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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:
Roger, are you even trying at this point?
/delurks
So when I was learning second languages (first Russian but I already forgot that, then German, then English) gendered words even pronouns baffled me.
Then we hit the Enlightenment in history class and I was even more baffled to learn that some intellectual those days tried to import those into Hungarian (with putting “-né” after previously ungendered words; first of all “-né” means Mrs.). It didn’t stick.
Not that the “male as default” never existed in this language, for example our word for human (“ember”) did have the secondary meaning of male human being, but using it that way is considered seriously archaic (or uneducated country bumpkin… classism ho!) by now as “férfi” replaced it in that meaning almost completely.
/lurks back
But ‘they’ already exists. Also, in a language with pronoun gender, there can’t be genderless pronouns. Gender neutral (neuter) is not the same as genderless. Minor semantic quibble
@Malitia
*waves*
It’s funny how people don’t usually make this argument with respect to race. I don’t hear people (not even white nationalists) say that distinguishing between white people and black people is just too hard, so we need to make “white” a race-neutral word that refers to all races inclusively. Somehow having a separate race-agnostic word that refers to all persons of all races isn’t as big of a hassle as having a separate gender-agnostic word that refers to all persons of all genders.
Weird how that works.
Say Roger, I have a question for you. Finnish is a Germanic language. True or false?
WWTH:
*gets the popcorn*
Y’want butter-flavored, creme fraiche & garlic or plain?
@Axecalibur
*waves*
Welcome back, @Prophet309 and @Malitia!
@wwth,
http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/955/225/70f.gif
@Roger,
Seriously? You’re going with “I have nothing to refute all of these awful things about Trump, but he makes me feel good so I’m gonna vote for him anyways?” This is how dictators come to power through democratic systems. As they say on the internets, reals not feels.
I mean, I know that it’s gonna slide off of you like water off of an oil-soaked rag, but you do know that peoples ‘gut instincts’ for this stuff are terrible, right? Human beings are loaded to the brim with biases – you, me, everyone. Our instincts suck as soon as you get out of the surviving-for-another-day-in-the-wilderness arena and into the modern world. We don’t even have an intuition for geometric growth, which is probably the single most important thing to understand about living in a civilization.
I can imagine the reply now, too. “We all have those biases, so we’re both biased, so why are you using evidence at all, we’re both going off of gut instinct.” Which has an inkling of sense to it. However, we don’t all have the same amount of bias, and some people have developed tools to reduce and moderate our biases. One of the biggest ones is humility – the ability to say “I’m wrong” when faced with evidence. Something you seem to be lacking, given the metric tonne of evidence you’re ignoring in favour of what feels right.
(And before you reply to that with accusing me or others here of not having the humility to admit that we were wrong – I admit that I was wrong about Hillary, too. I used to think that Jill Stein would be a better candidate than her, once Bernie was out of the race. Now I can see that that would be a train wreck. I’ve got a history of changing my mind, publicly.)
Another good tool for defeating bias is to become familiar with how statistics works, so that you can a) recognize when a poll or statistic is misleading, and b) recognize the scope and impact of any given statistic. Instead of being led around by the nose by screamy-man-in-radio-booth or grease-dipped-suited-news-desk-man, you can just look at the raw statistics and understand what they say.
(Oh, wait, you’re all argle-bargle-intelligencia-disconnected-from-reality, right? No common sense in them there ivory towers! And then you have the gall to quote Euler, as if the philosophers you hold dear weren’t part of the same ‘ivory tower’. You leave my man Euler out of this!)
There’s a bajillion reasons for you to abandon Trump as if he were about to set your hair on fire. There are almost none for supporting him. Responsible adults sometimes have to take roads that don’t make them feel good, when the evidence points in that direction.
‘our word for human (“ember”)’
OK, that is something I did not know when I saw this play:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embers_(novel)
‘I admit that I was wrong about Hillary, too. I used to think that Jill Stein would be a better candidate than her, once Bernie was out of the race.’
