Episode 949 Scott Adams: Fun Thoughts Before Bed

Date: 2020-05-02 | Duration: 28:17

Topics

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Nate Silver, recommended for coronavirus data analysis Smart-City design concept with heat-chimney?

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## Transcript

[0:10]

oh I just hit my elbow on my computer hey everybody come on in it's time for the evening edition of no coffee with Scott Adams because you don't need any caffeine now no what you need is to cleanse the palate of your brain of all those bad and destructive ideas all that tension all this stress that you've been dealing with all day let it go tonight just good thoughts for the rest of the night for example did you know that the rem desert here got approved by the FDA for some kind of immediate use that's pretty good and did you hear that Kim Jong Il apparently attended at least the report is the kim giman actually attended i think yesterday the opening of a fertilizer plant now what it didn't say is that he

[1:14]

plant now what it didn't say is that he attended as a guest or did he attend as the actual fertilizer so that part was a little unclear so we still don't know exactly what's going on with Kim jong-un so hold on to that thought I'd like to show you something well actually if you haven't heard Alex Jones the GiftA clip that's going around about cannibalizing his neighbor have you all heard that well you're gonna hear it so this is Alex Jones talking about how if things get bad he's totally gonna eat his neighbor's ass I've extrapolated this out and I won't have to for a few years food stuff my neighbors [Music]

[3:15]

Oh Alex Jose thank you for that all right
do you follow what NIDA Broderick on Twitter so she's accused President Clinton of rape I think and but she's pretty witty on Twitter and she says there's one positive outcome to Biden being the Democrat nominee we won't have to hear it continually bitching about why he lost you won't remember this is Juanita Broderick it was it was unloading on Biden all right I have a recommendation for you if you're trying to figure out this little coronavirus stuff and are you a little frustrated as I have been that you keep seeing these charts and graphs and you're not quite sure if you should believe any of it because I'm not the point where it doesn't matter who shows me the chart doesn't matter what context I see it

[4:15]

doesn't matter what context I see it doesn't matter what sources are named the first thing the first thing I think is
is not so sure about that no matter what it is it's just my first instinct is like probably that you know if I if I had to bet if I had to bet without knowing anything about your data you're just showing it to me for the first time I don't even know where it's from you say it's from authoritative sources you've named your sources here's the URL I can check it myself I get it still not so sure so all of our data is just crap right now everything's just ridiculous garbage but it's not stopping people from being certain that they can read these you know these these entrails and that they can make something out of it like horoscopes so everything that we think are these data-driven decisions well in principle yeah we're making

[5:19]

well in principle yeah we're making data-driven decisions hypothetically yeah we're making a lot of data-driven decisions in our imagination and we're also making data-driven decisions in the future but I'll tell you what we haven't done yet is making a data-driven decision because how could we all the data is just crap and the the most frustrating part is watching people so certain that they can compare one country to another and here's one of those situations where I wanted to call BS on it I mean I tried but there's some topics that I can't penetrate because I don't have standing meaning that why would you believe me if I said that somebody whose data is wrong like really why would you believe me it wouldn't make sense unless I could point to something specifically and often I can't I just look at it and I say to myself I

[6:21]

I just look at it and I say to myself I don't know what's wrong with this but I definitely don't trust it so that's sort of where I am that's not very helpful but so I recommend following nate silver you all know nate silver right famous for statistics and 5:38 is his website and he of course for conservatives we've loved too I say we because I'm in this conversation we'd love to make fun of him because he famously predicted that at one point that there was a only a 2% chance that Trump could win the presidency so I predicted there was a 98% chance he would win now that worked out well for me and then people said haha cartoonist gets the right status statistician gets it wrong and of course I played to that because it was it was fun to talk about it that way that's not exactly what happened because as I will say often and

[7:22]

happened because as I will say often and it's worth saying again what neh silver does is tell you the odds which is not the same as telling you what's going to happen so for example what I gave you the odds that I think it's a 60% chance that the hydroxychloroquine is not all it was cracked up to be 40% chance it is I'm not predicting that it's not I'm telling you the odds before he presents a pretty big chunk so if it goes you know if it goes in the in the other way you can't really say that the person who predicted the odds was wrong because even in the in the case of Dave silver he did say there was a 2% chance that Trump would win and sometimes 2% happens that's that's how sistex works so I've of course had fun because you know that weren't that went in my direction that one time but if you're trying to understand the graphs that you're seeing in the statistics

