All Episodes
Previous Next
March 22, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:02:27
Episode 460 Scott Adams: False Memories, Russian Collusion, 2020 Forecast, Climate Change Strategy
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
What a morning, what a morning.
One of my favorite mornings ever.
Why? Because I get to spend it with you.
And I'm not even kidding.
I love doing these periscopes.
I really do. It's actually my highlight of the day.
At least the work portion of my day.
I have other highlights.
So... I'm going to look at a couple of my tweets here this morning so that I can track along with what I've been talking about.
All right. So, let me start with a little thing that I like to call the simultaneous sip.
You, who are already listening to me, are on time!
And if you have some kind of a vessel for liquids, it could be a cup or a mug, it could be a chalice or a stein, possibly a thermos, if you have filled it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee, you can join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Now, I'd like to start...
With a little bit of fake news.
And this one's kind of fun.
Most of you are probably familiar with a very well-known author.
And probably he would have other titles such as maybe Statistician.
I don't know. There are probably other titles for him.
But Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
So here's the interesting story.
That might differ from whatever you're seeing on the internet right now.
So, I almost don't know how to describe this story because it's so weird that I don't know if you'll believe it.
You know, sometimes things are so weird that even if you just describe them accurately, people will say, well, I don't know about that.
That doesn't sound like something that's really happening.
So, telling you ahead of time, I'm going to tell you a tale Then you probably won't believe.
So I noticed on the internet that people were talking about some kind of an argument that I was having with Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
And I didn't know what it was about because I had blocked him for being unpleasant, but I don't remember why.
In other words, some time ago, it wasn't too long ago, maybe a couple weeks, I don't even remember.
There was something he said, and I was in a blocking mood, and I blocked him.
Now here's the important part of the story.
I don't remember why.
I don't remember what the topic was.
I don't remember what he said.
I don't remember why it bothered me.
I was just in a blocky mood, and I have a vague memory that he was being unpleasant, and I happened to be in the kind of mood where I thought, you know, what if I just removed unpleasantness from my Twitter experience?
So there are a lot of people that I block lately, not exactly because of what they've said, not exactly because of maybe their attitude or their knowledge or really any of that.
I'm starting to block people for my happiness.
In other words, if somebody makes me less happy than I could be, for whatever reason, their attitude, the topics they care about, it doesn't really matter.
It's not really a statement about them personally.
It's just that my exposure to their opinions is not making me happy.
So whatever the reason was, I blocked him.
That started the assumption that there was something specific that he and I were disagreeing with.
And as best I could tell, without looking at his feed, there seems to be some kind of idea, and I'm not making this up.
I swear I'm not making this up.
But there's a conversation happening about me And about some kind of alleged problem that I have with Nassim Nicholas Taleb that I'm not aware of.
I'm literally not even aware of it, but apparently it's a topic of conversation.
And so I've been seeing how long I could go without knowing why I'm in a conversation or disagreement with Taleb.
I actually don't know.
But other people have been joining in and taking sides and stuff.
And the only thing that I could pick out of the context is that I had once made the claim that if you know you have bad data, it's a good idea to correct it with the good data, you know, assuming you can be sure that your good data is really good, and you're sure that the bad data was really bad.
Now, I'm hearing from third parties, but not from Taleb, because I blocked him, so I don't know what he's saying.
He's blocked me too, so he doesn't know what I'm saying.
But I keep hearing from people that he's taking the side that there are situations in which bad data is better than good data.
Now, I take it on faith that he didn't say anything like that.
But that's how it's being presented to me.
So because I think it's fun, I keep saying I'm taking the side that says that good data is better than bad data.
And I'm watching people argue with me.
And I think it's funny because I don't really think that there's an intellectual argument in favor of inaccurate data.
And people keep telling me, no, no, Scott, you're just not listening.
There's an actually really good argument in favor of bad data.
Now, some of you have already caught on, right?
Obviously, this conversation is not really happening.
In the real world, there is no such thing as Taleb taking the side of bad data while I'm taking the side of good data.
But I keep pushing it to see how long people will believe that's actually what's happening.
And honestly, I don't know what's happening.
I really don't know what's happening.
I don't know what Talos' opinion is.
I don't know what topic we're talking about.
I don't know what he says about data.
I don't know what he said about me.
But I'm just saying the same thing over again.
Well, I'm just taking the side that if you can replace bad data with good data, you should do that.
There's probably no exception to that.
And I'm watching the appearance that he and I are disagreeing on something when, in fact, I don't even know what he's talking about.
All right, so the funny thing is that there's a general opinion that he and I are having a disagreement, but I'm allegedly in the disagreement.
I don't know what the topic is.
I honestly don't even know the topic, but something about data.
All right, that's fun.
If you are watching the ongoing saga of...
My attempts, and now other people have been very active in it as well, primarily Joel Pollack writing a number of articles talking about the fine people hoax.
