
Yes! Yay!
Whoa, whoa, whoa!
People who look similar to me but are not me and will not give me any money whatsoever and can't help me in any possible way got a tax cut!
So that's good for me.
I feel sorry for those poor black and brown people who are also not that guy who got the tax break because they got nothing.
Unlike me, poor white guy.
Here, if you're coming in late, I'm not talking about myself.
Poor white guy, I'm looking at those rich people who got those big tax breaks, and I'm thinking, you poor suckers who are also poor like me.
If you're brown or black, some other color, I wish you could have the great feeling I get knowing that complete strangers who share my pigmentation got a tax break.
Good for me. Come on!
That's not even good thinking, people!
People! Now, you might not be surprised to know that Juan went on to list some other things that were fake news and take it out of context and other things.
And when he was done, he had this whole list of things that clearly fit the pattern.
Here's a claim that I've been making for a while.
People are really bad at recognizing patterns.
The problem is we think we're good at it.
Do you know why racism is largely a thing?
Pattern recognition.
People think they see a pattern and then they say, well, that pattern must mean something.
So then they discriminate against Elbonians or whoever they discriminate against.
But those patterns don't mean as much as we would think that they might mean, or they mean nothing at all, or they're completely misleading.
We can't tell the difference.
We humans are terrible at pattern recognition.
Let me give you a concrete example that just happened.
You know, you all watched the Roseanne situation in which she called Valerie Jarrett looked like a cross between Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes.
And people said, that is racist because you would not say that about a white person.
And then other people found an older tweet, I don't know how many years ago, about Susan Rice.
In which it said she was like a man with big swinging ape balls.
And the person on Twitter said, look, you got the Susan Rice thing, there's the monkey reference, you've got the Valerie Jarrett thing, there's an ape reference, there's a pattern, people.
There's a pattern. Black people, ape references from the same Twitter person.
How can that be an accident?
Look at the pattern, people.
Now, how many of you said to yourself, pattern, here's what I saw.
I saw Roseanne thinking that Valerie Jarrett was not black and using an ape reference.
And I saw her making a reference about Susan Rice, who apparently is black.
I don't know. I don't make any assumptions about people's race, but I'm going to assume there's some in there.
And so I say, well, there's a person she thought was white, And a person she presumably thought was black or at least far black or at least brown or something.
So the pattern is that she uses it for people.
She just makes monkey references.
And that would fit my experience that white people make monkey references all the time.
I told you that I made a monkey reference recently that I didn't realize until I said, oh, I was talking about China being the big gorilla in the room, and I immediately took it back.
I said, oh, I don't want to make any animal references to anybody who isn't me.
And then I was just cleaning up some comics I was submitting for Dilbert, and I realized I'd once again made some other ape or monkey reference, not about anybody of any ethnicity.
It was just, I make a lot of monkey references.
In fact, I've had monkeys and monkey references fairly frequently in Dilbert, and none of it had any racial overtones.
People use monkey references.
Monkeys are fun.
I like monkeys.
In fact, of all the animals, monkeys are some of the best.
Monkeys are awesome.
And because they have some DNA in common with humans, it makes more sense that we use monkeys more than elephants, more than cougars or whatever else.
Monkeys are awesome.
So the pattern I see is that people use monkey references all the time.
And if you see the other pattern, that's my evidence that I present to you that we're terrible at pattern recognition.
Because we're looking at the same thing.
You're seeing Yanni. I'm seeing Laurel.
My pattern is meaningful to me.
Your pattern is meaningful to you.
And we come to opposite conclusions.
So patterns, very much like history repeats, not true.
History literally never repeats.
It can't, because all the variables are different now.
If only because history did something before, it makes us more wary of it happening again.
The odds of history repeating as a real thing, I mean, it's just superstition.
History does not repeat.
There are things that people do over and over again.
So people are a little bit predictable, but history doesn't repeat.
And analogies are terrible.
They're not thinking, they just feel like it.
Analogies are sort of like patterns as well.
It's a special case of a pattern.
So if you're making your argument based on a pattern, based on an analogy, or based on history repeats, that's all magical thinking.
