Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 24, 2026
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MainContent Confirmation Bias

Back to episode — Episode 2682 CWSA 12/07/24

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ave at least one person in the story that privately I'm thinking to myself you know if something happened to them it might be a better world. A lot. A lot. And I asked myself is this what social media is doing to me? Is social media turning me into somebody who immediately thinks of violence when I'm just reading the news and it's not about war. I mean if it's about war of course but when I read a…

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e so not completely safe but I have no idea. So here's a little experiment for you. Find your favorite AI and ask your AI if there are any problems with people who are vaccinated in terms of more cancer more heart disease more mental illness or anything whatever you want. Just ask your favorite AI. So I asked Perplexity because Perplexity is like really good and you know what it said? It said there are no known health problems from the vaccination beyond you know there's always a few people who have a bad reaction to everything. No unusual bad reaction. Do you believe that? It's from a search engine yeah. I'm pretty sure that no matter which search engine you asked it would say that the vaccination was as safe as anything else we do in the medical world. Now I'm not saying that's true. I'm saying that the AI will tell you it's true. And at the same time I will wake up and every single day there's another expert telling me that it's like just killed millions of people and they're dropping like flies and they're going crazy and they're getting early onset of everything in the world. Which of these is true?

Let me just say this. If you're sure you know which one of those is true you shouldn't be. You shouldn't be because there's really no way to know. I don't believe there's any way to know. You might be guessing right because one of them is right. Right it's either perfectly safe or it's way more dangerous than we thought it was. It can't both be true. So somebody who's watching this is completely correct but not because you could know. It's just it's a 50/50. So some of you are going to guess right. I'm genuinely genuinely confused. I cannot tell if there's even any way to know right. So in the comments I'm saying is there even any way to know. And the trouble is that everybody who studies it seems to have some motivation. They're either starting at looking for trouble and oh they found it or they're starting at making sure that there is no trouble. Oh we didn't find any trouble. So I think everybody in that domain is motivated one way or another even if they're not aware of it.

I'm seeing somebody yell in all capitals it has random effects because it goes to random parts of your body. Now if that were true and it might be then you would see that everything would be increased in terms of bad health. Now when I asked Perplexity after it said you know there's no indication that the shots have any problems at all I said but is it true that there's a big increase in health problems and it said yes there is in just the last few years there's a major increase in a whole range of health problems. And so then I asked why what's causing this major change in health problems. Do you know what it said? Lifestyle. It said that in just the last few years there's been enough of a lifestyle and demographic change and demographic that explains what we're seeing. Do you believe that? Now part of it is in any five year period America gets a lot older because we're not replacing with young people as fast so it should be that if everything was working properly that every year from now on there will be much greater health problems than usual because we're older right. So if I were to predict will next year have more health problems more heart attacks more diabetes than last year almost certainly right. There's no way it's going to be less next year because we don't have c

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ures for it and there will be more old people eating junk food and our food is probably getting worse and you know social media's turning us into couch potatoes anyway. So I don't know. I have no idea. And that ladies and gentlemen concludes my prepared thoughts for today and I think you can see the problem. I can't trust any data. I can't trust any video and everything's racist against white peo…

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