If you're new to my Periscopes, you probably have heard the fake news that the President of the United States allegedly called the racists in Charlottesville fine people.
That actually never happened.
It's the most widespread fake news that is generally believed, but you can look at the transcripts and you can see that he says in direct language, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the racists.
He says it in direct language.
I'm not talking about them.
But it's widely reported as, oh, that's exactly who he's talking about, even though he said it directly.
Now, what's interesting about this, when we have a world full of fake news on lots of topics, why did I pick this one thing to really die on this hill?
And it's because this one thing, this one piece of fake news is not like the rest.
It has a very different nature.
And what's different about it is that, first of all, it's the mother of all fake news.
Everything that the anti-Trumpers believe about Trump is built on this little fake news foundation that he once said directly that racists were fine people, which, of course, didn't happen.
But if you believe he did say that, Then everything that you build on top of that starts making sense.
But it wouldn't make sense if you knew that he'd said the opposite, which is what actually happened.
Now, so that's the first thing.
The first thing is that not all fake news is equal.
This fake news, it's sort of like the alpha news.
It's the fake news that informs all the other fake news.
It's the central spine of the fake news about President Trump.
If this one spine could be removed, the rest of the body is likely to fall apart like a boneless chicken.
Now, that's the optimistic view.
People do stick to their fake news pretty diligently.
But my hypothesis was this.
If I could take one Super-prevalent piece of fake news that people believe about the president, and I could show them with evidence that just can't be doubted, because it's right there on the page.
It says it in clear language, and yet it's being reported as the opposite.
And I thought, well, this is unique, because usually you can't prove something this easily.
I mean, normally, if people are saying the president is bad for the economy, It's like this big complicated argument and you can see arguments on both sides and maybe it was all Obama and maybe it was the Fed.
There are very few situations where the complexity of the disagreement is so simple.
He either did or did not say the Nazis in Charlottesville were fine people.
Can we prove why he said?
Yes. We have a video and we have the transcript.
And they match, and they say in clear words that he did not call them fine people.
He said the opposite, in clear words.
Now, that's what makes it unique.
You almost can never so simply and so directly and so conclusively prove that the news is fake news.
It's very rare. Normally it's a big, complicated, hard to dissect situation.
So I thought, if I can make people understand How badly they've been duped on just this one thing.
It has two things going for it.
One, it can be proven beyond any doubt.
Any doubt. Not even reasonable, but any doubt.
That's very rare. And it's the most important thing.
So if I could do that, it would really change how people understood their world.
Because here's what you learn as a hypnotist.
Here's what you learn as somebody who has studied persuasion.
I'm describing myself now.
If you were to look at a situation such as the widespread reporting, misreporting, that the president called racist, fine people, what do most of you believe explains that?
Most of you are going to say, well, obviously, the bad guys are lying.
Most of you think that, right?
Well, if it's not true, and yet they continue to say it's not true, how can you explain that?
Obviously, they're just lying because they're on the other side of the political spectrum.
If you're a hypnotist, as I am, if you've studied false memories, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, the whole psychology side of the world, you probably don't see it that way.
On top of that, I've had private conversations with enough people who believed the fine people fake and That I've determined by far the most likely explanation is that they believe it.
Now you say to yourself, no, Scott, Scott, Scott, you can't believe something that's so clearly fake.
It would be one thing to believe the president wasn't good for the economy, or to believe that ISIS isn't 100% solved, or to believe that things will or will not go well with trade with China.
Those are big, complicated things.
But if you're lying about this simple, objectively false statement of the fine people, if you're lying about that, there's no explanation other than you're a liar.
That's what most people think.
That is completely wrong.
That is actually the least likely explanation.
The thought that they are intentionally looking at the news And that their jobs are to report the news.
They're news professionals.
And you think that they know it's false, they know it's easily proven as false, and they still say it on TV? That's actually the least likely explanation.
By far the most likely explanation, the one that is the most common, is that they actually believe it's true.
False memories, and here's the thing that most of you don't know, but people who have studied the mind and psychology do know.
So you might have learned the fields of, let's say, economics and business, and you might have learned about science.
But if you didn't learn about psychology, you'd be missing really the key element.
People who know psychology would say, false memories are the texture of your entire experience.
Most of what you understand as your memories are false memories.
Let me say that again.
The vast majority of your memories are not real.
They're approximates.
They're cobbled together from things you're thinking at the moment.
They are not photographic reproductions of the past.
Most of your memories are assembled from the fake news in your own head, basically.
How many of you have had the experience, let's say even in the last two weeks, where you had a disagreement with somebody about a fact, and then somebody whipped out an email or a text and showed that you remembered it exactly backwards?
Happened to be twice this week, I think.
You know, once went my way, once didn't.
It's the most common experience in the world that two people remember the same thing differently.
Fake memories, false memories, Are the texture of our entire existence.