Now, if you wanted to not be the subject of someone else's bad pattern recognition, let's say you said to yourself, hey, I'm a Trump supporter, just as an example, and I don't want people to have bad pattern recognition and think that you personally are racist because they see some pattern of Republican behavior.
What would you do?
How do you get out from underneath that incorrect assumption, the bad pattern recognition, which is said, well, these other Trump supporters said something I don't like, so there's the pattern.
I guess they're all like that.
I can only think of one thing that would make a difference, which is do something useful.
Try to do something that violates the pattern.
So instead of saying the pattern doesn't exist, say instead that you'll do something that so clearly violates the pattern that the person who was seeing it before has to question it and say, well, I don't know, this didn't fit my pattern, so I don't know what's going on here.
At least give them some question.
To that point, Many of you saw my periscope with Bill Pulte, who is working on the urban blight, the Blight Authority, trying to get rid of urban blight, tearing down, run down places in inner cities, mostly Detroit, Pontiac, that area for now, would look to spread that program that works really well.
It made me think all day yesterday about things to do with that land.
Apparently Bill's getting all kinds of emails and contacts from people volunteering and offering to help in one way or another.
Bill and I were talking about what can we do to harness that.
So we're having that conversation.
But I want to run past you one idea I had and just let you percolate on this a little bit.
One of the big problems in the urban areas is a lot of single parents, more single mothers, I would imagine, than single dads.
But a lot of the single parents.
And there's also, of course, an employment problem, and there's a childcare problem, and crime problem, and all these things.
And I was trying to figure out what could you do with these big, contiguous swaths of land that Bill Pulte and his Urban Blight project have made clear so that you could build something from scratch.
What would you put there?
And I had an idea I wanted to run past you just to get some feedback.
What about building reasonably priced, let's say, inexpensive homes using all the best technologies so that they have good energy efficiency and all that stuff.
But what if you designed them so that each of these homes had a little workspace that could be an office or a place to meet clients with a separate entrance?
So it's just one room of your, doesn't have to be big, could be a condo-like situation.
But you've got one separate dedicated space and maybe it's plumbed.
Maybe it's got a separate bathroom and an exit.
And you would use that for whatever kind of business you could do at home.
So for example, you could be anything from an architect to a hairdresser.
You could be doing nails.
You could be a massage therapist.
You could be a parole officer that people come in and meet.
Any kind of low traffic Situation where you have maybe one client at a time and they're there for a while.
So you don't have a lot of traffic of strangers.
So imagine that the only people who move into these units are the people who have a use for it.
So this way mom can work at home, the kids in the next room.
Anybody who goes to this business understands that the person working it may have to make a sandwich or something.
So just so you know that that's the kind of business you're going to.
So imagine that.
And imagine that they're built also for, you know, you could do childcare, you could wash a dog, you know, you could be a pet groomer.
You know, there's almost infinite numbers of businesses that could be in your home with a separate door, separate bathroom, and it wouldn't add that much to the cost of the home, but it would be your source of income.
So you would immediately have a source of income and you could write it off in your taxes, right?
So the point would be to create communities which, first of all, have lots of external security cameras and some kind of efficiency around them so that, you know, people are watching them.
So you've got lower crime because everybody's watching.
And then you've got jobs and you've got childcare kind of worked into the system because you're working, a lot of people are working at home.
But then here's the next idea.
This is just my personal situation.
The best lifestyle I ever had Was in the worst place I ever lived.
So the worst physical place I ever lived was a dorm room that was this tiny little dorm room in college in which I had a roommate.
So I had like half of a small room.
And I had to share a bathroom with 20 people on the floor or whatever.
So that was the worst physical space I've ever lived in.
But it was also the best time of my life in terms of enjoyment and mental stimulation and everything else.
The reason... Yes, it was Hartwick College.
And the reason it was so good is because of the people and the situation.
So I was surrounded by people who were like me.
So I would walk out of my room and there would be a single person about my age who I had a lot in common with.
So it was the people that made the space excellent.
Now imagine, if you would, that these communities try a little bit, as much as they can, to get people who work and play together well.
So, for example, people with young kids, or just kids, could be in one group, one block.
Another block might be more younger single people.
Nobody gets kicked out if they have a kid, but the idea is you start with people around you who you're going to interact with who are somewhat like you.
