Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 10, 2026
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onhardt who's a senior writer at the New York Times and therefore we should all listen to him, he did a tweet thread in which he's showing, he's making the point that science doesn't know why the COVID cases suddenly dropped. They also don't know why they spiked. And they won't know why they dropped next time and they won't know why they spiked next time. Now of course the Delta variant is part of…

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ebody asks you for a sacrifice and they say I need you to make this big sacrifice because we're trying to achieve this specific thing, you can say to yourself yes or no. I would like to help you achieve that specific thing. But if your so-called leaders say I would like you to make this big sacrifice and you say great, until when? And what target are we going for? And they say we'll let you know. We'll get back to you on that. We'll see how it works out. It's flexible. It's fluid. You know the situation is fluid. We don't know. Will there be another variant? Don't want to make any promises because it might be another variant. Don't know, right? So we don't want to make any promises because we don't know what the future looks like. But we'd like you to make this big sacrifice to get to this future that we can't see. Nope. Not acceptable. Not even a little bit acceptable.

You need to tell us what you're shooting for. Now will I forgive you if you have to change later and modify it and say oh damn we thought we could get to this but now we're a little smarter, we learned something, we have to modify the goal? Okay, okay that would be just normal. How many projects in your big corporation end up exactly the way you planned them? None. None. But every corporation tells you you better have an endpoint. I'm not going to give you a bunch of money unless you show me a business plan with a specific target of how much money or ROI you're going to shoot for, right? There's no leadership in any country, in any company, that lacks an endpoint that's described pretty specifically. But also everybody knows you're not going to hit it. You need it even if you know you're not going to hit it because it gives you a direction.

Now the government would like you to be happy with well we're going to save as many lives as we can. No, no. Try that in your corporation. Oh we don't need a business plan. We're just going to make as much money as we can. We want to be flexible. Don't want to lock ourselves into a specific thing. We just want to make as much money as we can. That's our plan. That's not really a plan, right? So don't expect massive compliance with no target.

Now if we made a target, what are the likelihood that we'd have to revise it later? I think it's a hundred percent.

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But it has nothing to do with whether or not you should have one, right? Because you always miss your target if you're a corporation or anything else. You just need them. John Gruden, coach of the Raiders, resigned. Some emails from his past were made public and they had things which people are calling misogynistic and anti-gay and a little bit racist, they thought. Now here's my take on that. I…

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