Episode 1427 Scott Adams: Why You Shouldn't Listen to Doctors Who Don't Understand Statistics

It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. The best time of the day. Well, it's 4th of July 5th. We're celebrating like demons here in the United States, our Monday off, even though it's not really the holiday. And I would like to kick this Monday off with, well, really the best thing that's ever happened to you. It's called the simultaneous sip. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker cells or stein, a canteen, junk or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's gonna rock your world. Now go. Ah, well, because it's normal, it looks like my locals broadcast is not working. I told you there's a problem. Whenever you have any one piece of extra, extra technology, this thing is not working. And I'll show you why. So there's a bad, bad battery on one part of my hardware which is making this stream not working. So we're going to end this. All right, the locals is turned off now. Now, that was not a problem with the locals platform. I've been experimenting with my various different types of sound equipment, and one of them has this fatal flaw that it takes a battery. What are the odds that I would be organized enough to have a spare battery all the time, to always have a spare battery, and to be able to hot swap it as soon as I'm ready? So this is a problem with almost all of the audio solutions that I've tested so far. They all have some kind of a fatal flaw anyway, so let's continue with this. Jonathan Trolley has interesting comments about Hunter's laptop. Have you heard about Hunter's laptop? Well, apparently there's more and more information that Hunter was acting as a conduit for deals that would involve his father's influence when his father was vice president. And there's yet another story about this coming out from an ex FBI director, Louis Freeh. And I guess he made some donations to the. To some Biden charity and then asked for some business deals. Now, if anything like this had happened to any of the Trump kids or that family, this would be, of course, the biggest story in the news. But this has every element to be a gigantic national story. But it isn't. It just isn't. So the media has simply decided, as Jonathan Turley is pointing out here, they've simply decided this isn't a story. And if you think that what makes a story is the, the elements of the story, you know, the variables in the story, is it important to you? Is it going to matter, blah, blah, blah, if you think that's what makes a story? Nope, it is not. That is not what makes the story. And. All right, just looking at your comments for a moment, there's somebody here who desperately wants to get banned. But keep it up, Keep it up. You'll get banned in a minute. All right. Cori Bush, who is a congresswoman, tweeted yesterday, quite provocatively, she tweeted, when they say that the Fourth of July is about American freedom, remember, the freedom they're referring to is for white people. This land is stolen land, and black people still aren't free. That came from a congresswoman. She's black, she's a woman, and she's in Congress. But apparently something's holding her back, because what, she's not president yet. She's not the emperor of the universe. What exactly is holding back Congresswoman Cori Bush? She's crushing it. Congresswoman Bush, you're in Congress. You did okay. You did okay. So the weird thing is that I of course, agree with the statement, how many of you who are watching this, who happen to be white, or at least non black, how many of you think this is unreasonable? Is it unreasonable that black Americans would not want to necessarily celebrate a day of freedom when they didn't have any freedom? Yeah, I feel as though it's a perfectly valid point. However. However, it also seems that everything should have a start. Because correct me if I'm wrong, but the original founders didn't let people, people like me, vote either, did they? Did they? Because let's say my family were not landowners. Actually, we weren't here during that period, so my family wasn't here yet. But suppose they had been and had not been landowners, they couldn't vote. Right. And if you were a poor person working for a rich white person, did they treat you well? Or maybe he got beaten. If you were a poor white person, too. So things were definitely not great for everybody. But I think the point is well taken that if you're black, maybe that is not your Independence Day. I think that's a reasonable point. I wouldn't disagree with that at all. But it's too bad there's not a date that would have give us more unity on stuff like this. Speaking of race, which seems to be the only thing anybody cares about now, which is a really good sign if what you're complaining about is race in the United States in 2021, where race is the smallest problem that's ever been anywhere. Still a problem. I'm not minimizing how big the problem remains, but it is probably the lowest that specific problem has ever been anywhere at any time. That's my guess. That's probably an exaggeration. But you know, things are heading in the right direction at least. So ESPN has this racial drama and what makes this story interesting is that it's a story about nobody doing anything wrong except the people who reported it. It's a story about bad behavior, except there isn't any bad behavior. The only bad behavior is the people who reported it because it was based on a private phone call. Whoever reports a private phone call without the permission of the people on the call, they are bad people, really bad people. But let me tell you what this is about. So I guess there are two women who work for ESPN and they both would obviously like to succeed in their jobs. I'm sure that's fair statement. And one of them is white, one of them is black, and the black one got some kind of a job that the white one thought was guaranteed to her in her contract. And then in a private conversation said that what's behind it might