Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
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ng thing. I'm pretty sure everybody involved in these opinions has good intentions. I believe that. I believe they have good intentions. And now here they are disagreeing with each other. But my problem here is that it got too complicated. So the thing that I make fun of that made Dilbert popular, and I've said this before but it's worth reiterating, Dilbert is not about something that somebody d…

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e it with you. I'm not going to tell you where it came from. But somebody mentioned to me that they were going to go to Florida for their first experience. They'd never been to Florida before. And going to Florida in August. Florida in August. And the person said to me, I hear it could be humid there. It could be humid. To which I said with a straight face, yes it can. Yeah it's true.

And then the person said, is it humid like Hawaii? Because I've been to Hawaii so I know what humidity feels like. I was tempted to say yes, just like Hawaii, but I couldn't make myself be enough of an asshole to do it. Yeah, suppose. Why is humid? Here's the difference. I would like to give you my impression of walking, let's say, off of the airplane and feeling Hawaii's humidity for the first time. And then I'll do feeling Florida's humidity for the first time. Somebody who's never experienced either.

We'll start with Hawaii. Experiencing humidity for the first time. Wow, what is up with this? This feels great. Why does my entire body feel good? I think the air feels better. I feel great. Let's have a vacation. Snorkel, anybody?

All right, so that's experiencing Hawaii humidity for the first time. Now I'd like to give you a similar impression of going outdoors for the first time in August in Florida. For those of you listening, it was hilarious. It was hilarious. So Florida in August should be fine. You'll be fine. You'll be fine.

All right, I saw I was following a hashtag on Twitter and I see that the unvaccinated are taking a victory lap. So the unvaccinated is saying we were the smart ones and we've been vindicated and validated. Is that the news you're seeing? How many would agree with the statement that the people who rode out the entire pandemic with no vaccinations at all, how many would agree that they were the smart ones and they have been totally validated? Go. Yes.

So the people who are vaccinated who are not vaccinated, they say they've been validated. I'm looking at your answers. They seem to be somewhat mixed. Somewhat mixed. Why is it that we all watch the same news and the same science and the most basic question of the pandemic, we still disagree on what caused that? What would cause the unvaccinated to say we won, we're the smart ones and science has proven it, at the very same time that the people who were vaccinated were glad they did? How do you explain that? Can you explain it with two words?

Yeah, confirmation bias would be one. But confirmation bias is sort of the weak form of what I'm talking about. It's cognitive dissonance, right? But the thing is you don't know who has it. That's the fun part.

So let me do what almost nobody will ever do in front of you. This is very rare, what I'm going to say. You will almost never see a public figure who talks, you know, somebody who talks for a living in front of people, you almost never see anybody say what I'm going to say now. It could be me because that's how cognitive dissonance works. I'll tell you my impression. If you put a gun to my head and said you're going to have to choose who's right, I would choose that I'm right. Whatever that is. You know, we don't, it doesn't matter for this discussion. It doesn't even matter. I would still choose I'm right.

So if you ask me all right, you know that there's a thing called

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cognitive dissonance and you also know that you might be easily triggered by it because I'm in a situation where I could be triggered into it. So you should always look for the trigger if you're trying to decide who's got cognitive dissonance and who doesn't. You look for the trigger. And the trigger would be that something happened that was the opposite of what you believed was possible or could…

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