[8:24]

you're seeing in the statistics especially the ones comparing countries he's the best one to follow because he doesn't get too technical and he just says you know I don't think you can compare these here's why this looks like it's misleading and here's why and I think if he does the best job of now if you do follow a nate silver and a te silver and he said nate silver 538 is on twitter and he's you have the most famous statistician if if I can call them that I'm not sure if he uses that label for himself but and he was you sort of warning people on Twitter not to compare us to Sweden and and even that there's a parallel to compare us to any other country but what silver was saying is that you can't really it there's nothing that's jumping out as statistically true about the decisions

[9:25]

statistically true about the decisions that we're making versus other countries because it seems that people are doing all kinds of different things and getting sort of similar results so that's that's sort of the insight that I was looking for like that's what I was feeling but when he put it into words you know because he's smarter about that stuff when he put it in words I was like oh yeah yeah I'm seeing that everybody's doing all kinds of different things and yet the outcomes are pretty similar with the few exceptions of the hot spots if you take out the hot spots as he recommends everything looks about the same no matter what you do and what's that tell you I don't know if it tells you anything but it's worth noting that it doesn't well at the context that he was talking about if I can I hope I accurately convey this the context is that everybody who says if you do X you'll get a better result and Nate is

[10:26]

you'll get a better result and Nate is pointing out that people are doing all kinds of things and no matter what they do they're getting similar results so it is almost certainly true that whatever you thought was that thing that needed to be done probably isn't the thing because if there were some one variable that was jumping out as the thing to do then the people doing that would have great results the other people wouldn't it would be obvious so follow Nate he can sort it out for it
I was right after a few days or a day after I was telling you that the president was really getting his groove in talking about the coronavirus because I said that he'd found this new discipline where no matter what the question is or no matter what he's going to talk about he first says you know losing even one life is too much it's a tragedy for the victims and then he'll go and make his point and that inoculates him because he first shows empathy of how bad things are for

[11:27]

empathy of how bad things are for everybody and then he talks about his point and I said you know that's keeping him out of trouble so apparently he lost that discipline today and he made one comment about the number of people who might die the being in the 6070 hundred thousand range and and I guess the context was he was saying that we're doing pretty well and so Joe Walsh who was the anti-trump er gets on and you know he's all offended on Twitter that the president could act like it's a victory to lose a hundred thousand people or worse than that effect and I thought god that is the lowest level of punditry and politics it's it was so obvious it's sort of like something a 6th grader could have done you know just waiting for that all these common hackneyed overused attacks did he forget to say in

[12:27]

overused attacks did he forget to say in front of the sentence this one time out of a thousand that every death is too much did oh wait there was this one time yeah there was just one time he didn't say it before the sentence and so that means he's a monster who wants a hundred thousand people to die and he's a narcissist he only cares about himself because at one time I mean seriously Joe Walsh I mean it seriously and I'm not even I'm not even bothered by it because he's his opinion disagrees with mine or you know I don't think it's appropriate or something or even that is harmful because it's so ridiculous because you know it's totally inert what it is is so boring that I just think you should never talk in public and if you're that boring it's like really that's the most obvious thing to say it's dumb nobody believes that anyway let's talk about something fun I spent a great deal of time in my garage trying to invent things that are totally

[13:30]

to invent things that are totally impractical and I want to run through something just for fun to make you think about something that maybe you can improve on here are two known technologies that I have melded together so for example one way if you look at this as the left side and the right side these are different technologies on the Left we've got a lake that pumps water up to a mountain reservoir and then when you need need electricity you let that water flow back down through a generator back into the lake now of course that alone would not be a good system because the energy it would take to pump it up hill would almost certainly be more than the energy that you could create pumping it down so this would work if you have some other source that is not dependable at night and the only thing you're trying to do is give a little night's electricity but how do you get that well there's another technology called a heat chimney and it