Once you understand that, you can start to understand why things are the way they are.
In other words, the news will start making sense.
The way people act makes sense.
As soon as you realize the basic texture of reality is false memory.
That's the norm.
So when you say to me, well, there are two possibilities why people keep saying this to find people wrong.
One is that they all have coordinated and they've all, either they've had a meeting or maybe they just all know it's a good thing to do, that they're all going to lie on, wait for it, all the smartest news professionals in the world have decided to lie about the one thing that's easily proven as a lie.
You think they would pick that?
Do you think that even if they wanted to remove this president, they would pick the one thing that's so easily falsifiable?
You would never do that intentionally.
You know, I can imagine that in the big world there's somebody who might have done it intentionally, but you can't tell me that thousands of news professionals All decided to lie on the one thing that is the easiest to debunk.
By far the easiest.
It's right there on a page.
They reported it.
They reported it themselves.
CNN reported it right before they started reporting it wrong.
It's possible. I don't like to speak in absolutes, right?
Because that's how dumb people talk.
Dumb people say this definitely happened or this definitely didn't happen.
I like to talk in percentages, right?
The odds of them lying about that are very low.
All right, so enough on that.
I see people complaining I've gone on too much about that.
So I have a book coming out in October called Loser Think.
And one of the main themes of the book is this, that your ability to understand your world is very much informed by what experience you've had.
Now, that's obvious, right? The experience you've had in life gives you better or worse ability to understand the world.
But I've taken it to the next level, and I've suggested that the things you've studied Give you superpowers or they deny you superpowers.
For example, Brit Hume recently tweeted an article by Dan Cortez in which he was talking about the fine people hoax.
And Brit Hume was saying, basically he was realizing that the news had been reported wrong for all this time.
Now, if you don't know Brit Hume, the thing you need to know is that he's a Fox News guy.
But he's not really the opinion guy.
He's a credible, let's say, probably in the top tier of the most credible people.
In the news business, whether you're talking Fox News or anywhere else, he is willing to take the side that the evidence suggests.
And if you've watched him for a while, yeah, he's a stray shooter, which feels rare, doesn't it?
But he's probably among the more credible news people working today.
And he said, whoops, basically, I'm paraphrasing here, but his quote, his tweet suggested that he now understands the fine people thing was fake news.
So then that got retweeted today by, let's see, by Russell Roberts.
Now, at EconTalker, that's his Twitter handle, Now, he's apparently a respected, noted economist.
And what he says about this is, he says, I try to stay away from most things Trump, but this story is crazy, talking about the fine people hoax.
Evidently, I was misled as to what Trump said after Charlottesville.
Truth is elusive. All right, so here's the point I'm going to make.
Russell Roberts is a noted economist.
And capable economist.
So he's learned sort of, you know, the ways of economics.
So he's educated in facts and economists also get educated a little bit in psychology because you can't really understand economics unless you understand how people act.
So his level of understanding led him to look at the data As Dan Cortez laid it out and as you can see it in the transcripts, he looked at the data and the data caused him to change his opinion.
Now, does that sound like a nothing?
How rare is it?
How often have you ever seen in the realm of politics How often have you ever seen someone say, oh, the data has changed, so therefore I change my opinion.
And guess what? I'll do it in public.
I'll do it in public.
I don't even know if I've ever seen it.
I don't know if I've ever seen it happen.
But here's the point.
And then I think, my God, my God, what are people going to say to that?
What would be the response to watching this highly rational person, who's no fan of the president, say that the facts were misreported, I changed my opinion?
What will that do to other people?
Well, I go into the comments, and here's one.
From J.J. Verheyen.
And so J.J., talking about this fine people thing, he says, to accept, quote, fine people on both sides is to deny the reason for the gathering.
Okay, I don't really know what that means, right?
This flyer was created by the organizers, a provocation which culminated in the murder and injuries of those protesting the flyer.
Notice the blood. Were you misled or are you a victim of revisionism?
So this is a commenter who looked at the same facts as the established economist and was not moved by it.
So changing the facts did not change this person's opinion.
And so what's the first thing I did when I saw this dissenter?
Yeah, somebody's saying word salad, correct.
So when you see somebody devolve into high-concept word salad, where they're trying to draw together concepts and, you know, form something out of nothing, and the words sort of fit together, but you don't know what they mean, yeah, that's word salad.
And it's a tell for cognitive dissonance.
So anyway, here's the punchline.
So he disagrees with the economist.
They both looked at the same facts.
The facts are just as plain as they could be, but he's come to a different opinion.
In other words, when I say a different opinion, I mean he didn't change his opinion.
So different facts did not change his opinion.
So I said to myself, I wonder what this guy does for a living.
He's an art director.
He's an art director.
Now, summarizing, the person who studied economics sees that the facts were wrong, looks at the correct facts, revises his opinion in public.
