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May 27, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
33:31
Episode 543 Scott Adams: Teaching You Tricks for Spotting Fake News, While Others are Duped
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Chris, it's good to see you.
It's been so long.
Beth, hi.
Beatty, Tyler, Kevin, it's all great to see you.
And I know why you're here.
It's for the coffee, but it's also for the learning.
And when I say learning, I mean it.
I even put on my professor sweater to make it extra impactful.
But first, before we get to that, it's time for something I like to call the simultaneous sip.
And it starts when you grab your cup, your mug, your glass, your stein, your tanker, your chalice, your thermos, perhaps a flask, fill it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee, and join me now for the simultaneous sip.
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Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
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But if you like to watch it live, this is the only place to do it.
So, we're going to talk about Ian Bremmer first, and then I'm going to give you a lesson on identifying fake news Such as the Ian Bremmer tweet.
If you are not up on the news, let me tell you what happened.
So Ian Bremmer, who is president and founder of Eurasia Group and a political science professor at NYC, also a frequent guest on news shows, has a big footprint on Twitter as well.
So you've probably heard of him.
You've probably... I've seen him talking about stuff on TV. So he does a tweet, yesterday or the day before, in which he says, and by the way, this is not true, so this is just what the tweet said.
Kim Jong-un...
So he attributed this to Trump.
So he tweeted as if this were a quote from Trump while Trump was over in Japan or is over there.
He said, allegedly, that Trump said, Kim Jong-un is smarter and would make a better president than sleepy Joe Biden.
Now, first of all, the first thing you need to know is that's not true.
President Trump did not say that.
But, what is true?
So, apparently, Ian Bremmer took the tweet down after there was some confusion.
A number of reputable news sites apparently retweeted it as if it were true.
And the internet, many people on the internet thought it was true.
I think his comment was that It was sort of a comment on the state of the news and social media.
I'm paraphrasing, but that's all Ian Bredder said about it.
I like the fact that he's not saying too much about it, which makes it kind of funny.
So here's my take on it.
This was clearly, now that we know that it was not real, We know, I think we can say this with some certainty, that it was intended as parody.
In other words, it was a tweet which was supposed to be sort of in the, let's say, in the general field of something that the president might have said.
And that's the joke.
The joke is that it's outrageous, but it's not so outrageous Given the things that President Trump has tweeted or said in the past, it's not so outrageous that it's obvious that he didn't say it.
It just wasn't obvious.
And so I think as parody, it fell short, meaning that it didn't quite hit the zone.
Now, the zone for parody is anything that even a dumb person would know is just a joke.
So the line of parody starts with everybody can tell it's a joke.
Alright, everybody knows that's a joke.
No way that's real.
It's clearly just for fun.
So that's the starting place for parody.
But parody can sort of stretch into another zone that's a little more dangerous.
And the dangerous zone for parody is where dumb people can't tell the difference.
Smart people think it's hilarious because they say, ah, that's obviously a joke.
This couldn't be true in the real world.
It's so funny that somebody made a joke that's so close to reality that dumb people can't tell the difference.
Now, that's a dangerous form of parody, but it's still parody.
It's intended as a joke.
The smart people laugh, dumb people get confused, and that's part of the joke.
Part of the joke is that dumb people can't tell the difference.
Ian Bremmer's attempt at parody, and I'm going to call it parody, some of you are going to disagree with me, but pretty firmly confident that it was intended as parody.
And the problem was that even smart people Wouldn't necessarily know that one was supposed to be a joke.
So as parody, it was a complete failure because it was too close to the original.
Now, we could say, let's give him some credit for being so close to the original voice.
That even smart people can't tell the difference.
So there was definitely some art that went into the tweet, meaning that it confused even smart people.
Now, I didn't see it until it had already been taken down, and people knew it was not true, so I didn't have an opportunity to find out if I would have been fooled by it.
But I think...
I would have been fooled by it.
I think it would have fooled me if I just saw it in the wild.
I'd like to think that at least a little flag would have gone up and that the little flag would have said, maybe I should wait on this one.
I'm going to wait for a little confirmation on this one.
