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Nov. 21, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
29:04
Episode 311 Scott Adams: Morality Halfpinions, CNN Mind-Reading, Fiction, and Fires
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Hey everybody, hey Nicholas, Duncan.
Come on in here. You know what time it is.
I think you do. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And while you're getting in here, I'm going to reverse my camera and show you a little good news from the outside world.
If you've been following my periscopes, you know I've been showing you external views of how much smoke there is.
I'm about 150 miles or more from the closest of the big fires in California.
But until recently, the hills which you see here very clearly were invisible.
So this is the first day in over a week, at least, that those hills are visible.
And as you can see, they're not that far away.
So we haven't been able to go outside because everything beyond this tree level, to see the trees that are close, everything beyond that was a complete whiteout until today.
Good news and apparently good work by the firefighters.
Maybe some rain coming on Thanksgiving.
So that's all good news.
Yeah, the fires are still burning, is my understanding.
But at least the biggest part of this smoke danger where I live has passed.
Okay. Let's talk about CNN's mind reading.
The big story on CNN is...
that the president wanted the Justice Department to investigate Clinton and he wanted Comey fired.
Now, whenever you see a story about anonymous sources Telling you what the President was thinking.
How much credibility should you put in...
How much credibility should you put...
I just saw something funny go by in the comments.
How much credibility should you put in a report by unnamed sources who are familiar with the President's internal thoughts?
How about none? If you've never been interviewed or the subject of the news, it's easy to look at a story like that and say, well, yeah, people who know him say that he wanted to do X. Now, it's entirely possible that that's exactly what he was thinking and exactly what he wanted.
But let me tell you how easily this could be misreported.
So suppose the president is talking about all the things going on, all the attacks against him, and suppose he says to his aides, well, maybe we should just indict Hillary and indict Comey.
If they're going to play this way, maybe we should play this too.
What do you think? And then his aides say, no, Mr.
President, that's a bad idea.
Don't do that for the following reasons.
And then the president says, okay, and then he doesn't do it.
Now the way I told it, does that sound like a story?
That just sounds like the way people talk behind closed doors.
If you put me in that situation, do you think that at least once I would have asked the question, hey, do you think we should just go after Hillary or go after Comey?
Because the reasons for going after them appear to me stronger than the reasons that people are coming after me.
Should we consider that?
And then people say no.
And then I go, okay, I heard your reasons, so I won't do it.
And as we can see, he didn't do it.
So once this is reported by CNN, it sort of morphs a little bit because you're not in the room.
So here's one of the most important things about communication that you can understand.
Things that you say at a rally in the context of, you know, entertaining a crowd are different than than what you would say at a press conference and are different from what you would say in what you think is gonna be a private meeting among your staff.
So the way you talk in each of these contexts is quite different because it's a different audience and it will be received a different way.
What CNN is doing, and this is a clever trick, they're taking a private conversation and they're moving it to the public.
Just the very act of doing that alone should make this sound wrong.
Does it? It does.
They moved it from the private context where it didn't mean much of anything.
It's just one of a thousand ideas that people kicked around and decided not to act on.
Suppose we had a full list of all the things that the president suggested, you know, said, hey, what about this, and all the things that his aides had suggested, and then decided not to do.
Don't you think that's a big list?
All the things they kicked around, and then they said, okay, there's a good reason we can't do that, and so we won't do it.
So what CNN has done is a little sleight of hand that you don't recognize if you're not doing communication for a living.
They took a private conversation, they moved it to another domain, acting as if it were public, and then it's all wrong.
That's easy to do if you are moving the context from one to another.
Another thing, here's an opinion piece, I haven't read it yet, but let me click on it, called Our Fragile President, by one of the president's usual critics.
So now somebody is reading the president's mind, and they've decided that instead of him being a counterpuncher and a tough guy, that he's mentally fragile.
How exactly do you know that?
Because all of the evidence is that he has the toughest mentality I've ever seen.
Take, for example, the Saudi situation.
Do you think the president was unaware that there would be enormous pushback about the morality of going soft on Saudi Arabia?
Of course he knew that.
He did it anyway. So why did the president choose what anyone, any normal person would have known?
So I'm not reading his mind.
I'm just saying something that anybody would have known.
Anybody would have known that his pushback for the Saudi Arabia statement would be huge.
But he did it anyway, right?
