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If you thought Chuck Tingle’s version of the Clinton-Trump debate last night was surreal, well, take a look at what Dilbert creator and wannabe master persuader Scott Adams has to say about it.
Unlike some of Trump’s superfans, Adams is willing to admit that, yeah, Hillary kind of won the debate, at least by normal debate standards.
Clinton won on points. She had more command of the details and the cleaner answers. Trump did a lot of interrupting and he was defensive. If this were a college debate competition, Clinton would be declared the winner.
But Adams thinks this “victory on the 2D chess board” doesn’t really matter, because in his mind, apparently, Trump is playing some kind of 95th Dimensional mashup of Chess, Cribbage, and Hungry Hungry Hippos, or something. And in this game, Trump is the clear winner.
“Clinton won the debate last night,” Adams explains. “And while she was doing it, Trump won the election.”
IS YOUR MIND BLOWN YET
On the off chance that your mind is not, in fact, blown, let’s look at exactly why Adams thinks Trump is the real victor in this game of 95th Dimension Chesscribbippos.
As he sees it, Hillary needed to prove to skeptical Americans (or at least to Dr. Adams) that she’s healthy. And she failed.
Clinton looked (to my eyes) as if she was drugged, tired, sick, or generally unhealthy, even though she was mentally alert and spoke well. But her eyes were telling a different story. She had the look of someone whose doctors had engineered 90 minutes of alertness for her just for the event.
Huh. This is your takeaway from a debate in which Trump sniffled so much that people started to wonder if he wasn’t hopped up on the cocaine?
Some will say Clinton outperformed expectations because she didn’t cough, collapse, or die right on stage.
But that’s not enough for Adams, who raises the serious medical question: Is Hillary’s smile kind of weird?
Clinton’s smile seemed forced, artificial, and frankly creepy. … My neighbor Kristina hypothesized that Botox was making her smile look unnatural. Science tells us that when a person’s mouth smiles, but their eyes don’t match the smile, they look disingenuous if not creepy. Botox on your crow’s feet lines around your eyes can give that effect. But whatever the reason, something looked off to me.
CLEARLY UNQUALIFIED TO BE PRESIDENT
Trump, by contrast, was the perfect model of health and handsomeness! Well, not entirely.
To be fair, Trump’s physical appearance won’t win him any votes either. But his makeup looked better than I have seen it (no orange), his haircut was as good as it gets for him … .
But Trump didn’t WIN THE ELECTION LAST NIGHT just by being somewhat less orange than usual. He showed what a calm, cool, and collected customer he is.
Trump needed to solve exactly one problem: Look less scary. Trump needed to counter Clinton’s successful branding of him as having a bad temperament to the point of being dangerous to the country. Trump accomplished exactly that…by…losing the debate.
Wait, what?
Trump was defensive, and debated poorly at points, but he did not look crazy.
MASSIVE WIN
And pundits noticed that he intentionally avoided using his strongest attacks regarding Bill Clinton’s scandals.
You actually think he lost the debate … on purpose?
In other words, he showed control. He stayed in the presidential zone under pressure. And in so doing, he solved for his only remaining problem. He looked safer.
As I put it in a tweet to Adams last night (you’ll have to forgive my typo):
Yeah, Trump throwing a tantrum as the same exact moment he was attacking Hillary for having a bad "temperament" was super duper reassuring. https://t.co/RQnRLxd66C
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) September 27, 2016
Trump definitely looked presidential, not at all like a giant petulant baby who shouldn’t even be in the same city as the nuclear codes.
BLINKING SARCASM.GIF
The most memorable moments of the first debate: Clinton laughs off Trump’s temperament barb https://t.co/NW6ToTCDFS https://t.co/IR90V9KcLc
— POLITICO (@politico) September 27, 2016
Ladies and gentleman, Donald J. Trump! https://t.co/H9Uy8yzNYZ by @RiosJose559 via @c0nvey
— FLOR DO DESERTO (@FlorDeserto) September 27, 2016
https://twitter.com/peterwsinger/status/780607277938147328
https://twitter.com/CCW000/status/780897508310458368
Oh, wait, that last one isn’t Trump. Hard to tell sometimes.
And here’s the latest Pledge Drive capybara, with a friend:
Is there a word for the hybrid of a sealion and a concern troll?