How often does that happen?
How many people revise their opinion in public?
Doesn't happen a lot.
The art director, who obviously had some kind of an art background, Look at the same information and maintained his original opinion and wrapped it around and wrapped it with word salad.
Now, my book, Loser Think, talks about this specific phenomenon and it talks about the skill stack you've developed and whether or not it gives you proper vision into reality.
So that's the macro theme of my book, that the people from art school probably see everything as a little bit more connected.
So here's my hypothesis.
If you're an artist, the thing that makes you an artist is that you don't see clean categories.
You see, for example, you know, this thing and this thing are normally not related, but the artist imagines that they can be.
The artist takes things and puts them together.
An artist combines things.
An artist says, I'll take a little of this and a little of that.
An artist is a conflator.
An artist is a combiner.
An artist says everything's connected.
This thing over here is going to move this thing over here.
It's all one big ball of stuff.
The economist says, let's look at this little basket.
I'm going to analyze this basket by itself.
This basket probably doesn't affect this basket.
They're just different things.
Completely different disciplines.
And I think that matters.
All right. I don't know if you've been enjoying...
I'm changing topics now.
I don't know if you've enjoyed this as much as I have.
But I'm watching the anti-Trumpers try to prepare themselves and us for a Mueller report that is anti-climatic.
So after two years, somebody says, Scott, you're an artist.
I actually am a trained economist with a master's in business.
And I do art as well.
So, but I'm a bad artist.
In terms of art, I'm a pretty bad one.
So I'm watching the people talk about how the Mueller report might underperform.
And my favorite one, oh my God, it was funny.
And I don't even remember who was interviewing them, but, oh, Chuck Todd.
So I was watching Chuck Todd interview Preet Bharara.
Now, if you're new to this, Chuck Dodd is a major anti-Trumper.
This was on MSNBC, which is a major anti-Trump network.
Pree Bharara was fired by Trump and is another major anti-Trumper who has been saying for I don't know how long, and he's a lawyer, so he's been saying for how long that Trump is in big trouble for probably collusion.
I don't know if he talked about collusion, but for obstruction of justice.
And so, Barrara, and I'm going to try to paraphrase as best I can the situation.
Barrara was indicating that we might be, you know, disappointed.
He didn't use that word, but there might not be much in the Mueller report.
Chuck Todd Was pushing back on that, saying, yeah, but maybe not the collusion, but certainly the obstruction.
And then Chuck Todd went through the laundry list of, well, he fired Comey, he did this, he did that.
Don't those all prove obstruction?
And then, in one of the funniest things I've ever seen on television, this anti-Trump prosecutor guy who's been saying Trump's in trouble forever, He says, looks at Chuck Dodd, he says, well, I don't think I ever said there was enough to indict him on obstruction.
You can see the life drain out of Chuck Dodd when he realized that Pri Barara was saying, I never said there was enough to indict him.
So this is after Todd had gone through the laundry list and his own guy, pre-Berrara, was like, well, not much there.
Because Berrara is no doubt getting prepared to be totally humiliated in terms of this Mueller thing.
Now, let's make some guesses about whether Trump knows What the Mueller report will be.
Do you think Trump already knows that the Mueller report will be a dud?
Well, let's look at the evidence.
I don't know the answer, but let's look at the evidence.
Number one, Trump has, surprisingly to many of you, but less surprising to me, has said that he would like the entire Mueller report released, but it's up to the Attorney General.
Now, what do you make of that?
Trump says the whole report should be released.
Fooling everybody, like people weren't expecting that, right?
I was expecting it a little bit, but generally it wasn't expected.
Trump is a good strategist.
There are two possibilities.
One, there's stuff in there that's really bad, in which case it's going to come out.
If there's stuff in it that's bad, it's going to come out.
It's going to be public. If there's stuff in there that's not bad, well then it doesn't matter if it comes out or not.
In fact, it'd be better if it comes out.
So Trump has taken the only smart approach, which I have to admit was a little non-obvious until recently.
Honestly, until he did it, I didn't realize how smart it was.
He takes the position that of course everybody wants to see it, because first of all it makes him look innocent.
I think the report itself is going to make him look innocent as well.
But even if there's a little bit in there that's negative, you know, maybe in the margins there's a little bit of something that he wouldn't like, he's still way better off releasing it all and just taking the hit on whatever the little stuff is.
Now, do we think that he has a preview of the reports?
Well, I think it's unlikely that anybody in an official capacity has met with the President and said, I'm going to give you a whole preview.
Here's what's in the report.
You know, you don't have to worry about it, so you might as well say you can, you might as well release it.
I don't think so.
I don't think that's happened.
But here's what I think might have happened.
And this is speculation, only speculation.
And it's based on just being alive and living in the real world.
And not only being alive and living in the rural world, but being in many situations in which I was trying to deduce what some group who had a secret was really thinking.
