Episode 1478 Scott Adams - Vaccination Reasoning Viewed Through a Hypnosis Filter. And Coffee.

good morning everybody and it's time for another rousing edition of coffee with scott adams the best thing that happens in the universe except for the sun itself and if you'd like to make it better well all you need is a copper marker glass a tanker chelsea stein a canteen jogger flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine of the day this sim somebody says i simply tolerate scott well thank you some of some of you like the content but others are here for the tolerance and i appreciate it so join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the w today i think it makes everything better it's called the simultaneous sip go ahead my ass good stuff well in portland the people in charge have decided that instead of using the police which as you know are overfunded in portland according to portland instead of using their limited police to break up violence between opposing political groups in the city they decided to stand back and let them fight because they were just using things like sprays and clubs and stuff like that it wasn't especially dangerous until the gunfire i guess i guess the police got involved when there were shots fired but until then they actually just stood back and observed and they let the two opposing sides fight it out to which i say thank you i have never agreed with mayor wheeler more than right this moment they're letting them fight it out i don't know what could end it faster right because it seems to me that if you try to break it up and you keep them from hurting each other too much or too many people getting hurt they'll just come back but what happens if you let it let them fight it out a few times i think fewer people show up next time you know if you got your head broken probably you don't go back i don't know so we'll try that and i like it in the a b testing sense of things so while common sense tells you hey put those police in there and stop that fighting on your streets let's try this it could work i'm not saying it will i don't think you could quite predict that it'll come to a good end if you let them fight but we haven't tried it let's give it a try if portland wants to be the test case for a let them fight i say put some bleachers in there and sell tickets and let's go nuts well i think i predicted to you that afghanistan has some surprises coming i didn't know exactly what the surprises would be but one thing you can be sure of that whenever you've got one of these fog of war or chaotic situations something is going to come out of this that you say to yourself what how did that happen you know just something completely on the left field that explains everything now i don't know what that'll be but there's a weird thing happening now in slow motion that i don't understand and it goes like this the americans are getting out of afghanistan without violence mostly right you're hearing anecdotal stories of somebody who doesn't want to cross a checkpoint stories of the taliban taking away passports something like that it's probably happening because i doubt the taliban has such command and control that they can control every checkpoint but overall am i wrong that the that the by the administration seems to think he could get the people out on time by the end of the month and that it's going peacefully now here's the weird thing you know your your unintended consequences and we're all geniuses aren't we all geniuses we can predict exactly what will happen in every international situation because we're so smart but here's something that might have accidentally happened the best case scenario i'm not going to say it's true yet and certainly i think all evidence suggests that the withdrawal was botched so my my first take if you remember was hold hold we need to find out more information it looks botched but wait there might be something we don't know about because why is it we all see it botched but the people in charge all did the thing that was obviously wrong like there's something to explain that we don't know yet so i say oh wait but i waited i waited for the administration to give us its version of the story and just sounds botched maybe there's more to it but it just sounds botched so far and i i say that only from the perspective of the administration didn't really put up a fight you know they didn't give you an argument that they did it right that made any sense you know they're saying they did a good job but you know they're not really supporting that argument so here's the here's the most optimistic thing you could say and i'm not saying it's true it's just interesting that it's possible and in fact maybe more possible than the alternative and it goes like this the way this came down was the least loss of death possible under all scenarios i think that's where it's heading that this is accidentally totally botched but accidentally gave us the best outcome why because afghanistan fell so quickly what could have been the safest thing to happen in afghanistan i hate to say it but if it's inevitable the taliban is going to take over the safest thing is to surrender right away that's what happened so we didn't see it coming we weren't prepared for it but it was the safest thing just complete surrender on day one because otherwise you have the fight and you still surrender i mean you get to the same place right so and then but the second part and the part we're obsessing on is the withdrawal you know that's completely botched right does everybody agree that we're all the experts and we would have gotten the people out they wanted to be evacuated we would have done that first before we got rid of most of the military now we did put military back in but they're not getting people etc so it's still botched no doubt about it but so far the taliban has been playing as strategically very smart and the strategic smart thing for the taliban to do would be to give us a deadline that's a little challenging but possible and they did that apparently at least according to the biden administration that deadline is challenging but possible like you know we we have a really good chance of getting really close to achieving it now so far that's pretty reasonable for uh you know a group that's known for its unreasonable uh actions what happens if i'll just put this as a hypothetical it's not a prediction it's a hypothetical and things are heading in this direction what happens if the hostages not the oxygens well they might be what happens if the people we want to evacuate including the afghan interpreters and the people who we want to get out what happens if we get them all out isn't this going to look like the biggest success of all times at the same time it was botched believe it or not they can happen at the same time you can botch everything and just get lucky that's what it looks like it looks like everything was botched and so far fingers crossed you know there's no reason to think it'll go this way all the way to the end but fingers crossed they avoided a civil war by collapsing immediately and if we get the people out which looks like it's happening it's the best thing that could have happened am i wrong about that i mean if you're just counting uh bodies how could we have done better than this assuming that we do get the evacuees out now that's a big big assumption right but so far so far it's happening now i'm not saying that's you're saying it's delusional it's not delusional because it's put in in uh a statistical sense right it could happen it's just unlikely i mean if you if you had to predict wouldn't you predict that the taliban will not let everybody out keep a bunch of hostages most obvious thing right and i feel like inevitably they're going to keep a few but let's say i'll just give you a number let's say they keep 20 i don't know 20 americans that didn't get out and but we get everybody else out so suppose we lose 20 souls they happen to be american what did we avoid probably a hundred thousand deaths 50 000 if the civil war happened so biden may have accidentally traded 20 american lives this is just a speculation this not based on data he could have accidentally traded 20 lives to save 50 000 afghans is that immoral well it's not america first but i don't know if it's immoral you know you could argue that one all right um rasmussen poll asked if taliban takes american hostages should the u.s use military to rescue them and 78 say yes is that good news or bad news it's good news because the taliban needs to know that we're going to get our hostages out or there's going to be big trouble hostages slash evacuees and having 78 of the public say yes send the military in while about the same amount of the of the public says get adams to afghanistan that is exactly the right situation for the taliban to say you know if we don't let everybody out we're really effed right so this is the best poll i've ever seen in my life because it says the american public are completely on the same side i mean 78 is as good as you can get in the american public and then uh rasmussen poll also asked is the biden administration doing enough to evacuate americans and 59 said no and i think this is under the category of how could you do enough