Episode 52 - When Lying Matters and When it Does Not

Hey everybody, it's time to gather around for you know what's coming. You know what's coming. It's coffee with Scott Adams. It's the best time of the day except for those other times of the day, which are pretty good too, if you have a good life. And now for the simultaneous coffee. So today we're going to talk about facts and fact checking and lies, damn lies. And we're going to help. Well, I'm going to help you sort out when does lying matter? When does it not many of you know I wrote a book called Winn Bigley subtitle Persuasion in a world where facts don't matter. What do I mean by facts don't matter? Because you rationalists say facts matter. You can't have science without facts. Facts matter. Yes, yes, yes. Facts matter to the outcomes. If you walk in front of a truck and the truck hits you, that's a fact and it matters. So facts do matter to outcomes, but in the context of persuasion, facts don't matter because they don't persuade. And I'm going to walk you through some examples of where facts matter and where they don't. Why is this important? Let me tell you. If you turn on the news, you'll see non stop reporting about President Trump that says some version of President Trump told 943 lies since breakfast. And you turn on the, you know, the news again in an hour and it's President Trump lied about this, he lied about that, he lied about this. And then they'll bring on Trump supporters and they'll say, aren't you bothered by all the lying? The lying? What about all the lying? How could we live with such a liar? Well, let me tell you, there was a time not so long ago, 2015, approximately when a very reasonable person could say, I'm really worried that not adhering to the facts, especially for a president, could cause some big problems. That was a reasonable thing. In 2015. You could say to yourself, I don't know, I like the truth. Feels like when we depart from it, it's just going to cause trouble. And if you've got a president who's not passing the fact checking, ah, I don't know, whole world is going to fall apart. This is a big, big problem. Back in 2015 that made sense, but now it's 2018 and a half and we've actually seen the horrible impact of all the Lyme. So now we can assess did it matter? Did it matter? So we don't have to guess now you don't have to look at my book and say, I'm not so sure that's true. You don't have to wonder. You can just look and see what happened. We now have enough history to determine whether lying is bad or it doesn't make any difference. Let's talk about some specific examples. Shall we go to the whiteboard? Yes, let's go to the whiteboard. Stay with me. We're turning. All right, so here are some examples. So we'll look at some examples to see if lying makes a difference. Let's take the example of isis. If you're in a war, does lying help you or hurt you? Well, it kind of depends, right? If we're lying about, let's say, how long we plan to stay in Syria, let's say we didn't plan to stay there forever, but we say we did, let's say it's a lie. Is that a good lie or a bad one? Well, it's a pretty good one because if they think we're going to stay forever, then they say, ah, there's no point in even trying to start this caliphate again. They're just going to be here, and why bother? Could we lie to them online to disrupt their recruiting? I hope we are. Yes. So disinformation, lying, building morale, even if it's not true, basically, manipulating the truth is a legitimate weapon of warfare. So in the case of isis, lying, if you do it right, is just another weapon. So in that case, if you use it right, you're doing a good job in North Korea. Let's talk about the military ones again. Suppose we said to North Korea, we are definitely going to blow you up in a nuclear blast if you don't do X, Y and Z. Maybe we're bluffing, but it's still a good lie because it might get us to peace. And peace is way better than nuclear annihilation. So again, wherever there's war and bluffing and negotiating, massaging the truth a little bit can get you to a good place. Let's take the economy. If you were to say, this economy is looking so good, I think the GDP could be someday up in the 5 or 6% range. Is that a lie? Well, it might not be true and it might be intentionally misleading, but what does it do? It causes people to invest because they say, man, it's looking good. This president is telling me the economy is going to be great next year. I'm going to invest this year so I can get in on this. And what does that cause it causes the economy to do well, optimism is driven by somebody telling you what the future looks like. Can anybody tell you what the future looks like? I mean, aside from me. So basically hyperbole, exaggeration, outright lying, not getting to the facts. There are a whole bunch of situations where you come out ahead. But let me give you an example where that's not true. Race relations. What do race relations, what is it about race relations that's different from all of our other topics right now? Well, let me give you an example. Economy doing great, optimism is up. You know, investment is up. I think the report today was that tax receipts are like at an all time great. You know, employment is hitting records. You know, ISIS is, you know, looking good. Our progress there. North Korea is looking good. We're negotiating on trade in Iran. We don't know how that'll all turn out, but at least we're pushing on things that probably needed to be pushed on. So we're looking at this world where it feels like almost everything is going well. And what is there that's true about all those things that are going well? Full of lies, all kinds of Trump untruths and lies and exaggerations, hyperbole, getting facts wrong. It's just a mess in terms of the truth. And yet every one of those things is doing great. But this one. But race relations. All right, so let's look at the lying variable about this one. Why? Why is this one the one that's just sort of hanging