[14:33]

technology called a heat chimney and it has to do with the fact that heat wants to rise so if you had for example let's say this is a mountains so on the left of the mountain you've got this reservoir and this system of storing water that you can later release to create energy through a generator but on the other side you've got air so you're heating the air and doesn't have to be a hot house but I drew it that way imagine there's like a mile long hot house the Sun is going through the glass and into the stone surface heating it up that hot air has to go somewhere so it goes up this long tube it turns a generator similar to a window would work but you know a generator and then the air goes out into the atmosphere now the second thing that this can and it's been and by the way I'm not inventing this these are existing things I'm just sort of putting them together one of the things you could do is use this hot air system to scrub the air to

[15:34]

this hot air system to scrub the air to remove pollution they think you could remove co2 I'm not sure about that but you can at least scrub the pollution out because forcing things through a filter is sort of the way you do it at least one way to do it so if you could create a system that would have hot air going up that would operate most of the day at night so you could actually get that to work through most of the night because there's always a differential between the valley and the top of the hill so as long as there's a differential you've got an airflow so one of these will work all night and that can create enough electricity maybe to help pump some water up if you've got some extra and then the two of these can feed a town now forget about whether this would work exactly there's a there's a larger point here the larger point is I think that the future is building inexpensive

[16:35]

the future is building inexpensive places to live in which you've designed the entire town this is almost never done design is usually limited to the the specific let's say industry so for example a a builder and an architect might might design a house but and they might maybe design a little neighborhood but they're not designing the whole town towns sort of get built up over time most of the time so it's you know you just do what you can given the constraints but if you started from scratch to build the most efficient well-designed city that was the perfect place to live everybody would want to be there you don't even need a car you've got free electricity or it's close to it so and you've got good weather so if you're going to locate this this new town that will be the future town that's well-designed so it's really an expensive rate both of those things yeah and

[17:36]

rate both of those things yeah and somebody's saying in the comments nuclear you could do something similar simply by having nuclear power and let's say generation four so in all these cases you're deciding on your location you're making sure you've got the right kind of weather and temperature from what you're trying to build and make sure you have a water source and the energy source so let's say you can find lots of places that meet this test in the United States where you could build a city then how would you do it I think it needs to be some kind of massive coordinated wiki sort of situation because there are so many skills involved that's why it's never been done I think I think there it would take so many different kinds of engineers to to coordinate it would be hundreds of them it would just be really hard but once you got it going probably each of the modules could be adjusted for example some of the engineers might be doing

[18:37]

some of the engineers might be doing waste treatment some of the engineers might be just making sure everybody has Wi-Fi but those are all little modules so you could always say okay we get a better way to do the Wi-Fi we've got a better way to treat the waste and you know you trade those out but the point is you could design a city that was super cheap and super good at the same time somebody says it sounds horrible what about this would sound horrible it's it's something that literally hasn't been designed yet all right so then Solar will only be four times as expensive as current electric generation well I'm not here to argue the pros and cons of the different power sources I'm just saying that it's fun to think through the ideas of how you could go about that and I'm pretty sure that if you designed a town really well it would be better to live in than anything that

[19:38]

be better to live in than anything that anybody lives today and way way cheaper and I think that that's the future it's going to happen
once you have the design finalized you don't need the engineers anymore that is incorrect sounds like you have not worked around technology you never don't need the engineers because things are continually breaking and needing upgrades and fixes and a problem shooting you might need fewer of them well probably not even that you always need the engineers so he says Germany has done that well I'd be interested to know when that happened because we can do it now way better
what is the value of money in a future that doesn't require it well that's a big question there you need someone managing the backend yeah you definitely need somebody managing the whole thing you forgot about power transmission

[20:39]

you forgot about power transmission lines yeah well you could use power transmission lines but you lose a lot of power Scott loves campus housing I love alternative alternative housing so I'm not trying to put any of you in any kind of special housing you know the the Conservatives who were in my audience or so primed to look for socialism wherever they can find it that you see it even where it isn't so if I say hey you can do anything you want live anywhere you want but also some other people want to might want to choose these these kinds of options that's not exactly socialism that's everybody can choose anything they want and it's the market wants cheap housing it will it will have it yeah there's lots of net-zero housing but I believe that the cost of building that stuff and the fact that they use solar panels and