I might have been smart enough to do that.
But I probably would have thought it was mostly true.
So what do we make of this?
The president has weighed in and thinks it's outrageous and maybe the libel laws should be changed.
But here's my take on this.
I am familiar with Ian Bremmer from Twitter.
We've exchanged some tweets in public.
So I also know that his Twitter feed His Twitter feed is usually at least tongue-in-cheek, a little light-hearted.
He has serious topics as well, but it's very common for Ian Bremmer to be using humor and sarcasm, that sort of thing, in his tweets.
Now, if you didn't know that, and the first time you ever came in contact with his material was to see that tweet, That would be out of context, because you don't know that he does humorous tweets.
So I probably would have been at least alerted because I know the context, but I think I still would have been fooled.
So I would call this simply a mistake.
Meaning that he meant to hit the parody zone, missed it by a hair, but that hair is a big deal.
If you miss it, you really missed it.
So it doesn't matter that he barely missed it.
He missed it. So he took it down, which was the responsible thing to do.
He has acknowledged that it was not real.
He has not, as far as I know, has not apologized.
Do we require an apology?
No. I don't know.
It was a mistake.
So he has said that it's a comment on the news.
That anybody would believe it.
It's sort of a comment on our current situation.
And I actually, or somebody says he did issue an apology.
I haven't seen the apology.
And then somebody else in the comments is saying he doubled down.
Let's just say it doesn't matter.
He did say it wasn't real.
He took it down.
He said it was a comment about the world, which I accept.
I think it was a comment about the state of how people will believe just about anything.
Oh, so just about 10 minutes ago, he issued a policy.
Let me be current, and let's just search for him.
And let's see if he tweeted it.
So Ian Bremmer says, this is one hour ago.
He says, my tweet yesterday about Trump preferring Kim Jong-un to Biden as president was meant in jest.
Okay, so that's what I told you before he said it clearly.
It should have been obvious.
The president correctly quoted me as saying it was a completely ludicrous statement.
I should have been clearer.
My apologies. Apology accepted.
Apology accepted.
He did his apology within the 48-hour window.
He clearly said what he got wrong.
And in this case, it's implied what he would do in the future.
A good apology should be sincere.
You should acknowledge what you did wrong, how it hurt people, essentially.
And then you should say what you're going to do later to make it better.
Now, in this case, the what you're going to do later is just, you know, not do this.
So he doesn't really need to state that.
That would be optional in this case.
I would say apology completely accepted.
Not that he needed to apologize to me, necessarily.
So he just said my apologies...
Took responsibility, told us what it should have been, told us what the mistake was.
Bam! Done, right?
We should be done with this.
So, remember my standard.
My standard, which I recommend to all of you, is that if we judge people by mistakes, we end up hating everybody, because we all make mistakes.
And people don't make mistakes like this intentionally.
Clearly, he wasn't thinking, hmm, I'm going to fool the world into thinking this is real.
I'll get away with this, because obviously it's not something you could get away with.
There's too much visibility on the present.
So it was clearly a mistake, and it was not one that he made consciously.
So you can't judge him by something he wasn't even aware of he was doing.
But you can judge him, and I would recommend that you always take the standard.
You could judge him by how he responds to his mistake.
He fairly quickly took the tweet down.
He clarified. He apologized.
100% acceptable.
Ian, if you're watching this, thank you.
And it was actually a good lesson on fake news.
But let's take a sip before I go to the whiteboard.
Ready? Sip.
So I want to give you a quick lesson on identifying fake news.
Here's one of the most important lessons you'll ever have in your life.
So here's the big picture.
Let's start with this. On this dimension we have stimulation, just to how interesting something is and how compelling it is.
And then we have time on this dimension.
So here's you.
Your normal interest and stimulation in events will go up and down.
Here you're bored, here you're interested, here you're really interested, here you're bored a little bit, and then you get interested.
So your normal life is boredom to interest, boredom to interest.
The real news is mostly below your boredom line, meaning that if the news simply gave you information about what's happening every day, You really probably wouldn't be interested at all, because your life is kind of interesting.
The news, if it doesn't affect you personally, and that's most of the news, Not that interesting.