you know really how could you do enough you know it's always going to look like it wasn't soon enough didn't do enough but it does look like it's not enough all right here's the question that i asked on twitter and this is a this topic will be more about persuasion than about whether you should get a vaccination can we agree that i don't care if you get vaccinated everybody everybody i don't care if you get vaccinated so anything i say next is going to be about vaccination persuasion but it's not intended to work on you really it's not a trick right let me say it again this is not some kind of like backward psychology hypnosis trick i really don't want to persuade you on this i really really don't it's totally unethical because it's a you know it's a health decision you got to make your own decision on that i'll persuade you on politics i'll be happy to do that i'll persuade you on how to live your life better how to have systems instead of goals i'll persuade you on all kinds of stuff but not your health decisions not that that's on you totally but let's talk about the persuasion game because it's happening whether i participate or not and omar khatib alerted me to uh there's a series of tweets from advertising insider in which they asked some advertising uh professionals what the governments could do to persuade more people to get the vaccination now did the advertising executives say much the same thing i did which is hold on even if we could even if we could persuade people to get the vaccinations it would be unethical so let me back out of this conversation right away because i'm a marketing professional and i'm not going to cross that ethical barrier well that didn't happen instead they gave you pretty good specific suggestions for doing the most unethical thing in the world persuading people to get a health outcome a particular treatment so here are some of their persuasion points and i'm going to evaluate them so you can get a little lesson on persuasion at the same time number one are marketing executives good at persuasion anybody anybody who works at a big company where there are professional marketing people are those professional marketing people trained in persuasion let's say the way i am i'm a hypnotist etc do you think they have the same kind of persuasion training as this cartoonist no not even close but they do have a lot of tools so they can do polls and they can do focus groups and they can a b test things so they can use brute force to get to a good outcome because you can just randomly try stuff semi-randomly and then just test it and see if it works and then do more of the stuff that works so that's marketing but here's what marketers are not good at the first try because almost nobody is right the the first thing you try isn't necessarily going to work so here are some of their first things to try from uh let's see uh this is from uh these are different marketing executives this from jim lasser suggests using humor to disarm those who oppose the vaccine nope nope you can use humor uh it'll maybe make a good commercial for selling your soap or your beer but humor isn't going to change your health care decisions i'm sorry it just isn't now maybe he's right that's why you test it right so what what is the value of my opinion on the initial input the thing that you could test well i think my opinion is pretty good better than the average because i study this field but i could be wrong maybe you test this and it's exactly the right thing but i doubt it my instinct tells me the humor is not where you go on this definitely not in fact i would go with fear the opposite of humor humor is hahaha i'm relaxed i'm having a good time that's not the head you want to put people in if you want somebody to do something as radical as putting a needle in their arm you've got to scare the out of them right that'll work you got to scare them i don't think anything else will work let's go on with these other ideas he said that the same guy said that the stickiness of puns can be effective i don't know about that now the stickiness of puns in terms of wordplay that does have some scientific support if the glove doesn't fit you must acquit sort of word play it's a rhyme the rhyme does actually create some persuasion so science supports that but that's not enough to get somebody vaccinated all right um another another guy said a marketing professional said let's turn it from you've got to get protected to let's uh fm track this thing down and kill it so mike lee i think said that uh well i'm not sure about the attribution but the idea is that you got to get tough with it talk tough and then people say yeah let's go to war against that virus terrible idea terrible idea i mean i i don't i don't even know what to say about it it's just a terrible idea all right so forget that one another said that that who originally cast a doubt on the vaccine should play the trump card and give him credit for starting the vaccine program and directing the resources possibly the worst of all the ideas if you bring trump into the conversation of vaccinations do people even try to make a medical decision no as soon as you add trump to the conversation it's a political conversation it doesn't matter what the data is you throw trump into any conversation about health care and it's just a trump conversation so this is a horrible idea like really really really bad from this marketing professional don't throw trump into the conversation that just makes everything worse all right here's another one an effective campaign we have to find people who are anti-vaccine and and convert them so you'd have to find the anti-vaccine people and get them to be pro-vaccine and then help sell it would that uh convince you if you saw somebody who is anti-vaccine let's say let's say you are and they were that anti-vaccine just like you but unlike you they had changed to be pro-vaccine would that change your mind no no no it wouldn't not even for a second the first thing you say is well they bought off another there's another sheep looks like another sheep went to slaughter no it would be the least persuasive thing in the world to see what other people are doing now suppose all you did was show that smart good-looking people were getting vaccinated and the people who were not getting vaccinated were unhealthy looking slobs who make lots of bad decisions in general well that might work that might work not a specific person because we we discount celebrities opinions completely but what if it was a a montage of smart beautiful looking people getting vaccinated and you know obese bad decision makers not getting vaccinated that might work because people are tribal and they'd say oh i want to be in that tribe not that tribe so i mean it would move some people in either direction but i think your net would be good and when i say that again remember you'd have to test it i'm not smart enough nor is anybody to know what will work without testing it persuasion doesn't really work that way even though even the hypnotist even the hypnotist who's hypnotizing you in real time just the two of you in a room that hypnotist is still a b testing because you're trying stuff you're looking at the reaction try something else look at the reaction so without the testing you don't really have a system for persuasion they have to be part of the team all right here's some more you shouldn't assume everyone is motivated by politics okay that's real helpful because well how does that persuade you i guess the point is to make it non-political but we've tried that that didn't seem to make any difference um someone who is pregnant and also a marketing professional said that she was persuaded by someone by hearing from people who are genuinely concerned for you interesting so her suggestion was that she was persuaded by hearing from people who were genuinely concerned for her now we're getting closer now now that's some real um real persuasion at least good thinking because we are persuaded by people who genuinely care for us why is it that you don't think the pharmaceutical companies can be trusted because they don't care for you why is it that you don't think the government could be trusted they don't care for you why do you not believe the the pundit you see on the news don't care for you in fact it might be the same pundit who wants to hunt you down it might be in a lot of cases so now most of the people telling you to get the vaccination are people who don't care for you literally don't care about you one bit they don't even know you you're a stranger but how persuasive would be somebody who actually does care for you now they may not be experts on vaccinations but i'll bet it is persuasive so i don't know how you could ramp that up to get lots of concerned people talking to vaccinated people or and i'm not suggesting you should i'm just saying that at least this is genuine persuasion smartness you know it looks like something you could test all right here's another one you should treat the campaign for the vaccination persuasion with the kind of budget and tactics you'd see a political party use to get out the vote i think they did didn't they wouldn't you say that the government did exactly that used the same kind of mass persuasion