Episode 2178 Scott Adams: Today I Teach You A New Rule For Spotting Fake News, You'll Love This one
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
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New rule for spotting fake news,
Politics, Oppenheimer Movie, Dementia, Washington Post, Genetic Urges, Pattern Recognition, Apple AI, President Biden Popularity, Gavin Newsom, Election Integrity, Design Is Destiny, Fake News Identification, RFK Jr., Ethnically Targeted Bioweapons, Ibram X. Kendi, Quote Credibility, History Isn't Real, VP Harris, Fermi Paradox, Simulation Theory, Vivek Ramaswamy, Scott Adams
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of human civilization and possibly some of the animals.
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Before or after is good.
Well, let's talk about the news.
It's all light and breezy and not too many people died, or at least in a news-making way.
Probably the same amount of people died yesterday as every other day.
But they were, sadly, they were not newsmakers.
So, my rule about death?
If you know you're going to die anyway, shouldn't you make some news?
I mean, not bad news.
You don't want to kill anybody.
But, you know, do it a little bit interesting.
Add a little bit of something something.
Whatever.
All right.
So according to Elon Musk, he's changing the name of Twitter to X. It will be X.
Let me be the first person to say the NPC comment.
Are you ready?
What will the NPC say?
Is it X-rated?
It's X-rated!
You ready for that?
What else will the NPC say?
Can I use it if I don't have an ex-wife?
Yeah, we'll expect that.
Soil it in green, his people!
That's the important thing.
All right, apparently there's some god-awful movie called Oppenheimer.
And when I say god-awful, there are three big criticisms of this movie.
Number one, it's like three hours long?
Somebody says three hours long?
Do you know why movies are three hours long ever?
Like, what is the reason that there would ever be a three hour movie?
You know there's only one reason, right?
No, not for the Oscars.
Nope.
That's not why.
It means that the director has too much power.
That's what it means.
A good, tight movie, like a 90-minute movie, usually is because the studio had the edit power.
So they just said, we're not going to put out a three-hour movie.
That'd be crazy.
So they just knock it down to something you'd actually want to watch.
But if you have a really high-end, best director ever, and maybe some stars, then the studio has to eat whatever they produce.
So it might be an Oscar-worthy, tremendous thing, but no way in hell I'm going to watch it.
No way in hell I'm gonna watch another three-hour movie as long as I live.
This is my promise.
My promise.
I will never watch another fucking three-hour movie.
Do you know how many times I thought that was a good idea?
Quite a few.
Quite a few.
I've fallen for that trick, I don't know, dozens of times.
I don't know how many three-hour movies there are, but I think I've seen them all.
I'm not gonna fall for it again.
I'm gonna take a stand.
This could be the best movie ever made.
I will not watch it.
Three hours.
That is not fair.
That is not... It's not even respectful.
It's not respectful of the audience.
At all.
Anyway.
But that's only one thing wrong with it.
I saw on internet that this movie doesn't have enough people of color.
And there's no woman speaking in the movie until 20 minutes in.
So, I mean, yeah, I mean, you want Morgan Freeman to be playing Oppenheimer.
I know you do, but you can't have everything you want.
So apparently just because Oppenheimer was a real person and he wasn't a person of color, that somehow that seemed reason enough to make him a white supremacist.
Now, they don't call him a white supremacist.
I just assume because he's white.
It's just natural, natural assumption.
So a very big mistake to make this movie about a real live white man.
And they cast a white guy to play the part.
It's like ridiculous in 2023.
So the Hill has a story about a study in the Lancet.
That getting a proper hearing aid for older people can reduce your risk of dementia by 48%.
Isn't that amazing?
48% difference just getting a proper hearing aid.
Now, this fits with everything else we know about dementia.
How many times have you heard that the people who retire and stop reading books and stop challenging themselves, they have a worse time of dementia?
It's a pretty well understood thing.
And if you quit your job early, this is actually one of the biggest reasons that I don't plan to retire.
You know, until I'm a total embarrassment.
Because I know that that's the thing that keeps me alive.
The fact that every day there's something in my day that I say to myself, oh God, I'm going to have to do a lot of thinking.
Like today's one of those days.
I have a very complicated task I have to do later.
I have to change my password on four separate sites.
Don't ask why.
It has something to do with publishing.
But do you know how hard it is for me With the way my brain is wired, to change four passwords, which is a simple process, right?
They'll all have a simple... Do you know the odds of me doing that correctly?
And do you know how long it will take?
An ordinary person changing a password?
Five minutes?
Five minute stops?
This is an all day, this is all day for me.
I have to actually block out a full day to change four passwords.
Because I know that of the four, there's no chance that all four will work.
One of them will tell me that I've already opened an account, and I've used every password that can be used, and I can never use another password because I've used them all, and by the way, they're not sure that my username is real anymore.
Right?
I mean, I'm making that one up.
But it feels like you can't do a simple task like change four passwords all in the same day.
Somebody's gonna send you the message to your spam, you're gonna look and it won't be there.
And you'll wait, and it just will never be there.
There's some services, I think it's OpenTable.
I had an OpenTable account for the app many years ago, but now I can never use it again.
Because it gets in that mode where it thinks you already have an account, but it won't let you in, won't let you change the password.
I forget what it was.
It was one of those situations where you literally could never use it again.
Unless you pretend to be somebody else, I guess.
Anyway, so it makes sense to me that hearing aids would improve Your prospects of not getting dementia because it's just one more input.
So my belief is that the more input, you know, the more things coming through your ears and eyes and senses and, you know, your brain and all that, that that's the only thing that keeps you from getting dementia.
It's just how much is going on.
And so keep that in mind.
It's not just the hearing aids.
It's just everything you do with your brain.
Alright, well, oh, sad news, sad news.
It turns out that the Washington Poop, I mean the Washington Post, the Washington Post.
It's only in the Dilbert Reborn comic.
That's called the Washington Poop.
