Episode 902 Scott Adams: I Tell You About My Experience With Models. No, Not That Kind.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Models are meant to be useful...not accurate
#Loserthink in the news, Rachel Maddow and others
Prediction: A Biden ticket switcheroo
China's wet markets remain open?
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
But is that going to stop you from enjoying the simultaneous sip?
No, no. No, you're not the kind of person who would be deterred by things like that.
I just realized you can't say deterred Without turd.
Hmm. Never thought about that before.
But you can't say pandemic without dem.
That's a thing, too. All right.
Get ready. You're all in here.
I know you're poised.
You're ready. Oh, yeah, you're ready.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the pandemic, better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go! Yes, I can feel my blood plasma getting stronger every moment.
I don't even know what that means.
Yeah, tonight I think I'll be giving myself a haircut.
I have been hearing some suggestions that maybe I should work on the mullet.
It does look a little naturally mullety.
This is not a time for photographs.
I think I'm going to lose all of my photographs.
Well, not that I took any during this period.
Alright, let's talk about some of the things in the news.
It's fun, of course.
Last night I already talked about Bernie.
Bernie dropping out. Bernie's dropping out.
And of course, it goes without saying that now the big question is, who will Biden pick as his vice president?
And will he pick a vice president before he's replaced at the top of the ticket?
What would you say?
Do you think that Biden will select his vice president...
Before he is replaced as the top of the ticket.
Because if he has a vice president, they can't really replace him without moving the vice president up.
Because if they don't promote the vice presidential candidate to the top of the ticket, should they decide that Biden can't go on, then what does it say about who he picked for the vice president?
If the vice presidential pick is not the automatic one who bumps up to the top, then that person probably was not well chosen to begin with.
So that's not, I mean, it doesn't follow completely 100% logically, but people are going to think of it that way.
Yeah, I'm going for the Tiger King look.
Thanks for making that comparison.
How much did you love the fact that That Trump got a Tiger King question during the press conference.
On one hand, you say to yourself, my God, what a waste of the public's time and the government's time to ask such a silly question at a time when we were more concerned about the massive global death toll and all that.
But I disagree.
I disagree. First of all, you could tell that Trump sort of enjoyed it.
He sort of enjoyed the question.
It was sort of like a palate cleanser.
You just needed a little change of pace from the heaviness of the topic.
And I think the country enjoyed it too.
So to the reporter who asked that question, well, it wasn't news per se.
So, you know, you can't say you were necessarily doing your job of getting the news.
But on the other hand, the country sort of appreciated it.
So I don't know which news outlet it was who asked that question.
But to the reporter who did, I say, thanks.
Thanks. You know, I don't think we should be silly all the time.
But every now and then, things get so heavy that I don't mind somebody, you know, the class clown.
I don't mind somebody who tells a joke.
I don't mind somebody who tries to, you know, break the mood a little bit.
So thank you. I appreciated that.
Well, the debate has already started ahead of time about whether the models were always bogus or they were good and useful and credible.
And the argument's shaping up like this.
Some people are saying, well, of course the death toll is lower than even the lowest estimates of the model.
It's outside of the entire range of the model, but it's better.
It's because we did such a good job that even the models could not predict how effective we would be.
So that's one of the movies.
And the other movie, and of course we don't know how it all ends, so both of these movies assume that they can predict that we're turning the corner.
Then the other movie says that the models were just baloney from the start, and we should have ignored them all and just kept going to work, and we would have never known the difference.
Here's my take on this.
I don't think people understand The models are not designed to be right.
And I think that's probably, I don't know, 95% of the public is under that impression, that if the experts build a model, That the whole point of the model, especially if it's got a very wide range, between 100,000 and 2 million people are dying, you figure that range is so wide, it's going to be in there somewhere, right?
So that's the usefulness of the model.
So if you're not anywhere in that gigantic wide range, critics get to say, hey, I told you.
I told you. Now, and of course, the critics will also point out that the bottom of the range assumed that you tried as hard as you could to mitigate.
So if you do even better than that, well, what good was the model?
You know, it just shows that the model was completely in its own world from reality.
I disagree. Because that's not what the models are for.
The models are meant to be useful.
They're not meant to be accurate.
Now, I say this as somebody who built many financial models in my corporate days.
It was my main job. And I was always acutely aware that my estimates and my predictions were not accurate.
So instead, I designed them to be useful.
And since most people will never be able to understand the distinction, you could explain it to them forever, and they'll look you right in the eyes right after you've explained it, and they'll say, yeah, but it's not accurate.
