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Recent quotes:
Is President Trump Doing Management Wrong? | Scott Adams' Blog
A good way to tell whether a pundit or citizen understands the field of risk management well enough to critique Trump’s performance is to ask how they view his history of bankruptcies. If a person thinks those bankruptcies are a sign of poor management, they probably don’t know much about business. But if they understand the few bankruptcies – out of hundreds of projects – as part of a diversification strategy with good risk management that siloed off the losers, you might be seeing someone who understands business.
The Odds of Being Killed by an Immigrant | Scott Adams' Blog
The idea that we can predict the future based on the past is one of our most persistent illusions. It isn’t rational (for the vast majority of situations) and it doesn’t match our observations. But we think it does.
The big problem is that we have lots of history from which to cherry-pick our predictions about the future. The only reason history repeats is because there is so much of it. Everything that happens today is bound to remind us of something that happened before, simply because lots of stuff happened before, and our minds are drawn to analogies.
How To Know Your Product Will Succeed | Scott Adams' Blog
Prediction-wise, I don’t care if someone thinks my product is both useful and a good value. I’m happy about that, but it doesn’t predict anything. I need to see people doing things that are so unexpected that it borders on irrational. That’s a good indicator. Facts and reason are not.
Your Body is Your Brain Too | Scott Adams' Blog
When I am not feeling good, I don’t ask my brain to fix things on its own. I manipulate my environment until my thoughts change. That’s because I see my body as the user interface to my brain. I don’t let my brain think whatever it randomly wants to think. I constrain it to productive thoughts by manipulating my environment.
The Illusion of Knowledge | Scott Adams' Blog
If you believe you are smart, and a smart person disagrees with you with a solid argument, it forces you to either change your mind (which humans don’t like to do) or to enter an hallucination that explains away the new argument as total nonsense.
How to Be Unpersuasive | Scott Adams' Blog
The “So” Tell: When you see an argument on the Internet that begins with the word “So…” you can be sure that what follows is a mischaracterization of the other side’s point followed by sarcasm and derision over the mischaracterization (but not the actual point). The sarcasm and derision are good persuasion because they act as an emotional penalty for maintaining the opinion that is under fire. But generally the “so…” structure of an argument causes both parties to debate the characterization versus debating the actual point.
How to Be Unpersuasive | Scott Adams' Blog
Appeal to Experts: As long as there is at least one expert on the other side of a topic, the experts as a whole are not persuasive. To be clear, if you are introducing yourself to an unfamiliar topic, the number of experts on each side might matter. But for familiar topics such as climate change, it only matters that some experts are on the other side. And there are always experts on the other side of controversial topics.
How to Be Unpersuasive | Scott Adams' Blog
What about this irrelevant data? Even relevant data has limited persuasion power unless it is substantially new information. People tend to only believe data that fits their existing opinion. Irrelevant data (such as the fact that Clinton won the popular vote) is even less persuasive than relevant stuff.
How to Be Unpersuasive | Scott Adams' Blog
What if the situation were reversed? Lately it has become common to address any criticism about your team by speculating that the situation would be viewed differently if the other team were being accused of the same misdeeds. While this might be true in some cases, it is an intellectual point in the same way as hypocrisy, and thus it has minimal persuasive power. The only power it might have is embarrassing the media toward a more even-handed approach in the future. But it won’t change anyone’s opinion about the current topic.
How to Be Unpersuasive | Scott Adams' Blog
Hypocrisy: Pundits like to point out that politicians often criticize others for the very things they have done. That sort of observation is good entertainment but it is an intellectual exercise with no emotional power. You need emotion to persuade. And hypocrisy is such a universal human quality that it’s hard to get worked up about it when you see it.
How to Be Unpersuasive | Scott Adams' Blog
Analogies: Analogies are good tools for explaining a concept to someone for the first time. But because analogies are imperfect they are the worst way to persuade. All discussions that involve analogies devolve into arguments about the quality of the analogy, not the underlying situation.
Fake News Versus Misleading News | Scott Adams' Blog
Most humans live the illusion that people can do a good job of sorting out truth from fiction if only they have good data. But that’s only true for trivial decisions with no emotional content. For any decision that matters, facts are irrelevant to decision-making. Humans choose their paths based on how they feel. Later they rationalize their decisions. The human mind doesn’t make decisions based on facts and reason. We only think we do.