Ratbert is actually working at the Washington Poop in the Dilbert Reborn comic, which is available only by subscription if you subscribe on Twitter or scottadams.locals.com.
Anyway, Jeff Bezos is reportedly, he wants to take a more direct interest in the business that he owns, the Washington Post, because they reportedly lose $100 million a year due to failing subscriptions.
Huh.
What would cause a business like the Washington Post to lose customers?
Let's see, they're a news entity.
News entity.
What would make a news entity lose customers?
Well, competition.
Competition would do it.
Does it look like there's a lot more competition for news?
Not serious competition.
There is, but not serious.
So it's probably not the competition.
Is it because they probably have very high expenses?
Maybe not, no.
Could it be?
That the news entity is more famous for fake news than real news.
Could it be that?
When you think of the Washington Post, or I say to you, well the Washington Post has a political story today about Trump, what's your first thought?
Oh, there's some useful news, fully in context, accurate I'm sure, in which I will learn something that's useful to me as a citizen in my decision making while I vote.
No.
No.
You tell yourself it's fake news, because it always is.
You know, depending on the topic, it's always fake news.
So, you're not going to believe the science they report, because that's probably bullshit.
You're not going to believe any of the politics or the opinion.
What else do you use newspapers for?
To find out the same thing that you can see in a tweet?
You know, there's some new study or something?
What else is there?
Well, there's celebrity news.
News about public figures.
And we'll talk about how often the news about public figures is accurate.
Because on a day when the news is talking about the news, the news about the news is that the Washington Post is losing a lot of money.
Wouldn't it be interesting to be on a live stream that teaches you how to spot the fake news even better, which would make the Washington Post go out of business faster?
Anybody in for that?
Does anybody want to help me put the Washington Post completely out of business simply by teaching you how to better spot fake news?
That's all I'll do.
That's the only thing I'll do.
I'll teach you how to better spot fake news, and it should put the Washington Post completely out of business.
You ready?
That's coming up.
I'm going to do the whiteboard in a little bit.
But let's do some other stuff first.
So I saw a tweet from Owen Gregorian about a Newsweek article about researchers from the University of Colorado.
They found about 500 different genes that directly influence what we choose to eat, including those involved in our experience of taste.
So it turns out that your genes will determine what you like and would also presumably It makes sense, it follows, would have a big impact on who's overweight.
For example, I like sweet stuff sometimes, in the right context, but I don't like it enough to seek it.
I wouldn't look for it.
You know, maybe I'd eat it if somebody, like, forced me to be polite.
It's like, oh, I made this myself.
Oh, did you?
You made it yourself.
A little bit of it in my mouth to show you that I'm supportive.
So I do eat sweet things.
And sometimes even like, oh, that was tasty.
But I'm not really drawn to it.
Now, I've always believed that was genetic.
Because I observe people around me And you can look at how quickly they come to get the food.
From the moment you tell a room full of people that the food is ready, watch who lines up first every time.
It'll be the same people if you have the same set of friends.
When the pizza comes, see which friend gets to the pizza first.
It'll be the same ones every time.
They seem to have a genetic, you know, craving or preference for food that I simply don't have.
Now some of it is you can train yourself to get rid of some cravings, especially for sweets, by just staying off them for a long time.
If you stay off your sweets for a long enough time, they don't even look like food anymore.
You've probably not had that experience.
But if you do stay away from sweets long enough, it doesn't look like food.
Like your brain just redefines it as, oh that's some kind of like entertainment.
If I want entertainment at some risk to my health, well, there it is.
But you don't see it as food.
You see food as food, and you see dessert as entertainment.
As you should.
But I wanted to add to this that science is finally catching up to where hypnotists were 40, well, actually 50 to 100 years ago.
There are things I learned 40 years ago in hypnosis class from just a hypnotist, without the benefit of any science, that are just being discovered as true, or have been discovered in my lifetime.
In my lifetime, science discovered that alcoholism has a genetic base.
Is anybody here old enough to remember before that was obvious?
What, you didn't know that?
Honestly?
You didn't know that?
Yeah, I think you're kidding, right?
Everybody knows that alcoholism has a genetic base, right?
I thought everybody knew that.
So, you know, it runs in the family.
It's easy to demonstrate it's genetic.
Now, as a hypnotist, I knew that long before science did.
Because you could just tell people were driven by different desires, and they didn't come from nature.
People were just driven by different urges.
It was obviously genetic.
So that's something I knew long before.
When the large language models were introduced, the AI that we have now, And I said, what you're going to learn is about people.
You'll learn about AI, but AI is going to teach you more about people.
And what it taught us was exactly what I was waiting for, for 40 years.
That humans are nothing but pattern recognition machines.
That's all we are.
So they reproduced our intelligence just with pattern recognition.
If you don't realize that people don't think, we don't actually reason, we just imagine we do.
Now I do think there are some non-emotional topics where people can get to something like a reasoned chain of cause and effect and something closer to science.
But in your daily life, you don't do anything like that.
Your daily life is just pattern recognition and cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias and then reinterpreting what you did as smart after the fact.
You do it first, and then you tell yourself there was a reason you did it.
That's actually what you learn in hypnosis.
But science is just catching up.
Do you remember the first time you heard that there was a part of your brain that doesn't activate until after you've decided to do something?
Like the actual reasoning part of your brain isn't even involved until just after you make a decision.
It's a rationalizer.
All right, now science has demonstrated that, that you actually rationalize after your emotional decision.
But hypnotists learn that on, it's like day one.
All right, people are completely irrational.
Everything you think about, people thinking and using reason and all that, complete illusion.
Nobody's using reason at all.
You know, except in the limited case of maybe balancing your checkbook, you know, doing some actual science.
You know, there's some reason there.
But not in your daily life.
In your daily life, it's just patterns and urges and genetics and stuff like that.
And that free will is an illusion.
By the way, if free will were not an illusion, I don't think hypnosis would even work.
I don't think it'd be a thing.
It's very much a thing.
