Episode 158 Scott Adams: The Good News Breaking Out Everywhere
Date: 2018-07-27 | Duration: 38:54
Topics
GDP 4.1% Return of our soldiers remains from North Korea EU agrees on framework and trade war is avoided Israel’s offer to help Iran What do the critics have left…an unimportant meeting? Shadow banning uproar
Transcript
[0:06]
Bum bum bum bum ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba. You have something there. People, people, please! Bruce, Owen, Jeremy, come on in here. Gino, Ascension, it’s time. Oh yeah, it’s time. Not only is it time for the simultaneous sip and Coffee with Scott Adams, but it’s time to celebrate the good news. Sometimes we get so broken down and beaten up by the bad news that we forget to stop and celebrate. But today, let us drink to the GDP 4.1. Yeah, that’s some good GDP. Simultaneous sipping.
[1:06]
Take a look at how the news has morphed and shifted and evolved very quickly. I’ll give you some headlines from CNN, starting from the top left of their page where, in theory, those are the important stories. In the top left, there is the GDP. That’s reported as the top news. Remember, I told you it seemed to me like there’s some kind of shift happening at CNN—a shift toward a little more balance. Sure enough, the top two stories are: the economy is doing well, the GDP numbers, and then a live update that says “Trump: this isn’t a one-time shot,” just quoting something positive from the President. They have “How the US economy is doing in four charts.” Now, that’s funny because when I first looked at this page, it was linking to an opinion piece saying that the President
[2:08]
was responsible for the good news, but I don’t see that piece now, so that may have gone away. So, what have we got going on? We’ve got the 55 service people’s remains that are being returned by North Korea, which of course is different from denuclearizing, but it’s all heading in the right direction. We see the economy doing well. On CNN, the question asked—I just watched an interview—was, “What’s behind it?” It seems that at least part of what’s behind it is consumer optimism. What is it that makes consumers optimistic? Persuasion. That’s right. Consumers were optimistic, and somebody or something made them that way. What was it? President Trump is certainly a big part of that.
[3:10]
There’s of course news about the European Union agreeing to agree. They don’t have a final deal, but they are agreeing on a framework to get there. So now it’s looking like the trade war suddenly, with the flipping of the EU to working with us, it now seems that the trade war might be more of a positive. Suddenly, the biggest problem in the world just flipped positive and might actually come out much better than anybody suspected. That’s the same thing that happened with North Korea. Remember, I keep telling you how often the worst problem—when it looks like it’s the deepest, worst situation—it might be exactly that. It might be the worst thing and getting worse, but we’re not good at telling the difference between “Oh my God, we’re almost doomed” and “Hey, everything’s
[4:11]
fixed and better than ever.” We humans can’t tell the difference. Those look a lot alike to us. So the trade war, if you want to call it that—I would call it a negotiation—fits that pattern. It looks like it’s doomed until at least one big entity, in this case the EU, says, “You have some points, let’s negotiate.” That’s where we are now. Trade’s going well. I saw the tax cuts getting some credit for the good economic news. I don’t know how much that is deserved or how long it’ll last, but that’s the way it’s being reported even on CNN. Once again, you’re seeing CNN being objective about that. North Korea is going well. Syria—that area has some very positive things with Israel talking
[5:11]
to Russia, with Russia maybe getting a little distance between themselves and Iran. These are gigantic shifts. You’re seeing almost all of the biggest metrics either good or heading that way; even the signs are good. I call that the Golden Age. The Golden Age is when the way you think about things is the important part, not a physical constraint. Here are some examples: the reason the economy is doing so well, to a large extent, is because people expected it to. So people invested; consumers spent. The economy is clearly the best example of the Golden Age, where our problems are psychological, not physical. If you get the psychology right with the right optimistic leaders, then you get the
[6:11]
economy right. That’s what’s happening. You saw there with North Korea, probably the problem—the base problem—was psychological, because we didn’t really want to attack them and they didn’t want to attack us. It was a problem of thinking what the other one was thinking and not doing it well. It looks like we may have gotten past that, where North Korea said, “There’s just no reason to attack you,” and we’re saying, “We didn’t really have a reason to attack you, but we have lots of good reasons to work well together.” Same thing, I think, you’re seeing with Iran. You saw Israel, for example, saying very clearly, “If you could find a way to work with us, this could be really great, but it’s the way you’re thinking about the situation that’s holding you back.” Iran also is a psychological problem masquerading as a physical problem. Now, in this context of all the
[7:14]
things that are going right for the President, but also the world and the United States in particular—we’ve got all the big stuff: North Korea, the Middle East, the economy, the courts. Every one of those big things, including unemployment, is going well. So what do the critics have left to criticize the President? This is what it’s down to. Just think about this. Think about all those things he got right: war, the Middle East, the economy, the courts. He got all that right, or it’s heading in the right direction. What’s the biggest criticism? I’m not even making this up. The biggest criticism is he might have known about a meeting. A meeting. That’s it.
