Episode 1200 Scott Adams - Don't Miss My Impression of Reporters Looking at the #Kraken, Section 230

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Back to episode — Episode 1200 Scott Adams - Don't Miss My Impression of Reporters Looking at the #Kraken, Section 230

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ns. We don't have objective experts. That's not a thing. All the experts have something in it for themselves. So if Trump is an expert on cons but the problem is he's also might be doing a con, that's exactly the same as every one of the experts that Biden tells you to believe. Everyone. They all have an incentive for the con, which doesn't mean they're all conning, but they've all got an incenti…

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a big difference in the opinions of people who know how to do stuff versus the people who don't know how to do stuff. And I feel, and this is more of a gut feeling based on experience, that it's doable. I think maybe it wasn't doable before blockchain. I think maybe it wasn't doable before facial recognition, before you could take a fingerprint, before you could do lots of other stuff. But I think at the moment we finally have all the pieces that we could build an app that would be at least way more secure than what we have. Nothing's 100% I guess.

And I have seen people say, "Oh, you think blockchain's the answer, but somebody thinks maybe not." So I don't know that it's a settled question, but like I said, somebody should build the app and then just run it in parallel for the next election. And don't count the app. Just run it in parallel and see what you get. See if you learn anything. But we should definitely be running one in parallel by 2022. It doesn't take that long to build an app. Let's see some prototypes. We should have a dozen different prototypes, different startups or whatever, and we should be able to run them all.

I would say the main thing that you need to get a fair election is that you can identify the voter, which the app can do better than a human can do. And that the voter can audit their own vote all the way to the end point and they can make sure that their vote got recorded the way they wanted it to. Could the app be built to do that? I say yes. There's lots of ways to do it wrong, but I think you could do it.

CBS News is reporting, and reporting is a stretch, that Trump supporters are reportedly calling for a boycott on voting in the Senate election. Now, do you believe that story? Now, do you think that CBS News is really reporting this as news, because it's real, that Trump supporters might want to not vote in the Senate election? Oh my god, this could not be more obvious propaganda. They're trying to create this idea that Trump supporters would not vote on a principle. There are no Trump supporters recommending a boycott. This is disinformation.

Now, I'm not saying there isn't some one idiot somewhere who would say anything, but no, it's not true that Trump supporters are considering not voting in the most important election in their lives. No, that is not. Somebody says Ali was trying to push it. No, he wasn't. All right. If you're telling me that Ali Alexander was convincing Republicans to not vote in the Senate race, don't even try to tell me that. It can't be true.

Now, I know you're going to send me a tweet and you're going to think that it says that. I'll bet it doesn't. I'll make you a bet. So all of you have seen the facts, right? So those who are saying that it's real and that Ali Alexander is pushing it, I haven't seen it. So even with no facts and no information, I will say with confidence it's not true. I'll bet if you read it and if you ask him, you'll find out that you're misinterpreting something.

All right. Somebody on Periscope, somebody's saying he retracted it. Are you happy? I guarantee Ali Alexander. And here's why I guarantee it. He's not an idiot. You would have to be the biggest idiot in the world to be pushing that. Now, if he play

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ed with it and retracted it, that's, you know, he may have some scheme going on there in terms of communication style, but there's no way he thinks that's a good idea. Trump said that he would leave office if he loses the electoral college. Of course, that's a big if, I suppose, but I think at this point we should review our predictions. If you predicted that Trump would lose in the electoral col…

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Wisdom from this episode

"There's a big difference in the opinions of people who know how to do stuff versus the people who don't know how to do stuff. And I feel, and this is more of a gut feeling based on experience, that it's doable."

People who have actually built things hold very different views on feasibility than those who haven't. Experience tells me this is now achievable.

"The main thing that you need to get a fair election is that you can identify the voter, which the app can do better than a human can do. And that the voter can audit their own vote all the way to the end point and they can make sure that their vote got recorded the way they wanted it to."

Fair elections fundamentally require secure voter identification—something apps can do better than humans—and the ability for each voter to personally verify their ballot was recorded correctly end-to-end.

"Somebody should build the app and then just run it in parallel for the next election. And don't count the app. Just run it in parallel and see what you get. See if you learn anything."

Build new voting systems and run them in parallel with existing ones—without using them for official counts—to test, compare results, and learn before full adoption.