So I've sort of been in this situation.
Here's how I think it went.
And I'm going to tell you, this is an example story.
I'm not saying this happened.
I'm saying, probably happened.
So I'll put a probably on this.
Some version of what I'm going to describe Probably happened.
And it would have gone like this.
It would have started with, let's say, Rudy Giuliani contacting somebody in Mueller's office and saying, can you give us a preview of what's in that report?
And of course, the person in Mueller's office would say, no, I cannot give you a preview.
So I'm going to take as a given that there's nobody in Mueller's office who has leaked it in any kind of detail.
I think that's probably a good bet because they haven't leaked up till now.
Leaking would be deadly.
I mean, it would be bad for them.
They'd go to jail. There's no reason to do it.
So I would say it's very unlikely that they've leaked in a direct way.
But here's the fun part.
Let's say you're Giuliani and or you're one of the other lawyers for the president and you're pretty smart.
So I'll start with that.
You're smart. You've lived in the real world.
You know how things work.
If I were them, if I were Giuliani, this is what I'd do.
I'd go to my contact on the Mueller investigation.
By now they know each other pretty well, because they've had to have lots of contacts.
And I would say, I know you can't tell me what the Mueller investigation details are, but, wait for it, I've been asked to put together a legal budget for the White House.
For the coming year. And of course, the legal budget would be far higher if there's something negative in that report than if there isn't.
So for just budgeting purposes, you don't have to tell me anything that's in the report, but for budgeting purposes, should I budget a big number or should I budget a small number?
And then the Mueller person looks at him And he thinks, ah, I can't tell him that exactly, because that would be very close to, it wouldn't be the same, but it would be very close to saying what the report says, which is nothing. So, the Mueller guy pushes back and goes, I can't do that.
Then Rudy, or one of the other lawyers, because they're smart, and they've lived in the real world, they say the following, this isn't a normal situation.
We're talking about the effectiveness of the President of the United States.
We're talking about a president who's trying to keep North Korea's nuclear weapons at bay.
We're talking about a president who's trying to deal with China and get a deal.
We're talking about a president who's dealing with the most critical issues in the world.
In the world.
And he's much less effective if he has to worry about this stuff.
All I'm asking is for the benefit of the country that you just tell me if I should budget a lot for legal defense or I should budget low.
Now you're that contact in the Mueller department.
You understand the argument.
You're not an idiot. You don't want bad things for the country.
You don't want that. You could hate this president, but you don't want bad things for the country.
And you do understand the point, that this president is highly degraded by dealing with this thing, which you know is nothing.
What do you answer to Rudy Giuliani then?
You say, Rudy, I can't tell you anything.
It would be a breach of ethics, a breach of everything, if I gave you any information about this.
But, if you budgeted low, you should not expect to feel bad about it.
See what I'm talking about?
Almost certainly, the president's lawyers could get somebody in Mueller's group, who actually knows what's happening, could get them to say, you should be worried about it enough to budget for it, or maybe don't put a budget together.
Maybe minimize that.
Anyway, so I'm not going to say that that exact scenario played out.
What I'm going to say is that there are lots of ways to deduce The severity of it without actually the information being given.
And the lawyers for the president are absolutely smart enough to do that.
And the Mueller people are absolutely smart enough not to tell them details.
I believe that I have a pretty high opinion of their professionalism.
So I think the president knows he's not in trouble, and so he can say, yeah, I'd love to have all that information come out.
It makes him look less, you know, it makes him look innocent.
But he can also rely on Bob Barr to stop anything from coming out if maybe it's bad.
So he still has the ultimate dodge if needed.
If needed. Bob Barr could always say, I can't release this part because it's confidential or something.
All right. Let's change the conversation to climate change.
And I've got two editions that I don't think you've seen before.
So I'm starting with this.
For background, if anybody's new to this, I started a many months-long deep dive into climate change and to try to figure out what's going on.
So I'm legitimately on the fence in terms of knowing whether it's a huge disaster coming or no big deal.
I can't tell because the people communicating it are not reliable for a number of different reasons.
In other words, both the skeptics and the climate scientists are presenting their information collectively.
I'm not talking about any one person.
I assume that there are credible people on both sides, but if you look at collectively their arguments, most of it is garbage on both sides.
So I've concluded for sure that That there's massive misrepresentation and lying on both the climate science side, but also the skeptics.
Which doesn't mean that we don't have to worry about climate change.
It doesn't mean that at all. Because 75% of everything you hear about climate change could be false.
Let's say the models are not that accurate.
Let's say some of the measurements are not that accurate, etc.
But as long as 25% of it gets to the heart of it, Well, you still have a big problem, even if 75% of it is BS and lying.
Typically, and many of you don't know this, I think half of all published, peer-reviewed scientific studies eventually get debunked.
Half.
So if that ratio held for climate science, even if it were all true, half of the studies about it would be false, which would be completely normal.