as get out the vote i feel like that's sort of a non answer that's a very marketing meeting answer all right here's my take so i'm going to add my own persuasion suggestions again i'm not trying to persuade you i'm teaching you how to do persuasion okay can can we all deal with that distinction not trying to persuade you that would be unethical but i'll tell you how persuasion works i think you need a fake because in other words i think there are a bunch of people who are close to being persuaded and would like to but they're still stuck in their old opinion so they need to fake because something that they can say oh something changed so now my old opinion was right but now my new opinion is right too because something changed so you need that fake because the something changed the fda approval might be that so i think some people are going to say even though the polls suggest it's not going to make much difference i think it will i think the polls are misleading i think that the fda approval is even going to make the moderna vaccination more popular even though it doesn't have fda approval people are going to kind of expect that it will get it because the pfizer got it so there's some you know crossover persuasion that the pfizer thing will make the modern thing look safer even though they're different things it's just how your brain works so the fake because i would look for other fake because not just the fda approval but how about we've waited long enough that the odds of problems are way down because you would have seen most of them you know pop up that would be fake because but there could be others too as i said you need fear and visual persuasion anything less is barely trying so you need to show people die in a covet like in the worst possible ways and saying i should have gotten the vaccination and then dying and there are plenty of anecdotes like that cnn is promoting that kind of persuasion with their their story choices and uh i think it works i mean you could argue that cnn shouldn't be in the persuasion game but unfortunately they are and i would say that those anecdotal you know terrible visuals where you can sort of put yourself in the bed you say oh i can see myself being that guy don't be that guy all right um show people that you like getting vaccinated that's similar to showing the you know the two groups you know one is beautiful and one is not um i would also like to see an expert explaining risk management to people you've never seen that except me and i'm far from an expert if you if you can't show me let's say nate silver i like to use him because a lot of you disagree with some of his opinions so he's sort of perfect for this you can disagree with his opinions but not his rationale meaning that his his thinking process is generally pretty close to flawless is it's his field he knows how to think statistically he's good at it wouldn't you like to see somebody who is just just flat out good at it maybe a few of them so you've got a few different opinions explaining to you the risk benefit thinking through all of the risks we know about and all the ones we don't putting some kind of statistics on them and just walking you through it say okay here's the risk of getting vaccinated all these potential risks here's what we know about them here's the risk of not getting vaccinated here's what we know about it put some numbers on it i think that would be at least a fake because for some people some people would say you know nobody ever explained it that well right all right let me let me uh okay here here's the persuasion that would work you ready for this again i'm not suggesting it this is an example of what would work you take nay silver and you say you sit down for a couple hours with uh mike rowe you all know mike rowe if you're not american you might not mike rose a famous personality who is sort of an every man he does what's called dirty jobs he did a show where he would do like these awful jobs where you literally get physically dirty you know doing gross stuff so he's famous for being like a a level-headed rational person who just can see how to get stuff done right that's sort of his brand so you take it nate silver and you spend two hours with micro teaching him how to look at the statistics and then you have mike rowe explain the statistics to the public why because if nay silver does it you're not going to understand it right he's almost too good because his explanation would have enough nuance in it to be accurate but maybe a little confusing because you can't follow the nuance of statistics but you take that stuff and you package it up with mike rowe a really really credible voice especially to the right who has a lot of a lot of resistance micro could sell the out of this you really could now people are saying is he a scientist is he a statistician no no he's he's you that's why it works do you know who would be the most persuasive person for you the person who would convince you specifically the best would be you if you could make a digital version of yourself and give it a script written by somebody who knows what they're talking about and then that digital version talks you into getting vaccinated it would be the most persuasive thing that could happen you couldn't beat that right mike rowe is you that's sort of his brand you know i don't i hate to characterize other people because he might not want to characterize himself that way which is unfair but in my in my view the thing that makes him popular is you say yeah i think just like that that's you know micro is saying the words coming out of his mouth are the ones i'm thinking but he's saying it better than i'm thinking it that's the ultimate he says what you're thinking but he says it better than you're thinking it somebody says why a white person that's a good question if you could if you could take the same concept and replace micro with i'm going to say charles barkley just to pick a name right i picked charles barkley because i don't know if anybody's been more popular with everybody if you don't follow basketball that's an unfamiliar reference but charles barkley is black but his sort of approach to race is so commonsensical that it just appeals to left and right in a weird kind of way so yeah you take a charles barkley who everybody likes and he's famous for being a plain talker common sense kind of guy yeah that's that's actually that might even be an upgrade on my idea i think mike road be great but yeah a charles barkley absolutely he could do that somebody says steve harvey maybe i know i i think charles barkley is more relatable i feel like more more the you know the every man talks like you do kind of thing um and here's another idea it seems to me that the anti-vaxxers um like to call the people who are taking the vaccination sheep what would trump do if he were the recipient of a thing like that he'd take the gun out of their hand and he'd turn it around so if uh here's a little vac little uh persuasion tip the things that people call you are things that they personally think are persuasive so if the anti-vaxxers are calling you sheep for getting vaccinated what would be the most piercing thing you could call them sheep they've given you the answer you don't have to wonder what's the worst thing that you could say about them because they told you it's what they're calling you sheep so if you could find a way and again this is persuasion i'm not saying you should do this it's just how it works if you could find a way to make the people not getting vaccinated and label them sheep in all likelihood that would really hurt because it's the word they use when they're insulting other people if you can make that stick to the person using the word it's gonna hurt a little extra so that would be an approach um also the anti-vaxxers tend to be conspiracy theorists or the only people who are right two possibilities right either they are subject to believing conspiracies or they're right and we'll all find out later but uh in terms of persuasion if you came up with a conspiracy theory that worked in the other direction hypothetically it could persuade people so in other words you would need a counter conspiracy theory a conspiracy theory that says for example that china is the one telling you that the vaccinations are dangerous because they probably are i don't know if that's true but i would guess that china and russia are messing with our communications about the vaccines just like they do with our our social structure and our politics right so it seems to me um let me check this seems to me that you can do a counter conspiracy theory all right um when i asked people to describe to me how vaccines make things worse i got a ton of cognitive dissonance i'm going to give you the hypnotists filter on how to see the world so the question i asked is how could it be that so many people think that vaccinations make the variance worse so that's a a very popular thought and may be true might be true that the vaccinations make variance worse so i asked the following question can you describe the mechanism for how that could possibly happen because everybody's sure of it i mean it seems like the entire public is sure that's true but i said well describe how exactly that works and what