Yeah, me too–I was one of those people manipulated into thinking she was ‘untrustworthy’, until I read more about her and why I would be likely to think that. Also, I realised that Jill Stein might be better off achieving other offices first (Wikipedia tells me she actually has had a go a few times).
@Guest
As thee original title references “candles burning down” the translator probably didn’t think of the Hungarian word ^^; Also the Hungarian plural suffix isn’t “-s” but “-k” (so the plural of “ember” would be “emberek” in that case).
Welcome, Malita and Prophet309!
I was going to say some stuff but then PoM was absolutely incredible and said loads of really, really smart things, so instead I’m going to just sit here and be happy and ponder what she said.
You’re just full of bad science, aintcha?
Please don’t?
I agree about Roger and basically everything else, but…don’t judge my whole profession like that? We’re not actually less useful than you guys, that’s just what they like to say when they’re trying to get rid of us. So, please? It doesn’t help us if we bash each other?
@Littlelurker
It’s a very popular tactic among people who can’t back up their position with facts: start spewing poorly understood (and often just plain incorrect) philosophy to try to cover for that and/or call into question the existence of facts and evidence.
Sorry LittleLurker – I’m a scientist too! I wasn’t saying that we’re all disconnected from reality in our ivory towers, I was accusing him of saying it. Scientists, philosophers, all of the “ivory tower” professions get accused of being disconnected all the time, and it’s nothing more than a slur directed at us to discredit what we’re saying. You can’t do good science or philosophy without being deeply connected to the world around you.
I guess the sarcasm wasn’t very clear! Mea culpa, and apologies <3
@Scildfreja
Alright, thanks. 🙂
@Malitia 🙂 thanks for the explanation. But ’ember’ is an odd word anyway–not particularly common in English, and not the word you’d use to describe a candle burning down. So I do wonder if there’s at least some kind of bilingual resonance going on, who knows.
“However, we don’t all have the same amount of bias, and some people have developed tools to reduce and moderate our biases. One of the biggest ones is humility – the ability to say “I’m wrong” when faced with evidence. Something you seem to be lacking, given the metric tonne of evidence you’re ignoring in favour of what feels right.”
OK – let me give you a counter argument. There might be people who aren’t particularly articulate, or whose views aren’t particularly fashionable, who nevertheless have some insight and knowledge. It’s the idea of distributed knowledge, right? The wisdom of crowds.
So maybe professor Brainiac has some incredible theory for xyz. Fine. But Prof. Brainiac is so much more articulate than me that he could literally be telling me anything and it would sound convincing.
Unless you are the most intelligent person in a world, there has to be a limit to how convincing you will find arguments.
And in fact, if we all just nodded along and agreed with professor B. you’re in equal danger of heading somewhere terrible. The wisdom of crowds only works where the crowds are made up of independent individuals. We should welcome diversity of opinion, no matter what its basis.
And, in some cases you won’t be able to articulate exactly why you are doing what you are doing, or why you think it is right. That doesn’t mean it is wrong, any more than it means it is necessarily right just because you feel it.
That to me is humility. Acknowledging that I might be wrong (I might be wrong.) It’s not agreeing with things that I feel to be wrong just because some guy quoted the x to the power of z’s at me.
Anyway, I do understand how statistics work.
Personally, I’d love to try a language with no gender in it. Sounds very interesting. And, as for color-blindness – again, sounds great to me. I’m sure this is a very unfashionable and deplorable opinion, but not a big fan of identity politics.
Gross gross gross gross gross
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/02/donald-trump-s-douchebaggiest-interview-ever-any-girl-you-have-i-can-take-from-you.html
Especially that bit about Paris Hilton. And… well, everything.
Also Roger, WWTH asked a question, want to take a stab at it.
*popcorn*
http://66.media.tumblr.com/48bc37728d8ed1747181e37cb27f86a7/tumblr_nw71nhDhFe1u4sepmo2_r1_500.gif
http://67.media.tumblr.com/c5bb91e92b939864a0329b05aec68bef/tumblr_inline_o83qfayxer1tfzekw_1280.png
Of course you aren’t.
Finnish is a Urgic language.