So I could anticipate, thanks to hypnosis training, that the large language models would have a limit.
And the limit would be they're not going to get too much smarter than us, because that's it.
That's what intelligence is.
It's just pattern recognition.
That was interesting.
All right now, apparently Apple AI is coming, and maybe sooner than we think.
It appears there's a possibility, I think this is unconfirmed, that Apple may have done a lot more work on AI than they've told us.
And that maybe by fall, you'll see Apple products coming out with, you know, not just AI, but as some are speculating, really, really good AI.
Because I don't think Apple's going to roll it out unless it beats the shit out of the other products.
Would you agree with that?
That probably Apple has had something that's about as good as ChatGPT for a while.
I'm just speculating, but guessing.
They're too smart to not have done something.
There's no way they waited until ChatGPT came out.
I don't believe that.
But we do see they didn't put it into Siri.
So, you know, my guess is that they're waiting for something that's like a leapfrog or, you know, it's a level better than what you're seeing on the market.
Just speculating.
It could be less than what's on the market.
We'll see.
But it's a big, big deal and it's coming.
And I will remind you, when I talk about companies, you should ask me if I forget.
If I'm talking about some big company's prospects for the future, you should ask me if I own stock.
If I forget to tell you.
So I owned Apple stock until recently.
For years I owned it.
I got rid of it because of the AI risk.
I don't recommend you follow my advice.
Because it looked to me like they were behind on AI.
But you don't really know.
You don't really know.
It's entirely possible that the Apple will triple in value because of AI.
It's also possible that the App Store model disappears with AI and that anybody can make a phone.
So here's the other thing.
The other thing I predict is that we're not that far away from a phone that's just a screen.
And all it does is talk to the internet, and that's about it.
So basically, your phone would just be what got processed on the internet, and then got sent to your phone.
But there wouldn't be any brains in the phone.
So if you lose your phone, you go to the store, you pick up another one, and you put it in the same password you had on the lost phone, and it just pops up.
It's your phone.
To me, it seems like that's the future of phones.
And the only thing that would prevent it would be, you know, ubiquitous access to the internet, which we now have.
A variety of ways.
So I think there is an existential risk to Apple with AI.
At the same time, if you were going to bet on Apple's performance from the past being indicative of the future, what would that be?
What would you call it if you used the past performance of a company to predict the future performance?
What's that called?
There's a word for that.
Using the past performance of a company.
Thank you.
Yes, the word is stupid.
Stupid is the actual technical term for imagining that you can predict the future by the past.
You know how history repeats?
No it doesn't.
Who the fuck told you history repeats?
It can't repeat.
It doesn't even have the possibility.
There's not even one of the possibilities.
Yeah, there's some patterns that you'll see over and over, but history can't repeat, because there's always a different starting point.
Even if you put the same pattern into it, you're starting from something new, so you're gonna end up with something new.
All right, so I don't know what's going to happen with Apple, but I think that the reason I owned a big chunk of it until recently is that it operated like an index fund.
Do you get that?
It was such a big, stable company with so many lines of business that it could have a really bad time with any one product and, you know, probably they'd be fine.
But AI actually takes a risk to 100% of their product line, in my opinion.
Now, again, it could be that the risk managed properly in an Apple way, the way they always do, could be the thing that triples or 10Xs their stock price.
But the risk is not like it used to be, right?
So owning a little bit of Apple probably makes a lot of sense.
Oh shit, that's advice.
Yeah, the only advice I'd like to give you is diversification.
I feel like that's fair, right?
Because that's what everybody would say is a good thing.
So if you're looking at Apple, maybe think of it in terms of diversification.
That's the only thing I'll say about it.
Now, I do own QQQ, you know, an index fund which has Apple as a big component.
So I get the secondary effect either way.
So I'm not completely out.
All right, I saw that CNN's Smirkonish was talking about the popularity of Joe Biden and saying it was the second most unpopular president in modern history.
Jimmy Carter was the most unpopular.
So what does it tell you when CNN, and Smirkonish in this case, is talking about Joe Biden being the second most unpopular president?
Does that tell you that CNN is in the bag for Biden?
No.
This does not feel like a story they would have done before.
I don't believe they would have done this when he was running against Trump, or a negative story in general.
And we also saw that Jake Tapper interviewed the IRS whistleblower.
Did you think you'd ever live to see that?
Jake Tapper interviewed a highly credible IRS whistleblower who has the goods on the Bidens.
Can you even imagine that that happened in the world you live in?
The only thing I can conclude is that CNN has very much decided they don't want Biden to be the guy they have to defend for the next four years.
Imagine being CNN and saying, oh shit, we're going to have to defend Biden while he's just crumbling into dust.
We're going to look ridiculous.
You got to give us somebody we can defend, right?
Give us anybody who looks better than Trump to at least the base.
So it does look like all indications are that the Gavin Newsom switcheroo is in full play.
Does anybody think it would be anybody except Gavin Newsom?
Can you think of one name of who the alleged deep state Democrats, who else would they want to put there?
Let me make a prediction for you that I will die on that hill.
You ready?
Michelle Obama will never run for president.
Never.
Michelle Obama will never run for president.
Here's another one.
RFK Jr.
will never, ever be on the same ticket as Trump.
There's no chance of that.
And every time I see it on the internet, somebody's saying, hey, I've got an idea.
Because everybody thinks they thought of it.
How many of you thought you were the first ones to think of, I've got an idea.
What if?
Just stay with me.
What if Trump picked RFK Jr.
as his running mate?
How many of you thought you thought of that before anybody thought of it?
No.
Some of you did.
It's never going to happen.
There's nothing in our world that could make that happen.
All right.
But if I'm wrong about it, then I will eat crow right in front of you and admit my weaknesses.
But probably not.
All right.
So, yeah, it looks like the Democrats are gunning for the Bidens.
In my opinion, the only reason that Biden wants to be president is so he can pardon himself and his son.
I honestly don't see a second reason.
Do you?