[8:14]
The biggest headline criticism of the President is, “Well, I think he might have known about that meeting.” Now, you can try to turn that into the worst problem in the world, but anyway you want to spin it, whether he did know or he didn’t know, whether he lied or he didn’t lie, it’s a story about a meeting that he didn’t even attend. Think about it. All that’s left is he may or may not have been forthcoming about a meeting that he didn’t even attend. That’s it. Now, I suppose Mueller or somebody can “indict a ham sandwich,” as they like to say. So maybe there’s something they can construe with some kind of an illegal sampling, but it kind of comes down to: there was a meeting he didn’t attend and maybe he said something about it that doesn’t pass the fact-checking. Why
[9:16]
would he do such a thing? Well, it wasn’t important. Sometimes when things are not important, you just try to get past them, and maybe that’s all that’s happening here. Nothing happened at the meeting, as somebody points out. It was a question about a meeting that was never important in the first place in terms of the content of the meeting. Which obviously changed the election results! Remember, I promised you a Summer of Love. Consider some of the headlines you saw. Nikki Haley calling for more civil conversation online. I’ve seen CNN—and especially I kept mentioning Chris Cuomo because he
[10:19]
seems to be a dominant voice of reason at CNN—and he seems to have turned a corner in a good way, a way that’s good for the country, of objectivity. That seems new, it seems good, and it seems worthy of respect. Now, let me ask you this: has your Twitter experience been meaner than usual, let’s say, in just the last few weeks? Keep it very local—the last two weeks. Has your Twitter experience been people being mean, same as usual, or not as bad? Tell me, please. Let’s see your comments here. Somebody saying “tamer,” “same,” “subsided,” “nicer,” “not as bad,” “leaner,” “same.”
