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Sept. 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
19:59
Episode 223 Scott Adams: How Opinions Get Assigned to You. Whiteboard!
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Well, I'm looking a little overexposed, both literally and figuratively, but I wanted to come on here and give you a whiteboard talk about one of my favorite topics, persuasion, and how it's affecting how we see the world.
And specifically, we're going to talk about how you get your opinions.
I'll wait till we get a thousand and then we're gonna jump right into it.
Now we haven't done the simultaneous sip on this one because I did that already this morning.
So we're gonna do a whiteboard talk in a moment.
All right, I think we have enough people now.
Now, here's what I'm watching and it might be a difference between someone who is trained in persuasion versus people who are not.
The way The way reality is being presented to you is that there are events that happen in the world and then people look at those events and they form opinions.
That's how the world is presented to you.
That's how the news organizations present it to you.
It's how you probably imagine the world.
There are events.
We observe the events and then we form opinions.
In my filter of reality, nothing like that is happening.
That is not happening.
Let me give you my filter on it and then you can compare it to the one you have and see which one you like.
In my world, there's a news event.
And just to make it fun, let's talk about President Trump causing the news event.
Then there's the news media and social media.
This is what I call the opinion creation phase.
In other words, people who are not you...
They're framing it.
They're changing the context.
They're putting the pundits on it.
They're putting emphasis here or emphasis there.
They're leaving things out.
Sometimes the facts are just wrong.
But this is the phase where the opinions are created.
And then once these opinions are created, you, the poor consumer, looks at your favored sources.
Probably the left is looking mostly at the stuff from the left.
The right is looking at mostly news sources and social media on the right.
And we get our opinions from this stuff.
Now some of you might also be on social media, obviously you are if you're watching this, but in general it's this phase that assigns you the opinion.
Now I know that you don't want to believe that about yourself, but you certainly believe it about those other people who aren't doing their thinking, they're not doing their homework, they must be getting their opinions from TV. My view is that that's a universal truth.
The television is giving your opinions.
Now how does that really make a difference in the real world?
Now what I'm watching is that the opinion makers are changing the events to turn you into the belief, and I'm going to say you in this case is the anti-Trumpers, so I'm talking about the anti-Trump part of the world, to believe that the president is a racist, And to believe, here's the key part, to believe it's their own opinion.
And that they believe their opinion that the president is a big ol' racist is because they think they've seen facts and events and formed an opinion.
Nothing like that has happened.
Nothing like that.
What happened was they watched people who assigned them their opinion about something that was complicated.
They're not really the expert on it.
They don't know all the context, but they see all these smart people that are on the channel that they watch, the people who usually agree with them, and they say, well, if these people think it's bad, it must be bad.
That's my opinion. I'm going to take you through some hypothetical situations in which imagine that the stories about the president We're reported just factually.
Just factually.
Take, for example, we'll go all the way back to the housing discrimination story from the 70s.
Here's a factual way to report that.
We don't know what President Trump, then Citizen Trump, was thinking.
Or whether he was involved in any of those, you know, consciously involved in those decisions.
That's not in evidence.
What we do know is that the Democrats he hired to do the work discriminated against black people.
Now, were they Democrats? Well, probably.
I don't know. The President himself was a Democrat then.
So is there any evidence of the President being a racist after he became a Democrat?
In other words, or after he became a Republican.
So during the time that the President was a Democrat, there are some stories of him being a racist.
But we don't have evidence of what he was thinking.
We only have other people's interpretation of what that all meant.
There's no evidence of what the president was thinking.
There are only evidence that people who worked for him, who were probably Democrats, were discriminating against black people, and that's bad.
All right, let's move forward in time.
Let's take the president's announcement that he was running for president.
If it were reported as just facts, without all the opinion phase, it might have looked something like this.
The president announced that he's running for president.
He says one of his signature issues is going to be immigration.
And he thinks that there are too many criminals coming in with the nice people.
And that we could do with less crime.
We like nice people, but there are too many criminals coming in with the nice people.
Would that be factual?
I believe that would be a factual statement of what he said.
The way it was reported is, he doesn't like Mexicans.