Because do you believe that Biden thinks the only way the Democrats can win is if he runs?
No.
Do you think that this is what he wants to do at his current age?
No.
He looks like a desperate man.
He's acting like he's desperate to stay out of jail and keep his son out of jail.
What do you think would be President Trump's main incentive for running for office also?
To pardon himself.
So, ladies and gentlemen, may I humbly suggest That if you live in a country which is on the verge of nominating two people who's at least among their top two reasons for running for office, are their only way of staying out of jail.
That's what we've done.
So congratulations, public.
We all did that.
Hey, give yourself a pat on the back.
You're part of a system.
That elevated the only two people who shouldn't be running for office right now.
In fact, you could scour the country looking for somebody who would be a worse choice than somebody running for president to stay out of jail.
Now, in my opinion, the Trump charges at least are kind of trumped up, but they're still there, right?
I think that they're minor infractions, normal person wouldn't be prosecuted, that kind of thing, but they're still there.
How in the world did we get ourselves in this position, ladies and gentlemen?
We did this, didn't we?
Do you think you could really blame the media for this one?
Because you know exactly what's going on with both these candidates.
You know.
You know you did this intentionally.
Everybody who answered a poll tweeted about a preferred candidate, if it was either one of those.
I mean, not every one of you individually, obviously.
But when I speak about you, I mean the public.
Yeah, I think blaming this one on the media is going too far.
I think we gotta take this one.
I think the public has to accept that with full knowledge and completely conscious, we chose to have a presidential race, so far, In which the two main candidates are just trying to stay in a jail.
That's a real thing.
Right?
Now I do think it's Trump's best bet is to get elected and pardon himself.
And I don't think he did anything that should be jailable.
At least nothing I've seen.
Well, the difference between the two candidates is that Trump has a second and third reason.
Trump's second and third reason would be revenge.
Let's not pretend that's not part of it, because you and I and some of the others want that same revenge.
You want revenge on the system, if not on individuals, right?
I want revenge on the voting system.
I want revenge on an election system that is designed not to be credible.
It's designed that way.
It's not designed to be believable.
It's designed to not be believed.
Because it's not auditable.
Fully.
You know, there's lots of parts that are auditable.
But it's not fully auditable.
And it wouldn't be impossible to be fully auditable.
And we want it to be.
So it's got to be intentional.
It's got to be intentional.
Our system has to be designed to be not credible.
Or at least to be rigable.
You know, same thing.
So design is destiny.
I would assume that given our current design of the election systems that a rigged election is a guarantee from the design.
The design guarantees it.
It just doesn't tell you when or how much.
So it doesn't necessarily change the election.
And it doesn't necessarily change any specific election.
But it's guaranteed by design.
Design is destiny.
All right, here now your lesson on how to identify fake news.
Here's a new rule.
The quote taken out of the middle of a sentence.
Now, I've told you that quotes, any kind of a quote by a famous person, a public figure, is usually out of context.
So you already knew that, right?
If you saw one sentence, you'd say, oh, that's probably out of context.
But worse than that is the few words taken out of a sentence.
So it's bad enough that it's a full sentence taken out of, let's say, the paragraphs around it.
But you can go to another level and take just two words And of a full sentence.
What are the odds that if you see a report of a public figure, this is the important part, a public figure, not just somebody you know, public figure, and they're being demonized on social media and in the news, over two or three words from a larger sentence.
How many times is that going to be real?
A few words from a larger sentence.
Basically never.
Basically never.
You want some examples?
Sure you do.
RFK Jr.
is in trouble for, as The Hill, the publication The Hill, says that he used, he said that COVID was, quote, now this is The Hill's What do you think might have been left out of the sentence?
and the sentence was picked out of a larger context.
And the words they picked out was ethnically targeted.
So those are the quote words.
He said that COVID was ethnically targeted.
What do you think might have been left out of the sentence?
I don't know the answer to this.
But if he said that COVID was ethnically targeted, is it possible, and I don't know, I'm just asking, is it possible that he said, you know, the way it looks, it acted as if it's ethnically targeted?
Yeah.
Did the rest of the sentence say, it looks like it, it acts that way, or the outcome was as if?
Those all mean different things.
Same words, but what is just before them and what after them completely changes the meaning.
Because if you found out that RFK Jr.
was simply raising an eyebrow, saying, we should understand why this affected people in different ethnicities differently, and then he makes a separate claim that's connected, that the U.S.
has been investigating, let's say, ethnically targeted Bioweapons.
We should imagine that other adversaries would be doing the same.
Now, even if there's no evidence that anybody ever did any experiments on ethnically targeted bioweapons, even if there's no evidence, don't you think it might be true?
I mean, if you were in that job, wouldn't it occur to you that it'd be better if it didn't kill your side?
That'd be like, right at the top of the list of things you'd look into.
You know, it'd be a big variable.
So, if we observe, as RFK Jr.
points out, that different ethnic groups may have been, of course all data about COVID is sketchy, but the data suggests That maybe some groups had a completely different experience.
Wouldn't you want to know more about that in the context of a world in which probably everybody who's doing bioweapons research is at least looking into ethnically targeted stuff?
So, here's the rule.
If you see a partial quote So it's gotta be a partial quote, taken out of a sentence, so it's not even the full sentence.
The person complaining is paid to complain.
Are the people who write bad stories about RFK Jr.' 's comments, are they paid to complain?
Yes, they're writers.
They're writers who work for an entity that if it didn't support the side that reads it the most, they would lose all their money.
So if CNN started reporting all the same things as Fox News, they would go out of business.
So there's somebody to make money from the story they're putting forward, the narrative, right?
So it's a partial quote.
The people who are promoting it are making money, directly or indirectly.
Assume there's an E at the end of make.
And it involves a public figure.
Now the public figure thing is the real key.
Because you don't see this so much about, you know, your neighbor.
So you need a public figure.
RFK Jr.
is perfect.