And then you'll start again and you'll say, okay, okay, I don't think you're hearing me.
Nobody can predict the future.
So being accurate wasn't even in the set of possibilities unless you were just lucky.
So being accurate is not even a goal.
Because it can't be done.
If anybody could predict the future the way these models pretend to...
Well, anybody who could do that would be rich from the stock market.
They'd be rich from a dozen other things that they could predict and they could bet on.
Because anybody who can accurately predict the future of anything, of anything, from a hurricane, from climate science, to the economy, the stock market, to the coronavirus, anybody who could accurately predict Predict the future in those multi-variable situations would just go make bets and be rich.
But it's not a thing.
It's just not a thing.
So that's why people don't do it.
If they couldn't do it, they'd do it.
They'd say, whoa, this model's giving me an edge.
I'll go make a bet based on this model.
Instead, the models are meant to be useful.
Now, how many of you are you confused?
Because you're thinking to yourself, and by the way, I'm using a A persuasion technique.
Now, I'll call it out in a minute.
But how many of you are thinking to yourself, Scott, Scott, Scott, you're talking crazy because you're saying that the models don't need to be even accurate, like even accurate within a gigantic range, they don't need to be accurate, and still they're useful.
Explain that, cartoon boy.
Those are like opposites.
If it's completely inaccurate to not even be in the general range, it can't also be useful.
Except that everyone who makes models know that they can be.
You'll see a few people say yes, the people who have some experience in this field.
The models are not meant to be accurate.
They're not designed that way.
It's not a hope. It's not a dream.
It would only be luck if they were accurate.
What the models are supposed to do is change your behavior.
That's the only thing you need to know.
The point of a model is to change your behavior.
And if the model does that, and it changes your behavior in a productive way, then it can be said that the model was useful, even completely inaccurate.
So let's take this case of the coronavirus.
What did the models which were completely inaccurate Did they persuade us?
I think you'd say yes.
At least enough of us were persuaded that it was a gigantic risk that huge changes in behavior happened fairly quickly.
So, did the models cause us to change behavior?
Yes. Now, the second question is, Should they?
Was it right to change our behavior?
Well, that's the part that becomes the two movies and maybe we'll never settle.
But the argument goes that if we hadn't changed our behavior this much, we would not be getting a result that at least preliminarily looks like it might not be so bad compared to the models.
Now, can the models predict accurately How well people will respond even in the near term?
Not really. Nobody can make a model like that.
Because they can't pick up innovation.
Did the models, for example, predict that somebody would find a way to split ventilators and effectively double the capacity?
Did the model pick that up?
Did the model have a number in it for the effectiveness of the hydroxychloroquine?
Because if the model did have an estimate, For the effectiveness of the hydroxychloroquine, how do they know that?
We don't know that. How would the model people know the effectiveness of the hydroxychloroquine if we don't know, and the scientists don't know?
So keep in mind that these models are persuasion, and if they persuade you in the right direction, they worked.
They were useful. Now, of course, they could over-persuade you, right?
They could persuade you to do the wrong thing.
So that's the distinction.
If it persuades you to do the right thing, and even if you can determine that, because even after the fact, we'll never really know what was the right thing, even after the fact.
We can only know, here's the only thing you can know, is if the model got people to act in the way that the consensus of the experts thought was the right way to act.
That's about as good as you can do.
So I would argue that we're not acting so much to satisfy the requirements of the model, but rather I would put it this way, as a person who has developed many models for the purposes of management.
Management decides what they want to do, and then they have you build a model that supports the story.
And if the experts collectively say, you know, I don't think we can model this.
Honestly, I don't think we know how big a problem this is.
But from the little hints we have about how viral it is, the information we got out of China, of how bad it was, the number of body bags that we had to order, the number of ICU rooms that were over capacity.
So based on the little hints...
We experts, not me, but talking about the experts, look at it and say, we should try as hard as we can to avoid the worst case.
That might be the only thing that could be known with any kind of confidence that all of the experts collectively had sort of the same feeling about it.
And I think they did.
I think if you were to survey the ones who are the virologists, I think that in general they would all say, whoa, based on these little facts, which are anecdotal but very scary, it does look like, in my professional opinion as an expert virologist, for example, it does look like we should put the maximum effort into stopping this.
And then they build a model, because the public isn't going to take an opinion The public needs something a little more convincing.
What would be more convincing than just interviews with scientists who say, hey, you should do this thing?