But that came from here.
That wasn't the event. That wasn't in the event.
So people think they formed an opinion about the event, but they didn't really.
They adopted the opinion that was assigned to them.
Let's take the Judge Curiel situation.
Here's how it could have been reported if you just reported the facts.
It would look like this.
In a legal context, when you're talking about laws and lawsuits and the court, it's important that the judge and the jury not have bias.
And lawyers go to great lengths to make sure the jurors they pick don't have bias.
Likewise, if it's a judge trial, you want to make sure that the judge does not have any experience that would lend even the impression of bias.
So it's not just that they have bias or don't.
You don't ever want to be in a situation where there's even the impression that you do.
Now in this particular case, the Judge Curiel case, Judge Curiel has a Mexican heritage.
And because of the way President Trump's immigration policy had been reported, and because of the way they had assigned opinions to the public, and Judge Curiel is part of the public, is it worth noting that the judge is in the aggrieved class?
In other words, is the judge part of the population that the news has told you should be disliking this president for racism?
Well, he is.
Now that says nothing about Judge Curiel's qualifications as a judge.
It does say that in this specific case, There was something about the judge's situation, his Mexican heritage, which suggests that he would be in the class of people likely to have bias because that bias has been assigned to everyone in that class and he's in the class.
Now, that's a long explanation, but the point is, in a legal context, it's normal, appropriate, and even advised, your lawyer will tell you to do it, to call out any trace of potential bias.
But even better than that, if you've done that and the judge does not recuse, you've created a situation that's very positive for the defendant or the accused.
And the positive situation is you've set up the judge To have to go out of his way to make sure that he's not looking biased.
And sure enough, when a decision came up that was in this gray area, where the judge could either have the trial before or after the election, and normal treating everybody the same, nobody is special under the law, if he had just treated it the normal way, it would have been before the election, which would have been terrible for candidate Trump.
But instead, Judge Curiel ruled in this gray area in a way that was very favorable for the president.
Why did he do it? Well, we don't know what the judge was thinking.
Maybe he would have done that anyway.
But we do see that Trump's strategy of calling out the potential bias got him to a place where when the gray area happened, the judge was under the microscope and he went in the direction that was good for Trump.
So if you had reported this without the bias filter, it looks like somebody in a legal situation who handled it exactly the way you would handle that.
You would handle it by calling out actual or even potential bias because you're either going to get rid of that judge or you're going to cause that judge to bend over backwards to show they're not biased and maybe that's what happened.
All right. Let's take Charlottesville.
Here would be a factual way that Charlottesville could have been reported.
There was this horrible event.
There were neo-Nazis, or I guess white supremacists, I'm not sure what the difference is, white supremacists marching, saying anti-Semitic things, and somebody got killed by one of them.
Terrible situation. It's awful.
The president, when talking about it, An event which was organized around people who wanted to keep statues, the Confederate statues, and people who didn't.
The President said, ambiguously, there were fine people on both sides.
Some people said, hey, are you trying to say that the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists, are fine people?
Well, first of all, that would be ridiculous because no president would do that.
And if they were crazy enough to do it, they would certainly keep with the story because crazy is crazy.
I mean, it's not the sort of thing you'd say once unless you were going to stick with it.
It's kind of a big commitment.
But when they asked him to clarify, he said, no, no, the white supremacists are bad.
I condemn them. So, there was some ambiguity in what he said, and then he clarified it, and he clarified it to everybody's satisfaction.
Because we're all, you know, everybody probably watching this is on the same side that the white supremacists are to be condemned, and the president did.
We're all on the same side.
So that's the way it could have been reported, but it wasn't.
So, here's my point.
When I'm looking at the news, I'm watching the news media Assign people the opinion that Trump is a racist and then blaming Trump for that assignment, which wasn't anything he did.
I believe that if people simply watched, let's say there was no punditry, let's say all punditry went away and nothing but facts were ever reported and those facts were always put in context.
I don't believe that the people Looking directly at the facts would have opinions that are anything like the opinions they actually hold.
I just saw a Gallup poll of racial feelings, people who thought that race relations were either better or worse over time.