happened was and this is the hypnotist filter so my filter on this is probably different than yours your filter is probably something like this some people are right and some people are wrong some people are well informed they did their own research some people are not and to you i would think that that's all there is to this vaccination makes variance worse question somebody's right somebody's wrong the hypnotist filter is different the hypnotist filter says this there were a lot of people who who publicly and to their friends have said i understand this issue it's basic evolution if you put evolutionary pressure on the normal virus it will give an advantage to the variant boom scott i just explained it evolution 101 just apply it to this situation and you're done anybody can understand this evolution is survival of the fittest the fittest variant will be the one that can get through the vaccination right pretty logical okay here's my view of the world my view of the world is that when people realize they couldn't explain how a vaccination makes a very into worse that they spun into cognitive dissonance and when you look at my tweet and you see the comments you'll see there's all word salad but it'll be word salad you think makes sense because the person who wrote it thinks it makes sense let me give you some i know you're skeptical i'm going to read you some of the explanations of people who are very smart by the way so everybody who gave these explanations of how evolution would um you know cause the variance to be dominant they're smart people but they're showing all the tells of cognitive dissonance i'll give you some examples well so far let's start with this whiteboard let's say there are two situations there's a person with no vaccination and a person who's vaccinated let's say this the non-vaccinated person gets the regular alpha virus but it mutates inside them and the mutation is a new variant and then it spreads everybody agrees that can happen right that it can happen that you can get the regular virus but it mutates inside the person and then what comes out the other end is a new variant and then that variant could spread that's if you don't have a vaccination but what if you do have a vaccination well in that case the alpha various virus goes in it mutates and then a new variant comes out and it spreads what was the difference between the vaccinated person and the no vaccinated person nothing because both of them have have the virus in them both of them can spread it there's no difference so now everybody who is positive there's a difference has to explain this and that triggers cognitive dissonance now let me say as clearly as possible i don't know if vaccinations cause more variance i don't know i mean i legitimately don't know and i'm not sure i even am biased in one direction all i do know is that when people try to explain it their spending is spinning into cognitive dissonance that i do know so i can say that with great confidence you know it's something i study so let me give some examples again these are smart people with smart explanations um a vaccine which targets a specific part of a virus will mean the small mutations in the virus can survive while the targeted virus cannot since viruses are mutating all the time eventually one of these mutants aka variants will become dominant how'd that happen how did one of them become dominant just by being more viral right in my example the vast or the unvaccinated person which of these cases is there going to be more variants well i would say that the vaccinated person has less virus to begin with and less chance of spreading it so i would think there would be fewer variants if you got vaccinated i don't know that that's true i'm just saying that's where the logic takes it with you know the limited information i have so here's my question what would what would make the variant survive and i'm hearing things like well the old virus and the new variant are fighting it out and uh one is one is compelled nothing compels a virus if you have two viruses in you they both would spread if you had the delta spreads if you have the other one the spreads so i can see why there would be more uh well actually there's just no mechanism described here now then other people use uh analogies but the analogies fall apart i'll give you one analogy that was used if you're trying to breed small dogs let's say you kill all the big dogs and then you breed the small ones and then you do the same round again whatever the largest puppies are you kill all of them and then only small puppies grow up and then they have babies and they're small right so that's the analogy so so the virus would be like that no i wouldn't because the virus doesn't kill all puppies the virus doesn't kill all anything it just reduces it so the analogy would be if you're trying to breed small puppies you take all puppies and kill 10 of them how does that help so the analogy just falls apart because there there's always some difference in the analogy from the original it's a big difference so there's that all right so some of you in the comments are saying uh survival of the fittest how many of you in the comments think that survival of the fittest can explain why the the big variants get out past the vaccines and the the weaker ones don't is it survival of the fittest because that's the thing right you've all studied evolution survival of the fittest how many of you know that survival of the fittest is not science and that it's not evolution and the survival of the fittest doesn't exist how many of you know that how many of you know that the theory of evolution does not include survival of the fittest that's completely debunked how many of you knew that somebody somebody was about to say that and do you know who debunked it stephen j gould i i think probably the top evolutionary biologist in the country i think he's passed away now but it's debunked by the top evolutionary evolution scientist and agreed by all of all of science there's nobody in the evolution field who thinks survival of the fittest is a thing did you know that because so many of you said we have survival of the fittest you just apply it to the virus but it doesn't exist anywhere it's not a thing most people think it is it's sort of like people believe that trump said you know the nazis were fighting people people think that trump said drink bleach it just didn't happen none of those things happened and there's no such thing as survival of the fittest it doesn't exist do you know what does exist instead survival of things that didn't die it's a big difference right so if you had a you know a species that was just perfectly well suited but then let's say a uh say a tsunami kills everybody were was that group unfit no they just had bad luck there was a tsunami they got them all right so there's luck and there's survival of things that survive but that's it there's just survival of things that survived so in the world of survival of things that survive which is the whole explanation just some things survive they get lucky that's it no it's not semantics it's not even close to just being semantics if you don't see the difference between survival of the fittest and survival of the random you're missing a really big point i'm saying that the way we evolve is survival of the random it's not the fittest sometimes it is but it's coincidence all right um so it's not so much natural selection it's just chance would be a better way to say it it's just chance so i don't see how chance can be part of the explanation um but we are warned by ian martis that there's a bigger risk called original antigenic sin how many of you have heard of that raise your hands if you've ever heard of original antigenic sin i'm going to try to explain it but forgive me because i don't understand this field well enough so i'll give you the dumb person's you know the idiots definition it goes like this if your immune system has been trained against a particular attacker let's say a virus you're you have uh a kind of uh immunity memory and that immunity memory um could work against you as well as for you and the way it could work against you is that when a new virus comes in a variant let's say your immune system says i know i know exactly what to do and it ramps up to fight the virus but it's a different virus it's just one that's like it now your immune system is all ramped up to fight the wrong thing it's actually working overtime on the wrong thing because it said i think that virus is a lot like that other one so it goes to work on the wrong virus and then the right one just has a you know clear channel now that apparently that's a real thing which has happened in the past in different situations so just know that that's out there all right um i don't know what the size of that risk is actually um and that is what i wanted to talk about today uh i'm gonna run and do something else and uh i hope you don't hate the persuasion lessons in the context of these boring topics like vaccinations and masks and stuff like that i think i think the persuasion stuff is interesting and if you don't let me know but i think that you learn something when you see the persuasion element separate from the science all right that's it for now