So you couldn't have much of a business model of the news when it's more boring than anything you're doing during the day.
Why would you tune into that?
Now, every now and then, the real news is so interesting that you really do have to tune in.
There's a disaster, a terrorist attack, a hurricane.
So sometimes the real news is more interesting than whatever you were doing on your own.
But it doesn't happen often.
Sort of a 20 to 1 situation.
20 times it'll be boring, and one time it'll be interesting.
But fake news has a completely different graph.
Fake news is pretty much permanently more interesting than your life.
So the fake news, you can't look away.
It's like, what? Are you kidding me?
That happened? Now every once in a while, The fake news will be maybe less interesting than whatever you're doing, but it's not often.
So here's the first rule for identifying fake news.
All right? You ready?
Now, I want to tell you, this is not a 100% rule, as in every time this is true, it's fake news.
It doesn't work that way. But it's a really, really strong indicator.
And it's probably a 10 to 1 or 20 to 1 indicator, meaning that if you treated it as if it were true, you'd be right 10 times and wrong maybe once, and you wouldn't know which that once was necessarily.
But if you see a news story that is so provocative, that is more interesting than your normal life, and you can't look away, there's probably a 10 to 1 chance it's not true.
Now, when you saw the Ian Bremmer fake quote that was meant in jest, as he explained, but before you knew it was meant in jest, because it was poorly executed, it looked like maybe it wasn't.
What did you think about that?
Did you say to yourself, oh my god, did the president of the United States just say that a brutal dictator, Kim Jong-un, would be a better, smarter president than Joe Biden?
Did that seem like something that could be real?
Well, unfortunately, that was the problem.
The problem was, it felt sort of real.
It felt completely within the realm of things that are real.
That was the problem. That's why that one was hard to tell.
But generally, if you see something that's extraordinary, it's not true.
So your first reaction to an extraordinary story should be, okay, it's extraordinary, therefore there's a 10 to 1 chance it didn't happen.
Okay? So that's the first rule.
If it's extraordinary, there's a 10 to 1 chance it's not real.
And that you'll later find out it wasn't.
Here's some more tips on spotting the fake news.
Yes, I do have a whiteboard with two sides.
Envy me! Envy me for my two-sided whiteboard that I made myself quite proud of it.
Here's some more ways to tell.
Things that are credible, and in this case I don't mean true, I mean credible, meaning that it has the quality that it's believable, even if it's not true, because sometimes you can be wrong.
But things that are credible are disasters.
If you hear that there's a disaster that's actually happening or happened, probably true.
Names and places, Usually true.
Not every time, but usually you know who was involved, and usually you know where they were.
So that kind of news you can usually depend on.
That's usually true. Here's the key one, and I put it in a different color.
Reported by both sides.
If your news is only reported by, let's say, anti-Trump media, let's say it's reported as true on MSNBC and reported true on CNN and reported true in the New York Times, but it's either not reported at all or reported as false on Fox News and Breitbart.
Is it true or is it false?
The answer is almost every time it's false, and it works in the reverse.
If it's reported as true on Fox News or Breitbart, but it's not reported as true on CNN and MSNBC, probably not true.
So I would look for the four-point check.
I would say if these four organizations, and these are just sort of proxies for right-leaning and left-leaning, but if these four all reported the same, Breitbart, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, if they all reported the same, almost certainly true.
This could still be wrong, but almost certainly true.
If only one of those two sides reports it as true and the other one says it isn't, Probably not true.
It doesn't matter which side it is that's reporting it is true and which side says it's not true.
Here are some other indications of fake news.
Predictions are pretty much always fake news because people can't predict.
Some of the biggest things in the world, news-wise, are based on predictions.
Climate change is based on predictions.
Now, it might be true, and probably is true, that the science is roughly right and that CO2 is being added by humans and it has some impact on heat and we should care about that and make sure we're checking that out.
The predictions, though, of, you know, in this year the oceans will swallow us all up or whatever the predictions are, those are far more likely to be fake news because we can't really predict that well.
So the current reality might be true, might be false, but more likely to be true if it's the current reality.