Is that what you do if you're trying to, if you're fragile?
Do fragile people intentionally take in public the hardest choice that will be criticized the most?
They kind of don't.
That would be an irrational thing to do if you were fragile and you were just looking out for yourself.
The easiest thing that the president could have done is just agree with every other frickin' person in the world.
That's what a fragile person does.
Just go along with the crowd.
What the president did was Decided that he could take the heat.
So the president is, like Jesus, like Jesus, dying for our sins.
Worst analogy ever.
I'm not trying to persuade you here.
I'm trying to make a point.
The president is saying fairly directly, I realize how bad this looks.
I'm gonna take it all personally.
So that you, the country, you, the rest of the country, can retain your moral standing.
Think about it.
The president has allowed everyone else in the country to maintain their moral standing by criticizing him.
And they maintain their moral standing.
He doesn't. He gives up everything.
for the country so he's the immoral one but he's also making the adult leadership decision that how do we get to a place where the citizens of the country Can keep their moral standard as they are.
Because the citizens are hopping mad, right?
The citizens are saying, no, no, we're moral people.
We cannot condone this.
And they're saying it loudly, publicly.
They're saying it in every publication.
Both the left and the right.
It's the most unifying thing I've seen lately, which is the entire country saying, no, we are moral people.
We are above this.
The President has created a solution where he alone We'll die for this decision.
Now it's sort of a, hopefully, a temporary political death, meaning that he's taking all the heat.
The Jesus analogy is not meant to persuade.
I'm just making an example of somebody who sacrifices.
So one of the tests of whether your analogy is useless or useful It's useful to describe a new concept, and if you could describe that same concept without the analogy, as I just did, it's a person taking a sacrifice for the greater good, then the analogy is just a shortcut.
If I was doing it because I wanted you to think Trump was Jesus, that's probably not my best play.
So while everybody gets to exercise their moral indignation, and by the way, I haven't done this yet, so I would like to join in with the rest of the country and say, my God, I don't want to be associated with the murder of a journalist.
That's the worst thing.
Moral thing I've seen in 10 minutes.
It's a pretty immoral world, so there are lots of examples.
So I would like to join with everyone in the United States except our president.
Everyone. I'm going to join with everyone in the United States except the president.
I'm going to oppose him with my strongest moral fiber.
And I really do.
I'm not even kidding about that.
From a moral perspective, Being nice to somebody who just bone-sawed his critic, there's no way you can defend that.
It's indefensible on a moral level.
On a practical level, on a self-interest level, on a strategic level, it's really easy to defend.
On those levels, it's really easy to defend.
But only one person is going to take that heat and And luckily, it's not you and it's not me.
It's just the president.
He has decided to take the adult decision.
Now, I have referred to his critics on this as taking the child position.
The child position is, look at all these complicated variables.
There's only one that matters.
That's what children do.
They look at a complicated situation and say, I want candy.
But it's dinner time. It's bad for you.
It's bad for your health. It's bad in the long run.
I want candy.
That's the child's view.
So the child's view on Saudi Arabia is we can't work with the Saudis.
They killed the guy. That's immoral.
We can't be on that side.
I want candy. They're leaving out all of the other complexities of the Middle East.
It's not adult thinking.
But luckily there is exactly one adult And as luck would have it, he's in charge.
So he got that going for you.
I would also suggest that those who are saying that the United States is what it is, the most powerful nation, because of our moral fiber, may not have a good understanding of history.
I would go so far as to say That the reason the United States is as powerful and as strong as it is might be closer to the immoral things we've done.
Take, for example, The United States, stolen from the Native Americans, who we murdered and gave diseases to and everything else.
Not we, I wasn't there.
But the United States is not exactly built on a moral base.
But in its defense, in its defense, the Christian ethic is a strong unifying thing for individuals and for business.
Christianity is really good for business because if two serious Christians get in the room to negotiate, they have a far higher feeling that the other one will do the right thing.
So there's nothing better you can do for an economy than dump a bunch of Christians in one place and say, all right, all you Christians, figure out how to make some money.
Christians are really good at that.
And one of the superpowers is that because they share a belief that God is watching them, they're a little more likely, maybe a lot more likely, to not cheat, even if maybe they could.
So Christianity is super useful for capitalism.
Those two things just fit together really well.