[11:22]
“Not as bad,” “same,” “slightly less,” “the same.” Now, “since I started blocking Nazis,” “meeter” (probably meaner), “saved,” “not as bad,” “slightly meaner,” “not as bad.” This is very far from being a scientific poll and we’ve got comments all over the place. But I would suggest this: maybe it’s because it’s what I want to hear, but when I tell you something that sounds more like I want this to be true than it actually is true, put it in context that sometimes I’m talking about things that are true and sometimes I’m causing them to be true. It might look the same to you. If you ask people, “Are people being as bad or not as bad on Twitter?” what you should expect, because of the
[12:25]
way our brains are organized, is that you will remember all the bad comments. Because we tend to remember the worst of our interactions online, it’s likely that things could be getting better or staying the same and a lot of people would still report it as getting worse because they’re influenced by that last thing that happened five minutes ago and it was bad. So it’s a hard survey to do. Even if you did it in some scientific way, people would remember it differently than it was happening and they would remember the bad parts more. Here’s my point: there were a number of people who said it’s not as bad. That’s what it felt like to me. To me, it felt like my Twitter got less bad, and it’s a very recent change. Now, it could be they changed their algorithm. It’s entirely possible
[13:25]
that Twitter just changed something to get rid of the crazies, and some of them were coming after me and there are fewer of them. It does feel like the ones coming after me—most of you have seen my critics if you follow me on Twitter—you knew how weirdly similar they were. They would come in—and I don’t want to give ideas—but they would all say the same fairly lame things and they were weirdly similar. So it made me think it was organized at one point early in the election cycle. It probably was. Now, I don’t know if it’s organized now, but there’s less of it at the moment. We’ve talked about this before. I told you my new technique on Twitter is that the first time a critic gets personal as opposed to talking about an idea—they can talk about my ideas and
[14:26]
criticize them all day long. I like that. Criticizing my ideas is a good system. They criticize my ideas, I criticize theirs, maybe we come up with better ideas after that. But when people come after me personally, I call them a Nazi and tell them I’m blocking them because I block Nazis. My experience of this has been that, first of all, it makes my Twitter experience way more pleasant, and a number of you have started trying it and reporting the same thing. It doesn’t feel like it would make you feel as good as it does, but it really does. You feel immediately good because you’ve labeled them, you’ve told them why, and you’re not lying. What would be more Nazi-like than going after the person instead of the idea? That gets pretty close to the definition of Nazi. It’s about the human; it’s not about their ideas or
[15:26]
what they’re doing; it’s about the person. So when people come after you personally, that feels pretty Hitler-like. I say I block anybody who comes after me personally, and then I never have to see them again. I realized that for every troll or critic that would come after me personally, if I responded in my usual clever way and then left them the ability to respond again, then I would have three or four interactions with an unpleasant Nazi. But if I call them a Nazi and block them on the first sign they’re coming after me personally, I never have to hear them again. Now, some of them create new accounts just to come back and say the thing again, but it’s kind of rare, and then I just block them again. That gives me two bites.
[16:32]
Now, I also wonder what that does to the algorithm. If you call somebody a Nazi, I wonder if that works against me or the person I labeled. I’m not sure how that works. Probably works against me, too. Somebody says, “Scott, do you have issues with being shadow-banned?” I have issues with people reporting that I am, but the types of reports change over time. I probably have fewer people saying that I’m shadow-banned than I ever have before. I don’t know if that’s just a cognitive thing. Maybe I just don’t notice, maybe people got tired of saying it, or maybe they don’t notice. So I actually don’t know. I do not know if I’m shadow-banned. Now, in the current world, shadow-banning me would
[17:35]
mean that the algorithm does not favor whatever you’re doing. If you imagine, for example—and this is just a hypothetical—if I’m following a lot of political people on both sides, which is what I do… I certainly follow more Trump supporters, but I follow lots of people on both sides. You’ve got a lot of CNN people, etc. If you’re following people on both sides, one of those two sides might be saying different things than the other. So following both sides might work against you because it guarantees that you’re getting some unpleasant people, whatever you think that looks like, because there’s a different form of unpleasantness on the left and the right. Maybe the algorithm punishes one of them more than the other based on your interactions, but I don’t know. Speculatively, there could be an algorithm that’s doing things, and maybe not the same every week. It could be that on a week where I retweet some
[18:36]
people who have their own bad tweets that I’ve never seen, I get suppressed a little. But then the very next week, if I retweet somebody who is loved by the angels, maybe I get a little less shadow-banned that week. I don’t know. Without knowing how the algorithm works, it would be impossible to know for sure. Yeah, I went to the shadow-ban website and it said I was not shadow-banned, but I don’t have any confidence that that website is accurate. Like I said, it’s entirely possible that you’re shadow-banned in the morning, not shadow-banned in the afternoon, and then re-shadow-banned by evening just because the algorithm is continually monitoring whatever’s going on—who you retweet, who you interact with, what kind of words they use, what topic is in there. It’s entirely possible it comes and goes. I imagine it would, right?