If it's a prediction, eh, don't believe it at all.
Predictions are terrible, very unlikely to be true.
Mind reading. You see continuous mind reading, especially on CNN and the anti-Trump press.
The reason you see so much of it is that the real world is not serving up enough bad news about this president.
The real world is giving him a good economy and success and defense and trade wars, or at least going in a direction we think could be productive.
So the real world is just not serving up enough bad news.
So the anti-Trump press starts finding bad news through mind reading.
And they will say such things as, Nancy Pelosi got under his skin.
We don't know that.
We don't know his internal mental state.
Because he didn't act like that on the outside, how would you know?
On the inside, he's in some kind of turmoil.
You don't know that. And it's unlikely that given all the things that this president deals with, consider the size of the scandals, the size of the risk, the size of the rewards, the size of the issues that the president deals with.
Do you think that Nancy Pelosi's little comments got under his skin?
It probably is the least important thing that happened to them all year.
So whenever you see somebody saying that they know what somebody's mental state is or what they're planning or what they really thought, the first thing you should say to yourself is, I don't know, probably fake news.
Not every time, because we are humans and we have to make assumptions about what other people are thinking and feeling.
In order to work, you know, and operate in the real world.
And sometimes we're right on the obvious stuff.
But when it comes to the news, mind reading is fake news.
The way people frame things is not the news.
Because you can take the same set of facts and frame them positive or frame them negative.
Do not be fooled that the way people are presenting the facts is truth.
Because people present things to tell a story.
Even a photographer who's just taking a picture, this is the Peter Duke theory, that even a photographer is not just taking a picture and pictures don't lie.
Never. That never happens.
The photographer is deciding which picture to show you, which picture to take, how to pose it, what angle, what story to tell.
So even a photograph Even a photograph is framing something a certain way.
So framing is not news.
That's somebody's opinion, and they're trying to manipulate you with their framing.
Quotes. Quotes I wouldn't believe unless you actually hear them.
If you hear it on video, it's probably true, but we're actually entering a phase in which even that is not reliable because now we see that we can create these so-called deep fakes where you can put words into somebody's mouth that they never spoke, and it's going to look really real.
So you can't even trust quotes anymore even if you've seen the video.
I would say at the moment, Probably 99% of what you see on video as a quote is true.
But it might be taken out of context because I don't have to go too deep into your memory banks to tell you that there are plenty of times when part of a quote was accurately given, but if you leave out the second part of the quote or you leave out the context, it can be an accurate statement that somebody used these words and still completely fake news.
Because all you did was you left out a part, you left out a context, you left out what somebody said just before the answer.
So even direct quotes should be regarded as probably fake news, if those direct quotes are about politics.
How about science?
Science is our probably most reliable way to get to truth.
Why do I have science on the fake news category?
Well, the problem with science is that by the time you hear about it, it's filtered through liars.
So the people who write stories about science, and that's how you hear it for the most part, you hear the news talking about science.
You don't hear the science.
You hear people reporting on what scientists said.
Now, if you talk to the scientists who read what the news says about their own story, those scientists more often than not will say, well, they didn't quite get the story right.
It's missing a key thing that I think you should know.
That would be the most normal situation, is that even the scientist would say it's fake news, even if the news is about this scientist's science, because the news reporters will get it wrong.
They'll miss key things, they'll lose some context, they'll oversell it, that sort of thing.
So even the science, you have to assume, It is going to be filtered through liars.
And you also have to assume that there are a lot of, I think, something like half of all peer-reviewed science turns out to be not reproducible.
So, half the time, a report about a new study is telling you something that's not true.
About half the time.
If not more, it might be more.
And especially if the story is so amazingly fascinating that it's beyond what you would expect, that fascinating element should be a tell that it might not be true.
It's a little too interesting.
If something's a little too interesting, a little too provocative, a little too outside of what you expected, it's probably not true.
It might be, it could be, but probably not.
Alright, anonymous sources, you should know by now that anonymous source means it didn't happen.
Far more likely than it did happen.
When you hear an anonymous source says that somebody did something horrible behind closed doors, you should automatically think it's not true.