But I think it's a mistake to say that the United States got so strong because of our strong moral fiber.
That strong moral fiber helps a lot in individuals.
But at a national level, we did some bad things.
To get where we are, such as stealing the land from the Native Americans, just to pick one example, right?
You could go through your own examples of terrible things the United States has done, which doesn't make the United States terrible.
The country doesn't always follow the moral path.
I got myself into a weird little pickle with a periscope in which I talked about a hypothesis that people who read the most fiction Might be primed for confirmation bias.
Because when you read fiction, everything in the story has meaning.
Every clue means something to the story.
But in the real world, it's just coincidence.
So if you're used to seeing lots of coincidences, the next coincidence you see, you can say, well, there's another coincidence.
It doesn't mean anything. But if you read fiction all the time, and this is just a hypothesis, I'm not claiming there's any proof of this, the hypothesis is that your mind would be primed to see any kind of anecdotal situation as meaningful, because anecdotal situations are meaningful, In fiction. So I said that, but I used a bad chart in which I also threw in another concept about the likelihood that your major was part of it.
And if you looked at the chart, it looked like I was saying, which I was not saying, it looked like I was saying that Republicans are more likely to be the scientists.
And in fact, that's obviously the opposite.
Most scientists lean left.
So, a lot of people who are, and here's the funny part, the people who complained and are getting on me like I'm the dumbest guy who ever lived, are the people who didn't understand the point.
I'll bet you almost all of them are fiction readers.
In other words, I made a point that fiction readers are more likely to draw conclusions from a few clues than maybe a scientist would.
A scientist would say, yeah, the clues point in one direction, but that doesn't mean anything.
You've got to look at all the clues.
You've got to put it in context. You've got to put it in a controlled study.
Just the fact that it looks like it leans in one direction really doesn't tell you anything.
So I ended up proving my point by causing a whole bunch of people to think I'm really stupid.
Wasn't exactly the plan, but it's humorous.
Just the same. All right.
Oh, somebody's doing it here.
So somebody's saying, Um, Scott.
Well, let me see if I can make that come back.
I used to be able to scroll back these comments.
I was going to make fun of somebody here, but I lost the exact comment.
Correlation doesn't mean causation.
So, right.
I said most scientists don't lean left.
Now, if you were going to test my hypothesis, as opposed to the one you think I said, my hypothesis is that among scientists, the ones who read the most fiction, Would be the most susceptible to being fooled by anecdotal non-scientific information.
So you'd have to look at that class and say, all right, within scientists, some of them read a lot of fiction, some don't.
Is there any difference? And my hypothesis is that there would be.
Now the question of why are most scientists also Democrats?
That could be explained by a lot of different things.
It could be socioeconomic factors which cause you to go to college in the first place.
It could be that most professors are in an environment where all the other professors tend to be liberal, so that over time even the scientists become liberal, at least the professors do.
So it's very possible.
That scientists being a minority of any college situation, that those professors end up over time becoming liberals, and then they're training people to the same point of view.
Because if you're a liberal professor, you're going to say, everybody who doesn't believe in climate science, models, which are not science, but that's another story, must be a bunch of dumb Republicans.
So it does make sense, because we're not talking about one variable controlling everything in the world, That among scientists, because they're in a big environment in which they're the minority, and most of them are liberal, over time, you'd expect that most scientists at universities...
Would be liberal, and therefore they would be raising more liberal scientists.
So that's an entirely different set of factors than what I was talking about, which is if you read too much fiction, it probably primes you because everything you do primes you.
It shouldn't be the exception.
It would be strange if it's the exception.
Now... Fiction reading scientists think outside the box better, too.
That might be true.
I would not doubt that a bit.
Yeah. And by the way, if you ever meet a Republican or a conservative scientist, they will tell you that they keep their head down.
I think they will tell you that they don't talk about their views too much in public.
I have had that experience of talking to a conservative scientist, and it was fascinating to hear his opinion.
Somebody says, that's me, I don't talk about it.
All right, now we're also entering the holiday phase.
And during the holiday phase, I would draw your attention to the following phenomenon.
Have you noticed that the news, and it doesn't matter which side of the news you're talking about, the news tends to have a certain, let's say, temperature, which is, ah, things are going wrong, there's problems, there's problems.
And that temperature doesn't seem to change, even as the news changes.