A picture. So the scientists know, and everybody involved knows, that a picture is more influential, so it gets turned into a graph, a picture, a range, a statistic, because that's how you communicate it.
So the graph and the picture should not be seen as something which should be viewed as true, Or false.
Or accurate.
Or inaccurate. Because they're not even built for that purpose.
They're built to persuade in a way that the consensus of the experts legitimately feel is in the best interest of the country.
Because I think mostly they're, you know, they're good eggs who want the best thing to happen.
So this argument we're having about whether they were accurate and whether they had to be revised and all that is people who don't understand what the models are.
So these are arguments from people who have never modeled and don't understand the world.
And so neither the pros nor the cons arguments are even a little bit sensible.
They're not even the right argument, really.
And what you should see...
with any model is that they start out wildly inaccurate because nobody can predict the future and then as you get closer to whatever date you can measure for sure whether you're right or wrong As you get closer to knowing the answer, the models start getting molded and retrofitted and tweaked until they come into conformance with reality.
You saw that in 2016, the polls of who would win the election were wildly off, but as you got closer and closer to election day, they started to narrow.
I think Rasmussen, you know, nailed it.
But most of the other polls were at least closing that gigantic gap that said Hillary would win.
Most of them narrowed toward the end.
And that's normal.
Does that mean that the polls were all wrong?
Well, if you think polls are right in the first place, yeah.
But, you know, polls are pretty gross objects, too.
So, all right. Here's the...
Here's some examples of loser think in the news.
So this is, let's see, Kevin Miller, some user on Twitter, said that there's literally no argument to the numbers would be higher if we didn't do all that we did.
And yet, people will argue it.
So Kevin is saying that You can't reasonably argue that the reason that the numbers are good is because we did all the mitigation.
So Kevin's saying, it's so obvious that should be the end of the argument.
The mitigation is the reason the death rate is low.
It's the reason. It's an obvious reason.
We did it for that purpose.
The experts said, if you do this, the death rate will come down, and then it came down.
That's why it came down.
So Kevin is saying, there's no argument.
The numbers would be higher if we didn't do all that we did.
So this is loser think.
And it's a specific form of loser think that I write about in one chapter of my book, Loser Think, which you should all buy because you have time to read it.
And this is what I call the failure of imagination.
So whenever anybody says there's no other explanation...
There are two possibilities.
One, it was at the right.
There's just no other explanation.
But the other possibility that's gigantic is that you're not good at imagining other possibilities.
And that's the case here.
So let me give you an example.
So Kevin cannot imagine, based on his comment, I'm saying he can't imagine because he says there's literally, not figuratively, literally there's no argument except that the mitigation worked.
It's the only thing you could say looking at the Evidence.
To which I say, no, no.
I'm afraid that's not the only way to interpret it.
Here's the other way.
You tell me if this is crazy.
The other way to interpret is the mitigation worked a little bit, just like everybody thought it would work, but a little bit.
And the biggest difference was that the models were wildly inaccurate.
How do you rule out that possibility?
Because Kevin is correct that it has to make a difference that everybody did social isolation and a lot of people wore masks and it had to make a difference.
So Kevin's right about that.
But how can Kevin measure how much of the total difference can be ascribed to that one factor?
He can't. It can't be measured.
You can't measure it. I can't measure it.
The experts can't measure it.
It can't be measured. And if we try to compare it to other countries, say, well, let's compare it to one of these other countries.
We'll find one that did everything the same except maybe this one variable, and then that'll tell us something.
It's like, oh, you did everything the same except you didn't wear masks.
Well, we'll compare you to the countries that did wear masks and see if we learn anything.
Probably doesn't work because there aren't two countries that are enough alike.
Yeah, I'm seeing people mention the countries, well, what about Sweden?
What about the fact that Singapore had a good result, but they didn't wear masks?
But they did do good contact checking.
My point is that all the countries are going to be so fundamentally different on so many big points from, you know, is it a country where they hug a lot?
Do they have old people living inside?
What's the size of the country?
What's the quality of the health care?
What's the flexibility? You just can't compare two countries, I don't think.
I don't think we'll ever have a good answer about what works, except that we'll know social isolation has to work, I mean, logically it has to work, in the same way that face masks logically had to work a little bit.
You just don't know how much.
So, Kevin, I would say that you are blind to the other possibility that, of course, the mitigation works, but we don't know how much, and it is easily possible Easily possible that the biggest difference in the change of the estimates had to do with the estimates weren't that good in the first place.
Now, I'm not saying that's the case.
I'm saying you can't rule it out, and it's so dead simply obvious that it's possible, and it would be routine.
