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Feb. 19, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

18:45

Episode 423 Scott Adams: Scott Solves the Climate Debate and Saves the World (Really)

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	Hey everybody, come on in here.
	This is a special Periscope on one topic.
	That topic is me saving the whole world in the context of climate change.
	Now you could look at this two ways.
	I'm either saving us from doing something that is the wrong thing, or I'm saving us from doing nothing, and that's the wrong thing.
	But whatever the right thing is, I'm going to save you from doing the wrong thing.
	And here's the context.
	We live in a world where smart people are telling us that we have a disaster looming in the terms of the climate.
	And if we don't act really aggressively, we're in big trouble as a species.
	At the same time, a huge chunk of the world simply doesn't believe it.
	So that's your problem.
	We need to figure out, do we really have a problem with climate change?
	Or are we just being persuaded that we do?
	And I had a realization that some of you saw in my earlier Periscope.
	But I'm going to break it down to you in a way that I believe quite literally could solve this problem.
	Because it's not a science problem.
	It's a persuasion problem.
	And no matter what you think is the underlying truth, you would have to agree that half of the country or something like that has been persuaded in the wrong direction.
	Whichever direction you think is the wrong direction, there are a lot of people on it.
	And I'm going to suggest a way to solve it.
	And I'm going to do that by teaching you a little bit about persuasion, so you're going to learn something no matter what.
	One rule of persuasion that's totally important is that you need to talk to people in the language that they understand.
	You can't talk to people in your own language.
	You have to talk to them in the language that they speak.
	And I've identified that that might be the largest problem.
	With the debate, is that people are not talking to the people that they're trying to persuade in the language that persuades.
	And I'm gonna give you a concrete example of that.
	It looks like this.
	There are three pillars of climate change persuasion that you see the most.
	The hockey stick graph, the prediction models, and the 97% of climate scientists agree.
	But here's the problem.
	That is an argument that speaks in the language of some people, but is anti-persuasive to another group of people.
	And it looks like this.
	Now, these are just proxies for people who think the same way.
	But if you're young, let's say in your 20s or you're a teenager, or you're a journalist, and somebody shows you the hockey stick graph, you say to yourself, that looks pretty persuasive.
	Why wouldn't you believe it?
	It comes from credible scientists.
	They show you their work.
	They show you the data. Totally persuasive.
	Show any hockey stick graph to someone who's older or has business experience and what will be their first reaction?
	Bullshit. Prior to even hearing about the climate change argument, it was widely famously known and universally known among business people that when anybody shows you a PowerPoint graph on any topic whatsoever, and it's got a hockey stick shape, You automatically assume they're lying or they're persuading you of a bunch of bullshit.
	So if you're older and you've seen a lot of certainty before that turned out to be wrong, you've seen, for example, that scientists were all on the same side of climate and of nutrition for years and were completely wrong about what is good nutrition.
	You saw that they were unified thinking that stress caused ulcers And they were all wrong.
	The experts said that the year 2000 bug would be cataclysmic.
	They were all wrong.
	We saw all the experts say that we would reach peak oil.
	They were all wrong.
	So pretty much people who are older and experienced have seen this pattern before, and if you show them the hockey stick, They're automatically primed to think you're lying.
	Because the hockey stick is the most famous symbol of lying in the corporate world.
	Would you know that if you were young?
	If you were 18 and you never had a job, would you be aware that the hockey stick graph is literally a symbol of lying in the corporate world?
	You probably didn't know that, right?
	A lot of you didn't know that. And by the way, look at the comments and you'll see that the people who have business experience are all going to confirm that no matter what the topic is, if somebody shows you a hockey stick graph, that's your first reaction.
	Bullshit. Because it usually is.
	Let's go to the prediction models.
	If you're young, or you're a journalist, and the best scientists in the world come to you and say, we've done these complicated prediction models, and they're looking at 80 to 100 years, and we think these are very useful, and they tell the story, and a lot of them are lining up the same way.
	They hindcast perfectly, meaning that the models do fit with the past.
	And for the last several years, they claim, you might argue this, but they'll claim that the predictions have been accurate.
	Therefore, this is good evidence.
	If you're young or you're a journalist, that's pretty persuasive.