So they use him as the vessel for which they, you know, put their bullshit in from every side, and then they blame him for it.
So they make up a bunch of ridiculous bullshit, they pick a public figure, and they blame the public figure by taking two words out of an entire, you know, conversation.
Two words.
Do you think that's ever happened before?
Are there any other examples in the news in which somebody took a partial quote and made something of it?
Well, how about this?
I saw a tweet just today, coincidentally, from Ibram Kendi.
You know Ibram Kendi because he's a CRT and DEI and ESG kind of proponent.
So does Ibram Kendi make money From saying provocative things.
Yes.
That's his job.
He writes books.
He's a pundit.
So he basically makes money.
And then the quote is something about a positive.
It's about a public figure.
So it's coming from somebody who makes money.
It's about a public figure.
In this case, DeSantis and Florida.
So Florida is like a stand in for a public figure, but it's really DeSantis.
So you got your public figure.
And now where's the partial quote?
You ready for the partial quote?
This is Ibram Kendi's tweet.
And slavers defended slavery by claiming it was a positive good.
Yeah, the two words in quote are positive good.
For black people.
I don't think anybody said that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but he's putting a quote, positive good, around something that actually nobody said.
Am I right?
Isn't he using the quote as an example of what people are thinking?
He's not using it as an actual quote.
Am I right?
I believe nobody ever said those words, positive good.
Now, I only know that because I pay attention.
I've read about this story enough to know that was never in the story.
Suppose you didn't know that.
Wouldn't you assume he's quoting an actual person who said slavery was a positive good?
You would assume that, right?
Remember, follow the rule.
It's a partial quote.
It involves a public figure.
All right?
So all of your antennas should have been up.
And then it goes on.
It's a positive good for black people.
Today, Florida's Board of Education.
So now the Board of Education is sort of a stand-in for Florida and DeSantis.
So it's really about a public figure, right?
If DeSantis had not been the driver of it, this wouldn't be a thing.
And then it said that the Board of Education of Florida approved new black history standards for enslaved people and saying that the enslaved people, the black people, developed skills that, and here's the partial quote, could be applied for their personal benefit.
Sometimes slaves learn things that, quote, could be applied to their personal benefits.
What do you think the first part of the sentence was?
What do you think the second part of the sentence was?
And what do you think the context was?
Now, I don't know, but I'll tell you the context I heard.
That if you were a slave and you were working in the field, that's like the worst work, and you'd learn, let's say, to how to shoe a horse.
Like you watched somebody and you learned a skill to shoe a horse.
You could improve your situation from the worst thing in the world to slightly less worse.
Still a slave, still terrible.
Everybody agrees it's the worst thing in the world.
But at least you got out of the field by learning a skill.
And then, presumably, when slavery ended, maybe some of those skills could be used productively.
Now, does anybody think that whoever was saying the sentence could be applied for their personal benefit, is there anybody who thought that that meant, well, you know, they had a pretty, pretty good.
I'll tell you.
You think you've got a good?
Well, let me tell you how happy those slaves were.
No, nobody's saying that.
And you know nobody's saying that, right?
So, there's your fake news.
Partial quote about a public figure from somebody paid to make trouble.
There isn't the slightest chance that any of this is true.
Not the slightest.
Now, just to round out this point, there are a lot of sources of information, but they do not have all the same credibility.
And while I think my audience understands it, which things are more credible than others, the general public needs a lesson.
Now, I'm going to show you roughly what that lesson should be.
OK?
So I'm going to kind of do it on the fly here.
But there are lots of ways that we learn things, and they're not all equal.
Let's say you see there's a scientific event, or let's say activity, in which they produced a preprint paper.
Preprint.
So somebody says, yep, we did this study.
It's a preprint.
What level of credibility Would you give a pre-print study?
And that means that it has not been peer-reviewed.
Close to zero would be the right answer, right?
Close to zero.
But how many people would know that?
Who would know that?
Do you think the general public, when they hear there's a study and it's written up in a pre-print, do they know that that has no credibility?
Probably not, right?
They probably think it's over 50%, don't you think?
Or maybe they probably think it's about 75% likely.
Because, you know, we're scientists.
Scientists.
Now suppose that same thing got peer-reviewed.
What's the credibility of one, any one, peer-reviewed scientific journal?
Give me your number, your estimate of just generally credibility.
It's less than 50%.
Your common sense would put it way above 50%.
But it's been studied, right?
It's been studied by a lot of people.
You can't reproduce half of the things that pass as peer-reviewed.
Do you know why?
Do you know why peer-reviewed has such a bad record?
Because peer-review is bullshit.
It's just complete bullshit.
The person who does the peer-review is just basically looking to see if it looks like science.
That's about it.
They're not checking the data.
They're not going and recollecting the original data.
All they're doing is saying, OK, you had some data.
You say it's true.
I'm not checking.
And then you did this manipulation with it, and you look at it and go, all right, it looks like somebody who knows what statistics are did it.
So you got data they say is true, statistics that I haven't looked at in great detail, but on the surface it looks at least they did the math right.
And then they say it's peer reviewed.
That gives you almost no comfort whatsoever.
So peer review is a completely nakedly broken system, has been forever, it's widely reported at this point.
But if you're not a nerd who pays attention to the news, how would you know that?
How many people that you stop on the street and you said, peer-reviewed scientific journal, how likely is it right?
Don't you think most people would say 90%? 75?
It's actually closer to 40 or below.
How about an anonymous source?
Let's say it's in a really fine publication like the New York Times or the Washington Post.
The Washington Post, let's say they have a story with an anonymous source.
Let's say it's about politics.
Specifically, it's about politics and it's negative for one political figure.
Zero.
Yeah, the correct estimate is zero.
I don't think I've ever seen one that was true.
Can you remember one that was ever true?
Ever?
I don't remember any.
So if you're not a certain age, you haven't seen how many times this comes and goes.
But I have.
I've seen enough.
I don't think any of them are true.
So on the surface, if you see a Washington Post story from an anonymous source, you should just laugh.