[21:40]

the fact that they use solar panels and stuff there's a lot of disadvantages of those typically when you see something like a zero energy house all of the design was done by the the Builder but but is that the best way to have electricity is the best way that each house generate it's own maybe but if you designed the whole city maybe maybe you have one place that generates electricity be it you know be it a central site with say nuclear or something else all right an interesting comment is the herd management goal large-scale campus life I don't know what that means tampa bail houses are the best somebody says you know i looked into all of those alternate alternative building things when i built my house now this was ten years ago but some things haven't changed and people kept telling me you

[22:42]

changed and people kept telling me you know use these hay bales some kind of different hay bales and you put them in your walls and you'd build up the thing but you started looking into all these alternative technologies and you find stuff like yeah this hay is really good insulation that doesn't cost much it's not really that hard to build but it'll be filled with rodents and I think the straw becomes less effective as an insulator over time I know something happens to it it degrades or bugs get in there and eat it so it turns out if you actually if you try to build your hippie house you won't be happy and in five years bugs will lead it yeah so there are a lot of these new technologies and then the other problem is that you would never you would never get code approval you would never find a builder who knew how to build it yeah they all sound good but if you try to build anything that's not standard

[23:42]

to build anything that's not standard stuff doesn't happen now you here's my other idea my other idea is that you design a bunch of rooms that are standard designs but they're the best ones because you've seen a million different kitchens right but it's not true that they're all just as good there are some designs for how you design a living room a bedroom etc that are just better there's no doubt about it some some room sizes are better so you come up with yeah do a bunch of testing and you come up with the sizes that are the best you might have a few varieties you know two or three different choices but they're all standardized and there are also 1 foot square sizes so if somebody wanted to build it themselves or keep the construction cost down every part of the house you'd never have to cut anything because the whole town would have access to 1 foot square pieces for the floor and let's say for the ceiling let's say

[24:44]

and let's say for the ceiling let's say maybe from the walls and it doesn't have to be just one point squares but the point is that there's no situation where you'd ever have to cut any material everything could be built by taking it and putting it where it belongs because all the rooms would be designed to be the exact size of existing things and that that alone would probably lower the cost by 30% 40% somebody says the best room designs become dated pretty quickly I agree and that's why you would want to have the option to redesign your home fairly easily once it's been built and if everything is modular you could take out of your floor and say hey I think I want this to be a different kind of room and put it in a different floor without cutting anything nothing would ever be cut how much is Lego paying me yeah I'm

[25:46]

cut how much is Lego paying me yeah I'm being paid paid by big Lego you know I don't know if modular homes will ever be as the trouble with modular homes is that they require that the labor happens in the factory and if the labor turns out to be the expensive part I think you could find situations where people could build their own homes maybe not the hard parts you know there might be something that they can't do like framing or the basement but for all the walls and floors and stuff the homeowner could build it themselves all they need is the pieces do you like vertical farming I don't know that anybody's figured out how to make it economical I actually have an investment in an indoor farm company that's doing well actually don't build where there is freezing and thawing yeah that would be one of the main concerns correct what happened to geothermal so

[26:49]

correct what happened to geothermal so geothermal is a perfect example of a technology that works better if you design the city because if you try to do geothermal for your one house it just as an economical but if you are trying to do geothermal for an apartment complex or let's say college campus or or a city you would do it efficiently because you you know you would have common systems and stuff and you would do it once before everything got built so that's why you designed it from scratch all right that's all I got for now you've had enough of me today
somebody says they built their house and it was a nightmare yeah have you seen the Elon Musk tweets today people are wondering what's going on he said the Tesla stock was too high so it went down he said he's his girlfriend's having his baby on Monday he said that he's selling

[27:50]

baby on Monday he said that he's selling all of his property in his possessions and people are saying wha what's going on I don't know maybe we'll never know but that's all for now I'm more swearing before bed please not tonight I'm in a good mood tonight and I will see you in the morning