	Now go to somebody who's older or has business experience and you say, I have a complicated multivariable model going out 80 years.
	What's the first reaction?
	Bullshit. Doesn't even matter what topic you're talking about.
	Doesn't matter if it's climate change or a financial prediction.
	It doesn't matter what it is.
	If somebody says they have a complicated multivariable model that goes out for years, bullshit.
	Now, remember, I'm talking about persuasion.
	I'm not talking about the underlying truth.
	It could be true that climate change has all the risks that the scientists are telling us.
	That could be true.
	But the way it's presented is as if it's a lie to these people.
	To these people, it's completely persuasive.
	Let's do another one. 97% agree.
	If you're young... Or you're a journalist and you hear that 97% of the people working in this field agree on the same conclusion.
	That's very persuasive.
	Very persuasive.
	Go into a meeting with a bunch of experienced business people and tell them that 97% of climate scientists agree.
	What do those experienced business people say?
	Really? You're that accurate?
	97%? And what did the smart ones say?
	Is there any difference between what the smartest scientists say and the not so smart scientists say?
	Can you really measure it?
	Can you convince me that somebody really talked to the right people?
	There's something about this claim that's just automatically fishy to an experienced business person.
	So here's my point.
	The three most accessible persuasion facts, and accessible means that you don't have to be a scientist to understand the general idea.
	So if somebody's arguing about, you know, radiation and forcings and the troposphere, most people can't follow that.
	So the scientific arguments are not persuasive because we just don't know.
	So instead, these arguments are used And the scientists who bring them out are probably closer to this category themselves.
	In other words, these are arguments that the scientists presumably would find convincing.
	And therefore they use it to try to convince others.
	But here's the problem.
	They're not speaking the same language as the people they're trying to persuade.
	The people they're trying to persuade, in many cases, they don't have to be older or experienced in business, but they think a similar way.
	These people See these things as anti-persuasive.
	In other words, they're literally the opposite of persuasive.
	They will talk you out of believing it if you use these.
	How do we solve this?
	The very first thing we need to do is understand that we're talking different languages to different populations.
	And if you're talking these three things and trying to convince people who have business experience, you can't get there from here.
	These things will never be persuasive to people with business experience, and that's a lot of people.
	So what do you do?
	I've got a suggestion. Starts with this question.
	It's a question we should all be asking on the topic of climate.
	What would it take to change your mind?
	What would it take to change your mind?
	Now the reason that that's a good persuasion question is that people like to be consistent.
	So people who have an opinion, whether they're afraid of climate risk or they're not, they're not likely to want to change their opinion even if you give them good evidence.
	Even the facts, the argument, it doesn't change people's opinion because they like to stay consistent with what they said before.
	Now, that's not the only thing going on here, but it's an important one.
	So one of the ways around that is to ask somebody, what would it take to change your mind?
	Now the clever part about this is that once you've answered that question, and let's say you said, okay, if you could demonstrate this to me, I will change my mind.
	Now they have two consistencies, not just one.
	The first consistency is, I want to keep the same opinion I used to have.
	But the second one that you've introduced is that they've committed in writing or verbally to change their mind if a certain specific test is met.
	Now they have two things that they have to be consistent with and it's sort of a tie.
	This gives people the freedom to change their mind and still be consistent because they would be consistent with their statement that if you prove this X, whatever X is, I will change my mind.
	So they have something they can be consistent with.
	I'll tell you mine. So here's what it would take to convince me that climate change is a catastrophic problem that we have to do everything we can as soon as possible to deal with it.
	My choice for the top skeptic is Tony Heller.
	I want to be very clear that I don't know if anything he says is true.
	I don't know.
	I do know that I've been looking at a lot of skeptical arguments, and I find him the most persuasive across the biggest range of topics in climate change.
	So I've asked him for his top five.
	What are the top five arguments that you would die on?
	What hill would you die on?
	What's your top five?
	Because you don't want to play whack-a-mole forever.
	You don't want to debunk a few things and then have them just go to the sixth thing and the seventh thing.
	You want to say, what are the top five that if they can be debunked, You'll give up and say, okay, I was just kidding.
	Not really just kidding, but you know what I mean.