That's the right approach, just laugh.
They're not even trying.
How about a video?
Video.
Let's say there's a news story and they just show you the video.
You can see for yourself, you can hear for yourself.
What percentage would you put on the credibility of a video?
30%?
Maybe 30%.
Somebody said 30%, I'd agree with that.
That's where my personal lesson is, around 30%.
Even if you're looking at it, even if you're hearing it, and even if it's completely accurate, about 30%.
Because what they leave out is what happened just before the edit, and what they leave out is what happened just after.
That's how you got the fine people hoax and the drinking bleach hoax.
Those were videos and the Covington kids hoax, right?
And also the Trump overfeeding the koi fish.
All of them are the same technique.
The video is real.
It's exactly what is there is exactly what happened.
It's just the beginning and end were taken out to change the context.
How about a full quote as opposed to a partial quote?
So it's a real thing somebody said.
That part is established, let's say, with documents or whatever.
And so he says, somebody said, you know, it's not a partial quote.
What credibility do you give a full quote?
No more than 20% credibility.
No more than that.
Because a full quote still has the problem of being taken out of its larger context.
Do you know why something is news?
This is the Scott Alexander observation which changed my life.
This little piece of knowledge, I've said it before, but it fits in this context.
The reason something becomes news is because it's not true.
Do you understand why?
The reason it's in the news is because it's not true.
Because things that are true don't surprise you.
They're not newsworthy.
They're not.
So the only thing the news does is something that will make you go, what?
Are you kidding?
And reality doesn't do that too much.
Or not enough to sustain the business model.
So, if you see something that, let's say you read tomorrow, that Hunter Biden was found on the side of the road cannibalizing a stray dog.
He was just eating it with his bare teeth.
And that was the story.
What would be your impression of the likelihood of that being true?
You should immediately say no.
The reason it's a story is because it's so wildly implausible that your brain explodes when you hear it.
So the more like Hunter cannibalizing a stray dog with his bare teeth, the more the story's like that, the less likely it's true.
The reason it's in the news is because it's untrue.
So once you get rid of the model that if it's true and important, that's like a direct, you know, path to the news.
Not if it's boring.
If it's true and important, it does not become news.
Not automatically, because nobody cares.
Let me think of something that's true and not in the news.
Pollution doesn't seem to be getting worse in America.
Have you seen all the big stories about the pollution?
At least overall, you know, in pockets, yes.
But overall, no, it's not a story.
It's just sort of a good thing that's about what you think it is, and that's about it.
It's a big deal.
I mean, the actual environment that you have to live and breathe and drink, it's a big frickin' deal.
But it's not news.
Because it's just what you expected.
But the day you get Hunter Biden eating a stray dog with his bare teeth on the side of the road, that's news.
It just didn't happen.
All right.
How about a whistleblower under oath?
One whistleblower under oath with no documents to back it up.
One whistleblower under oath with no backup.
No supporting documents and no friends who saw the same thing.
Credibility.
Eh, 50%.
Yeah, if you say less than 50, I won't argue with you.
So I'm saying estimates, you know, 20 to 50%.
That's about right.
If there's no supporting evidence, just one person, not good enough.
Suppose you have two.
Suppose you have multiple whistleblowers.
And they're both under oath.
And they have the same story.
Where are you now?
Yeah, you're up around 75, 90%, aren't you?
And then the whistleblowers produce the documents.
Emails.
And the documents agree with both whistleblowers under oath.
You're up close to 100%.
I'm going to say nothing's 100%.
But you're up to 95.
Yeah, it might even be 99, right?
Exactly.
All right.
So here is what I would love to see as a standard for the news.
Imagine you had an AI news bot, and you told the AI, all right, look at all the other headlines and stories in the other publications, take them and compile them, and then put a grade on them for credibility.
So it would collect all the stories, like the Ibram Kendi quotes and the RFK quotes, and it would say, okay, give that a Give that a 2 and a 10 for credibility.
We'll give this one a 1.
Maybe this is a 0.
We'll give that one whistleblower a 5 and a 10.
Two whistleblowers, we'll give a 7 or an 8.
And two whistleblowers with documents, boom, 10.
10 doesn't mean 100%, but 10.
How much would you love To see the stories you're seeing with an overlay of the credibility based on the quality of the evidence.
Now another one would be, the other one I use is, are the left and the right reporting this story the same?
That's a really good one.
So if the left and the right both say there's a hurricane, probably a hurricane.
Very good chance.
Very good chance.
If the left and the right say Trump made a giant mistake and then they show it to you in the video and the documents and everything, probably true.
Because even his friends say it happened.
But suppose one entity says it happened and the other entity says it actually didn't happen.
Did it happen?
And it goes either way.
So it could be CNN says yes, Fox News said no, or doesn't cover it.
Or the reverse.
Fox News says it happened and CNN just says it didn't.
You need both of them to say it before you can be confident.
Doesn't mean the one source is wrong.
But you shouldn't have confidence in anything that's only from one side, the other side says it didn't happen.
Because you do see examples where one side is just purely lying, and it did happen.
It did.
So it's not 100%.
But the only thing that gets close to 100% is when the enemies agree on the facts.
Then you're pretty confident, but not great.
All right, Kamala Harris said in a tweet that extremists want to replace history with lies.
She's talking about the slavery and the slaves benefiting somehow from learning skills, allegedly.
And she said extremists want to replace history with lies and we will not stand for it.
And then in Florida she stands with them, blah, blah, blah.
Did anybody tell Kamala That fake news didn't start in 2015 when Trump came down the escalator.
There are actually people who are, you know, modern adults who, like, can wear suits and, you know, look good and they can get jobs and they went to college and everything.
Actually went to college and somehow believe that history is real.
How many of you think history is real?
I mean the big events are, but I'm talking about the interpretations of why.
It's not real.
Let me tell you something that most of you won't believe, but a few of you will.