@IP
Don’t feel bad about your pun, I haven’t followed the newa enough to have gotten it, regardless.
Hm! I said that off-the-cuff at the time, based on Cantor’s countable correspondence theorem, but it’s not really that square-on accurate, was more of a shower-thought. Shall we look at it closer?
We’ve basically got an infinite number of statements out there in statement space. Based on a language L which is composed of a finite grammar { G }, lexical rules, etc, you can construct a statement of indefinite length S = { g1, g2, g3 … gn }. For any such statement S, S’ can be constructed by adding gx at the head of S. So, that’s a statement about a statement, right?
What we’ve got here, though, is a pretty close situation to Cantor’s correspondence argument, which shows that the rational numbers are countable by showing that they map one-to-one with the natural numbers. I’ll explain it briefly for the audience!
(oh, wait, gotta put out some candles for msexceptiontotherule first)
Right, so a countable infinity is 0..n, the natural numbers. Countable’s perhaps not the right word for it, cause you can’t actually count them, but the idea is that in this infinity, you’re moving somewhere. An uncountable infinity would be the real numbers, where there’s an infinite amount of values between 0 and 1, or 0 and 0.1, and so on. Uncountable infinites don’t get you any traction, countables you can at least move from one to the next. Sort of.
So, the natural numbers are countable, as are the integers, which go from negative to positive infinity. But how? That’s twice the infinities, right?
True (sorta), but you can map the integers to the naturals. You can just group the negatives and positives together:
0, {1, -1}, {2, -2}, {3, -3} … {n, -n}
So, countable! But what about the fractions? Rationals. a/b. That’s gotta be uncountable, right? You start at 1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5… 1/n, and you’re never gonna get to 2/1, right?
Right?
Turns out that you can still turn them into a countable sequence. Imagine that you take your 1/n sequence, and you write it down. On the line beneath, you write the 2/n sequence, and below that 3/n. And so on.
With that grid, you can draw a line from one rational number to the next, mapping the whole mess to the natural numbers. It looks like this:
http://www.makemaths.com/uploads/1/0/0/4/10044815/5851164_orig.png
In the same way, can we take all possible statements S and map them to the natural numbers, making them countable? Not sure, but it sounds plausible to me. The question is whether Cantor’s Diagonal Argument applies, which is the way he showed that the Real numbers are not mappable to the Naturals.
I’m over-focusing on this, so I’l have to come back later. Work doesn’t pay me to do this stuff after all 😉 . Wouldn’t be surprised if the diagonal argument showed that all statements are aleph-one, though! Like I said, shower thought. Feel free to chip in and show me I’m wrong, though!
@SFHC, eech, how could I forget that one? Thank you.
Oooh, sexy maths!
http://dncache-mauganscorp.netdna-ssl.com/thumbseg/764/764612-bigthumbnail.jpg
My thought was as follows:
You can have a statement about a statement. That means you can have a statement about a statement about a statement, as far as you like.
That means that statements are in the Reals, which makes them Aleph-one.
I don’t have a proof for it though.
EJ –
Epistemology != Sophistry
OK – so what is nice about Donald Trump? He talks in really simple sentences so it’s easy to see when he’s wrong, and also when he is right.
Most of the stuff Hilary says isn’t even wrong. It doesn’t actually refer to anything.
So, Donald Trump comes across like your old uncle and you roll your eyes at some of the stuff he comes out with, but he’s alright. Also, I don’t think he’s stupid, but he is intellectually unsophisticated. And that is a good thing, because the vast majority of people don’t have the mind for sophisticated intellectualising, and it just ends up as a way of pulling the wool over your own eyes.
Also, as a scientist, I think we have to try stuff out and see what happens. Let’s try Trump and see what happens.If it’s bad we can vote for someone else next time.
@ roger
Yeah, but at least with the first atom bomb test there was a good chance the world wouldn’t be destroyed.
(Do you even think about what you’re writing. Rhetorical question, BTW.)
Oh, sweetie, I occasionally read space.com but that doesn’t make me an astrologist.
Oh, no, thank you, we’ve dealt with fascism in the USA before and that sucked. Japanese internment, Jim Crow Laws, sterilizing people against their will, having homosexuality be illegal and all that. We tried that experiment for decades, it’s not gonna be different this time.