And it turns out, I wasn't aware of this until I saw it just this morning, that race relationships were kind of going okay, You know, white people, and this was specifically about African Americans and white people.
And, you know, black people had a lesser opinion, but it was kind of stable.
And then I think it was the Trayvon Martin thing that just took it off a cliff.
And this was all during the Obama administration.
Now since then, the white people's opinion of race relationship has improved a little.
And black people's opinion of race relations has gotten a little worse.
How would you report this?
If you were going to report race relations in the United States, what would be the accurate way to say it?
If you're just dealing with the facts and you're adding no opinion, you would say race relations are worse than they used to be, They took a big plunge during the Obama administration.
Took a big plunge during the Obama administration.
And then, 85% of the people, now let's make it, you know, the biggest population, not 85%, but whatever is the white population, 65%.
But the group that represents the largest group of citizens thinks things are improving.
Under the Trump administration.
That's what the data says, right?
The biggest group of people in the United States, which is white people, think race relationships are improving.
And keep in mind that both black and white people were in total agreement that things were getting worse during Obama's administration.
But now there's a disconnect.
Black folks say it's getting worse.
White folks say it might be getting a little better.
What's the difference? What's the difference?
We're looking at the same facts, right?
The difference is that the media has sort of bifurcated into two parts.
The people watching one set of media, the Fox News crowd, think things are looking up.
And the people watching other media think things are looking down.
But here's what's not happening.
There's nobody looking at the facts, the events, and making up their own minds.
That's just not happening. What's happening is people are assigning opinions, and you pick your tribe, and then you take your opinion.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, you're talking about other people.
And maybe that's true.
I'm sure there are plenty of people on this Periscope watching this who are not really, you know, just taking every opinion that they see in the news.
Well, I'm talking in general.
So if you're trying to decide how the country is in terms of race relations, and you're looking at your own experience, your anecdotal experience, well, and you're looking at your own experience, your anecdotal experience, well, that might be telling you something if everybody else is having the same but probably not. Probably not.
It's probably just anecdotal.
So, I was wondering, are there objective measures of racism That are not captured by opinion polls.
So it's one thing to talk to people and say, hey, do you think race relations are better or worse?
Then you're just getting people's opinions as they've been assigned by the media.
But is there anything you could measure?
That's just a plus.
Now somebody said employment, so black unemployment is great and black business creation, business ownership is up and that's great.
But those are really sort of continuations of a trend that have more to do with just economics and a good economy.
They're not really about whether race relationships are good.
It just might mean they're no worse.
Obviously if you're black you can get a job, right?
But that was true before.
So that doesn't really measure racism exactly.
So is there any...somebody said the number of race crimes.
That would be interesting but dangerous because you worry that the way those things are measured might have drifted over time.
In other words, it might be that in the old days, they would just say, ah, that has nothing to do with race.
But maybe in our modern times, maybe people would say, well, it's not directly because of race, but you can see how it affected it, so let's put it in this category.
Number of interracial marriages.
Well, that's interesting.
How about number of people who spend quality time with people who are not their race?
I think you could probably get a reasonably decent survey of that.
It would be a little hard because you're dealing with human memory and people want to put themselves in a certain light.
But I think you could measure that over time at least.
That's a good idea. Changing in voting patterns.
I don't know if that really gets there.
Mixed rate, birth rates?
Maybe. I would say that's one of the good ones.
One of the standard jokes is that if somebody is accused of being a racist, they say, I can't be a racist because I have a black friend.
And then everybody goes, ha ha ha!
That's what racists say.
Racists are the ones who say, I can't be racist because I have a black friend.
It's such a cliche that people mock it.
Here's what I think.
I think that's a great start.
If he asks me, the best response to somebody who says, I'm not a racist, I have a black friend, the best response is not, ha, ha, ha, that's what racists say.
The best response is, that's great, you should make some more.
I hope next year you've got two black friends.
Why are we discouraging something that's so clearly a step in the right direction?
Somebody said it would be a step in the right direction if a black candidate did not get 95% of the black vote.
I do think that that had an impact on people's feeling about race relations.
I just don't know exactly how.
Law enforcement?
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