be ESPN's trying to correct for an abysmal history of diversity. Now, this was a private conversation that somehow got published which. Who made a mistake here? Was it bad behavior by the white. The white. What are they, correspondents or what are they, hosts? What would you call them? Whatever they are, the people on tv, on espn. Was it bad behavior that the white one would say in a private conversation that she believes that her employer was being influenced by the need to have a better diversity record? There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that at all. This was somebody accusing their employer of good behavior. Right? Because isn't ESPN supposed to be trying to correct their history of bad diversity? Now, I'm not saying that you agree with it. Not you individually and analyst. Thank you. Analysts, we'll call them. Yes, sports analysts. Thank you. But what's wrong with that? What's wrong with a white analyst saying that her employer is concerned about diversity and acting upon it in a way that is good for diversity but bad for the people who don't get the jobs that maybe they would have if diversity had not been a main interest? There's no bad behavior in the story. Except whoever's the fucking asshole who decided to publish a private conversation. That's the only Bad behavior in the story. And yet we're so starved for race related stories that we have to make this one. Now, most of you know I have a little sensitivity to this because I lost two corporate careers for being white and male. And I hasten to tell you that my boss has told me that directly we're not going to promote you because you're white and you're male. And we have a really bad track record of diversity in senior management. So we can't make it any worse by promoting somebody like you. Again, they told me directly. I'm not interpreting something. I'm not assuming anything. They told me directly. This is normal. Everything you hear about this ESPN story where there's a white analyst who believes she lost a job because of her race, this conversation is going on everywhere, all over. This is nothing about espn, really just the most basic conversation happening in every big corporation right now. So there is no bad behavior here and nobody should be treated that way. And I don't even think that it was an insult because some would take it as an insult to the black analyst because the assumption is that she only got the job because of her ethnicity. But that's not even in the story because in the very story, the white analyst is complimenting her and saying that she's qualified. So, you know, it's not like somebody saying one of them is unqualified. That's not even in the story. All right, we'll make anything a racial story even if it isn't. Did you see the clip of Biden and his declining cognitive abilities trying to buy something at a store and also talk to people at the same time? It didn't go well. It didn't go well at all. And so is it Rodney Jackson, Trump's ex doctor at the White House, is claiming or asserting once again that Biden needs to take a cognitive test. Now, here's the interesting thing. Apparently there is a scheduled medical checkup before the end of the year. So we know the White House is going to do that on Biden before the end of the year, don't you think they need to include a cognitive test? It would be one thing if somebody showed no symptoms whatsoever of cognitive decline. If people were asking for a cognitive test in the context of nobody noticing anything wrong, well, could you argue, well, maybe we don't need that. Right. But that's not the context. The context is that literally everybody can see there's something wrong with Biden. He is clearly slowing down under that context. How do you even argue that a cognitive test is necessary. And I've got a feeling that the only thing keeping it from happening is that Kamala Harris is too weak and they don't want her to be the president. I feel as if they realized that she would be a, you know, a nightmare as a president. So I think the Democrats are in a bad place. They can't, they can't test Biden's cognitive ability because I don't think they're going to get the answer they want and they cannot do it. So what are you going to do? Just keep limping along and pretending Biden's still in charge? I guess so. So I'm trying to figure out what kills more people, fake news or vaccinations. All right, so here's a startling statistic. 86% of Democrats and this is from CNN Brian Stelter Show. So I'm sure the facts are all correct. 86% of Democrats have one shot, but only 45% are Republican. Did you know the difference Was that big? 86% of Democrats have at least one shot and only 45% of Republicans. Now Brian Stelter blames, you know, Facebook and Fox for scaring people about the shots and points out that generally conservatives tend to be more afraid of change and more afraid of things. But that doesn't seem to be the problem here. The problem seems to be that conservatives or Republicans, let's say, don't trust science. They don't trust science and they don't trust the news. So when it's proposed, hey, get this shot. The conservatives say, I don't trust you and don't get it. Now I was looking at some of the comments for why some Republicans are not getting it. The most common comment from people who don't want the vaccination is it has a 99.9% survival rate, at least for people with good health. Now the anti vaxxers say, why are you making me take an experimental? They would say, let's say a not 100% tested vaccine when I already have a 99.9% whatever survival rate. Why would I take that chance? What's wrong with that analysis? Go tell me. What is wrong with the analysis that there's a 99.9% survival rate. Can you tell me what's wrong with that analysis? Well, somebody says it's selfish, but that's true. You could define it that way, but let's just say you're making the decision for yourself. You, you're allowed to be selfish when it comes to your own health decisions. You could be selfish that's