Scott Adams' Blog

The Persuasion Filter and Immigration

Posted January 29th, 2017 @ 8:02am in #Trump #immigration #Obama #Islam #Terrorism

President Trump has issued temporary immigration orders that ban citizens from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. This is a good opportunity to test the Persuasion Filter against what you might call the Hitler Filter.

For new readers of this blog, my starting point is the understanding that human brains did not evolve to show us reality. We aren’t that smart. Instead, our brains create little movies in our heads, and yours can be completely different from mine. We see that situation now. Half the country thinks President Trump is well on his way to becoming a Hitler-like dictator. But many other Americans think Trump is an effective business person with good intentions. They can’t both be right.

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Outrage Dilution

Posted January 26th, 2017 @ 8:24am in #Trump #Whenhub

I’m having a fun time watching President Trump flood the news cycle with so many stories and outrages that no one can keep up. Here’s how the math of persuasion works in this situation:

1 outrage out of 3 headlines in a week: Bad Persuasion

25 outrages out of 25 headlines in a week: Excellent Persuasion

At the moment there are so many outrages, executive orders, protests, and controversies that none of them can get enough oxygen in our brains. I can’t obsess about problem X because the rest of the alphabet is coming at me at the same time. 

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Should Twitter and Facebook be Regulated as Utilities?

Posted January 25th, 2017 @ 7:06pm in #Instagram #Facebook #Twitter

The Constitution guarantees every citizen the right of free speech. But what happens when the most effective channels for that speech are corporations such as Twitter and Facebook? Does the government have an obligation to make sure those companies are not limiting free speech for some classes of users?

My sketchy understanding of the law is that the government is only responsible for making sure the government itself is not abridging free speech. I think most of us agree that we don’t want the government volunteering for any more work than the constitution says it should be doing.

But shouldn’t the federal government get involved if a few monopoly corporations start to control the national conversation by filtering out voices that disagree with them? 

That seems to be the situation right now. For example, Twitter is apparently “shadowbanning” me because of my past Trump tweets, or so I assume. That means my tweets only go out to a subset of my followers. The rest don’t know I tweeted. My followers tell me this is the case. They have to visit my timeline to see my tweets.

@ScottAdamsSays Your tweets are not at all showing up in my tweetfeed. 😠

Realistically, can I quit Twitter and be a successful media personality without it? Not in today’s world. The only way I could make that work is by having a huge presence on Facebook or Instagram.

But that might be a problem too. Instagram (owned by Facebook) just removed my girlfriend’s (@KristinaBasham) blue verification badge – on inauguration day – without explanation. Was that politically motivated? She has 2.7 million followers and lots of imposters pretending to be her. The blue verification badge was invented for situations like hers. We have no way to contact anyone at Instagram to fix it. 

The same thing happened a few months ago and we worked through a friend-of-a-friend to get her verification badge back. The official explanation was that removing it the first time was just a glitch. This time my contact didn’t reply to my email.

I can’t be 100% sure that Twitter is shadowbanning me to limit my political speech. They might have a bug in their system, for example. But it would be a big coincidence if they are not, given how many Trump supporters were targeted by Twitter in the past year. 

Likewise, I can’t be 100% sure my girlfriend is being punished by Facebook/Instagram for her association with me. But it seems like a big coincidence that she lost the verification on Inauguration Day. That lack of transparency is just as much of a problem as an actual abridgement of free speech. if I can’t know whether my freedom of speech is being limited by corporate overlords, how can I have trust in the Republic? And without trust, the system falls apart.

I want to trust my government, but without freedom of speech, I find that impossible. That’s why I support creating a law requiring the government to audit the major social media sites to certify that freedom of speech still exists for all classes of users. (Within reason.)

You might think there is not much risk of losing the right of free speech in the United States. But keep in mind that I have already lost my free speech in a practical sense. The social media tools you take for granted are not available to me in their full form.

If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you, it should.

—

A number of you have asked me whether I have been predicting recent political events with spooky accuracy or actually causing them with my own persuasion. You might get some insight into that question by watching what happens on this topic. My intention is to influence.

How am I doing so far?

Update: Kristina got her blue verification badge back from Instagram after several days. No explanation given.

Battle of the Hats – Hitler Phase

Posted January 25th, 2017 @ 5:49pm in #Trump #pink hat #Hitler

I can’t stop laughing at this. All the silliness of the past year in one picture.

@instapundit @ScottAdamsSays @AdamBaldwin So that’s where the chicks got their inspiration. pic.twitter.com/UX5ExBsTMj

— Bill Marcy (@UnHolyFamily) January 25, 2017

Building My Podcast Streaming Studio at Home

Posted January 24th, 2017 @ 1:43pm in #podcast #Canon #Telestream #Wirecast #WhenHub #Rongyuxuan #Sennheiser

A number of you asked what equipment I’m using to build out my home podcasting studio. I put that tutorial in a WhenHub Whencast (my company’s startup) so you can see an example of how WhenHub works for sort of thing.

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Battle of the Hats

Posted January 24th, 2017 @ 11:14am in #Trump #pinkhat #branding

When Donald Trump ran for president he put his clear, simple message on the front of bright red hats. The message was perfect. The choice of a hat instead of a t-shirt or other garment was perfect. The color red was perfect for his message – bold, sexy, and important. The hats were a master class in branding and influence. Political historians will be referring to Trump’s hats for ages.

Compare that to the Million Woman March. They chose pink because – I assume – it is a bit of an ironic color for women who are fighting for their rights. Women are “owning” pink to rob it of its power to brand them as the so-called weaker sex. At least that’s why I assume they picked pink.

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Books That Have Timers (by design)

Posted January 20th, 2017 @ 12:24pm in #Books #writing #author #god's debris

I’ve written three books that have what I call “timers” in the design. And by that I mean I intentionally wrote them before the public was ready to read them, with the expectation that someday they would be ready. That day seems to have arrived. Here’s why.

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A Look Back at My Trump Predictions

Posted January 20th, 2017 @ 10:28am in #Trump #Whenhub #inauguration

Many of you asked me to provide a quick index to my Trump-only blog posts. I did that for you here in a Whencast. Feel free to share on social media or embed in your own blog. My updates to this will flow automatically to wherever it is shared.

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Listen to Me on The Harvard Lunch Club Podcast

Posted January 19th, 2017 @ 9:19am in #TalentStack #Podcast

I’m putting together the studio equipment I need to do my own podcasting and livestreaming. But in the meantime you can hear me on the Harvard Lunch Club podcast.

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Could a Climate Science Expert Change Your Opinion?

Posted January 18th, 2017 @ 10:14am in #climate science #climate deniers

It seems to me that the big problem with the climate change debate is that no one would recognize a good argument if they saw one. We only think we have the ability to recognize a good argument. What actually happens is that cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias generally keep a wall between us and reality. We live in our own little movies in our heads while being sure everyone else is watching the same movie. They aren’t.

Here’s a thought experiment:

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