out? I'll tell you why. Because there are some lies in this field that weren't told by the President. The lies on this one topic are told by the media. So the media told you, for example, that the President of the United States said that people who are self identified racists in Charlotteville marching with tiki torches. The media lied to you and said that the President called them fine people. He didn't. He said that there were people on both sides of the Confederate statue issue. Some want to keep them, some want to get rid of them, and there are fine people on both sides. He was not talking about the racists. But the media told you that. So what happens to race relations? It's a mess. It's a frickin mess. What did Hillary Clinton tell you about the Trump campaign? All a bunch of racists. What evidence did they give? Well, that doesn't matter because they were persuading. They didn't care about the facts. Didn't care about the facts. They were persuading. Did they succeed? They did. They did succeed. So the Democrats and the Media supporting them, lied, lied, lied, lied, lied, lied on this topic, race relations. And they freaking ruined it. They just ruined it. I mean, they're really destroying the country on something that's as dear to the American experience as anything, which is the whole trying to live with people who are different than you. You know, the ethnic melting pot, that's the old term. I think there's updated terms for that, but that's pretty central to who we want to be and how we want to live our lives. Who ruined that? Wasn't the president. Do you remember the President ever saying, well, I certainly like to discriminate against this group or that. Imagine the worst thing that the President ever said. If the media had reported it just objectively. Suppose the president had said during his campaign, we want to seal up the border and, and deport anybody who's not legal. Suppose that was just reported as fact. They would have said, this president really wants to enforce the laws that are on the books. Enforcing those laws that are on the books will be very bad, very bad for the illegal residents of the country and we have some compassion for them. We hope that this can be worked out. That would be a completely objective thing to say. And sure enough, he's not deporting the 14 million people here. That was a little bit of hyperbole. But if had simply been reported objectively, well, we've got a president who says he's going to enforce the laws that are on the books. It was the media that said, therefore he's a racist. Because I'm pretty sure if we had exactly the same issues with Canada, he'd be talking about a Canadian border. Can you think of any reason he wouldn't? If Mexico had been, let's say a high income country and there was just no immigration problems whatsoever, would he still be talking about them because they're brown? If we had this enormous problem on the north where those damn Canadians were coming over and stealing our jobs and bringing drugs and crime and let me avoid the racist trap and say I have no reason to believe that Canadians or Mexicans are bringing a higher level of crime or anything else into the country. Country. I've never seen statistics of that nature. So I'm just speaking about the topic and concept here. I'm pretty sure that the president would have been hard on Canadians if they had been the problem. Now take, and you can, you can take this analysis to almost any issue today. I saw, I think Pierce, was it Pierce. I'm sorry, Morgan. Yeah. So there was a news story that new poll says that Muslims have a far worse opinion of this president than the last president. Now, some of that is because. Some of that is probably because a lot of Muslims thought that Obama was one. So you get a little bit of a bump in popularity if somebody thinks you're one of them. So some number of people probably thought Obama was just a Muslim. And so whoever came after the person who was mistakenly thought to be a Muslim is going to be a little less popular in the Muslim world. So you got that going on. Then imagine that the media had just covered the Muslim ban objectively. Suppose they'd said, oh, he's trying to keep a type of destructive thought out of the country. And we don't know how to identify the people who have that destructive thought, the destructive thought being radical Islam. And so the same way we would treat, let's say, a medical quarantine situation, there are a few countries that, until we figure out how to handle this problem, that we can't tell who are the good ones and the bad ones. We're going to put a clamp on that. We're going to figure out we'll get better at it. But by no means do we want to ban Muslims, because we're not banning them from the countries that have good systems. And we can check out who's coming in. So imagine if that Muslim ban had been described in just objective terms. Where does the lying come from? Well, it's kind of coming from the enemy press. It's coming from the pundits that they allow on the air. So I would argue, again, just summarizing this. If you're saying to yourself, lying is bad, that is so simplistic, it's almost childlike. Lying is pretty much the fabric of our existence. You know, people are marketing, they're exaggerating their resume, they're putting on makeup. They're only filming themselves from the chest up so they can't see that he gained a little weight recently. We're all sort of lying, exaggerating, putting a little hyperbole on things, especially the people who are saying, you damn liar, you, they're lying, too. So in this big old lying world where everybody's shading the facts and exaggerating, and sometimes they're just wrong and we have terrible facts. Some of them are worse than others. If you lie correctly on ISIS economy in North Korea, you get not just a good result, you get a great result. I mean, you get exactly what you want. If you lie on this stuff, race relations, you've got a big problem. And that's what happened. But pay attention. Who