Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
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licious. All right, here's your question of the day. I want to see your answer in the comments. There is a startling rise in white supremacist, white nationalist violence in this country. How many people died from white supremacists in 2017? I don't have the 2018 number. But how many total people in the United States were killed by white supremacists? You can't look it up. Yeah, actually it's mor…

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hing we can do. So would it be great if you thought universal basic income was a terrible idea, somebody does a test and it worked out great? Wouldn't you be pleased?

What's the other thing that would please you? You thought all along it was a bad idea. Somebody did a test and it clearly didn't work. Now you're a genius. You knew all along. You should always be in favor of the test. Now if you lived in Newark and your taxes might be influenced by it, well maybe you think something a little different, right, because that's a different situation. But if you're not in Newark and Newark wants to do this or some majority want to do it, let them do it.

Let's talk about aspirin. So the news today is that aspirin may not be such a good idea in terms of taking a baby aspirin preventatively just in case you get a heart attack if you're, let's say, over 50. Now you should always talk to your doctor. Don't listen to cartoonists about medical advice. There are some situations where your doctor will tell you to keep taking the aspirin and it usually has to do with having a pretty verified risk of heart attack. But if you have a healthy heart and no special markers for risk, the newest information based on I guess three new studies is that aspirin might do more bad than good, meaning it could make you bleed more but it's not adding enough in terms of preventing heart attack damage to be worth it.

Now here's the interesting question. What percentage of scientists believed you should take an aspirin last year? What percentage now? I've asked this question before and there's this weird false memory thing that happens. I thought that that was the standard recommendation. In other words if you had asked me a year ago I would have said yeah, pretty much all scientists and all doctors say you should do that over 50. I thought it was close to a universal recommendation. And I think I said that on a Periscope and somebody said that's just not true. And then you start researching it. You find you can't really find any number that says that it was always true that the experts said you should take a baby aspirin. So that's actually probably a false memory that I had. So I probably have some kind of a false memory and some of you do too. The aspirin was basically universally recommended by the experts. I think if you dig into it you'll find that the scientists were a little bit more mixed.

All right, so that's an open question. Could you find how many scientists or how many docto

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rs were pretty confident about that in the past? I don't know what that number would be. I would like to invite anybody on to this Periscope as a guest. You can just click the option that says you want to be picked as a guest to join me specifically on the question of the 97% of climate scientists being on the same side. So if you believe that 97% or even 100% of scientists are on the same side o…

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