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well in portland

the

people in charge have decided that

instead of using the police

which as you know are overfunded in

portland according to portland

instead of using their limited police to

break up violence between opposing

political groups in the city

they decided to stand back and let them

fight

because they were just using things like

sprays and

clubs and stuff like that it wasn't

especially dangerous until the gunfire i

guess i guess the police got involved

when there were shots fired but until

then they actually just stood back and

observed

and they let the two opposing sides

fight it out

to which i say

thank you

i have never agreed with mayor wheeler

more

than right this

moment they're letting them fight it out

i don't know what could end it faster

right

because it seems to me that if you try

to break it up and you keep them from

hurting each other too much or too many

people getting hurt they'll just come

back

but what happens if you let it let them

fight it out a few times

i think fewer people show up next time

you know if you got your head broken

probably you don't go back i don't know

so we'll try that and i like it in the a

b testing sense of things

so while common sense tells you hey put

those police in there and stop that

fighting on your streets

let's try this

it could work

i'm not saying it will

i don't think you could quite predict

that it'll come to a good end if you let

them fight

but we haven't tried it

let's give it a try

if portland wants to

be the test case for a let them fight

i say put some bleachers in there and

sell tickets and let's go nuts

well

i think i predicted to you that

afghanistan has some surprises coming

i didn't know exactly what the surprises

would be but one thing you can be sure

of

that whenever you've got one of these

fog of war or chaotic situations

something is going to come out of this

that you say to yourself

what

how did that happen you know just

something

completely

on the left field that explains

everything now i don't know what that'll

be

but there's a weird thing happening now

in slow motion that i don't understand

and it goes like this

the americans are getting out of

afghanistan without violence

mostly right you're hearing anecdotal

stories of somebody who doesn't want to

cross a checkpoint

stories of the taliban taking away

passports something like that it's

probably happening because i doubt the

taliban has such command and control

that they can

control every checkpoint

but overall

am i wrong

that the

that the by the administration

seems to think he could get the people

out

on time by the end of the month

and that it's going peacefully

now here's the weird thing

you know your your unintended

consequences and we're all geniuses

aren't we all geniuses

we can predict exactly what will happen

in every international situation

because we're so smart

but here's something

that might have accidentally happened

the best case scenario

i'm not going to say it's true yet and

certainly i think all evidence suggests

that the withdrawal was botched

so my my first take if you remember was

hold hold

we need to find out more information it

looks botched

but wait there might be something we

don't know about because why is it we

all see it botched but the people in

charge all did the thing that was

obviously wrong

like there's something to explain that

we don't know yet so i say oh wait

but i waited

i waited for the administration to give

us its version of the story and

just sounds botched

maybe there's more to it

but it just sounds botched so far and i

i say that only from the perspective of

the administration didn't really put up

a fight you know they didn't give you an

argument

that they did it right that made any

sense you know they're saying they did a

good job but you know they're not really

supporting that argument

so here's the

here's the most optimistic thing you

could say

and i'm not saying it's true

it's just interesting that it's possible

and in fact

maybe more possible than the alternative

and it goes like this

the way this came down

was the least loss of death

possible under all scenarios

i think that's where it's heading

that this is accidentally totally

botched

but accidentally gave us the best

outcome

why

because afghanistan fell so quickly what

could have been the safest thing to

happen in afghanistan

i hate to say it but if it's inevitable

the taliban is going to take over the

safest thing is to surrender right away

that's what happened so we didn't see it

coming we weren't prepared for it

but it was the safest thing

just complete surrender on day one

because otherwise you have the fight

and you still surrender i mean you get

to the same place right

so

and then but the second part and the

part we're obsessing on is the

withdrawal

you know that's completely botched right

does everybody agree

that we're all the experts and we would

have gotten the people out they wanted

to be evacuated we would have done that

first before we got rid of most of the

military now we did put military back in

but they're not getting people etc so

it's still botched

no doubt about it but

so far

the taliban

has been playing as strategically very

smart

and the strategic smart thing for the

taliban to do would be to give us a

deadline that's

a little challenging but possible

and they did that

apparently at least according to the

biden administration

that deadline is challenging

but possible

like you know we we have a really good

chance of getting really close to

achieving it

now

so far that's pretty reasonable

for uh you know a group that's known for

its unreasonable

uh actions

what happens if i'll just put this as a

hypothetical it's not a prediction

it's a hypothetical and things are

heading in this direction

what happens if the hostages not the

oxygens well they might be what happens

if the people we want to evacuate

including the afghan interpreters and

the people who we want to get out what

happens if we get them all out

isn't this going to look like the

biggest success of all

times at the same time it was botched

believe it or not they can happen at the

same time

you can botch everything and just get

lucky

that's what it looks like

it looks like everything was botched

and so far fingers crossed

you know there's no reason to think

it'll go this way all the way to the end

but fingers crossed

they avoided a civil war by collapsing

immediately

and if we get the people out

which looks like it's happening

it's the best thing that could have

happened

am i wrong about that

i mean if you're just counting uh bodies

how could we have done better than this

assuming that we do get the evacuees out

now that's a big big assumption right

but so far

so far it's happening

now i'm not saying that's you're saying

it's delusional it's not delusional

because it's put in

in uh a statistical sense right it could

happen

it's just unlikely

i mean if you if you had to predict

wouldn't you predict that the taliban

will not let everybody out

keep a bunch of hostages

most obvious thing right

and i feel like inevitably they're going

to keep a few

but let's say i'll just give you a

number let's say they keep

20

i don't know 20 americans that didn't

get out

and but we get everybody else out

so suppose we lose 20 souls they happen

to be american

what did we avoid

probably

a hundred thousand deaths

50 000 if the civil war happened

so biden may have accidentally

traded

20 american lives this is just a

speculation this not based on data

he could have accidentally traded 20

lives to save 50 000 afghans

is that immoral well it's not america

first

but i don't know if it's immoral

you know you could argue that one

all right um

rasmussen poll asked if taliban takes

american hostages should the u.s use

military to rescue them and 78 say yes

is that good news or bad news

it's good news

because the taliban needs to know

that we're going to get our hostages out

or there's going to be big trouble

hostages slash evacuees

and having 78 of the public say yes send

the military in

while about the same amount of the of

the public says get adams to afghanistan

that is exactly the right situation

for the taliban to say

you know

if we don't let everybody out we're

really effed

right

so this is the best poll i've ever seen

in my life

because it says the american public are

completely on the same side i mean 78 is

as good as you can get in the american

public

and then uh rasmussen poll also asked

is the biden administration doing enough

to evacuate americans and 59 said no

and

i think this is under the category of

how could you do enough

you know really

how could you do enough

you know it's always going to look like

it wasn't soon enough didn't do enough

but it does look like it's not enough

all right

here's the question

that i asked on twitter

and

this is a this topic will be

more about persuasion

than about whether you should get a

vaccination can we agree that i don't

care if you get vaccinated everybody

everybody i don't care if you get

vaccinated so anything i say next

is going to be about vaccination

persuasion but it's not intended to work

on you

