Back to episode — Episode 2020 Scott Adams - Nikki Haley Bores Us, Wokesters Are A Common Enemy, And Some Fun Stories
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and you would be disgusted by them at a subconscious level but it would look just like that person. Kind of you know minus two or three percent. So you can see the power of the tool. In this particular example it made him look cute so it worked the opposite but you could. Yeah once you refine this tool a little bit and you get that uncanny valley thing going it's just going to look just like the…
← Previous segment →rrel of water a day I wouldn't like it. I wouldn't like it at all right. I like eating potato chips. If I had to eat 100 pounds of potato chips a day I wouldn't like it. I wouldn't like it at all. That doesn't make potato chips not taste good. They're still good. I just don't want too much of it.
Here's the right amount. Everybody has their personal level. Here's the right amount of wokeness for me. Somebody prefers to be called by some name than another name. It doesn't matter what it is. So you could say I prefer to be called black instead of African-American. Okay I don't have any problems with that. Is it inconvenient for me? A little bit but that's also how society works right? We all accept a little bit of inconvenience. Like I will hold the door for you even though it's a little inconvenient. It's just not very inconvenient. I'd rather hold the door for you because society is just a better way to grease society even though it's a little bit inconvenient.
So wokeness to me is like that. There's a little bit of good wokeness. It's a little bit inconvenient but I like it because I just like being, I would like people to call me by what I would like to be called. So if somebody has the same request to me I say well on the other foot I would certainly want to be called what I consider respectful so I would ask the same thing.
So somebody asked me that I'm good. Now with the pronouns specifically I'm an anti-pronoun but I'm pro calling people what they want to be called. I just ask that you don't give me a problem when I say it wrong. That's all. Maybe clarify for me if I say wrong. Oh I prefer you know her or him. Okay I have no problem with that. But you don't have a problem with me if I get it wrong. That's my bottom line. If I get it wrong don't give me any problems. Not cool because I'm trying. My head's in the right place. I'm trying to give people whatever respect they think is appropriate within reason. Within reason.
And those of you who are rejecting it fine. Yeah those of you say no no no no way I like it the old way. Yeah I'm okay with you too. Yeah I don't have any problem with that.
All right. But I think there's something good coming from the coming generation.
Twitter algorithms are so complicated. Elon Musk apparently concerned because his own tweets apparently sometimes would go to tens of millions of people and sometimes to much smaller number and he couldn't figure out why. And his engineers speculated that maybe it was because some of his tweets were not as popular or that people were kind of over him. He wasn't as interesting anymore.
Musk quite correctly as it turns out believed that that was BS and that there's something in the algorithm that nobody understands. And so he brought together his remaining engineers he has not yet fired and this is how it's reported anyway. We don't know it's true. We only know what's reported. But what's reported is that he brought them together and they could not figure out why his tweets get the amount of attention or lack of attention that they do.
Now think about that. The primary engineers at Twitter could not figure out how the algorithm works for Elon Musk. In other words they could not predict in advance that if you put this through the algorithm it should have a predictable outcome. It appears unpredictable and it appears too complicated to fix.
Do you know how they fixed it? They put in some code that forced Elon Musk's tweets to be seen by more people. They had to bypass their own algorithm because they didn't understand how it works or how to correct it. That's what I predicted. That's what I predicted. I predicted it was too complicated and there was no one person at Twitter who had an idea how the algorithm works. Does anybody remember me saying that long before Musk took over? Does anybody remember me saying that? Yeah okay so some people remember.
Yeah so it turns out it's exactly that. It's too complicated for any engineer at Twitter to actually know. If the system has been gamed that was the only thing that made sense to me from the start is that the en
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gineers didn't know themselves. They didn't know. Now if it's possible to put in this one line of code that bumps Elon's tweets higher up, I think they've adjusted it since then so that may not be the case now. But wouldn't that mean that any engineer who had access could have forced a line of code in there? I don't know if they catch every line of code or how that works but could somebody have i…
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