Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 2, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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ooks like. Now how many of these examples are there? How many examples are there? Some people say no, really. So here's what I think. I think the Democrats or the Republicans who voted for the bill must have been satisfied that it was clean enough, right? I believe that your information about it being a dirty bill with pork in it turned out to be not as true as you think. I think maybe that wasn'…

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me retweet it if I hadn't already liked the content. Yeah I was going to retweet it anyway but that would have been a little extra kicker.

So you can see all the techniques of persuasion in it. You can see all the writing technique which is you know just the top level commercial quality you could ever see. Marketing 100. And it's just a strong package. So you should read it for that reason.

I'll give you just a preview. He starts with three theories about why Stephen King could be tweeting so differently than the quality of work suggests. One would be substance abuse. That's in the public domain. We know that he was a long-term substance abuser, Stephen King was. We know he had a serious accident that presumably caused some head trauma. Does that make you the same when you're done? We don't know but it's certainly an open question.

And but the more interesting part which he develops is the fiction writers have overactive imaginations. And if you write fiction and in the first chapter, I think this is the example that Joshua uses, if there's a rifle hanging over the fireplace in the first chapter it's going to be important later on because that's how fiction is written. But in the real world you see all of these things that don't mean anything and they never will mean anything. They're just coincidences.

And all the coincidences could be interpreted by a fiction writer who has wired their brain to think everything matters. It's just an automatic thing. If you're in that mode everything matters. Every piece of evidence you know

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will have a role later on in the book. And then you look at the real world and you see all this stuff that really doesn't mean anything and suddenly your confirmation bias just kicks in. So yeah this means something. Oh yeah I'm picking up the hints. Oh a lot of people don't see this but I'm seeing that gun over the fireplace of the first chapter. It's an interesting theory and it's based on the…

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