[19:39]
It wouldn’t be a permanent thing because it would have to keep testing to see what you’re up to. Yeah, I don’t trust the site at all. Like I should have a Dale account? You’re right. Sometimes they delay posting your tweets. There’s always a confirmation bias trap here. Once you tell yourself that shadow-banning exists, you see it everywhere. You have to be careful because some amount of whatever is happening online is system problems. When you say one of the things they do is, when you post a tweet, it takes a while to show up—well, that just might be a system backlog. It could be a time-of-day thing. So you really don’t know. Let me give you my best example of confirmation bias. You saw the videos of Project Veritas, I
[20:43]
think, where there’s a video of an alleged Twitter engineer talking about shadow-banning and what it is and how it works. Have you all seen the video of the alleged Twitter engineer talking about shadow-banning? Most of you have. Now, if you saw that, it would be hard to walk away from that and tell yourself that it’s not happening because there was an actual live video of an actual Twitter engineer describing what it is, how it’s done, and why it’s done. But you know what is missing in the video that you didn’t notice? I want to see if anybody caught it. There’s something that’s not there that’s the important part. It’s not what’s there, because what’s there is
[21:44]
terrible. There’s something that’s not real and not there that is the most important part of the story. Proof is hard to come by if you’re just looking at a video. So it’s true that there’s no proof—him admitting that they do it. Boom. What is missing in that video is any context in which that engineer says, “We do that.” He describes what it is and why someone would do it. That is really different than saying they do it. There’s nothing in there that says anything like, “I know the guy who does it,” “I used to do it,” “We talked about it before implementing it,” or “We’re getting away with this so far.” There are a hundred ways he could have indicated they’re actually doing it, and none of it was on the video. All you saw was somebody explaining what
[22:45]
it is, exactly the way I just did. I just explained to you what shadow-banning is and why you do it and how it’s done. I just explained the same thing that the engineer at Twitter did. Now, some of you can say, “Scott, Scott, Scott, you’re being so naive. Why are you so naive? Of course they’re doing it. You saw the engineer describing it in his own words, you’ve seen the evidence.” That’s all true. We saw the engineer describing what it is without the part of saying that they do it, which seems pretty important. We see the evidence we believe. How would that look different if none of it was happening? Just conceptually. Don’t tell me whether it is or is not happening right now; that’s a separate conversation. Tell me how it would look
[23:46]
different to you if it wasn’t happening. It would look the same. Not only would it look the same, it would look identical to what you see now if it wasn’t happening. So if it is happening or if it isn’t happening, I don’t know, but I know it would look identical either way. So if you think, “Scott, you’re so naive, can’t you see it’s right in front of your eyes?” I would say you’re not operating at the highest level of awareness. At the highest level of awareness, you would know that you can’t tell the difference. Now, if you look at all that is happening to everybody in all the different ways, there were things that seemed a little more obviously shadow-banning. My guess is that it has happened, but there’s probably a complicated story to it, as in some engineer was tweaking an algorithm. Senior management does not
[24:48]
work on the algorithm and does not know if you tweak this variable what happens. There are just people working in the trenches. They’re playing with it. They’re the only ones who know how the algorithm works. Maybe they’re a little liberal, maybe they’re a little anti-Trump, maybe a little of that bias got into their work, which is very different than saying that Twitter management was behind it. Now, I told you the story that Jack Dorsey had reached out to me a year ago—at least a year ago, maybe more than a year—to say that they weren’t doing shadow-banning and could I give him evidence of it so they would find out what’s going on? I said at the time: that is not what you do if you’re actually shadow-banning and you know it. The “you know it” part is the part that I think is important.