really it's not a trick

right let me say it again this is not

some kind of like backward psychology

hypnosis trick i really don't want to

persuade you on this i really really

don't it's totally unethical because

it's a

you know it's a health decision you got

to make your own decision on that i'll

persuade you on politics

i'll be happy to do that i'll persuade

you on how to live your life better how

to have systems instead of goals i'll

persuade you on all kinds of stuff

but not your health decisions

not that

that's on you totally

but let's talk about the persuasion game

because it's happening whether i

participate or not

and omar khatib alerted me to uh there's

a series of tweets from advertising

insider

in which they asked some advertising uh

professionals

what

the governments could do to persuade

more people to get the vaccination

now

did the advertising executives

say much the same thing i did

which is hold on

even if we could

even if we could

persuade people to get the vaccinations

it would be unethical

so

let me back out of this conversation

right away because i'm a marketing

professional and i'm not going to cross

that ethical barrier

well that didn't happen

instead they gave you pretty good

specific suggestions

for doing the most unethical thing in

the world

persuading people to get a health

outcome a particular

treatment

so here are some of their persuasion

points and i'm going to evaluate them so

you can get a little lesson on

persuasion at the same time number one

are marketing executives good at

persuasion

anybody

anybody

who works at a big company where there

are professional marketing people

are those professional marketing people

trained in persuasion let's say the way

i am

i'm a hypnotist etc

do you think they have the same kind of

persuasion training as

this cartoonist

no

not even close

but they do have a lot of tools so they

can do polls and they can do

focus groups and they can a b test

things

so they can use brute force

to get to a good outcome because you can

just randomly try stuff

semi-randomly and then just test it and

see if it works and then do more of the

stuff that works so that's marketing

but here's what marketers are not good

at

the first try

because almost nobody is right the the

first thing you try isn't necessarily

going to work

so

here are some of their first things to

try

from uh let's see uh this is from uh

these are different marketing executives

this from jim lasser

suggests using humor to disarm those who

oppose the vaccine

nope

nope

you can use humor

uh it'll maybe make a good commercial

for selling your soap or your beer

but humor isn't going to change your

health care decisions

i'm sorry it just isn't

now

maybe he's right

that's why you test it right

so what what is the value of my opinion

on the initial input the thing that you

could test

well

i think my opinion is pretty good better

than the average because i study this

field

but i could be wrong maybe you test this

and it's exactly the right thing but i

doubt it

my instinct tells me the humor

is not where you go on this

definitely not in fact

i would go with fear

the opposite of humor humor is hahaha

i'm relaxed i'm having a good time

that's not the head you want to put

people in if you want somebody to do

something as radical as putting a needle

in their arm you've got to scare the

out of them

right

that'll work you got to scare them

i don't think anything else will work

let's go on with these other ideas

he said that the same guy said that the

stickiness of puns can be effective

i don't know about that

now the stickiness of puns in terms of

wordplay

that does have some scientific support

if the glove doesn't fit you must acquit

sort of word play it's a rhyme the rhyme

does actually

create some persuasion so science

supports that

but that's not enough to get somebody

vaccinated all right

um

another another guy said a marketing

professional said let's turn it from

you've got to get protected

to let's uh fm

track this thing down and kill it so

mike lee i think said that uh

well i'm not sure about the attribution

but the idea is that you got to get

tough with it

talk tough and then people say yeah

let's go to war against that virus

terrible idea terrible idea

i mean

i i don't i don't even know what to say

about it it's just a terrible idea

all right so forget that one

another said that

that who originally cast a doubt on the

vaccine should play the trump card

and give him credit for starting the

vaccine program and directing the

resources

possibly the worst of all the ideas

if you bring trump into the conversation

of vaccinations

do people even try to make a medical

decision

no

as soon as you add trump to the

conversation it's a political

conversation it doesn't matter

what the data is you throw trump into

any conversation about health care and

it's just a trump conversation so this

is a horrible idea

like really really really bad

from this marketing professional don't

throw trump into the conversation that

just makes everything worse

all right here's another one

an effective campaign we have to find

people who are anti-vaccine

and and convert them

so you'd have to find the anti-vaccine

people and get them to be pro-vaccine

and then help sell it

would that uh convince you

if you saw somebody who is anti-vaccine

let's say let's say you are

and they were that anti-vaccine just

like you

but unlike you they had changed to be

pro-vaccine would that change your mind

no

no

no it wouldn't

not even for a second the first thing

you say is well they bought off another

there's another sheep

looks like another sheep went to

slaughter

no it would be the least persuasive

thing in the world to see what other

people are doing

now

suppose all you did was show that smart

good-looking people were getting

vaccinated and the people who were not

getting vaccinated were unhealthy

looking slobs who make lots of bad

decisions in general

well that might work

that might work not a specific person

because we we discount celebrities

opinions completely but what if it was a

a montage

of smart beautiful looking people

getting vaccinated

and you know obese

bad decision makers not getting

vaccinated

that might work because people are

tribal and they'd say oh i want to be in

that tribe not that tribe

so

i mean it would move some people in

either direction but i think your net

would be good and when i say that again

remember you'd have to test it

i'm not smart enough nor is anybody

to know what will work without testing

it persuasion doesn't really work that

way even though even the hypnotist

even the hypnotist who's hypnotizing you

in real time just the two of you in a

room

that hypnotist is still a b testing

because you're trying stuff you're

looking at the reaction try something

else look at the reaction so without the

testing you don't really have a system

for persuasion

they have to be part of the team all

right here's some more

you shouldn't assume everyone is

motivated by politics okay that's real

helpful

because

well how does that persuade you i guess

the point is to make it non-political

but we've tried that that didn't seem to

make any difference

um someone who is pregnant and also a

marketing professional

said that she was persuaded by someone

by hearing from people who are genuinely

concerned for you

interesting so her suggestion was that

she was persuaded

by hearing from people who were

genuinely concerned for her

now we're getting closer

now

now that's some real um real persuasion

at least

good thinking

because we are persuaded by people who

genuinely care for us

why is it that you don't think the

pharmaceutical companies can be trusted

because they don't care for you

why is it that you don't think the

government could be trusted

they don't care for you why do you not

believe the the pundit you see on the

news

don't care for you

in fact it might be the same pundit who

wants to hunt you down

it might be

in a lot of cases

so now

most of the people telling you to get

the vaccination are people who don't

care for you

literally don't care about you one bit

they don't even know you you're a

stranger

but how persuasive would be somebody who

actually does care for you

now they may not be experts on

vaccinations

but i'll bet it is persuasive

so i don't know how you could ramp that

up to get lots of concerned people

talking to vaccinated people or and i'm

not suggesting you should

i'm just saying that at least this is

genuine persuasion smartness you know it

looks like something you could test

all right here's another one

you should treat the campaign for the

vaccination persuasion with the kind of

budget and tactics you'd see a political

party use to get out the vote

i think they did

didn't they

wouldn't you say that the government did

exactly that used the same kind of mass

persuasion as get out the vote i feel

like that's sort of a non answer that's

a very

marketing meeting answer

all right here's my take so i'm going to

add my own

persuasion suggestions again

i'm not trying to persuade you i'm

teaching you how to do persuasion

okay can can we all deal with that

distinction

not trying to persuade you

that would be unethical but i'll tell

