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June 14, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
23:55
Episode 89 - Compare the “Racist Dog Whistle” Filter to “If All You Have is a Hammer”
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Yes, I'm back again.
And this time, with coffee.
It's a little bit late in the day, but you know what's the wrong time for coffee?
Never, sometimes decaf, but never a bad time.
And so, if you have a beverage of any type, join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's some good stuff.
So, let me give you a little background before I give you a little whiteboard talk on a fascinating topic.
You're going to love it. As you know, I've been writing and periscoping and tweeting about the fact that humans have not evolved to the point where we can understand base reality.
We know there is a base reality because I exist to ask the question.
So even if all of you are imaginary, there's something there because I exist to wonder whether you're there.
But, in the same way that a dog might think it understands reality, but it doesn't know it's on a planet that's hurling through the universe, it really doesn't know much about reality.
But it probably thinks it does.
Thinks it knows enough. Snails don't need to know anything about reality, but they can reproduce.
They do fine. Plants don't know anything about reality, but they can reproduce.
Evolution only requires us to reproduce.
We don't need to understand reality.
And indeed, prior generations of humans, we can see you were primitive, magical thinking people who didn't understand reality.
But we believe, irrationally, that we were lucky to be born in a time when we figured it all out.
That didn't happen. It might have happened.
Let's be honest.
You might have gotten lucky.
After 15 billion years, your little life happened at exactly the time that humans had evolved to the point where finally they can understand reality.
Maybe. Not likely.
All right. So, with that background, I talk instead about filters on reality, a way to understand your reality that either works for you or doesn't.
That's about as close as you can get.
And the best way to understand if it works is if your filter predicts.
So if you've got a filter on reality that says, alright, if this is true, the next thing we should see is this.
And then that happens, you say, ah, my filter worked.
And if you're sure you see the reality the way it is, but every time you predict something it doesn't happen, your filter probably needs some work.
So I'm going to compare two popular filters on reality about politics.
Let's just see which one predicts better or has predicted better.
So, for example, the silent dog whistle theory says that President Trump and many of his followers are sending secret dog whistles Wink, wink, we're really racist, don't tell anybody.
And that the reason that President Trump does this, so goes this filter, is that he doesn't want to lose his racist supporters.
So he's sending them secret signals, yeah, I'm one of you, I'm a racist too.
Compare that filter, and by the way, that's, you know, on the left, the people who are anti-Trump, this is the dominant filter by far.
That's how they see the world.
Let's compare this to a filter I'll call, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I'm using this because it's funnier than saying confirmation bias, right?
That's just too wordy.
So we'll say, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
So under this filter, the people who have this point of view are interpreting things through a racial filter and seeing more of it than might actually be there.
Again, I'm not saying which one of these is true.
Because I don't understand reality.
We're only going to track which one of them does a better job of predicting.
Let me give you an example.
And by the way, I'm only going to be predicting, so this is fake predicting, because I'm going to be talking about things that already happened and it's easy to fit things to the past.
So don't take too much out of this for my backfitting of data.
Anybody can do that with all kinds of hypotheses, right?
You can always prove, oh, in the past it made sense.
It's whether you can actually predict the future.
Those of you who have been watching me have watched me predict the future on President Trump, on North Korea, at least so far, and a bunch of other things.
So let's take a few topics.
The silent dog whistle would say that the President will not do anything that violates his sort of racist secret signals to his racist supporters.
Let's take the topic of Jack Johnson, do I have the name right this time?
Jack Johnson's possumous pardon.
Would someone who is trying to send a secret racist signal to his supporters give a pardon to someone who wasn't terribly important in the current day?
Would that make sense in that filter?
It would not, right? Because even if you thought, oh, he's just doing this for political reasons, that doesn't fit the filter.
Because the filter is, he's doing things for political reasons that the racists will clearly see that he's on their side.
So this would be opposite of this filter, so it didn't work in this case.
But the theory that says, and I'll blow this out a little bit, that President Trump is someone who doesn't like political correctness, but he's not a racist.
It's just that you see things in those light because the media, etc., have caused that to happen.
So under this theory, he would give a pardon to Jack Johnson.
I always get, you know, Joe Jackson, Jack Johnson.
Those names are just too many J's for me to process.
But this filter says, of course, he would.
Right? Today we hear in the news that he's considering a pardon, or maybe he's already done it, for Dinesh D'Souza, who is, if you haven't noticed, a little bit brown.
Now, there's a situation where the people are even saying, hey, we're not sure that this makes sense as a pardon, you know, on the legal merits of it.
I don't know the details, so I don't know if it does or doesn't make sense.
But what we can say for sure is that he didn't need to do it.
President Trump didn't need to even consider that pardon.
But he did. So the silent racist dog whistle fails again.
