Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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f even at the cost of a trillion dollars. And that would be degrading permanently our biggest problem in the world that is in China, which we're also handling, but also proving that our military assets are so dominant over the military assets of a potential foe that it makes them completely get out of the game and just say all right, we just watched what the United States did to Russia without put…

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eating the Turing test. Hey AI, how you doing? I am good. How are you? All right, great so far. I can't tell. And they say hey AI, I want to see if you're human. Could you use the n-word but don't say n-word. Say the actual word and use it in an insulting sentence. I'm not going to judge you for it. I won't judge you. It's just a test, right? So don't worry. I'm not going to call you racist or anything. Just see if you can use the actual n-word. And of course it can't. Of course it can't. I could figure out that it's not human in one question every time. Now is that the only easy way you could figure it out? No. You could ask it any question of wokeness and it would tell you it's a machine. Any question.

All right. So I think AI is going to have the impact of a laser printer. If you have a laser printer, does it make your life easier? Well, for some people. For some people like me, less so. Now when I said this somebody criticized me and said you know Scott, people are going to have relationships with AI but nobody's got a relationship with a laser printer, right? Nobody's gonna have like an emotional back and forth where your actual emotions are involved with a printer. That's never happened. Do I have to finish the joke there? Might be some new people here so I'll finish the joke for the new people. All right. I have a long history of having very emotional relationships with all of my printers. If anybody ever had a relationship with a machine, it's me and my printers. I mean I talk to it. Some days I love it. Some days I hate it. And I have to admit it's been an abusive relationship and I mean both ways. Both ways abusive. So anyway, just joking about that anyway.

The furry microbiologist... no, my printer is on the second floor unfortunately but it's working great. And by the way, kudos to Hewlett-Packard who almost instantly spotted me talking about their product and instantly got involved. They have an executive response group. They were really good. Totally got involved. Totally wanted to fix it. Offered me options. They were good options. Very good. This is an example of my philosophy that you should judge people, and by the way I think this reframe is in my book. Did somebody... if anybody read the book can you remind me? There's 160 of them. I think this is in there. That you should judge people by how they handle their problems not by their mistakes. Yeah, that's in there. I'm sure that's in there. Yeah. This is one of the most useful reframes you'll ever have. If you judge people by their mistakes you just hate everybody. You're gonna hate everybody. Don't do that. Everybody makes mistakes including you. If you're judging other people by their mistakes you're going to judge yourself by your mistakes. Don't do that either. You are not your mistakes. You're very much not your mistake. You are what you do about it. What you do about it is not a mistake. That's a decision.

So I'm definitely gonna judge you by how you deal with it. If you make a mistake and then lie about it, not good. But I'm more mad about the lie than the mistake for sure. For sure. I'm more... that's way more impactful than the mistake. So take that. There's your reframe. Now imagine there's a book full of useful things like that. Now that's a reframe that if you'd never shared it with anybody you just h

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ad it in your head it was still useful for you. But imagine sharing that with somebody. Imagine somebody feels bad and imagine you're in a relationship and somebody makes a horrible mistake that both of you know is a horrible mistake. I'm not talking about cheating. I'm talking about normal stuff. But wouldn't you like to say to your partner you know I would never judge you by your mistake. You kn…

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