If they wrote the history of the last six years that I've been involved in politics, they wouldn't even be close.
Because the things that are really driving things are completely unknown to the news.
I don't know how any historian would find out.
I see things regularly that describe why things are happening, that I can determine are high credibility kinds of stuff.
And it's nothing like what's in the news.
The news is completely disconnected from why anything happens.
They're a little bit good on what?
Hurricane did happen.
The Electoral College did vote, right?
That kind of stuff.
The Supreme Court made this ruling.
That's good.
But the why of why anything happened, that's not in the news.
That's always unknown to the public.
And I know more whys than historians.
I mean, there are major, major stories that I personally know are not real and never will be real.
Because the thing that they don't know, they'll never know.
Because of who was involved and how they did it.
So, I personally know that the history of my lifetime will be ridiculous.
It'll just be stupid.
It won't even be close.
And you believe that the ancients had a better process?
I mean, it's trite to say that history is written by the winners, but it's even beyond that.
It's not just the winners.
It's the person who wrote it.
I mean, I guess you have to be a winner to even get the job of writing history.
But it's not even the winning.
It's just that it's individuals.
It's humans.
It's some human with getting paid.
Maybe somebody wants to write a history book and all they want is to get paid, so they make some stuff up.
So it's not even just winning.
It's that people do it.
Humans write history.
It couldn't possibly be true.
Let me design a system for you.
Alright, let's design a system.
We want a system that records accurately all the major events and the reasons for them in history.
Alright, good.
That's what we want to do.
Now let's design a system to get that done.
Alright, we're going to pick people who get paid no matter whether it's true or not.
We'll call them historians.
And they will be just as flawed as they are in every other element of human activities.
And then we'll assign them to get us our accurate history.
Who makes that system?
Design is destiny, right?
Our history-making and recording process is designed to make them all lies.
You get that, right?
It's not designed to be accurate.
It's designed to create lies that create the narratives that drive civilization.
And by the way, I don't even know if that's a problem.
So here's where I give you the old switcheroo.
It might be better to have fake history.
In fact, I could make a pretty strong argument that fake history is way better than real history.
Because it means that somebody said, you know, we can accomplish this or, you know, the world would be better or the country will be stronger if we just sort of decide this is our history.
Because what you do in the past, or I'm sorry, what you do, the decisions you make next, are almost entirely driven by not just your capabilities, but who you think you are.
How important do you think it is to my future decisions, just everything, that I define myself as a patriotic American?
In your mind, you think, well, that doesn't really affect too many things except maybe your vote or something.
But I would argue that it affects everything I do.
My definition of myself as a patriotic American, that informs littering, right?
Like I've got a piece of garbage in my hand and I'm walking down the sidewalk?
Does an American patriot just drop it on the sidewalk?
Do I litter?
No!
Because that's not who I am.
I'm an American.
Right?
And I take that seriously.
And all the history of what an American is, which is pure propaganda, right?
I've just been programmed the way every kid was programmed.
So I've been programmed to have this feeling of America as sort of special.
If we see a problem, we solve it.
Actually, that's maybe the single most important part of being American.
You see a problem, And then you just go solve it.
We're really big on problem solving, as opposed to history, right?
Maybe in Europe, it's more about history.
But in America, it's like, that's broken.
That shit's broken.
Let's fix that right away.
Fix it.
So I see the garbage in my hand, and I'm looking for a solution, which is the garbage pail.
So that's just part of being an American.
If I didn't think I were an American, I think I might drop the garbage on the ground.
I don't care.
It's not my country.
So I don't think you understand how important history is to give you a definition of who you are, and then that informs all of your decisions.
Even stuff like working hard and obeying the law.
That's American, right?
I mean, you could easily imagine if you didn't have that programming, you'd wake up into the system and say, all right, what's easier, stealing or working?
Huh, stealing looks good.
So the civilization requires some kind of agreed-upon lie about who we are and why we're here.
I'm not sure you need the truth.
All right, Elon Musk tweeted, the scariest answer to the Fermi paradox, that's the question of why we haven't seen the aliens if there are so many of them, allegedly.
The scariest answer to the Fermi paradox is that there are no aliens at all.
That we are the only candle of consciousness in an abyss of darkness.
To which I say, kind of a downer today.
Kind of a downer.
But I added, of course, if we're a simulation, which I think we are, billion to one odds we are, then being alone would be the normal state.
Just like a video game.
If you play a video game, it's limited to one planet or a few planets, maybe.
But it's not the universe.
So the nature of a video game, or any simulation that we would build, is that it would be limited in its scope.
And it wouldn't need other aliens on some planet we'd never go to.
So it seems to me it's just more evidence of being a simulation.
But that doesn't mean you're alone.
It means the opposite.
It means that there's a creator dimension.
And maybe those creators had a creator dimension about them.
So actually, if we're alone, it's more indicative of being infinitely surrounded by creator dimensions.
We just don't have access to them.
So it's like being alone on the other side of a wall.
Right?
There's somebody on the other side of the wall, it's just you can't touch them and deal with them.
But we wouldn't be technically alone.
And maybe our own creators are watching.
That's what it feels like.
My actually lived experience is that there's somebody watching.
How many of you have that?
You might say it's God, or somebody else, or maybe your spirit guide.
But how many of you have an ongoing feeling that there's some entity that's watching you?
I totally have that, and I don't have religious belief.
But I have a strong feeling of being watched, and always have.
From my earliest memories as a child, I was sure somebody was watching.
Now, you'll call that God, and I won't argue with you.
But the simulation theory gives you a creator as well.
It's just a different form.
All right.
Also, the simulation theory, I like because it explains, you know, everything.
All right.
Enough of that.
I had the greatest day today so far.
Do you know how long I've been arguing that when somebody debates with an analogy, you know, the analogy is the logic of their debate, and I keep saying, no, analogies don't prove anything.
And then you would say, yes, they do.
They do prove something.
In this case, it works.
It's telling you, you know, history is suggestive and patterns and blah, blah, blah.
