Back to episode — Episode 2028 Scott Adams - Trump Witch Hunt Grand Jury, Ramaswamy vs Cartels, Eric & UFOs, More Fun
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right? He did not say this is a skill I have but you don't have it. Now if he had, then we'd have something to quibble with. But if you say none of us have that, you know, except very rarely somebody in the field, then I'm on board with that completely. Yeah, no, nobody has that skill. And even the most qualified people in the field often don't have it. We see this all the time. Yeah. So does that…
← Previous segment →estion of using them is just easy, right? It's already a meme. Yeah, it's just easy anyway. So I think we're all against masks. But this is just an emphasis for Sam Harris's opinion that doing your own research is absolutely useless. It's completely useless.
In fact, there are three things that don't work. Follow the science. Would you agree? Following the science didn't work, did it? I don't think it works for anything anymore. How about do your own research? Well, people who did their own research had different answers. We know that doesn't work. How about listen to the experts? Is that working? Listen to the experts? No, no. So these are three things we all thought used to work. Follow the science, listen to the experts, but also do your own research just for a double check. None of those have any evidentiary value at all. None.
Let me tell you how to know what's true. It's the only way. Can you engineer a product out of it? That's it. Engineering is the only way you know if something's true. It'll take a moment for that to settle in. Just think about it. Engineering is the only way you know if something's true. Science doesn't give you that because science is always, even when it's a fact, it's still subject to revision. But if you're an engineer and you say, okay, you claim I can make a satellite, right? Your scientific claim is if I use this science I can make a satellite and I can communicate with Earth and maybe do GPS. Well, let's find out. So I'm going to build a satellite. I'm going to put it in the sky and see if it tells me where I am. Oh, that works. It's true. That's truth. The app is telling me from the satellite that I'm approximately in this room. That's truth. Everything else is tentative. Everything else is just a maybe.
So I think this is where we've been fooled forever. Science is not where you go to find out what's true. Engineering is. Engineering tells you what's true. Let's take you to medicine. Science says this pill will work. Do you know how you know? You got to make the pill. The only way you know is you put it out there and see what happens. That's engineering. I mean it's medical engineering in this case, chemistry, but I'd call it engineering, right? Not only engineers, that is a fellow. No, I don't mean that only an engineer can determine what's true. I'm saying that your way to know if something is true is if somebody can make a product out of it and it works the way it's supposed to.
Now even that isn't 100 percent because you could engineer something that works for the wrong reason. For example, we talked about this before. If you believe that the wing of your airplane had to have a
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Bernoulli effect in order to get lift and you built that plane, it would fly. Years later you'd find out that the Bernoulli effect had nothing to do with it. So you can test something and engineer it and find out it works. But then you have to fly the plane upside down to find out what was true. If you fly the plane upside down, which you can do, and it flies, then you know the Bernoulli effect wa…
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