Donald Trump comes across like they proverbial racist old uncle who creeps on the younger female cousins. I guess that’s “alright” if you’re not black and you’re not female. Y’know, if you’re sufficiently privileged that you don’t have to care about the quality of life experienced by women and racial minorities.
Of course, that makes you a raging douchebag, but who’s counting? The racist, creepster old uncle is super-fun if you’re not one of the groups he harasses, after all.
@Handsome Jack
This time shall be different!
No, he doesn’t. Most of the time he doesn’t talk in actual sentences at all, either because he isn’t capable of constructing a coherent utterance (this actually appears to be the case) or possibly in part because he’s doing it deliberately; it suits him very well to ramble incoherently precisely because an un-parseable word-salad can’t be as readily pinned down to an actual meaning and is therefore more difficult to prove clearly wrong – but it does allow him very effectively to create nebulous associations of ideas, and have them floating around so that they stick in people’s minds and give them all the right fuzzy feelings the Trumpeter wants them to have (fuzzy feelings such as those our current visiting Roger seems to find irresistible).
Fuzzy is also easier for him to backtrack on next day.
My money’s on a combination of both; he’s incoherent, and rather than try to be clearer he’s actually more than happy to lean as incoherent-but-blows-all-the-right-dog-whistles as he can.
You’re aware that Donald Trump was the one in black and Hillary Clinton was the one in red, right? Because I think you might have them mixed up.
Oh my god, I said astrologist when I meant astronomer. Embarrassingly enough, I always confuse the two. I used to do that with geometry and geology as well.
@Dalillama
I love Dr. Weird! I haven’t watched ATHF in forever. It’s changed its name, like, twice the last time I did.
With all respect to my much-beloved friend Jack, I am a scientist, and I would like to tag in here. (Even if the term “astrologist” makes me twitch.)
Roger, a responsible scientist doesn’t do something just because we don’t know what it would do. I don’t know what your field is, but in physics all our experiments are extremely carefully planned and controlled, and we tend to have a very clear idea of what we think will happen. If we just try wacky stuff without proper theoretical study first, we won’t be able to use the data. What you are proposing is the opposite of a good experiment.
Oh yes, if there’s anything Donald Trump is known for is his clear and cogent sentences. I mean, really? Really?
@EJ
I SAID I CONFUSED IT WITH ASTRONOMER!
Space.com does actual space news about planets and rockets and black holes and Stephen Hawkings thinking aliens will destroy us! I swear!
“How much gas is left in the tank? Let me light a match to look.”
No.
Don’t forget: his clear cogent sentences are sometimes filled with ambiguity! At least according to Roger.
(Well, this thread has been an interesting read. Roger hasn’t been as bad as some of the other trolls.)
@Roger
We should try new things
We’ll open the gates of Hell
See what would happen.
Dude my male relatives tend to live very, very short lives before I was born, what is this “uncle” of which you speak of?
I guess if you think of white guys as people, and everybody else as data, “see what happens” makes perfect sense. Nothing too bad will happen to the people, and if some data gets deported or loses access to important medical services or what have you, well now the people know more. They can make an informed decision next time.
@Jack:
You are forgiven, of course. I’m a Capricorn. Capricorns are forgiving people.
Others may forgive me, but…can I ever forgive myself?
So is geology like the mystical counterpart to geography then? That would explain a lot.
There’s a theory that people are able to reach self-forgiveness more easily if they feel they’ve done some sort of penance. This is how confession works.
If you feel like this would work, then for your sins against astronomy I require that you teach yourself the definition of a parsec as a unit of measurement, well enough that you can explain it to someone. Should you do this, I shall grant you absolution.
@Alan
No, that’s actually geomancy.
No, actually, he’s not. He’s a shitty, absolutely unqualified person whose only virtue is being born into money (which he’s done his level best to piss away), and his shittiness and lack of qualification comes across loud and clear in everything he says and does. His “system of thinking”, as you call it, comes straight out of Nazi Germany. (The reason he kept cheating on his wives and marrying his mistresses? He thinks superior humans can be bred like racehorses. I shit you not.)
He is like the triple-dog distillation of the worst aspects of everyone’s drunk racist boor of an uncle. Yet you would vote for him because a smiling lady in a red suit came across as too intelligent and unladylike for your liking?
Go straight to the corner, put on the dunce cap that is sitting on the stool there, and be seated upon said stool. Facing the wall, please.