not immoral. All right, yes. I'm going to say long haul. That's right. If you're ignoring the long haul risk, you have not made a decision based on statistics. So don't act as though you are right now. If you said, well, I've considered the long haul risk and very few people die from it, and worst case, I feel bad for six months, I'll still take that chance, well, then at least you've made some kind of a reasonable decision. You might be right, might be wrong, but it's reasonable. But if you've ignored the long haul risk, you're not making a statistical decision. What are you doing? You're making some kind of emotional decision. Here's what I would like to see. I would like to see an online calculator that shows the various risks for various situations so that you could put in your own long haul risk. Can you tell just off the top of your head, can you tell that your risk from the vaccination would be worse than your risk from not getting vaccinated? How would you decide that? Let me tell you about a doctor you should not listen to. So in Texas, there was some medical doctors were testifying before the state senate and they were opposed to mandatory Covid shots, but they were talking about the risks in general. And I want to point out a type of doctor you don't want to pay attention to. Okay, so these are some things that this doctor said in testifying. I think it was Dr. Edwards, but it doesn't matter who said it. It's a doctor who said this. He said, on a personal note, I believe that God gave us an amazingly robust immune system, and I don't think we can improve on God. That's a doctor you don't want to go to. If the only thing you knew about this doctor was that one sentence, don't go to that doctor. Really? That's a problem because this doctor has told you that he started with his belief in God and then worked backwards to his medical opinion. I don't see any other way to interpret this. Started with a religious belief and then worked backwards to his medical opinion. I think he's saying that directly now. He also believes that his medical opinion is compatible with God. But if you hear somebody start with their religion, as that's my starting place, and then I'm going to tell you why my religion is right, just run away. And I'm pro religion, by the way. I'm not a believer personally, but I'm very pro religion. I think it has all kinds of benefits for people that are unambiguous. What else did Dr. Edwards say? He said that Dr. Edwards stated that he has received, quote, numerous reports within hours receiving Covid vaccines, that people have suffered strokes, heart attacks, pulmonary embolisms, blood clots, and sudden death. If your doctor talks like that, you need a new doctor. If you ever hear your doctor say anything like this, run away. This is a doctor who's making a decision, number one, based on his religion. You said that directly. And number two, based on anecdotal reports in a context where incorrect anecdotal reports are guaranteed, meaning that so many people are getting the shot. It's guaranteed that some people have health problems soon after getting the shot. Guaranteed. It doesn't mean that they're all getting these problems because of the shot. It's just guaranteed statistically that X number of people will. Will get the shot and then have a health problem. So if he doesn't have a study to back up these numbers, what the hell. At the very least, he should be able to back up his anecdotal stuff with his study. He also pointed out that Harvard study, excuse me, has previously estimated that only about 1% of all adverse reactions to vaccines are ever reported to the VAERS database. So there's this database that people report any adverse reactions and only 1% of them get reported. But don't you think they report all the bad ones if only 1% of the side effects are reported? But don't you think all of the deaths are reported were heart attacks and stuff? So I would think he's probably pretty close to getting all the bad stuff. The stuff that wouldn't be reported would be a headache. Right? So I'm not sure that that matters as much as they say. So that's a big hole in this. We don't quite know how important that is. And so here's another thing this doctor says. He cited the fact that the CDC is now reporting over 4,000 deaths in this VAERS database, while for the previous 20 years combined, there were only that many deaths. So if your doctor says this, run away from the doctor, not from the vaccination. Listen to this. This is what a doctor said in public, that you should be essentially saying that this should matter to you, that the total deaths so far from these coronavirus vaccinations is more than 20 years of all the deaths ever reported from all the other vaccines put together. If your doctor says that, your doctor's a moron, why go. Yeah, let's see. Yeah, you're seeing some people in the comments can tell that this is a moron talking. Right? What's wrong with that statement? He's compared the wrong things. You don't compare this vaccination to all the other vaccinations. That's the wrong comparison. This is an idiot comparison. This is an idiot comparison. This is someone who doesn't know the slightest thing about how to compare things. Here's what he should have compared it to. Should have compared it to the deaths from the coronavirus. The vaccine for the coronavirus is an offset to the deaths from the coronavirus. The vaccine for the coronavirus is not trying to compensate for something about other vaccines. These are just different conversations for this doctor to put in that comparison to scare you. This is bullshit. Doctor. These are terrible, terrible, terrible way to look at. So I would say that this doctor is statistically incompetent. There is better, however, a better argument that the therapeutics are so good now that you basically don't need vaccines. So one of the therapeutics of Budin, Budesnoid or something, it's an existing one for asthma. Apparently if you get this within the seven days of symptoms, it reduces your hospitalization rate by 90%. What, a common over the counter? Not over the counter, but you can get a prescription easily. A common medicine that's available in every hospital easily can reduce your risk of hospitalization. 