Likewise, you would have a senior's place that would have a little extra Facilities.
So you would start with the idea that when you put people who are like people together, they're gonna be happier regardless of the space.
If you have a lot of parents with kids, those of you who have kids already know this, it solves all of these problems Because the kids are there to play with.
You've got other parents who can help you babysit once in a while.
You can get advice.
You can share things.
There's hand-me-downs. There's like a million benefits of having people with kids in physically the same area.
Yeah, you'd want to build so that there would be a good place to walk your dog and it would be safe, etc.
Now, I see each of these little pods, again, just brainstorming here, these pods being in sort of a circular or maybe a square fashion with some kind of a public park or meeting area in the center.
So that there's some reason that the people who are in the homes have a frequent reason to come out of the home and interact with the other people and that they're within a closed space.
Imagine, if you will, a literally sort of a fenced-in or a place that you couldn't get out unless you went through security.
And then you could tell your kid to just go outside and he would have neighbors who would have security cameras and nobody could get in or out to the kid where all of your kids are without going through a security guard.
So, if you imagine all of these technologies put together, it's pretty powerful.
Now, imagine, if you will, it's Detroit.
Somebody said that there might be a low water table, so maybe tunneling doesn't work too well depending on where you are.
I don't know if that's true for Detroit, but take this as a general statement.
One of the biggest problems if you're building in the north, where Detroit is, is it gets really cold.
So imagine that you use your Elon Musk tunneling boring machine to not only build some underground tunnels below it, That gives you your geothermal potential, so everybody can just circulate the air from their homes to these underground tunnels.
The tunnels are always around 56 degrees or whatever it is.
The underground temperature stays the same, and then that becomes a way to vastly reduce the cost of your heating and cooling.
Now, so the tunnel would help with your heating and cooling.
It would make it easier to run lines.
Maybe there'd be some transportation benefits or delivery services below ground, something like that.
But Musk has also developed this plan to turn the dirt from the tunnels into bricks on site.
Because taking dirt away is very expensive.
So perhaps you build the tunnel that creates the bricks which you can build the homes from.
Here's another building idea.
When I built my own home, one of the things I learned is that you would often have a room, you'd say, I want this room to be 19 feet by 17 feet, because you've decided that's just what you've decided.
And then you get your lumber to frame out the house, and the lumber is like, I'm just making these numbers up, is 10-foot pieces.
So two 10-foot pieces don't equal the 19 feet, so you've got to cut off a foot.
So instead of doing that, you simply build your rooms the same dimensions as the materials that you're likely to order.
So you just buy a 10-foot pole and you have a 10-foot room, etc.
Or a 10-foot piece of lumber.
That's not meant to be a real example, by the way.
I know the length of a piece of wood is not the length of the room.
But you get the point. If you make the rooms even, Even increments of what your materials are, nobody has to cut anything.
And that's a big deal, because labor is a big deal.
Suppose you design the rooms as perfect rooms.
You start with the furniture first.
That's how you design a house, by the way.
You start with the furniture.
Here are the things that I would like to have in a room.
And then you have to figure out how big the room is and what shape it is.
And then you take a bunch of the rooms you've designed and you see how they fit together.
So here's my problem with 3D printed homes.
I think 3D printed homes start with the technology, and then they say, what's the best we can do with this 3D home?
And so they can build a home, but I'll bet it's not one you want to live in.
So I would say that we should not shoot for inexpensive.
We should shoot for the best home you could possibly live in.
Something that's as good as the lifestyle I experienced in college, even though the living expense was low.
So I think any time you start with the technology first, you're limited in building a perfect home because you're trying to use the technology, and the technology can only do what it does.
Yeah, 3D homes are a little bit starting with a solution and trying to move toward a problem, but I think they're early on.
Yeah, so it might be prefab walls.
It might be something like that.
But, you know, if you live in just a normal home with normal drywall walls, it's a boring little home.
And you've got to paint the walls.
There's a lot of problems with it.
So we could probably do a lot better.
Somebody is saying they do what they do in Jamaica with shipping containers.
I use that as another example of the technology before the solution.
So shipping containers is really as much about what do we do with these shipping containers as it is about what's the best way to build a house.
So I think you don't start with 3D printing.
Don't start with shipping containers.