It wouldn't even be unusual if that were the case.
Nothing about that would be weird.
Can't rule it out. All right.
Now, there will be much said about the fact that the bottom range of the models was 100,000 deaths, and very quickly it got modified down to, well, 100,000.
We meant a minimum of 60,000.
And when that gets modified down, which it might be, I think it'll get at least a 50% chance it'll get modified down again.
People will say, well, see how wrong the model was.
And other people will say, see how good the mitigation was, and we'll never get to the end.
Let me ask you this. What are the odds that a big, complicated model would be accurate in the first place?
What are the odds that even if it gave a range, and it's a really big range of possibilities, what are the odds that it's still going to be in that gigantic range?
Is it really 95% like they might want you to believe?
In my experience, even big ranges are just routinely wrong.
I mean, it's not even unusual to have a gigantic range of possibilities and still be way under it or way over it.
Not unusual at all. All right.
Here's some other stuff.
The question of who Biden picks for his vice presidential running mate is getting really interesting because of the timing.
Because you know this conversation is happening among the Democrats.
They're thinking, oh my God, what are we going to do about Joe Biden?
Because we can't have him as our standard bearer.
You know that conversation is happening.
I know that conversation is happening because I've actually talked to people who are prominent Democrats.
And let me tell you, That conversation is happening.
But there are two logical ways to go about it.
Well, three, I guess.
Three. One would be to just replace him at the convention and just have some kind of a revolution at the convention and pick somebody else.
That's possible. But I think that would be very divisive.
That's risky. The other possibility would be to replace him now.
You know, to have somebody talk about a running And say, look, look, look, you know, we still have time to slot in Mario Cuomo or somebody.
Not Mario, Andrew Cuomo.
And so let's do it now.
I don't think that's going to happen because we're a little too close to the convention.
And it would look like the entire, it would look like the entire Democratic Party It would be one thing to argue it out among their members on the floor, because that would feel like a process of some sort, even if you didn't get your way.
You'd feel like, alright, the people who cared the most in my party, they all went to one place, or they were online, or they'd do it.
They argued, they worked it out, they negotiated.
Well, at least it's a process.
I don't love the outcome, but at least I see how it happened and got a little bit of visibility.
Okay, I can live with it. But if they replace him before that, If they found some clever way to say, hey Joe, just say you're not feeling good and we'll just slot somebody in there right away.
I don't think they could do it before.
Because as long as he's still able to appear in public and put three words together, they don't even have to make sense.
And we've seen that, right?
He doesn't even have to...
He literally doesn't even have to make sense when he talks.
And the Democrats are still willing to say, well, that's okay.
Well, let's let this play on a little bit.
I would love to know what they're thinking.
You know, the just mainstream Democrats who don't want anything except what's good for the country...
And they just want a credible candidate to be able to vote for them.
And they're looking at what their parties serve them up as their choice.
It's got to be terribly frustrating.
So I wonder about that internal process.
So here's my prediction based on what has the least friction.
So here's the least friction way to go.
Joe Biden picks, maybe even early before the convention, picks a vice presidential running mate.
Because if he assumes he's going to get the nomination, he could sort of presumptively say, let's get this out of the way, give you voters a little comfort about what's coming.
I'll just pick my vice president.
I think at that point, whoever that vice presidential pick is, assuming it's somebody you could reasonably see as qualified to be president, That Joe Biden could then just go through the charade of running for office But voters would say, we're sort of voting for the vice president.
In our minds, that's really who we're voting for.
So it feels like, and then maybe sometime between now and the convention, it wouldn't be so hard to flip the party and say, hey, let's take the vice president, put the vice president pick at the top, because the vice president was, after all, picked by the person who had the most votes.
And then maybe you could let Joe Biden slide off and say he's not feeling well.
It's all very elegant.
So I think it's going to be the vice president switcheroo would be the least friction way for the Democrats to get what they want, which is somebody else at the top of the ticket.
So that's my prediction. All right.
Let me ask you this.
If China believed that the wet markets were actually the source of the coronavirus, Would they keep them open?
Now, there might be something about China that I don't understand.
I'm sure there are lots of things about China I don't understand.
But on a risk-reward basis, if you looked at the entire GDP of China, how much of the entire GDP of China would be represented by the economic activity of the wet markets?
1%?.00001%?
There can't possibly be any serious economic impact of keeping the wet markets open.
But at least in terms of the upside gain of making money, it can't be that much money involved.
How big are these wet markets?
I mean, I don't know enough about the area, but it can't be that big, right?