90%. Well, that's pretty impressive. So we got a bunch of therapeutics that probably do all the work or a lot of the work that the vaccinations would. And you also have to worry about the fact that the people pushing the mandatory vaccinations are older people. Do you have any kind of a moral or ethical problem with the fact that the people who are talking about making your vaccinations mandatory are all the older people? Does that bother you a little bit? Doesn't necessarily seem like you're. Yeah, I'm not going to talk about Ivermectin. I know you want to talk about it. There's just nothing else to say about it. Some people think it works, some people don't. That's the whole story right now. All right? If I were 30 years younger, would I get the vaccination? Let me answer that question with a question. Where's my online calculator to calculate my odds? Why can't I go online and just say, okay, I have these situations going on with my health. What are my personal odds of having a complication from the vaccine? And maybe there's a range there? So we don't know the exact, exact situation, but a range. And then what is my risk of long haul risk that I would definitely not want or death from COVID itself? You know, comparing the vaccine versus the COVID So I'd like an online calculator where I could just go in there and it would. It would include long haul risk. And I just put in my numbers and punch out a number. Somebody says it does exist. Scott has cognitive dissonance. Well, you're going to have to do better than that. Give me the example and tell me what the trigger is. Why do you need a calculator for your life? That's just weird, man. This is where you. This is where you can see all the rational people versus the artists. I guess the rational people would be happy to know their odds. The artists are sure that they already can make a decision without knowing the odds of stuff. All right. Weirdly, in the Trump legal situation about whether the taxes were paid on fringe benefits, it looks like President Trump has pretty much admitted they did all that stuff, at least the fringe benefit part. So in his speech, he's talking about how companies don't get dinged for this typically, and he's right, but they are getting dinged for it. But here's the thing. The New York State Attorney General who's bringing these charges, Letitia James, she campaigned on promises to investigate Trump and his business dealings. She campaigned on taking Trump down if she became the Attorney general without evidence. That's right. The person who's in charge of prosecuting the Trump company promised to do it before having evidence of any crime that is almost certainly racist. She's black. Trump is white. He's assumed to be racist because he's white, blah, blah, and other things. So this looks like a racial case. And I wonder if the Supreme Court would just throw it out because she's tipped her hand that she's in. She's basically in it because she hates this guy. And it looks overtly racist to me. It looks like a hate crime. Yeah, it looks like the Attorney General is perpetrating a hate crime. That's exactly what it looks like. So I don't think this is acceptable independent of what the Trump Organization did or did not do. Having this particular person in charge of the prosecution. Totally unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. All right, Suppose a whole bunch of people don't get vaccinations and then they die, and we can calculate how many extra people died because they didn't get vaccinated. First of all, do you think we'll ever be able to do that in the United States? Do you think we'll come up with an estimate that says this many extra people died because we didn't get the vaccination? Let me tell you again, I'm not going to be talking about Ivermectin just because there's nothing to say about it. Right. Some people think it works, some people doesn't. That's the end of the story. But wouldn't we be able to actually calculate how many people died from fake news? Now, fake news would be anything that misled you on the statistics too, or scared you when you shouldn't have been scared. I would call that fake news. Will we be able to calculate how many people were killed by fake news? Now here's the complicated part. Would it be Fox News that you would blame maybe because they're discouraging people from getting vaccinations? According to Brian Stelter. Would you say X number of people got killed by Fox News saying there were risks with the vaccination? Or. Or could you say that the real problem is that the fake news, the CNNs and the scientific community itself have discredited themselves so much that the people you should trust to tell you to get a vaccination, you can't trust. You legitimately can't trust them. Whose fault would it be if, say, 100,000 people die who didn't need to die? Would it be Fox News for scaring you about vaccinations, which I think you could fairly say happened? Or would it be CNN and the scientific community and the Dr. Fauci's, etc. Who had so destroyed their own credibility that you couldn't trust them about anything? I feel like it's all of the above. Yeah. As you're saying in the comments. So does fake news kill people? Yes. Yes. In fact, we've reached a point where the biggest threat to the country is the fake news. Right. Because the fake news is telling you to go to war with Iraq. The fake news is telling you what to do or not do about climate change. The fake news is telling you what to do or not do about nuclear energy. The fake news is telling you what to do or not do about Iran. Right. It's all the fake news. We have one problem, fake news. Everything else sort of just falls down from that. The fact that we can't trust our institutions or our news. All right. CNN reports that 17 states