[25:50]
Even somebody saying, “Calling him a liar”—even if he were a liar, you wouldn’t do what he did. You just would let people wonder what it was. You wouldn’t approach and say, “Can you give me some examples because I’m pretty sure this isn’t happening?” That’s just not what you do. Now, I told you that I submitted a number of examples to one of his lieutenants and got several responses, but then the responses sort of just stopped coming back. My guess is that when Twitter management dug into it and tried to understand what their algorithm was actually doing—because remember, it’s complicated. I doubt the algorithm is something that a civilian can look at and say, “Oh yeah, look at this algorithm, there’s a box checked that says don’t tweet things for conservatives.” It’s probably nothing like that. It’s probably this big complicated multivariable equation that’s checking things and adjusting on the fly and all kinds of stuff. I’m guessing it’s complicated, and I’ll bet management didn’t really know what it was doing.
[26:50]
I would guess that by now they’ve done some work to try to distinguish between the people who are just Nazi trolls and the people who are political people with unpleasant preferences. “I’m not getting your tweets all the time.” Yeah, so I hear that people don’t get my notifications and my tweets. What I don’t know is how common that is. Take, for example, let me give you an example: I tweet several times a day. I’ve heard it said that the optimum number of times to tweet might be closer to one or two per day, whereas it’s not uncommon for me to do seven tweets a day. Now, is it possible that the
[27:53]
algorithm says, “Hey, you’ve already tweeted two or three things today, I’m going to slow down your other tweets”? Maybe. Maybe fewer people see them because we don’t want this to be all about Scott. So maybe my first few tweets get through, and then the algorithm says, “He’s an over-tweeter; we don’t want to give all of the attention to this one guy just because he keeps tweeting.” It’s entirely possible that I’m being throttled down for a reason that has nothing to do with politics. It’s also entirely possible that I’m completely wrong about that. Remember, confirmation bias would give you exactly the same look. There would be no difference; you couldn’t tell. [Music] And then there are some people who say they don’t get notices and stuff. Every once in a while, it’s because a filter is checked, or maybe they just get notices and don’t notice. There are too many ways to explain this.
[28:54]
“You’re pretty wrong about that.” Somebody says… I don’t know which part I’m wrong about; most of that was speculative anyway. Do you listen to Dan Bongino? I listen to him when he’s on Fox News quite often. He seems quite angry at the way the world is going. I think even Dan Bongino can have a good day this week or a good day this day. Somebody says the Trump Tower meeting was collusion. So here’s a question for you: when is it illegal to have a meeting and have somebody tell you something that’s good to know that’s also true? Is that ever illegal? Do you want to live in a country where it’s illegal to take a meeting and hear what
[29:55]
they have to say? I’ve said this before, but there might be some new people out here: if you put me in the situation of Don Jr., and I guess Jared was in that meeting and Manafort, and somebody said, “Hey, there’s somebody who has information that would be very useful to you, why don’t you take the elevator downstairs and hear it?” I would take that meeting. If something came in at that meeting that worried me in terms of something illegal, something the FBI should know about, then I would turn it over to the FBI. But I would definitely take the meeting first. Compare these two outcomes: One, you immediately turn it over to the FBI and they either do something or not. In this case, the FBI wouldn’t have done anything because no criminal thing happened. The worst they could do is talk to the people in the meeting, and the people in the meeting
[30:56]
would say, “Now it turns out it was a trick. We didn’t even have any stuff about Hillary; we just wanted to talk about a different topic. So we just tricked him into the meeting.” If he turned it over to the FBI first, he doesn’t get the information, and the FBI also probably doesn’t do anything useful because even if there was information, the FBI probably isn’t going to find out anything for a long time. But if you find out the information first and then you decide whether or not to turn it over to the FBI, it seems to me you have broken no laws and you’ve covered all your bases and you have the information. It is not illegal to have information, assuming it’s not marked as proprietary or something. Well, even then, it’s not illegal to have it. Let me ask you this, since I’m no lawyer: if somebody handed you US intelligence information that was marked top secret—they hand it to you—is it illegal to