And But the risk of keeping them open is so well understood.
Because if this is indeed the second time that something came out of that same environment, this time closing down the economies of the world, is there any argument that China could make for keeping them open?
Let's put it this way.
Suppose we went to China and we said, We're just going to decouple and move everything home and stop trading with you because we need to completely close travel because we can't have any kind of physical connection to a country that has wet markets because they're too risky for the other countries.
What would China say?
Would they say, oh, okay, we don't want to lose our whole economy, so we'll just close these wet markets?
So here's my question.
Is China not signaling to the world that they don't believe the wet markets were the problem?
Because you can't do these two things that they've done, which is say, oh yeah, the problem that almost killed millions of people, and did kill, I don't know, hundreds of thousands when it's all done.
You can't say we're going to keep it open, if you think that's what the problem was.
Now, yeah, somebody's saying in the comments it's a cultural thing.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe what I don't understand is the cultural importance, but the Chinese Communist Party is pretty cold-blooded engineering efficiency.
And there's nothing that I could imagine where these cold-blooded engineering efficient technocrats are going to risk trillions of dollars again for what would be the smallest economic benefit of these little wet markets that can't possibly be a good idea.
So I think China has basically signaled that they are not willing to be a credible partner in the world.
There's a line below which, if you're below the line of credibility, you just can't work with those people.
You have to just make a choice and say, you know, nothing personal, but we can't work with that.
Whatever you're doing over there, it's nothing personal.
But we can't expose ourselves to that risk anymore.
So we have to do what we need to do.
So, I love this comment from Lauren Pleska, I think from some other country on Twitter, dropped into my comments to mock me, because I was making some comments about the models, the same kind of comments I was just making here.
I was making it on Twitter. And Lauren goes in to say, and it's better if I say it in a mocking tone, that thing when a guy who draws a cartoon thinks he knows more than epidemiologists, or people who can pronounce that word, I guess, epidemiologists, about modeling infectious disease spread.
Look at the cartoonist.
That guy who draws a cartoon thinks he knows more than epidemiologists about modeling infectious diseases.
Oh, it is to laugh.
How silly that the cartoonist thinks he knows more than all the expert doctors in the world.
Well, you know, Lauren, that would not look like such an ignorant comment if it didn't happen this week.
This was the week...
In which all of the medical experts in the world finally said, yeah, the cartoonist was right.
Now, they didn't use those words.
But who was it who told you face masks really do work for laypeople when CDC and WHO and the Surgeon General and Dr.
Fauci told you they don't?
It was the cartoonist.
It was the cartoonist.
Now it was also many of you, because common sense got you to the same place.
But, Lauren, if your point is that the cartoonist cannot have an opinion which is superior to all of the experts in the world, I don't think you're paying attention.
Because I just did that.
In public. I did it aggressively in public.
I disagreed with all the experts in public.
Shamelessly. And we know, because all the experts have now said, yeah, yeah, you're right, cartoonist guy.
They didn't, of course, refer to me, but they've all come around to my point of view.
Am I right? Yes, I am.
So, let me say this.
And how about the experts, how about the medical experts who told you that because we don't know exactly exactly The hydroxychloroquine test results?
You shouldn't use them.
Didn't you have experts saying we don't have the test results so it's dangerous?
So you shouldn't use the hydroxychloroquine because it hasn't been tested through the test results.
The medical experts told you that, right?
Wasn't that the epidemiologists and everybody else?
And what did the cartoonists say?
The cartoonist disagreed to that and said, well, wait a minute.
If these drugs have been around so long that we know which people have a risk and which do not, for example, the people with heart problems and the people with hypertension have a little extra risk, and we also know that it's a long-term use risk and we're not contemplating using it for long term, under those conditions, said the cartoonist, it's probably still a good bet.
Because even if it doesn't help, we can be pretty sure it doesn't hurt, and there's so much anecdotal information that at least it suggests there's a non-zero chance it could be helpful.
So on a risk-reward basis, who was right?
Every medical expert who told you, no, you don't want to use this because it's unproven, or the cartoonist?
The cartoonist.
Because the medical experts...
Pretty much when they were already undercover, they were already turning my way, which is to say, well, we don't know if it'll work, but it's worth a shot on a risk-reward basis.
So who was right? All of the medical experts in the world, the CDC, the Surgeon General, were they right?
Was it the World Health Organization that was right?
Or was it the cartoonists?
It was the cartoonist and everybody else who had the same opinion who was not a medical expert.
It was President Trump.