did the lying? It was the media's lying that caused the problems. It was the President's emphasis on persuasion over facts that is getting us some good stuff. North Korea, economy, etc. So I'm not suggesting that you lie. I'm suggesting that you know the difference between a time when the truth is absolutely the best way to go and when shading the truth gets you a better result, such as dealing with isis, dealing with North Korea, dealing with the economy. All right, those are my points for today. Scott, answer the question that Trump lies for no reason. Well, you're using lying as a big catch all. I would say that President Trump has several categories that people like to lump together as lying because it makes that number bigger. One would be hyperbole where he simply exaggerates. Let's say the crowd size. Let's say the crowd size is 10,000 and he says, Ah, there's 20,000. It's the biggest I've ever had. That's intentional and it's persuasion. It's not facts. And it has a good result. It makes him seem like he has more energy, makes him seem more popular, gives him more power to do the job for which he was elected. So lying about his popularity actually improves his popularity because people say, hey, I need to get part of that energy. Everybody likes that guy. Apparently, according to him. Then there's a category of just not having the right fact. So there are. Sometimes he just remembers a fact wrong and if he remembers it wrong in a way that helps him, you know, he's more likely to use it, I would assume, because you're not going to talk about the things that are bad for you. So some of them are just genuinely doesn't have the data or is, you know, at a date or read a wrong, wrong source or something. But he knows the difference. This is very important. He knows when it matters. And so far he's been right because there's nothing that he's been, let's say, contrary to the fact checkers, none of it seems to matter yet. Then there's the category of all right, so we did. He's just wrong. Oh, then there's a category. There's sort of a special category that you'll see President Trump do that you don't see other people do very often, which is he will sometimes just make up a fact because it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. And it works for his persuasion. So if, let me give you an example. So if, for example, he's persuading about the economy. And he says, yeah, I talked to this small business owner, and he said he's doubling his. He's going to double his production this year. And let's say he just made it up. There is no small business owner. He didn't double his production. Well, does it matter? No. You look at that and say, hey, I better double my production, too. And next thing you know, the economy is doing well because everybody's. Everybody's excited. All right, When can I lie to my partner? Yeah, lying to your loved one is a dicier proposition. So here's the deal. If you're President of the United States and you have a greater good in mind, the economy, national defense, lying isn't the same thing as when you do it to your spouse. Those are different things. Yes, tax revenue is up. I don't know what that means in terms of the deficit. Exactly. Like, I haven't seen that calculation yet. I sometimes wonder if Scott is trying to convince us or himself because he works so hard at justifying. Well, that's the beauty of it not being 2015. In 2015, that was a reasonable thing to say. Does Scott believe this, or is he just trying to rationalize his opinion? But in 2018, you can just objectively look at the data. Economy's up, so is lying. North Korea is doing great. Lying is way up. I mean, you can see for yourself that it didn't make a difference. You don't have to wonder anymore. So if you're asking yourself, am I trying too hard to turn myself into a pretzel to justify this thing, I see. I say to you, just look at it. Everybody's looking at exactly the same thing now. All these things are doing well, and the lies didn't matter. They just didn't matter. Except for the ones the media told, because they were. They were destructive lies, not constructive lies. Somebody saying, so lying is good. So much cheating and stealing. No, that's a stupid fucking thing to say. Sometimes I can't tell if people are, like, even serious with their criticisms. And when I say that, I mean, I actually can't tell. Literally. Literally, I can't tell. So I just saw that comment go by. It's like, oh, hold on a second. Hold on. I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. Let me read that criticism again. Oh, so you're saying lying is terrific in every case. Every case. You should lie to everybody, including your spouse. And I guess lying and murder are good, too. Right, Scott? Right. With your pretzel logic. Scene. All right. What's the difference between lying to get ahead and cheating to get ahead? I'll tell you what's the difference between lying to get ahead and cheating to get ahead. You're using an analogy for reasoning. Just don't do it. Don't make analogies. It's like saying, well, Scott, what really is the difference between lying to get ahead and driving your car into a tree? Driving a car into a tree is bad. So therefore, logically, it's like, stop with your analogies. You're not going to persuade anybody with those. All right. Don't lie, cheat or steal. I think that's a great code. So for those people who just never want to lie, cheat or steal, I think that is a very honorable and good code. Don't run for president because you don't have a chance. But in your private life, that's an excellent rule. Would be good for business. People would trust you. Good for your personal life. Yeah. I think in your personal life, probably honesty is absolutely the best policy. All right. I'm sure this will all be taken out of context. I'd give it about an hour before somebody says lying is good and makes that a headline with my picture on it. Probably this picture. But. All right, that's all for now, and I will talk to you later.