you how persuasion works

i think you need a fake because

in other words i think there are a bunch

of people who are close to being

persuaded and would like to

but they're still stuck in their old

opinion

so they need to fake because

something that they can say oh

something changed

so now my old opinion was right

but now my new opinion is right too

because something changed so you need

that fake because the something changed

the fda approval might be that so i

think some people are going to say even

though the polls suggest it's not going

to make much difference i think it will

i think the polls are misleading

i think that the fda approval is even

going to make the moderna

vaccination more popular even though it

doesn't have fda approval people are

going to kind of expect that it will get

it because the pfizer got it

so there's some you know crossover

persuasion that the pfizer thing will

make the modern thing look safer even

though they're different things it's

just how your brain works

so the fake because

i would look for other fake because not

just the fda approval but how about

we've waited long enough

that the odds of

problems

are way down because you would have seen

most of them you know pop up

that would be fake because but there

could be others too

as i said you need fear and visual

persuasion anything less is barely

trying so you need to show people die in

a covet like in the worst possible ways

and saying i should have gotten the

vaccination and then dying

and there are plenty of anecdotes like

that

cnn is

promoting that kind of persuasion with

their their story choices

and uh i think it works i mean you could

argue that cnn shouldn't be in the

persuasion game

but unfortunately they are and i would

say that those anecdotal you know

terrible visuals where you can sort of

put yourself in the bed you say oh i can

see myself being that guy

don't be that guy

all right um

show people that you like getting

vaccinated that's similar to showing the

you know the

two groups you know one is beautiful and

one is not

um i would also like to see an expert

explaining risk management to people

you've never seen that except me and i'm

far from an expert

if you if you can't show me let's say

nate silver

i like to use him because a lot of you

disagree with some of his opinions

so he's sort of perfect for this you can

disagree with his opinions

but not his rationale

meaning that his his thinking process is

generally pretty close to flawless

is it's his field

he knows how to think statistically he's

good at it

wouldn't you like to see somebody who is

just just flat out good at it

maybe a few of them so you've got a few

different opinions explaining to you the

risk benefit

thinking through all of the risks we

know about

and all the ones we don't

putting some kind of statistics on them

and just walking you through it say okay

here's the risk of getting vaccinated

all these potential risks here's what we

know about them

here's the risk of not getting

vaccinated here's what we know about it

put some numbers on it

i think that would be at least a fake

because for some people some people

would say you know nobody ever explained

it that well

right

all right let me let me uh

okay here here's the persuasion that

would work you ready for this again i'm

not suggesting it this is an example of

what would work

you take nay silver

and you say you sit down for a couple

hours

with uh mike rowe

you all know mike rowe if you're not

american you might not

mike rose a famous personality who is

sort of an every man

he does what's called dirty jobs he did

a show where he would do like these

awful jobs where you literally get

physically dirty you know doing gross

stuff

so he's famous for being like a

a level-headed

rational person who just

can see how to get stuff done

right that's sort of his brand

so you take it nate silver

and you spend two hours with micro

teaching him how to look at the

statistics

and then you have mike rowe

explain the statistics to the public

why because if nay silver does it you're

not going to understand it

right he's almost too good

because his explanation would have

enough nuance in it to be accurate but

maybe a little confusing because you

can't follow the nuance of statistics

but you take that stuff and you package

it up with mike rowe

a really really credible voice

especially to the right who has a lot of

a lot of resistance

micro could sell the out of this

you really could

now people are saying is he a scientist

is he a statistician no

no

he's he's you

that's why it works

do you know who would be the most

persuasive person for you the person who

would convince you specifically

the best

would be you

if you could make a digital version of

yourself

and give it a script written by somebody

who knows what they're talking about and

then that digital version talks you into

getting vaccinated it would be the most

persuasive thing that could happen you

couldn't beat that

right

mike rowe

is you

that's sort of

his brand you know i don't i hate to

characterize other people because he

might not

want to characterize himself that way

which is unfair

but in my

in my view the thing that makes him

popular is you say yeah i think just

like that that's

you know micro is saying the words

coming out of his mouth are the ones i'm

thinking but he's saying it better than

i'm thinking it that's the ultimate

he says what you're thinking

but he says it better than you're

thinking it

somebody says why a white person that's

a good question

if you could if you could take the same

concept

and replace micro with i'm going to say

charles barkley just to pick a name

right i picked charles barkley because i

don't know if anybody's been more

popular with everybody

if you don't follow basketball that's an

unfamiliar reference but charles barkley

is black

but his sort of approach to race is so

commonsensical

that it just appeals to left and right

in a weird kind of way

so yeah you take a charles barkley who

everybody likes and he's famous for

being a

plain talker common sense kind of guy

yeah that's that's actually that might

even be an upgrade on my idea i think

mike road be great

but yeah a charles barkley absolutely he

could do that

somebody says steve harvey

maybe

i know i i think charles barkley is more

relatable

i feel like more more the you know the

every man talks like you do kind of

thing

um

and here's another idea

it seems to me that the anti-vaxxers um

like to call the people who are taking

the vaccination sheep

what would trump do if he were the

recipient of a thing like that he'd take

the gun out of their hand and he'd turn

it around

so

if uh here's a little vac little uh

persuasion tip

the things that people call you

are things that they personally think

are persuasive

so if the anti-vaxxers are calling you

sheep for getting vaccinated what would

be the most

piercing thing you could call them

sheep they've given you the answer

you don't have to wonder what's the

worst thing that you could say about

them because they told you

it's what they're calling you

sheep

so if you could find a way and again

this is persuasion i'm not saying you

should do this it's just how it works

if you could find a way to make the

people not getting vaccinated

and label them sheep

in all likelihood that would really hurt

because it's the word they use when

they're insulting other people if you

can make that stick to the person using

the word

it's gonna hurt a little extra

so that would be an approach

um also the anti-vaxxers tend to be

conspiracy theorists or

the only people who are right

two possibilities right

either they are subject to believing

conspiracies

or they're right and we'll all find out

later

but

uh in terms of

persuasion

if you came up with a conspiracy theory

that worked in the other direction

hypothetically

it could persuade people so in other

words you would need a counter

conspiracy theory

a conspiracy theory that says for

example

that china is the one telling you that

the vaccinations are dangerous

because they probably are

i don't know if that's true

but

i would guess

that china and russia are messing with

our communications about the vaccines

just like they do with our

our social structure and our politics

right

so it seems to me

um

let me check this

seems to me that you can do a counter

conspiracy theory all right

um

when i asked people to describe to me

how vaccines make things worse i got a

ton of cognitive dissonance

i'm going to give you the hypnotists

filter

on how to see the world

so the question i asked is how could it

be that so many people think that

vaccinations

make the variance worse

so that's a

a very popular thought and may be true

might be true that the vaccinations make

variance worse

so i asked the following question can

you describe the mechanism for how that

could possibly happen because

everybody's sure of it

i mean it seems like the entire public

is sure that's true

but i said well describe how exactly

that works

and

what happened was

and this is the hypnotist filter

so my filter on this is probably

different than yours your filter is

probably

something like this

some people are right

