Scott Adams' Blog

How to Legally Vote More Than Once

Posted October 23rd, 2016 @ 8:04pm in #Trump #Clinton

If you find it annoying that you only have one legal vote, here’s how you can get a few more. It’s called persuasion.

You can multiply the power of your opinion by convincing people on the other side to stay home on election day. Every vote you suppress on the other side is like an extra vote for you. And there’s no limit to how many you can have!

Persuasion doesn’t work every time. But you might enjoy experimenting to see how many times it works for you. For this exercise, I will assume you are a Trump supporter trying to suppress the votes of Clinton supporters. Here’s how you can do it.

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Twitter and Periscope Shadowban Update

Posted October 23rd, 2016 @ 11:02am in #Trump #Clinton

I was just on Periscope, the streaming app owned by Twitter. The running count for number of live followers on my session dropped from over a thousand to zero for no obvious reason, even though plenty of people were still on and interacting with me. At a count of over a thousand viewers I would have been close to the #1 stream on the app at that moment.

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How to Insult Me on Twitter

Posted October 21st, 2016 @ 11:02am

I’ve noticed that a lot of people are struggling to come up with creative ways to insult me on Twitter. As a public service, I will organize the common approaches in this post so people can insult me by number.

1. Act like you think I draw Garfield. 

2. Proclaim that I am the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.  (Assume a million people haven’t already told me the same thing.) 

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The Crook Versus the Monster

Posted October 21st, 2016 @ 10:25am in #Trump #Clinton

Thanks to timely assists from Wikileaks, Trump has successfully framed Hillary clinton as a crooked politician. Meanwhile, Clinton has successfully framed Trump as a dangerous monster. If the mainstream polls are accurate, voters prefer the crook to the monster. That makes sense because a crook might steal your wallet but the monster could kill you. As of today, Clinton has the superior persuasion strategy. Crook beats monster.

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I Score the Third Debate

Posted October 20th, 2016 @ 8:00am in #Trump #Clinton

I watched the third and most boring presidential debate last night. Here are my thoughts.

Clinton’s goal was to stay vertical for ninety minutes and sound more well-informed than Trump while framing him as an unstable monster. She accomplished all of that and won the debate, in my opinion.

But it wasn’t a big win. 

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I Wake You Up for the Presidential Debate

Posted October 19th, 2016 @ 9:04am in #Trump #Clinton

Here’s a little thought experiment for you:

If a friend said he could see a pink elephant in the room, standing right in front of you, but you don’t see it, which one of you is hallucinating?

Answer: The one who sees the pink elephant is hallucinating.

Let’s try another one.

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Is Twitter Shadowbanning me?

Posted October 18th, 2016 @ 10:29am in #Twitter #Trump #Clinton

According to many of my Twitter followers, Twitter is “shadowbanning” me. If true, that means someone at Twitter has decided to suppress my free speech on the site, presumably because I have said good things about Trump’s talents for persuasion. My tweets do not align with Twitter’s political preferences as I understand them.

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Lie Detection and Scandals

Posted October 17th, 2016 @ 9:46am

When Clinton’s surrogates respond to questions about Wikileaks by saying the Russians are behind it, that’s an acknowledgment of guilt. Guilty people almost always question the source of the information first. Innocent people start with a clear denial, or sometimes confusion as to why the question is being asked.

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Assume Half of What You Hear About the Candidates is True

Posted October 14th, 2016 @ 7:00am in #Trump #Clinton

This is a fun election. Trump and Clinton have provided us with one juicy rumor/scandal after another. But how do you know which rumors are true? I have taught you in this blog that even smart people are routinely fooled by confirmation bias. You think you can use your “common sense” to sort out what is true and what is an illusion, but it doesn’t work that way. Humans don’t have that sort of self-awareness. 

So what do you do?

I’ll help you sort out truth from fiction using the Persuasion Filter plus some pattern recognition.

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The Era of Women

Posted October 13th, 2016 @ 12:04am in #Trump #Clinton #gary johnson

If the latest groping/kissing allegations against Trump hold up – and I assume they will, based on quantity if not credibility – it won’t matter what Wikileaks says about Clinton. She will win easily.

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