have enacted 28 new laws that make it harder to vote. So that's CNN's take on these voting law changes. Harder to vote. That's it. That's the whole story. It's just making it harder to vote for obviously racist political reasons. Well, here's another report from cnn. Seat belts make it harder to drive. Well, it's true, isn't it? Don't seat belts make it harder to drive? Because you've got that extra time you have to do to put on your seatbelt, and then your passenger doesn't have the seatbelt on and the little noise comes on, hey, put your seatbelt on. Wouldn't you say that CNN should report the seat belts are making it harder to drive? I'm sure it's true that these laws make it harder to vote, but that's not the point, is it isn't the point to make the election secure? The intention should matter. The trouble is that you can get both. You can make it more secure and also more likely to suppress a vote at the same time. So intentions are a little mixed up here. Yeah, very good analogy. Thank you. All right, so apparently US And Iran are not making any progress toward a nuclear deal. Are you surprised? Oh, somebody says fireworks are racist because black people hear noise pollution. Okay, I don't know about that. So US Iran making no progress toward a nuclear deal. Big surprise. Aren't we back to Trump's approach with Iran? Because Biden somewhat simplistically thought that he would just get back into this Iranian nuclear deal, but that they would also improve it. So it's not good enough, even for the Democrats. Even the Democrats don't like the nuclear deal with Iran. I didn't know that before. Apparently, Chuck Schumer was adamantly opposed to the nuclear deal. So to his credit. And so when you thought Biden was just going to get back into the deal, even the Democrats don't want to do that. So there's no deal to get back into. So in effect, the Biden approach to Iran is pretty much the Trump approach. Because when it comes right down to it, what options did they have? If you're trying to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and Biden says he is, Trump said he was, too. You got to keep the sanctions on and you can't make a deal. So it's going to look exactly like Trump, you know, give or take, killing Soleimani. So once again, the Trumpification of politics is happening. How many of you think that we're experiencing a heat wave that's caused by climate change? I feel like our reporting is letting us down a little bit. I remember it wasn't too long ago when there would be a big hurricane season and the experts would come out and say it's because of climate change, but then a bunch of other experts would come out and say, no, it could be because of climate change. But we don't see it in the data yet. The data does not tell us that our storms are getting worse. Is that what's happening now? Because I keep seeing references to climate change as the reason that it's so hot. But is there a counterpoint anymore? Is there anybody saying, well, I see what you're saying about all this heat, but it's not in the data yet. We don't see it yet. Or have the critics, as well as the proponents of climate change as being a coming disaster, have they all agreed that this is really climate change, there's no pushback this time? Yeah, I don't have an opinion on it. I just don't know that there's any data out there. But we're all acting like we know what's going on. Yeah. All right, so that's just an open question. I would say that I think we should adopt a new concept. And the concept goes like this. In the old days, we thought of herd immunity as when X number of people have been infected or vaccinated. And if you got to that 60 or 70% of your public either already infected and having antibodies or vaccinated, well, that was enough to stop a virus from spreading because there wouldn't be enough people that it could jump onto. But I feel like we have to modify that today. And really we should look at herd immunity differently. And I think herd immunity should be when everybody who has a vaccination wants a vaccination, has one. That's it. That should be herd immunity. If everybody who wants a vaccination has one, then the other people are just taking a normal human risk and they. They get to do that. So why can't we just say we're done when everybody who wants one can get one and just go back to work and people will die. We can be sure of that. But they would die in the context of knowing what the risks were and taking a normal human risk reward decision and deciding to go on with their life or not. So it feels like everything we're doing is to maybe sort of a little bit protect a small percentage of the population who got vaccinated, but still could die from the virus, I suppose. Yeah. And the children. Yeah. And what we're doing to the children is the most alarming part of it. All right, so the only thing I'm adding to this is the thought that the words herd immunity, we should just change it for this one situation. Say once everybody who wants the vaccination has it, we're good to go. That's all you can do. But we are seeing more corporations forcing their employees to get vaccinated. I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, you certainly don't want forced vaccinations for all the obvious reasons. On the other hand, or at least if you can avoid it, you don't want it. On the other hand, what are you going to do? Some people are going to die if you don't do it. Yes, now we're all getting excited about the delta variant. I don't know if the variant scares you, if the other one, if the other one, if the normal one didn't scare you. I don't know how the delta variant is going to scare you. Extra. I don't imagine it. All right. And that is all I had to talk about today. I'll look into what my issues are with my sound and then I'll get the. So I already know what I need to do every time I test this, which is I add one variable, just one variable, to making the sound work. 30% failure rate. It's just guaranteed. And I will talk to you tomorrow.