Start with an open mind and say, if I were going to live in this place, what would I want it to be?
You know, it doesn't have to be gigantic, but it's got to be pretty good.
Let me show you a, here's a technique I built into my house.
Don't think you can see it.
It might be able to point you toward it.
Let's see. Okay, you can't really tell.
But if you see over there, There's the entry to my office.
You'll note that you can't see the door because the door goes out and then it jags and then it turns before the door.
I designed the office that way because that little bend in the entrance is a sound baffle.
And it works. So the sound from the rest of the house goes into that little area and it bounces around a little bit before I can enter my room and it just takes a lot of the noise off.
It could be better if it was more irregular or if it had some kind of acoustic padding in it.
But the point is that if you make your rooms with a little baffle entrance, it doesn't use much space, but it allows you to be pretty close to other people and you can't hear them.
So there are just a whole bunch of ideas that fit into that category.
Let me show you another thing.
I'm just going to turn the camera.
You probably can't tell.
So this is my floor.
This is a ceramic tile.
So this tile is so strong you could actually just drop a hammer on it.
You could drop red wine on it and just wipe it off with a cloth.
There's nothing you could do to this that will actually hurt it, at least that I've discovered.
Now there's a little bit of maintenance.
You have to seal it once in a while, but I'm not even sure that matters.
I've done it, but I don't think it matters.
So there are materials that never have to be cleaned.
I would never put a carpet in an inexpensive home because the first thing that happens is the carpet gets ruined and then the home value just goes down.
Nobody wants to look at it. Nobody wants to live in it.
So there are a whole bunch of things that you can do to make the world a better place with better housing.
And carpet off gases.
Yeah, and carpets off-gas.
The other thing I did with this house is the paint is all a low VOC paint.
VOC refers to the small particles that are always kind of being released by paint.
If you use regular paint, you're breathing that forever.
It's not good for your asthma, presumably.
I don't know what else is bad for.
But I use the low VOC paint everywhere in this house so that So the volatile organic compounds is VOC. Thank you.
And so it's a very healthy house.
All right. So at some point I may be...
I may be asking people for ideas, and we may collect them.
Bill Pulte and I may collect your building ideas, but we're figuring out the best way to do that.
Let's capture some creativity.
So back to my original point.
There are people who might say, you are a bad person because I see this pattern of people who are not you.
That's the other weird thing.
That you must be bad because I saw a pattern that involved other people.
You can't really change people's minds when they think they see a pattern.
The only thing you can do is violate it and hope that that's enough over time.
So if you have a way to help in any way, helping people of color, helping the urban situations, helping with prison reform, helping with retraining, helping with any of those things that make a real difference in real people's lives, If you can do that, go ahead and do it.
Because that's probably your one and only path to a better world.
All right. Well, you know what I mean when I say people of color.
I'm not saying that pink isn't a color.
Let's look at what other questions you have.
Oh, and I should tell you that I'll be periscoping at a different time or times for about a week.
So I'm going to take a little R&R. I'll be in a different time zone.
So you might not see me in my usual time, depending on the time zone.
We'll see. Who pays for all of this?
To be determined.
Personally, you know, I think I would be willing to invest in low-cost homes that had any potential for resale or rent.
So it seems like you could turn it into an investment opportunity, but it just requires somebody who knows how to do that to put in work.
So it's the private sector.
Yeah, I'm thinking private sector, exactly.
I'm not thanking government for any of this.
The Syrian president is going to North Korea?
I saw something about that.
Is that real? I have no idea why.
Chip Wade designs cool rooms.
Well, they'd have to be affordable, too.
Alright. Looks like everybody's meeting with North Korea now that the seal is broken.
Somebody said education is the key.
Here's the thing.
In urban areas, Education probably is the key, but you can't get there if you have violence and a bad living situation and the one parent is working and can't be around.
So you need to fix the environment to fix education.
They're sort of pretty related.
All right. Somebody asked, why did I skip from skipping some days to talking about persuasion?
I don't know exactly what that question means, but I think you mean, why am I talking about persuasion on all of my periscopes?
Because people like it.
So it's more of a demand thing.
Alright, I think that's it for now.
I will talk to you again sometime soon.
▲
Export Selection