Have you noticed that? Have you noticed that whatever news there is, if you had news, let's say, that's nuclear war, risk, or terror attacks, on a scale of 1 to 10, those things would be, let's say, a 10, and of how excited your treatment of it should be.
But the excitement stays the same no matter what stories are filling the news.
So what you should expect is that over the holidays, the big news slows down or stops.
In other words, we shouldn't see much in the way of actual big news in the next six weeks.
But the news business will still keep you ratcheted up to a 10.
So what you should see is small issues That are being promoted like they're big issues.
So you should see in the next six weeks, especially from CNN, tons of mind-reading stories and tons of watch how many unnamed sources are behind the biggest stories.
So when you have real news and real big problems, you talk about them.
But if you don't have real news, and we're not going to have it for six weeks or so, if it's typical...
Then you should see things like Ivanka's email becoming the biggest problem in the world.
You should see things like the president's treatment of Saudi Arabia, which if you think about it, is a pretty small problem that the news business has decided to make a big problem.
Because bad people are killing people all the time and we're still doing business with them.
It's sort of business as usual.
So, if you take a look at China, for example, they are apparently putting their Muslim minority population in concentration camps.
Think about that.
We deal with China.
And China is literally rounding up their Muslim population and putting them in concentration camps.
I think it's UIGR, U-I-G-U-H-R, something like that.
The UIGR population, they're, I think, ethnic Turks, maybe.
And there are a few million of them.
But they're actually, there's basically, you know, the first step toward, you know, ethnic cleansing...
And China, we do more business with than anybody, don't we?
So you always have to keep things in context.
So you're going to see things that are naturally small look like they're the biggest problem in the world in the next six weeks.
And then at the end of six weeks...
At the end of six weeks we'll just stop talking about the things that were, well, there was an anonymous source who said the president was angry about something.
We think that in his interior thoughts he had a bad thought.
We believe that he's not considering all the variables because we're reading his mind and it's not what we would have done.
We have a half opinion about doing this because we're going to ignore all the other variables and just look at this one because that's what makes it news.
Otherwise it wouldn't be news if you put it in context.
So you're going to see nothing but fake news, half-pinions, mind-reading.
Oh, and also, the other one is weird speculation about the future.
So, for example, I'm seeing this week, if we give up our moral leadership because of this joshogi thing, then everything will fall apart.
To which I say...
I don't see any connecting tissue.
How does that argument work?
Can you fill in some details?
That if we give up our moral leadership on this one thing, the Middle East will start acting differently?
Have you met the Middle East?
Has anybody met the Middle East?
I'll tell you one thing they don't care about.
One person getting killed.
If there's anything they care less about in the Middle East is one person got killed.
Because if they were caring about that, they wouldn't have time to do anything else.
Because you know how often one person gets killed for some evil political or religious reason in the Middle East?
If you could hear the ticker, it would be like click, click, click, click, click.
That's all the people getting killed for terrible reasons in the Middle East right now.
Click, click, click, click, click, click.
Cheshogi was just one who got a lot of attention.
So, which is not to minimize the brutality and horror of it.
I'm just saying that you've got to see these things in context.
Um... Yeah, as somebody noted here, I have a very tough holiday season coming up.
If you've never had a family member die before the holidays, I don't recommend it.
Because the next six weeks are going to be tough for me.
But I'll get through it.
Read Gordon Chang on China.
Yeah, Gordon Chang's my favorite go-to guy for that region.
Well, thank you everybody.
You're all so nice. But Fentanyl China, we'll be sorry.
And the K, H, and Khashoggi is pronounced like a rasping cough.
That sounds about right. Alright, well, I really...
I appreciate all your good thoughts.
They do mean a lot to me.
And I think I'm done for today.
Somebody keeps saying in the comments, so I'm going to...
I'll mention it. Somebody's trying to come up with a nickname for Kamala Harris.
And somebody is suggesting Koala Kamala.
Like a koala bear.
I think that's funny because a koala bear...
They're sort of famous for being the most useless animal.
The most useless animal can't even take care of itself.
If you didn't feed it, it would starve to death.
They're slow. They're like, oh, the koala bear.
I can barely move.
It's funny, but it's not nearly as weaponized as the word cold.
Cold, you're not going to beat.
I don't think. I don't think you're going to beat that word as a kill shot.
All right, that's enough for now. I'll talk to you all.
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