[31:58]
read it or is it only illegal for the giver? It’s obviously illegal for somebody to give it to you, but is it illegal to read something that somebody hands you? I don’t know the answer to that. Now, that’s not the situation with Don Jr. because it wasn’t our country. Nothing was presented as “it’s illegal to read it.” So if somebody handed you just a document and it was top secret… suppose it wasn’t labeled. Yeah, I think most of you are not lawyers either, so I think we should be careful not to believe each other and probably even lawyers would disagree. Somebody’s saying, “Jesus Christ, you’re dumb, Scott.” The people who say that… I don’t think you’re following along
[32:58]
these Periscopes. Somebody says, “I am a lawyer,” but you didn’t say what your opinion was in the same message. So it’s illegal to pass it on; I know that part. Could somebody give me an opinion that says you are a lawyer and then your opinion in the same message? Because I’ve got opinions and people saying they’re lawyers but I can’t pair them up this way. Yeah, that’s what I thought. So somebody said the press reads them all the time, so it’s not illegal, or at least it’s not prosecuted. Maybe that’s the line. I believe the press has a history of reporting on things that were stolen top-secret documents, and that might be illegal, but I think there’s a
[34:00]
precedent that they leave that alone because there’s a First Amendment thing there. So it could be illegal and also trivial at the same time, which is weird. Press is covered by freedom of the press. Freedom of the press is not a right; freedom of speech is a right. Am I wrong about that? There’s no such thing as freedom of the press in terms of the Constitution, is there? There’s freedom of speech. “You just have to be debriefed.” Interesting. All right, so there are some things I don’t know about that. But the point is, I would have taken that meeting. It would have been dumb not to take the meeting. The real question is: what do you do after you take the meeting? In the case of the Don Jr. meeting with the Russians, nothing came out of the meeting, so there was nothing to do. Had he gotten the FBI involved in the first place, it would have been this big complicated
[35:01]
time-suck of FBI and “what’s it all mean?” and “what did you do?” and “you better lawyer up” and all that. The only smart way to play it was to go to the meeting first, and then if you need to get the FBI involved, you do it then. “Freedom of the press is in the First Amendment.” That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying the First Amendment covers freedom of the press. So there’s somebody who says they’re a lawyer, and if they received it in good faith, arguably it’s not illegal or at least maybe you wouldn’t be prosecuted for it. Keep in mind that what Russia said they allegedly had on Hillary, they first of all didn’t have, at least in that meeting they didn’t have anything, and secondly they did not present it as any kind of a state secret. It was not presented as a top-secret anything; it
[36:02]
was just presented as information. Nothing came except that WikiLeaks email; those had nothing to do with that meeting. You’re conflating completely different things. Oh, the phrase “of the press” is in the First Amendment. Let me correct myself here. Let me actually read the First Amendment. What exactly does the First Amendment say? “Or of the press.” Okay, let me read the First Amendment. It’s been a long time since I read it, just so I correct my earlier error. First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” So the press is actually specifically mentioned. I actually didn’t remember that. “Or the
[37:04]
right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” But in any case, the original point stays the same, which is that the First Amendment covers people and it calls out the press specifically. But I would think that even if the press was not called out, they’re people. So it seemed like a clarification that was unnecessary, a little bit redundant, but maybe that’s good. What is “the press”? Do you think it means they can ask if I have allergies? I do. It says it’s “the freedom to write, not attend.” Okay, we do have the right of
[38:06]
assembly in any way we want. I don’t know if that includes meetings; it should. “It’s the right to produce written words.” Well, I can’t argue about what the Constitution means. If I could, I’d be a candidate for the Supreme Court. I think we can wrap it up. Consider that we’re having a good day today. All the big things are moving in the right direction, and the worst thing in the news is there was a meeting somebody didn’t attend. That’s it. And that’s all for now.