The analogy is important.
And then I'll say again, no, it isn't.
You just imagine that.
That's pure imagination.
Analogy is just a different situation.
It tells you nothing.
So I've lost every one of those arguments.
Would you agree?
Can we agree I've lost every one of those arguments?
People really like analogies as an important part of debate.
Would you agree?
Or maybe you think I did win.
But I've got the kill shot today.
You ready?
When I was talking about the simulation.
Let's see.
Somebody tweeted this.
Somebody named shareadventure1 on Twitter was mocking me and said, simulation theory is religion for nerds.
My, how things have come full circle.
Simulation theory is religion for nerds.
Now here's what I did in the old days.
In the old days I would say, your analogy is flawed.
Because one is based on faith, religion, and the other is based on statistics.
Totally different.
And that would totally convince you and change your mind, right?
No.
It would have no impact.
Debating the details of an analogy will never win your debate.
Never.
So you want to hear what I did instead?
I'm so proud of this that I swear I'm going to sprain my arm from patting myself on the back in about a minute.
I'm just so happy.
All right.
So after I saw the tweet that said, Simulation Theory is Religion for Nerds, instead of using my usual anti-analogy thing, I tweeted, Analogies give you an LLM level of intelligence in your arguments.
Get back to me when you achieve AGI.
Yeah?
You feel it?
Thank you.
Do you feel that?
Yeah.
Now, granted, 9 out of 10 people will not get the joke.
9 out of 10 won't even know what LLM is or AGI.
But if you went and looked it up, it would be pretty funny.
So if anybody's not familiar with those terms, they're AI terms.
LLM is our current model of intelligence, which is we know to be nothing but a pattern generator.
That's what analogies are.
Analogies are just, oh, I recognize that pattern.
But real intelligence, the kind we imagine to be like human intelligence, but I think we're imagining it, is called AGI.
It has some other words, too.
So instead of arguing the analogy, I'll simply note that that's an LLM level of AI.
And I don't deal on that level.
But if somebody wants to upgrade to AGI, that's actually thinking, and not just based purely on pattern recognition, now that's a debate I'm all for.
So I love the fact that this comeback requires somebody to do research.
It's like homework.
Not only am I going to disagree with you, I'm assigning you some homework.
You're going to have to study up on this to find out what I just said about you.
It's like the perfect tweet.
And I would like to authorize all of you to steal that tweet.
You can even say it's yours.
I'll give you full rights to it.
Because analogies must die.
We must take analogies out of public debate.
Because it's just too unproductive.
So come back to me when you're AGI.
All right.
I saw a Greg Gutfeld quote on competence.
I'm just going to read it because I like this so much.
It's kind of a kind of a chaser for today.
So Greg Gutfeld tweets, every absurdity today can be traced to an abdication of gatekeepers for competence.
New Hampshire pedophile elevated to public office.
So these are the examples.
Absurd diversity hires for the military to VP.
You know, the VP being a diversity hire.
We're told our standards for efficacy are oppressive, but the replacement is so destructive it will take years to fix.
Now, I feel like this is a Vivek effect.
Am I right?
Now that you have a A credible presidential candidate who is saying that the affirmative action hiring is ruining our capability as a country, because he can say it and he's not getting cancelled, and he's showing his work.
He shows his work.
He makes great arguments.
It allows the rest of us to play in his sandbox.
Now I think that maybe in a smaller way, I helped as well.
By getting cancelled, we're saying stuff that everybody thinks.
So this is Vivek saying things that everybody thinks.
Everybody thinks that if you focus on something that's not competence, well you'll get exactly what you designed the system to give you.
Right?
Design is destiny.
So if the design is we're going to favour your immutable characteristics, not your competence, You get what you pay for.
I love the quote.
I love that he said it and tweeted it.
But I love most that Vivek allowed us to do this.
Just speak our honest opinions.
We're not always right.
I'm not going to claim that free speech makes me right.
But damn it, I want to be wrong in public.
If I want to.
And I want you to tell me I'm wrong, and then show your work, and maybe I get smarter.
But absolutely, I want the free speech expanded.
And once again, Vivek, he's changing the world without being elected.
Who does that?
Trump.
Only Trump.
I can't think of anybody else.
But running for election, he's changing the world.
Now, I would say RFK Jr., same thing.
RFK Jr., I'm not even sure he expected or thought he could get elected.
He actually speaks about getting his free speech back via process of being a presidential candidate.
He says that directly.
That he would be too censored saying the things he's wanted to say forever about health and environment and everything.
That he has to be a presidential candidate to have any chance of all of not being squelched.
And he's right.
But how much do we owe Vivek and RFK Jr.
right now?
A lot.
Big debt.
Big debt to those two.
All right.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I believe will be the finest entertainment that you've seen today, so far.
Yes, so Twitter will become X. What do you think of that?
What do you think of Twitter becoming X?
My understanding of it is that it would be the beginning of turning Twitter into the everything app, right?
So X actually is a perfect name for something that's the everything app.
It's also got the X factor.
It's easy to remember, easy logo.
It's a good choice.
It makes me wonder why it didn't exist.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, there's no current stock that starts with X, right?
Let me check.
I don't think there is.
Xerox?
Or Xerox?
Oh, Xerox is X?
Oh, that's a problem.
I wonder if he has to buy Xerox.
What would it cost to buy Xerox so they could get that X?
SpaceX?
Yeah, we got a SpaceX.
He likes his X's.
Tesla model was an X. So he's put an X in everything he's done.
He's clearly been shooting for X for a long time.
Text X?
Oh yeah, there's an X in text.
Yeah.
And his car models were S3XY.
Sexy.
Alright.
Grimes is his ex.
Oh yeah, he's got a whole bunch of exes.
He has lots of exes.
And Hunter's X-rated.
Ex is U.S.
Steel?
No it isn't.
Is it?
Generation X?
Alright.
Thank you, YouTube, for joining today.
I think it was amazing and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