	Secondly, it has to be an iterative debate, meaning that it won't be enough to hear what Tony says, and it won't be enough to hear what the climate scientists say in return.
	You need to iterate it enough times that you feel you've exhausted the argument for just five items.
	And then here's the other key.
	I won't be convinced unless the last part of the exchange is Heller and he still doesn't convince me.
	So this is very much like a criminal trial where the defense gets to talk last.
	Because whoever goes last is going to have an advantage.
	So there's an advantage for going first and there's an advantage for going last.
	If the argument iterates, let's say there's a climate claim, there's what Tony Heller says is wrong about it, then the climate scientists say, no, Tony got that wrong, here's why, then he goes in.
	So that's iterative.
	But however long that is, whether it's two iterations or three iterations, I need to be convinced under the condition that the skeptic goes last.
	And if you can meet this test, I'm all in on climate change being a huge problem.
	Is there anybody else who would be with me on this?
	Is there anybody else?
	I'm not sure you've done the work to know who is your favorite skeptic, but I think the top five that Tony comes up with will be a pretty solid group of points that would be common to other scientists who are skeptics as well.
	Looking at the comments, a lot of you say, you're in, you're in, you're in.
	Now, who knows if this will work?
	I have asked Tony for his top five.
	I will publish them, and I will open it up for scientists to comment, or even non-scientists, to give us links that debunk what Tony said.
	We'll keep it up there. We'll keep it alive for a while.
	We'll iterate a few times.
	Just on the top five, we're not going to introduce new topics.
	And then Heller's going to go last when we think we've exhausted the topics.
	And then I'm going to let you know if it changed my mind.
	Alright? So...
	I'm just going to summarize for those of you joining us late.
	If you want to persuade, you have to talk in the language of the person you're trying to persuade, not the language you would like to talk in.
	And if you're talking to business people or people who have been around for a while, the least persuasive things you could say is look at my hockey stick graph because that's literally a symbol of Of lying in the corporate world.
	Literally, a hockey stick graph is a symbol of a lie in the corporate world.
	Probably not in the science world, but in the corporate world it is.
	Prediction models are a symbol of a lie.
	As our saying everybody agrees just gives you reasons to question that.
	So... That's my larger point, is the reason that we can't agree is that the scientists and the journalists, let's call them a team, they're speaking their own language.
	They're not speaking the language of the people they're trying to persuade.
	To get past that, we'll do the Tony Heller test.
	And by the way, this is the first time he's hearing about it.
	He knows that I asked him for his top five and that I want to publish that.
	But it's the first time he's heard this argument.
	So to get past it, just five top claims from the top skeptic as, in my opinion, the top most persuasive skeptic, which doesn't mean he's right about anything.
	It only means that I've looked at all the skeptics and he seems to be the most convincing.
	Even if it's not right.
	So we'll find out. So that's my test.
	If Tony can prevail on his top five criticisms of the climate consensus, then I'm going to be a skeptic.
	And if he does not prevail, I'm going to come down hard on the opinion that there's something big to worry about.
	I should tell you, for those who don't know, I am genuinely Undecided.
	And I think that's pretty rare.
	And I'm genuinely undecided because both sides seem to be lying to me.
	The critics that I've looked at, a lot of them have such transparently bad arguments that they're not credible.
	Likewise, since I'm older and I have business experience, when I look at the top arguments for climate science, they're packaged as a fraud.
	Which doesn't mean they're a fraud.
	It probably is more of an indication that the people packaging it don't know how to package it to be persuasive to this population.
	That's probably what's going on, but I don't know.
	That's what we'll find out.
	Alright, that's my solution to fix the world.
	And by the way, if I come down on the position after all this, if I come up with the opinion that climate change is a huge problem, as the experts are warning us, I'm going to start persuading on the topic of Generation 4 safe nuclear power.
	Probably the only way to get to a quick enough fix to make a difference.
	For those of you who don't know, Generation 4 are the Types of designs that do not melt down.
	So the risk of a nuclear disaster are essentially zero, maybe nothing zero, but they're designed so that everything can go wrong and it still won't melt down.
	That's the new designs.
	So we'll talk about that later, but I don't need to unless I'm convinced climate science is the problem that the experts say.

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