Because again, remember, even if you're saying, oh, he's just doing this for appearances, the whole filter says he doesn't do things for appearances.
That he's sending a clear message.
And so it fails a second time.
We saw that Kim Kardashian, who you may know, is married to a very famous African-American man named Kanye West.
Both of them get along, apparently, with President Trump.
The filter fails because if Kanye can't sniff out a racist, who can, really?
I mean, his filter is set for seeing things in a racial way.
He knows the president personally, has met with him, etc.
And he's not detecting it.
So the filter fails again.
Kim Kardashian was apparently going to talk about an African-American grandmother in jail for some kind of drug charge that wasn't that serious and considering her for a pardon.
Now, I don't know if that decision has been made, but the silent racist dog filter would say, no, that pardon will never happen.
This filter says, well, it could.
You never know if...
That would be clemency, not a pardon, somebody saying?
Okay. You don't know if a pardon is not granted for just the legal reasons.
It doesn't quite work. You know, not everybody gets a pardon.
But that's what you'd look at.
Alright, now let's take a look at Israel.
This filter says that President Trump sided with the marchers in Charlottesville who were chanting anti-Jewish slogans.
So this filter says, ha, he must be one of them.
But then he moves the embassy to Jerusalem.
Israel is putting up signs praising him.
Netanyahu likes him.
None of that makes sense if he's actually somehow...
Anti-Jewish.
But it makes perfect sense with this filter.
President Trump is, famously, you know that Jared's, one of his big projects is prison reform.
Now we can all argue about what's the right way to do it, but the basic idea for prison reform is that The basic idea is that people would earn early release by taking classes, learning a skill, something that would make them more valuable on the outside.
Now, would a racist work on something that is far and away more helpful for the black and minority community, because they have higher populations in jail?
Well, maybe, but it doesn't quite fit perfectly.
But this filter fits perfectly.
If you're keeping track, this filter kind of works for everything so far.
Now let's switch over to Roseanne.
Roseanne famously made two references that we know of, two ape-monkey things, and both of those references, again, that we know of, We're involved with women who had at least some amount of African-American blood.
Now, that perfectly fits the silent racist dog whistle, not in terms of the president, but here we're talking about Roseanne as a vocal supporter.
So that fits, right?
But here's the evidence you would want to look for to make sure that you are right about that.
Here's what you'd look for. The first thing you'd say to yourself is, do white people see this the same way as black people?
I would guess that something like 100% of black people would see any reference to monkeys or apes as like, red flag, red flag, instantly recognized.
Instantly, instantly, probably close to 100%.
I would think. Maybe not 100%, because nothing is 100%, but 95%, 98%.
If you did the same poll of white people, would they have the same response, or would some of them have a, let's say, a knowledge gap, or just an awareness gap?
Is there just sort of a reason that white people don't see it the way?
Let me give you a few examples.
When I was in school, there was a kid in my class, he was white, and his nickname was Monkey.
Because he kind of looked like a monkey.
And he was as white as you could possibly be, but he had big ears and sort of monkey features.
And let me continue.
It is also true, and fact check me on this, that white people often call children little monkeys.
They call white children their own children.
Hey, you little monkey, get off me.
You little monkey, you're like a little monkey.
It is a common white person thing to call other white people monkeys.
Now, have any of you ever seen a white person, or maybe you did it yourself, who ever referred to another white person because they were big, Did he ever say, oh man, that guy, another white guy, he's just like the size of a gorilla.
I know I have.
There was a science teacher when I went to school who, he was a white guy, but his physicality was sort of bent over and he had these enormous ape-like arms.
And everybody referred to him as having monkey arms and monkey-like arms.
Now, let me give you another example that I wanted to wait a few days before I broke this one out.
I was doing a live radio interview about a week before, or just a few days before, Roseanne's problems.
So between the time that President Trump got hit with the fake news that he was calling immigrants monkeys, I'm sorry, that he was calling immigrants animals, And then it came out, he was really talking about MS-13.
Between that scandal and the story about Roseanne, I did this live radio interview, and I was talking about North Korea, and I said the following about President Xi of China.
I said, Well, you know, President Xi may be, you know, injecting himself in the process talking to Kim Jong-un because President Xi wants to, you know, make sure everybody knows that he's the big gorilla in that part of the world.
The moment it came out of my mouth, you know, the interview started to go on and I say, hold on, hold on, stop everything, back up.
Let me rephrase that, because I realize we live in a world in which any kind of animal references to humans are inappropriate.
They're taken out of context.
Now, so I backed up and I said, okay, what I meant to say, and I swear to God I did this, in my mind I thought, I'll change that to he's the big dog in that neighborhood.
And I realized, okay, that's just another animal.
I've done it again.
So I think I changed this to something like, he's the most important player in that part of the world.