Automatically. The first thought you should have is that didn't happen.
Your first thought should not be, well, it probably happened.
It's in the New York Times, so it probably happened.
That should not be your first thought.
Your first thought should be anonymous source.
Those are never true. Well, sometimes they could be true.
Like, it's possible, but probably not.
Laundry list persuasion.
When you see the laundry list come out, there's a high likelihood that is all fake news.
So there are some things in which you could say this list of things about whatever the topic is are all true.
So that it could be true.
But more often than not, you see the laundry list when there's no substance to the claim.
For example, there's a laundry list of what the president has done that some people say is collusion with Russia and some people say is obstruction.
It's a long list of things.
But the quality of that list is that there's nothing on it that individually has much weight.
So if you see a laundry list of reasons why something is good or bad, you should say to yourself, what's the strongest thing on the list?
This is a good discipline.
Ignore the size of the list, because that's probably fake news, so that the number of things on the list Should tell you it's less credible, not more.
So the more things on the list, the less credible it is.
Keep that in mind. Not the more credible, the less credible.
Because if you have one good reason, you just focus on the one good reason.
If somebody says, I have one fact, one good reason, one good argument, it's so strong, here it is.
Well, that could very likely be a good argument.
If somebody says, I have a laundry list and there's nothing on this list that individually would be persuasive, it's probably confirmation bias that they just collected in a list.
This last one is really troubling.
Video. Video.
We used to think that if you saw a video, same as the story with a picture, that a video would even be more true than a picture.
Because you could tell yourself, well, a still picture, you know, I get how that can be photoshopped.
So you have less belief in a still picture, and you've also had the experience If you take your own picture, you take a selfie, you can take 20 pictures of yourself and 19 of them, you look like an ugly idiot.
And then there's just that one selfie that you look pretty good.
And you think, well, that's one out of 20.
So pictures... Can really lie to you hard.
We think video is more reliable because it's just a little harder to fake, but the days of it being hard to fake...
Here, let's get rid of this troll.
Anybody who says apologist, just so you know why you're being blocked now, apologist is not a reason or an argument.
It is not a fact.
An apologist... Is somebody who's doing mind reading of me.
So if you're just listening to this, a commenter said that I'm an apologist.
And that's mind reading.
Because you don't know my inner mental state.
You can't know that.
It's unknowable.
If you imagine that you can know my interior mental state, you're probably hallucinating.
That's not a good indication of reality.
Anyway, the point is that video is no longer something you can trust.
The video could be out of context.
For example, the Covington Kids situation, the video was not altered per se, but it was out of context.
And that turned something false into something that looked true.
There we go. We'll get rid of another one who thinks apologist is a good word to use.
You don't need to be on this.
All right. So, and then we have the additional problem that video can be Can be altered, and if you look at the latest situation about the slowed down Nancy Pelosi video, I didn't trust any reporting or any video from any source.
So, for example, when the New York Times said, here's the original video, and then next to it you can see the altered video, and so here's proof, you can look at it yourself.
Here's the original, here's the altered, you can see that they're very different.
When I read that story, I said to myself, video?
That's not reliable anymore.
Probably a year ago, I would have said, okay, it's the New York Times.
They're showing the video side by side.
This is as clear as it can be.
I mean, there's nothing to doubt anymore.
The news has been proven.
Today, I would no longer say that.
I would say that the odds that the New York Times could have...
I'm not saying they did.
This is not an accusation.
But you have to be open to the possibility that they just...
Showed you the wrong video, or that they changed a video on their own and showed it, or that they mistakenly got the wrong video, or that you only imagine they're different.
I mean, there are probably 20 different ways in which that could not be exactly what you thought it was.
So, here's the bottom line.
If you see something that seems to you like too amazing to be true in the news, it probably isn't true.
And when I say probably, I mean 10 to 1, as in not even close.
Not even close.
All right. And you saw the other things, so I won't go over them again.
But those are your cues.
None of them are 100%.
The more of these cues you see, the more likely it's fake.
And if you'd like to review this again, you can see it here on the Periscope playback, or you can see it on YouTube.
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