Literally none of that made any sense. In order:
That’s not how distributed knowledge works, everything involving Brainiac is nonsense, ‘diversity of opinion’ only applies to opinions, can’t and shouldn’t aren’t the same thing, now you’re just saying letters, fuckin doubt it, a language without gender is an incomplete language, and you are into identity politics (‘ordinary people’)
ETA: It’s Ugric not Urgic. And Finnish isn’t Ugric. Jackass
@Roger,
I’m not really sure what your example was intending to show – that people who are articulate are dangerous, because they might be misleading you? Professor B may or may not be right, but he’s so gosh-darn well-spoken that people believe him anyways? So we shouldn’t necessarily believe him?
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/4/48/Fluttershy_stops_her_Stare_S4E07.png
Okay, two things.
First thing – you’re right – Professor B’s ideas shouldn’t be judged based on his argument. They should be judged based on the evidence. This is how science works! It’s why we have such a tedious and annoyingly formal method of publishing our ideas (white papers, journals, etc). We don’t use all of the silly, archaic structures because we’re snooty-snoots who’re all stuck up – we use them in order to distance the personalities from the ideas. That’s how scientific consensus is derived, slowly and painfully. When you see a scientist making an impassioned plea for something – say, global warming for example – they’re giving voice to something that’s been put through a wringer of scrutiny to ensure that what you’re saying might happen, doesn’t.
(It’s also notable that anyone who’s actually curious about the claims can always go and look up the original sources themselves. There are educational gateways, which I agree are deplorable, but that’s a government and societal thing, not a science thing)
Second thing. Your argument against Professor B,
is literally what we’re saying your relation to Trump is – he’s convinced you, despite the pile of odious garbage his argument is. You don’t care about that, because you’re convinced. Trump is your Professor B. He makes the sounds you like, and has convinced you.
It’s false humility to say “I could be wrong” and then to go ahead with the thing anyways. Humility which doesn’t affect what actions you take isn’t worth anything. Humility is saying “despite my feelings, I’m probably wrong on this thing, so I will do the thing that seems to be right instead.” Real humility inspires caution and changes behaviours. Otherwise it’s just a show, a virtue-signal to demonstrate how ‘good’ you are, and to ward off an appearance of arrogance.
Finally, a brief word on the “color blindness” thing. I’m sure others here will have or are going to pull that apart at the seams, but I’m going to get in a quick comment on it.
Humans can’t help but “see” race. It’s wired into how our brains work, it’s instinctual. Saying “I’m colourblind to race” is just a buzzword to brush aside the real problems of confronting racism in their own lives and in society at large. If you aren’t applying occasional conscious pressure to confront racism in yourself, then you’re being racist. Being “colourblind” is just being blind to the problems of others.
(I love it when their arguments eat their own tail like that. Love-love-love it.)
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
I feel like your epistemological position is undermining your ethics.
“It’s false humility to say “I could be wrong” and then to go ahead with the thing anyways. Humility which doesn’t affect what actions you take isn’t worth anything. ”
I feel like you have a kind of absolutist take on knowledge and action – we have to act under conditions of uncertainty. As new information becomes available we should update our position and possibly change our actions.
It’s like, do I want to eat the old pizza that I found behind the heater, or the yoghurt that’s been out for a couple of weeks. Well, I had a sniff of them, and I found the pizza to be slightly less funky, so I’m going with that.
Now, you guys are telling me – don’t eat that it’s really bad! These professors did xyz experiments on pizzas and found blah blah blah… etc.
Well, that’s interesting information and I’ll bare it in mind, but for the time being I’m going to trust my nose, have a nibble of the pizza, and if I’m violently sick, I won’t eat any more of it.
(In fact the situation is even better than that, because even if I’m a complete idiot, hopefully the majority of people aren’t. So, I don’t have to worry too much about being stupid.)
But what you’re trying to say, is that me trusting my nose is some kind of error of rationality. I don’t see how you can claim that.
I would question whether our view of race is inherent rather than social. I mean, sure, we might notice a different appearance, but what that means is surely determined by the culture we live in.