And then over time they get replaced with better studies.
That's how science works.
So the fact that I'm saying there's massive deceit on both the climate scientist side and the skeptics of those same people doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't tell you anything about how likely the truth is on either side.
All we know is that there's massive lying on both sides.
That part is a preliminary conclusion.
But here's the question. What would your strategy be?
What's the best strategy if you knew climate science was a big problem?
And here I want to make a war analogy.
So you can imagine...
Imagine a hypothetical situation in which you had four countries.
Let's say it's a world with only four countries, just hypothetically.
And let's say that they all decided to go to war with each other until only one was left.
So everybody is fighting everybody.
So that's the imaginary scenario.
But you have the best military.
And let's say Enemy 4 has the worst.
Has the worst military.
What is the strategy that each of these entities should use?
Well, the obvious strategy, if you have the worst military, and everybody is fighting everybody, is to try to find a partner.
You're going to try to partner up.
But let's say, I'll just make this a little more interesting, let's say there's no partnering.
It's an artificial situation in which nobody can partner.
Somebody said Game of Thrones.
That's exactly where this is coming from.
So my situation is everybody's going to fight everybody and nobody can partner.
So somebody is just going to be the last country standing.
If you are the strongest military, what's your best strategy?
Anybody? You're the strongest military, but everybody is going to fight everybody.
Until it's all over.
What's your best strategy?
Stay out of it.
Stay out of it.
Because the less you can engage, the weaker your enemies will get fighting each other.
Right. Absolutely.
And I would argue that no one would argue with this point.
I mean, there might be situations where you could do some limited attack and it'd be such a mismatch that you should do it.
But generally, you want these people to all fight with each other until there's nothing left, and then you come in.
Does that sound familiar?
It's World War II. Do you know why the United States was so effective entering World War II? It's because the sides that were already there were decimated.
Decimated is the wrong word, because that means only taken down by 10%.
But Germany had taken a lot of hits.
From the European forces, the resistance.
So, now let's take this to climate.
Now, I will caution you that I'm not saying that, I'm not telling you that war theory translates directly to climate.
This is just a, let's say, just to get your mind thinking a certain way.
So, this is not supposed to persuade you about climate, make your climate decisions separately.
So the situation with climate is that if the climate scientist majority is correct and that there's a big problem coming, they also say that that problem will primarily come from China and from India and from some of the less developed countries.
What is our best strategy if it's true?
Let's say that climate science is a disaster coming, and let's say that China and India and other countries and whatever develops next are going to be the prime drivers of that problem.
What's your best play?
Well, in a perfect world, you would join hands with China and India, and you would sing...
Kumbaya! And then, because you're such good friends and you get along so well, you would coordinate a global effort in which all of you would act in unison as friends do.
Kumbaya! Kumbaya!
And you would solve climate change problems.
Wouldn't that be great?
That's not going to happen.
So let's say you're living in the real world, not the unicorns and rainbows and kumbaya world, where China is going to pursue its best interests.
India is going to pursue its national best interests.
And everybody else is going to pursue their own best interests.
And they're not going to grab hands with you and sing kumbaya no freaking way.
That's kind of the world we live in, isn't it?
In a world in which everybody is just going to do their own thing...
Shouldn't we stay out of it?
Because to get into it, you know, the battle of worldwide climate change would weaken our economy and almost certainly not work.
That's what the experts say.
Because if China and India don't do their thing, it doesn't really matter what we do.
But if we stay out of it, we can keep our economy strong And because we're a very capable, technological, high-economy country, we have a good government.
I know it seems hard to believe that, but compared to other countries, we have a relatively functional government.
What would be the impact of climate change on the United States?
Could be bad, right?
Could be bad.
But guess what? The United States could handle it.
We can handle disasters.
We can get out of the way in time because we see them coming.
We can build better buildings.
We can fortify against floods.
We can relocate entire populations if we need to.
We can grow indoors.
We could replace outdoor growing in five years.
Well, maybe not. But if we made it a national priority, you could create indoor farms that pretty much get you almost all the way there.
So the United States, as a strategy, if you borrow from the concept of, you know, war strategy, it seems like keeping ourselves strong while the other countries' economies are being destroyed is is actually our best strategy.
Now, I would love to hear smarter people talk more about this, because I'm obviously simplifying to the point of maybe, maybe simplifying beyond the point where it's even rational.
But it does seem to me that we can protect ourselves in this war against the climate better than all the other countries.
Somebody says, what about the moral aspects?
The moral way to approach it is to keep working on the technology that you could make available to the other countries should they want to use it.
But you can't make the other countries use it.
That's the trick.
You can't make other countries do it, and that's not going to change.
You can make it possible for them to do it, and that would be the moral thing to do.
But you can't make them do it.
If you could, then we could talk about that.