Is President Trump's stupid old, dumb old President Trump who doesn't believe in science, was his opinion about hydroxychloroquine superior to what was coming from the top medical experts?
Yes. Yes it was. We can see that plainly.
Because both the medical experts and Trump exactly agreed That it's unproven.
It would be better if it were proven.
There's some anecdotal evidence that works.
But that's not a guarantee.
But the risk-reward is still worth it.
That came from the president.
That didn't come from the medical community.
That came from a cartoonist.
It didn't come from the medical community.
But now what is the medical community coming around to?
Oh yeah, that was more about shortages.
Yeah, we knew that.
We knew it was about shortages.
We knew you were lying.
We knew that you were being irrational for whatever that reason was to prevent the shortages and the hoarding.
But, Lauren, Lauren Pleska, any other year, it would be reasonable for you to say, oh, yeah, let's believe the cartoonists, not the medical experts.
Let's believe the cartoonists.
That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.
Any other year, that would have been a reasonable, mocking thing to say.
But you're saying it right in the middle of me proving in public that my opinions are superior to the medical professionals.
Now, do you need another example?
How about the example where I'm the only one who said that the low number is going to be below the models?
Did I not, as not being an epidemiologist and not being a virologist and not being a medical expert, was I not loudly and publicly saying that I believe the numbers would come in well under the bottom estimate?
Who was right?
All of the experts in the world?
Or the cartoonist?
Who was right? The cartoonist or the experts?
Lauren? So, at least pay a little bit of attention who's being right.
Okay? I totally get that you should not ignore experts.
Even I don't ignore experts as much as I complain about it.
Even I take experts as the first position.
And if you're going to deviate from what the experts are saying, you have a good reason.
You're going to need a pretty good reason if you're going to disagree with the consensus of experts.
But I show my work.
You can decide. All right.
Wow, I think I've beat that to death.
Here's another example of LoserThink from Rachel Maddow.
So she was responding to the Attorney General, had a tweet about America needing to get back to work.
All right, so the Attorney General was making sort of a general statement We need to get back to work.
He was not putting a day on it.
He was not saying let's forget about the people who will die because he wasn't saying that.
He was making a general, universally true statement that we would all like to get back to work.
No real detail.
Rachel Maddow decides to mock him for that universally true statement that everybody agrees on.
And she says it this way in her tweet.
More than 14,000 Americans have already died.
One American died every 45 seconds today.
But sure, Mr.
Attorney General, go on.
Go on about this.
Get back to work. Here's the loser thing.
It's one variable thinking.
If the only variable we had to worry about was how many people were dying...
Well, I'd say get back to work.
Or how many people are dying specifically from the coronavirus?
Then Rachel Maddow would have a world-class excellent opinion here.
And it would be the sort of thing she should be proud to show to the world.
But if you're in a situation that has many variables, and you've got the economic pain and death that comes with that, and you've got the healthcare coronavirus death, And you've got lots of variables that ties it all together, the psychology, the economics, the credit, this world, this sea of variables.
And Rachel Maddow goes in and she picks out just one of them, just one of the important variables, to mock somebody who may have considered more than one variable.
If you want to really be the champion of loserthink, Be the person who says only one variable matters in a big multivariable situation, and then go in public and mock the people who think it's a multivariable situation.
If you want to reach the peak of bad thinking, Rachel Maddow, you have achieved the summit.
All right. Anything else happening?
I keep seeing questions about Dr.
Shiva and whether I agree or disagree, so I will reiterate what I said about that.
Dr. Shiva has a whole range of opinions within this category of the coronavirus stuff, and I don't know which ones.
You find controversial or you would like my opinion on.
So if you want to be more specific, put it in the form of a statement.
Dr. Shiva says X. What do you think?
So I'd be happy to give you an opinion on that, but you have to narrow it down a little bit.
I've sort of skimmed his opinions and I didn't see anything that far out of what I would think.
I didn't see anything that shocked me.
So I don't know what you're talking about exactly.
Um... Want to hear a Linda Tripp story?
So, here's one of the weird things about my life, and I noticed this about other people as well.
Have you ever noticed there are some people who, for completely, or at least what it looks like to be coincidences, often find themselves to be somehow attached to the biggest stories in the world?
Have you ever noticed that?
There are some people... Who just go through their life and they're not even trying to do it, but suddenly they're somehow attached to or their brother is doing something or their spouse is on something.
They're always just connected to the biggest stories in the world.
Have you ever noticed that? It's like this weird pattern that can't be explained.
