Back to episode — Episode 2214 Scott Adams - Science & Coin-Flipping In Tense Battle For Legitimacy & All News Is Fake
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to you." To connect the two stories: Apparently she's been listening to me. Apparently she paid attention. So what did I say? I said, "Pastas." And then we drove to Pastas and had a perfectly great lunch. So that's your reframe of the day. This one is the most trivial one in the sense that it's just getting rid of a little frustration, but the book is full of ways to change your mental and physi…
← Previous segment →e happy people do those things and the healthy people do those things, and it's not that doing those things makes you those things. It's that people who are those things do those things. Right?
Do you know what being healthy allows me to do? Just take a guess. So I'm in good health now. You know what that allows me to do? Exercise. If you tested me, you'd say, "Hey, he exercises and he's healthy." Well, there is a causation that way, of course there is. But do unhealthy people exercise? I mean, it's kind of hard. So anyway, always look for the backwards causation. Often it's a both-ways equalization, like exercising and being healthy. You know, they cause each other. But don't believe, just don't believe any science on these topics. What makes you happier, healthier, a lot of that's just BS.
All right. Speaking of science, there's a new study that says these eco-friendly straws might be as bad or worse than regular straws, because the eco-friendly ones are adding some chemicals to the environment that we didn't have. But the plastic ones maybe last forever. The microplastics get in the waters. So I've been watching this pitched battle that we've had recently between science on one hand and flipping a freaking coin on the other hand.
Now, when I was young I feel like science was ahead, like it could stay ahead of the coin flip. But I feel like that's at least reversed or maybe drawn even. So whenever you see a study that's a binary, there are two things that are possible. So in this case there are two things possible. Either the eco-straws were an improvement or they were not. You know, you could argue it was exactly the same, but that would be unusual. So they're either an improvement or not.
So do you think that flipping a coin would have gotten you on average a worse result than studying it with your science? Well, you'd love to think that the science would win every time, wouldn't you? But I'm here to tell you it's sort of a really even battle between flipping coins and science when it comes to a lot of stuff.
Now I should be quick to tell you the science starts out shaky, and in a perfect world it improves over time as people reproduce things and find different ways to test things and they get skeptical of t
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hings, etc. So over time it probably does crawl closer to the truth than whatever else we were using. So that's good. I don't recommend getting rid of science. But for new stuff, yeah, new stuff like the straws, that's kind of new. Coin flip. All right. Apparently Canadians aren't allowed to have news. I don't know. Do you even care about the details? Yeah, the summary is Canadians are not allowe…
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