My current thinking is that from a war strategy perspective, even if climate change is all of the risk that the scientists are saying, it would still make sense for the United States to not get involved in anything that's risky to our economy in the short term.
Any major dislocation to our economy in the short term is probably, and very highly probable, The worst strategy decision you could make.
So that's the first thing.
Here's the second part. And by the way, does anybody disagree with that?
I'm saying literally no disagreement in the comments, but I don't know if that means anything.
Now here's the fun part.
Let's decide if climate change is even a problem.
So I told you I was doing a deep dive to try to figure out why it is that the skeptics and the scientists who say that there's a big problem can't find middle ground.
And there are two claims that I've focused on because they seem to be the simplest skeptical arguments, and if they're wrong, they're the easiest to disprove.
And weirdly, as easy as these would be to disprove, it's very much like the fine people problem.
So I believe that the same false memory cognitive dissonance that applied to the fine people hoax is probably very much applying to the climate problem.
Meaning that neither side would be capable of changing their opinion even if facts were presented.
I think people are too locked into their mental models at this point.
So I've tried to see how could I find the one lever, the one fact, the one claim that if you could prove it, You would have your answer.
And if you could disprove it, it would just kill the skeptics and the skeptics would be debunked.
There are two charts I've seen that I do not claim to be accurate.
There are two skeptical arguments that I've seen a number of times which seem the strongest.
I would like to see them debunked.
So I've asked on Twitter, can anybody debunk these?
And it got real quiet.
So these are the ones that I'm watching.
One of them, and these are just my own versions of them, One of them is this claim.
And I think it's...
You'll remind me in the comments who made this claim.
But if you look at... So apparently the top 31 countries in the world have their own climate models.
And you say to yourself, well, if there are all these different climate models, maybe nobody knows anything.
But the claim is that 30 or so of the models are in this same range.
They're different. But they all say that we're in big trouble because CO2 is making it too warm.
Slightly different rates, but they're all heading toward doom.
So if these are correct, or even any one of them is correct, we're doomed.
And I think what they do is they pick an average of these and they say, all right, it's this one in the middle is the average, and it shows we're doomed.
That's the story. But you notice this one little outlier here?
And of all the models, there's only one of them that's different than the rest.
Apparently, this is the Russian model.
Now, what's different about the Russian model, as I understand it, and this is a very approximate understanding, is that there's one key variable that they include that the other ones treat differently.
And it's easier to measure Which one of them is the accurate way to go?
It turns out to be the Russian model.
So if you believe the skeptical argument, and I'm not taking that argument, I'm just presenting it.
If you believe it, the Russian model matches observation and also predicts that we don't have a problem.
All of the models, including the Russian model, match to the past.
In other words, if you run it against past data, they all seem to predict or at least follow the temperature line.
It's only when you get to the present and then predict the future where they diverge.
So if this is true, I would say the Russian model has disproved climate change as a gigantic risk, but it still says the temperature is going up, just not in an end-of-the-world way.
So if this model is true, I would say we should be looking at the Russian model because it's the only one that predicted the past.
It's the only one also that has predicted the last several years.
And that's important.
I should have put that on there. So if you look at...
I labeled this inaccurately future.
Well, let's say this.
The recent past...
The Russian model has correctly predicted.
And it's the only one.
So my graph is inaccurate here.
But I understand the Russian model is the only one that got the last, I don't know, 10 years or whatever correct.
And it's the only one that uses the correct inputs.
And I think those are two known facts.
That's the part you need to fact check on.
So if this is true, climate change has largely been debunked.
Not 100%. But you'd have to stop caring about it as much if that were true.
Now, here's another one.
And again, this is my version of the graph.
This is not intended to be exact.
But the skeptical claim is made that if you start at the 1900s and go to now, and you look at the temperatures, that it looks roughly like this.
The temperatures were going up, there was a period where they flattened or maybe fell a little bit, and then there's now.
And the skeptics say, if the CO2 has been rising this entire time, it was low here, but it's higher here, why do we have the same rate here as we have with much higher CO2 when nothing else much has changed?
And so they say the primary claim that we're in an unusual warming is debunked by your own data.
Moreover, you really have to add this to this, both of these, to say that CO2 did not predict either one.
So, but is that graph accurate?
I saw Richard Lindzen refer to something similar to that.
And he knows what he's talking about.
So it's not a crazy graph.
There's at least one person working in the field who says, yes, this is the actual data.
Here it is. Now, did the Russian model predict this?
Here's the fun part.
Yes. It did.
How about these models? How about the other 30 models?
Did they predict this?
Not so much.
Not so much. Now, I just made some claims that I do not know are true.
I know that these are the skeptical claims, and I'm presenting them to you as the claims of other people.
I do not have a way to put a reliability on them or any kind of assessment of likelihood.
I'm just telling you these are the arguments.
Now, if these arguments are wrong, how easy would it be to debunk them?