Now I assume it's just confirmation bias and selective memory and stuff.
But it's one of those fun things about reality that looks like that.
And I'm one of those people.
So I observe it in others, but I observe it in myself as well, that the number of times I'm connected to a major story, it's just sort of weird.
And the Linda Tripp one is one of those examples.
And there's no importance to the story.
It's just an interesting connection.
So Linda Tripp, if you remember, she had her knowledge about what Monica Lewinsky was up to, and she didn't know what to do with it.
And she sought advice.
Now here's the interesting part.
The person she sought advice from was a book editor, a publishing editor kind of person.
And that publishing editor kind of person I happen to know.
So I actually knew.
I think she's passed away.
But I knew the woman, the agent, that Linda Tripp went to.
And that agent told her to make her story public.
So that's the part of the story you know.
That Linda Tripp had some information.
She got some advice from a publisher.
The publisher said, yeah, you should take that public.
Here's the part you don't know.
The person who gave her that advice was a huge anti-Clinton person.
So the advice was not unbiased.
It was just pure political advice to take down a president.
Yes, it was Jonah Goldberg's mother.
That is correct. Now, Jonah Goldberg's mother, who gave Linda Tripp the advice, was married to, I believe, the senior vice president of my cartoon syndication company.
So I knew well the husband...
Because I worked with him as part of my cartooning.
So I knew well the guy who was married to the woman who gave the advice.
And those two people are the parents of Jonah Goldberg, who I met at an event during those times.
So there's no real point to the story, except the number of times I find myself connected to a story...
And then, you know, time goes by, and most of you know that Jake Tapper and I did a thing where Jake is also a cartoonist, and Jake drew a week of Dilbert comics that we use for a charity for wounded veterans.
And so we did that twice.
So I have, you know, this sort of working professional connection with Jake Tapper, who also dated Monica Lewinsky.
So in this weird way, I'm just minding my own business over in my life, and I've got two separate connections to this whole Monica Lewinsky story.
I mean, how random is that?
It's not even six degrees.
It's like one degree.
Or is it two? However you count that.
All right. Dr.
Shiva, somebody says, does not believe HIV causes AIDS. Well, I don't know about anything in that topic.
But that's not what you were asking me about, Dr.
Shiva. And by the way, that's not a secret or anything.
Jake has actually published, I think, at least one article in which he talked...
Favorably about Monica just being a good person.
And by the way, as far as I can tell, we've had a long time to observe Monica Lewinsky in the public eye, and I think we can say she's a good person.
That's my observation. She looks like a good person.
She was in a difficult situation, but she just seems like a good person to me.
All right. Prediction on when California will relax its stuff.
Well, I don't think anybody's made a decision, but here's what I did today to try to move the ball forward.
So I tweeted today that I think we should get back to work whenever the experts can tell us that doing so would keep the death count from coronavirus specifically below 50,000.
Now here's why I'm doing it.
Having spent many years doing predictions and estimating things and doing budgets and that sort of thing, one of the things I learned is that you can often estimate the cost of something or the price that somebody would be willing to pay without knowing any information about the topic.
Now you say to yourself, well, Sky, how's that possible?
How could you reasonably estimate what somebody would pay for something if you had very little information about those people, what they want, What the item is.
And I would say, you need to know something about it.
But here's how you can make predictions without knowing much about anything.
It goes like this.
Where you would feel comfortable is probably not that far off from where other people would feel comfortable.
So, for example, if somebody came to you and said, I've developed this new product.
It's a blank.
It has these functions and you want it because of this reason.
It doesn't even matter what it is. And you look at it and you say, okay, what would you pay for this?
And so I hold it in my hands and I look at all the features and I figure out what it would do for me and I say to myself, I would pay, I don't know, 50 bucks.
And what you would find is that you could do this experiment all over the country.
You'd probably have to keep it within a country.
But you'd say, okay, hold this product, tell me what you would pay for it.
And people would say, I don't know.
Sixty bucks? But you're going to find out they don't say a thousand and they don't say two dollars.
People have, for just psychological reasons, for bias reasons, for irrational reasons, we tend to gravitate toward the same perceived price of things.
There's no reason for it.
It's not based on being smart.
It's just a phenomena which I've observed over the years.
So, I believe that people will also gravitate toward 50,000 for the following reasons.
50,000 tends to be sort of a weird cutoff in our experience of life.
50,000 is sort of the number of people who died in Vietnam.
And we say that was too many.
50,000 is roughly in that neighborhood of how many people die from guns.