Now, if you had heard me say that out of context, if the only thing you'd heard me say is that President Xi is the big gorilla over there, sounded kind of racist, didn't it?
If this was your filter on the world, you'd say, Scott, that's not a coincidence that you called a guy who's Chinese a gorilla, even though I have the advantage of knowing what was in my head, and not once did anything remotely like that come into my thinking.
I refer to people as the big gorilla in the room, because gorilla is sort of the better animal for that.
It's not like the big elephant in the room that's used for things you don't notice.
It's not like the lion in the room.
People don't really say that. The big gorilla in the room is just sort of the phrase.
So I used it, and immediately I was like, whoa!
I realized that could get me in trouble, so I called it back when it was still time to do that.
So this filter has to ask itself, has Roseanne ever called white people, monkeys, gorillas, ever called her grandchildren who are, she has at least one grandchild who is black, I think.
But has she ever called her white grandchildren monkeys, get off of me, you're climbing on me like a monkey.
If you don't know that, it's harder to judge this situation.
It's possible that when she looked at these two women that she insulted, Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett, so this filter says, oh yeah, she looked at them and she thought monkey right away.
But here's the problem again.
If you were going to call, let's say if you were a racist, and you were going to call somebody who was black a monkey, Would you do it with those two individuals?
Look at a picture of either of them and forget about the race part.
These are two people who couldn't look less like monkeys in terms of their features.
It wouldn't be your go-to for either of them.
So it doesn't quite fit Of all the people you're going to call a monkey, you would pick somebody who is the least physicality and not even close to the white kid in my class who sort of looked like a monkey.
Somebody saying, oh man, this is going to be taken out of context.
Yes, it is. Probably.
Some of these things I do on video, because in writing things are taken out of context too easily.
It's harder for people to do it on video, so I do it on video for that reason.
So here's my proposition to all of you.
This came to me because I saw a tweet from Seth Abramson who said, this is just what I predicted.
I predicted that President Trump would not condemn Roseanne for her comments.
And I tweeted something, you know, mocking that point of view, but the more I thought of it, I thought, you know, that's halfway good.
Meaning that he was saying, I have a theory of the world, I made a prediction, and then I checked to see if my prediction was right, and it was right.
So far, that's good thinking.
So I don't want to over-mock somebody who was well on the way to doing the correct mental process.
But I would argue that it's incomplete.
Because there was at least one other theory that also predicts that he would not say anything about Roseanne, which is he always supports the people who support him.
He doesn't go after them.
And he doesn't care about political correctness.
And he's not big on apologizing, right?
So this filter works perfectly, but so did Seth Abramson's.
His filter did work.
It's just that he has to recognize the other one worked as well.
And if you can't figure out from this one scenario, which is the truth, at least you can look at a number of scenarios and say, all right, does this track?
Does it make sense that President Trump would be working on urban redevelopment if he was a racist?
And I think the team is either very diverse or more African American members I think.
I've just seen pictures. Would that make sense for him in any way if he were the racist?
It wouldn't, but it would certainly make sense on this filter.
So there's the filter.
Let me summarize by saying I cannot tell you which filter is reality because people can't do that.
We didn't evolve to know reality.
We can. Keep our eyes open.
Forget about what you've seen so far.
Make me a prediction.
Here are a few more predictions.
There have been a number of times President Trump has been accused of saying something that people took as racial.
In each case, when he was asked to confirm or clarify, he clarified this way every time.
So every time there was something that was taken more than one way, he never clarified this way.
He always clarified that now, don't be too politically correct, I'm not saying what you think I'm saying, this is what I meant.
So here's my prediction.
My prediction is that this filter will not predict anything that this one doesn't also predict.
But this one will predict lots of stuff that this one doesn't.
So that's my prediction.
So you have something now that you can look to the future.
Forget about backfitting to the past.
Everything I've told you so far...
You can discount because it's easy to explain things to the past.
Just watch your predictions and see how well they come out.
Let me see your comments and let me know how this one went.
All right, so people liking this, Good. Somebody says I should drink bleach.
I'm guessing that whoever said I should drink bleach might be on this filter.
Now keep in mind, I'm not telling you your filter is wrong, because I don't know.
I just don't think people have the ability to say, oh, mine's right and yours is wrong.
All we can do All we can do is see which one predicts.
And if you have counterexamples, you should absolutely mention them.
And this would be a good time to do it.
So if anybody has an example where this filter worked and this one didn't, or at least the common explanation of life didn't work, let me know.
Somebody says, I sound like Woody Allen.
Well, that's not exactly the look I was going for, but...
Yeah.
So... Alright, looks good.
Looks like people enjoyed this or got something out of it, so I think I'll just keep it there.
Go back to do some other stuff.
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