See, that's where I'm getting.
I'm trying to pick things that would be definitive if they were true, or close to definitive, but also easy to debunk if they are to be debunked.
So wouldn't it be easy to say, no, here are the official numbers, it doesn't even look like that.
Wouldn't that be easy? All it would take is somebody who is a climate scientist to say, I don't know where you got these numbers.
Those are not even the official numbers.
It's really more like this or something else.
That's all it would take. I've made this so easy that you could debunk it just by showing me the temperature.
I don't need to be a scientist.
I don't need to be involved in climate scientists.
I just need a climate scientist to say, no, they didn't use the right numbers.
The real temperature isn't that at all.
That's it. That would put it to bed.
Haven't seen it. Still waiting.
Likewise, I need somebody to say, that Russian model, that's wrong because they do X or Y. That's all.
I mean, I could probably easily be convinced that the Russian model is just, you know, Russian BS. How hard would it be to convince me that the Russians do not have a reliable model when their primary business is selling oil, right? Keep in mind, it's kind of a coincidence that this big oil state Doesn't see climate change as a big problem.
I mean, is that a coincidence?
I mean, you have to factor that in.
So, I make no claim that these arguments are valid.
I simply present them as the simplest to understand and the simplest to debunk.
I put both of them into the wilds of Twitter, and I wait.
And I have not seen anything like a debunking.
But maybe I'll see that by today.
All right. I wanted to give one other update on the fine people hoax.
Some very industrious people who have been following this, one in particular, has gone to Wikipedia to try to edit the Wikipedia page that indicated that the fine people quote was talking about the racist to edit it to be more accurate to say that He excluded them.
With specific language, he excluded the races.
So the first several times that the correct information was put into Wikipedia, it was re-edited back to the false version within seven minutes each time.
And keep in mind that these edits were accompanied with the actual transcript.
And the actual video, so links to them.
So there isn't any question on the facts.
They're very objective.
And yet Wikipedia's editors changed the correct fact to the wrong fact several times.
Let me give you the exact Twitter handle of the person who is...
Making this happen right now.
And I'll give you an update, because there's more happening on that.
So I'm talking about unstumpable 2016.
So unstumpable 2016 is driving this, and then other people have come in on both sides.
And then I guess with Wikipedia, when there's a disagreement, The disagreement gets elevated to what's called a talk page, and that's where everybody puts their comments outside of the page itself, where they can talk it out, the editors can argue, and then they can come to some agreement on the talk page, and then ideally it becomes a final edit.
So it's been elevated to the talk page, and in the meantime the page was frozen, which makes sense.
You want to freeze the page while everybody's arguing about it, so that part's fine.
In the meantime, I contacted Jimmy Wales, who is founder of Wikipedia.
This is one of the great things about Twitter.
It's hard to even think back in the old days.
But in 2019, I can have a question about Wikipedia, and within 30 seconds, I can send a message via Twitter, because we follow each other, Jimmy Wales and I. And...
And he got back to me, and he said he would look into it.
So the head of Wikipedia, the founder, the boss of it all, said he would look into it.
So he looked into it today, and since I first contacted him, one of the accurate edits had been sticking.
So there was an accurate edit in there saying that he excluded the racist from the fine people and gave the actual quote.
But I think there was some more context that was a little bit ambiguous, so there was still some more conversation.
So, Jimmy Wales looked into it.
Just think about this.
Just for a moment, think about this.
That the founder of Wikipedia responded to me directly and fairly quickly, given all the things he has to do.
Looked into it personally.
Saw that he came into it at a point when the conversation had been elevated to the talk page.
He checked the talk.
And he got back to me and he said, it looks like it's heading in the right direction.
In other words, it looks like it's sorting itself out in the way you'd want it to.
So he said, maybe I won't put my foot on, you know, I won't...
I forget what he used, but he didn't want to weigh in because he's sort of the big gorilla.
You know, if Jimmy Wales weighs in on a topic on Wikipedia, everybody's going to stop and it's going to be about him.
And so he quite wisely, in my opinion, decided to stand back and just monitor for a while because it looks like it's moving in the right directions.
I'll check back on that today.
But it looks like the corrected edit is sticking.
Now, that creates an interesting situation because Wikipedia will have a different reality with complete, you know, it'll have links to the actual sources.
You can check their reality, which will be different from the reported reality on TV. So, if I'm nothing, I'm not...
I sometimes say I would hate to be on the other side for me on anything because I'm just too damn stubborn to give up on stuff.
So the interesting thing about this story is the false memory part of it.
I promise you that I know more than you do about why the media is treating it the way they are.
And as far as I can tell, It's because they really believed it.
Many of you are still believing that they're just liars supporting a side.
But on this one topic, I'm personally quite convinced that they actually believed it was true, the way they were reporting it.
All right. So, there you have it.
And I think I've talked enough.
▲
Export Selection