and some people are wrong

some people are well informed they did

their own research

some people are not

and to you i would think that that's all

there is to this vaccination makes

variance worse question

somebody's right somebody's wrong

the hypnotist filter is different

the hypnotist filter says this

there were a lot of people who who

publicly and to their friends have said

i understand this issue it's basic

evolution

if you put evolutionary pressure on the

normal virus it will give an advantage

to the variant

boom scott i just explained it evolution

101 just apply it to this situation and

you're done anybody can understand this

evolution is survival of the fittest

the fittest variant will be the one that

can get through the vaccination right

pretty logical

okay here's my view of the world

my view of the world is that when people

realize they couldn't explain

how a vaccination makes a very into

worse

that they spun into cognitive dissonance

and when you look at my tweet and you

see the comments you'll see there's all

word salad

but

it'll be word salad you think makes

sense

because the person who wrote it thinks

it makes sense let me give you some i

know you're skeptical i'm going to read

you some of the explanations of people

who are very smart by the way so

everybody who gave these explanations of

how evolution would um you know cause

the variance to be dominant

they're smart people

but

they're showing all the tells of

cognitive dissonance i'll give you some

examples well so far let's start with

this whiteboard let's say there are two

situations there's a person with no

vaccination and a person who's

vaccinated let's say this the

non-vaccinated person gets the regular

alpha

virus

but

it mutates inside them

and the mutation is a new variant and

then it spreads

everybody agrees that can happen

right

that it can happen that you can get the

regular virus

but it mutates inside the person

and then what comes out the other end is

a new variant and then that variant

could spread that's if you don't have a

vaccination

but what if you do have a vaccination

well in that case the alpha various

virus goes in

it mutates

and then a new variant comes out

and it spreads

what was the difference between the

vaccinated person and the no vaccinated

person

nothing

because both of them have have the virus

in them both of them can spread it

there's no difference

so now everybody who is positive there's

a difference

has to explain

this

and that triggers cognitive dissonance

now let me say as clearly as possible

i don't know if vaccinations

cause more variance

i don't know i mean i legitimately don't

know

and i'm not sure i even am

biased in one direction

all i do know is that when people try to

explain it their spending is spinning

into cognitive dissonance that i do know

so i can say that with great confidence

you know it's something i study so let

me give some examples

again these are smart people with smart

explanations

um

a vaccine which targets a specific part

of a virus will mean the small mutations

in the virus can survive while the

targeted virus cannot

since viruses are mutating all the time

eventually one of these mutants

aka variants will become dominant

how'd that happen

how did one of them become dominant

just by being more viral right

in my example the vast or the

unvaccinated person

which of these cases

is there going to be more variants

well i would say that the vaccinated

person has less virus to begin with and

less chance of spreading it

so i would think there would be fewer

variants if you got vaccinated

i don't know that that's true i'm just

saying that's where the logic takes it

with you know the limited information i

have

so here's my question what would what

would make the variant

survive

and i'm hearing things like well the old

virus and the new variant are fighting

it out and uh one is one is compelled

nothing compels a virus

if you have two viruses in you they both

would spread if you had the delta

spreads if you have the other one the

spreads so i can see why there would be

more

uh

well actually there's just no mechanism

described here

now

then other people use uh analogies

but the analogies fall apart i'll give

you one analogy that was used if you're

trying to breed small dogs

let's say you kill all the big dogs and

then you breed the small ones

and then you do the same round again

whatever the largest puppies are you

kill all of them

and then only small puppies grow up and

then they have babies and they're small

right so that's the analogy

so so the virus would be like that

no i wouldn't because the virus doesn't

kill all puppies

the virus doesn't kill all anything

it just reduces it

so the analogy would be if you're trying

to

breed small puppies you take all puppies

and kill 10 of them

how does that help

so the analogy just falls apart

because there there's always some

difference in the analogy from the

original it's a big difference

so there's that all right so some of you

in the comments are saying uh survival

of the fittest

how many of you in the comments

think that survival of the fittest

can explain why the the big variants get

out

past the vaccines

and the the weaker ones don't is it

survival of the fittest because that's

the thing right you've all studied

evolution

survival of the fittest

how many of you know that survival of

the fittest is not science

and that it's not evolution

and the survival of the fittest doesn't

exist

how many of you know that

how many of you know that the theory of

evolution does not include

survival of the fittest

that's completely debunked

how many of you knew that

somebody somebody was about to say that

and do you know who debunked it

stephen j gould

i i think probably the top evolutionary

biologist in the country i think he's

passed away now but it's debunked

by the top evolutionary evolution

scientist and agreed by all of

all of science

there's nobody in the

evolution field

who thinks

survival of the fittest

is a thing

did you know that because so many of you

said we have survival of the fittest you

just apply it to the virus

but it doesn't exist anywhere

it's not a thing

most people think it is it's sort of

like people believe that trump said you

know

the nazis were fighting people people

think that trump said drink bleach it

just didn't happen

none of those things happened and

there's no such thing

as survival of the fittest it doesn't

exist

do you know what does exist instead

survival of things that didn't die

it's a big difference

right so if you had a you know a species

that was just perfectly well suited but

then

let's say a uh

say a tsunami kills everybody

were was that group unfit

no they just had bad luck there was a

tsunami they got them all

right so there's luck and there's

survival of things that survive but

that's it

there's just survival of things that

survived so in the world of survival of

things that survive which is the whole

explanation just some things survive

they get lucky that's it

no it's not semantics it's not even

close to just being semantics if you

don't see the difference between

survival of the fittest

and survival of the random

you're missing a really big point i'm

saying that the way we evolve is

survival of the random it's not the

fittest

sometimes it is

but it's coincidence

all right um

so it's not so much natural selection

it's just chance would be a better way

to say it it's just chance

so i don't see how chance

can be part of the explanation

um but

we are warned by ian martis that there's

a bigger

risk called original antigenic sin how

many of you have heard of that

raise your hands if you've ever heard of

original antigenic sin

i'm going to try to explain it but

forgive me because i don't understand

this field well enough so i'll give you

the dumb person's you know the idiots

definition it goes like this if your

immune system has been trained against a

particular attacker let's say a virus

you're you have uh

a kind of uh immunity memory and that

immunity memory

um could work against you as well as for

you and the way it could work against

you is that when a new virus comes in a

variant let's say your immune system

says i know i know exactly what to do

and it ramps up to fight the virus but

it's a different virus it's just one

that's like it

now your immune system is all ramped up

to fight the wrong thing

it's actually working overtime on the

wrong thing because it said i think that

virus is a lot like that other one so it

goes to work on the wrong virus

and then the right one just has a you

know clear channel

now

that apparently that's a real thing

which has happened in the past in

different situations so

just know that that's out there

all right um

i don't know what the size of that risk

is actually

um

and that is what i wanted to talk about

today

uh i'm gonna run and do something else

and

uh i hope you don't hate the persuasion

lessons in the context of these boring

topics like vaccinations and masks and

stuff like that i think i think the

persuasion stuff is interesting

and

if you don't let me know but i think

that you learn something when you see

the persuasion element

separate from the science all right

that's it for now