50,000 is sort of where people are dying from automobile accidents.
50,000 is sort of where the overdose numbers are.
Now, you know, it's in the 30 to 100,000, but I'm just saying 50,000 is that range, right?
50,000...
Has taken on a psychological and emotional meaning for us.
This is a hypothesis. I can't point any science behind this, so don't take it too seriously.
I put it down as a hypothesis.
Maybe we'll see if something happens this way.
We'll never know if it's because of this.
But, so here's the basic idea.
Yeah, and the flu. Somebody says in the comments, the average flu...
Kills in the range of, you know, give or take 50,000.
So I believe that in our minds there is a magic number which we accept in the United States as too much, and then below that it's like, well, I will accept up to 50,000 deaths because I need a car.
You know, society needs transportation.
I will accept 50,000 deaths from illegal drugs, overdoses, because the alternative is what?
Closing all the borders and not accepting mail from other countries.
So they say, well, given the trade-offs, I'll accept that.
So I'm going to continue to put out the 50,000 number.
And by the way, I heard Lindsey Graham use the same number.
I don't know.
It's possible that he heard it from somebody who heard it from me, but I think it's more likely that he came up with the same number.
I think the most likely scenario is that Lindsey Graham did the same thing I'm doing right now, which is, okay, just if I had to think about it as just a citizen, where would I be comfortable to get the economy back knowing that X number of people will die?
What is X? What's my X? And he said 50,000.
The more of us who can say that, the more 50,000 becomes a thing.
And even it could be we're debating whether it should be above or below 50,000.
As long as that number gets in our head, then we've got something we can tell our experts.
Hey, experts, we know you can't be that accurate.
But give us your best estimate of when we can go back to work and under what conditions.
That will keep us under this psychologically important level of 50,000.
And I think that makes...
So this is what I call the drug dealer's trick, where you find a way that you're both psychologically happy, even if you don't know you've made the right decision.
So we need to be, as a society, we need to be psychologically comfortable with whatever we decide, but also completely aware that we can't know what's the best thing to do.
It's just not knowable.
You can take a guess and you can adjust as you go, but you've got to be comfortable or you're not going to get off the first square.
And I think to do that we need to float the number of 50,000 and just wrestle with it for a while until that number becomes something we feel is comfortable.
I see a very insightful comment that says, bullshit.
Somebody says, too low.
Too low? You're saying too low because it won't get us back to work?
Well, I think that we can get to 50,000.
And I think we can get there simply by keeping old people locked up and doing a better job.
You know, here's an idea that nobody's talked about.
Suppose you had only one...
Now, let's say you had two tests, and you had two extended families.
So there were two families that had, from children to parents, and let's say one grandparent is living in the home.
And there are two of these situations.
So two households have a grandparent there.
You only have two tests available.
What's the best thing you can do if you have two tests?
You test the two grandparents in the two different households, and then you put the grandparents in the same house, and you have the young people move over and double up in the house that has the young people in it.
So then you've got the two tested grandparents who just say, nobody's coming in this house for six months.
We're going to shove pizzas under the door, but nobody's coming in the house.
You guys have tested.
You're good. You just live in this house, and the rest of us will live with the low-risk people.
Now, I don't know how often things like that would happen.
I use that as an extreme example to say that we have not exhausted the cleverness that we could apply.
So if the government said, right now, our models say that we're still going to be at 60,000, but I don't think our cleverness has been expired.
We have not gotten the bottom of the well of our cleverness.
So even though our models are still saying 60,000, we feel comfortable saying that human ingenuity can get us below 50,000.
So I think our experts have plenty of Ability to say, yeah, this is the time, and this is the way.
And they could also say, going to work without masks won't get you under 50,000.
Going to work with masks, with hydroxychloroquine, once we know a little bit more about the effectiveness.
So they could give us a prescription that is effectively a checklist.
I created a checklist for you.
But they could create a better one that says, all right, if you meet these criteria...
You're good to go.
And I think they could keep it under $50,000.
So these are the things I'll be pushing the most.
The number $50,000, a checklist so our experts can tell us whether we're on the list to go back first, and then a decision on the end of the month.
If you can give me those things, plus some confidence that We're not going to run out of ventilators and stuff.
And I think we're getting close to that.
Then I feel like we have something that looks like a plan.
And I would be very proud of living in a country that could get us to that point, actually.
If we can get to the point where we've got a number that we're managing to, and we've got a checklist where we can all say, yes, yes, that applies.
You know, no science needed.
Either I have a mask and I'm going to wear it or I don't.