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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
You see group think good
Professor say wrong things like
“Racism is bad.”
You mispelled Ugric.
Net says Ugric not Finnish.
/pol/ is not Google.
@OoglyBoggles
Confusion must be embraced,
For it never goes away,
And it makes much more sense,
Than the conclusions of my brain.
Roger has now spent what, 3 days trying to give himself an excuse to believe what Trump says even though he knows Trump lies? And he’s trying to use intellectual language while doing it while at the same arguing that Hillary Clinton is less trustworthy because she speaks in a more intellectual way than Trump. Is Roger trying to tell us that he’s full of shit and not to be trusted?
Seriously Roger, what the fuck are you even trying to accomplish? Why are you here? Who are you trying to convince?
OK, so, how is the argument for “your epistemological position is undermining your ethics” proven by any of the points you’re trying to make, Roger? It appears that at least some of those points lead to the conclusion that Roger’s not too worried about being an idiot, and in fact might be one. But you’re not interested in learning anything about what parts might be bad choices, because hopefully there aren’t so many idiots that ignoring rationality will cause problems. That strikes me as an irrational conclusion.
As does “trust your nose” to tell you whether something is harmful or not. Many bad things can kill you, while your nose says “can’t smell anything”.
If you’re just trying to be confusing because the conclusions of your brain make less sense than embracing confusion, I’m not sure you understand what you’re trying to say.
Well, we’ve already determined that your feelings justify supporting a despotic thin-skinned oligarch to the presidency of the United States, so I’m not surprised that your feelings would lead you to believe that.
Yes, exactly. We operate in an unsure world. As new information becomes available, we update. That’s humility.
You’re not updating. We’ve given you piles of information about Trump, and you didn’t update. You’ve declared your feelings to supersede any evidence that might require one.
I can certainly claim that, because your metaphor is bad.
If you’re faced with two similar choices, and there’s no good way to determine between them, then yeah – go with your instinct. That’s what it’s there for. It’ll help you make a choice when no good evidence is around.
But that’s not this situation. Evidence is stacked high against Trump. It’s not esoteric science nonsense or some airy theoretical proof that he’s terrible; the evidence is massive and it’s all very pedestrian.
Your reasoning is bad. Or, I should say, your reasoning is rationalizing. You’re minimizing the evidence against Trump so that your conclusion aligns with your desires. Don’t!
No, you wouldn’t question it, because you’re not curious about it. If you wanted to question it, you’d go do the research and find out instead of figuring out the conclusion that suits you best. Instead, you conjure up “what-if” thoughts to nullify positions you don’t like.
Go read what’s actually been examined on this topic. You say you know statistics, prove it. Either find some holes in the current consensus or admit that you have no basis for disagreement beyond your own subjective feelings.
No one proposed this. Adding a word for third-person references that is agnostic to gender is not the same as erasing gender from the language or from anywhere else. Dolt.
Again? Again, no one proposed this. What I described is the literal opposite of color-blindness. Reading comprehension, what is it.
Oh, honey, you sweet, sweet idiot. May you one day rectify your obtuseness soon.
http://66.media.tumblr.com/13a5b3905e4a3ccffe876074f46164dd/tumblr_nkm5mr82JT1u4sepmo3_r1_500.gif
(I think we need to enact critical thinking classes in elementary school–I need to figure out where my local school board is, sweet lord.)
I think Roger is mistaking “something stupid I did that harms only me” with “something stupid I did that harms the entire fucking world” and thinking that those are somehow equivalent degrees of stupid.
There is a big difference between going OOPS and dropping a bottle of ketchup versus going OOPS and dropping a bottle of sarin. That’s why ketchup is available in Kroger and sarin is not. Your stupidity is not in eating bad pizza, dipshit, but in imagining that all mistakes are equal if an equal amount of carelessness went into them.
@PoM:
Am I right in thinking that that boils down to the “I made a mistake but I had good intentions so it’s all fine” fallacy?
@Policy of Madness:
Look up ‘A Person Paper on Purity in Language’ by Douglas Hofstadter. He wrote an entire satirical article based on that, basically using white/black instead of man/woman; in other words, complaining about people trying to make generic words for chairperson when we already had the perfectly good chairwhite which obviously applied equally to both whites and blacks.
Of course, that paper is satire rather than any real attempt to act that way, and satire as it is actually supposed to be done as opposed to what people try to call satire when they get called out on their real beliefs.
Here’s one copy, at least: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
More like “I made a mistake but it doesn’t effect me so I’m ‘sorry’ I didn’t think it through or listen to anyone because the thing is I only really care if things effect me personally, fuck everyone else” fallacy.
@EJ
Related. It’s the concept that you need to take greater care in proportion with the degree of harm created when you fuck up. You move more carefully when you’re carrying a Ming dynasty vase or a bottle of sarin than when you’re carrying ketchup, because the consequences of dropping the former are far greater than dropping the latter.
It just boggles me that anyone would compare voting for Trump to eating possibly-bad pizza. One gives you indigestion, and the other possibly blows up the world. ????????????????????????????????
@Nick G
… doi! *smacks forehead* Makes perfect sense as soon as you said that. Thanks!
The word “men” could traditionally refer to a group of people of either sex, but that usage is awkward. What if you have a group that’s mostly women with some men? I’m fine with treating both “he/him/his” and “she/her/hers” as possibly gender neutral.
Thanks Jack, PoM.
@Jenora Feuer, oh my gosh, thank you. That essay was awesome.
EDIT – and written by the author of GEB, too! I thought I recognized the tone! Fantastic!
Did Roger just admit in his reply to me that he does not understand reality and whatever conclusion he tries to parse from reality makes even less sense to him?
Did he just admit in Four Verse that he has no idea what he’s talking about?
Also as a side note, Roger you lost many points. Your quatrain doesn’t stick to a ABAB rhyme scheme both in lettering and pronunciation. -aced and “ence” aren’t end rhymes. You can’t even choose between 6,7 and 8 syllables per line for Aesop’s sake. Don’t you give me that “it’s freeverse I done it hastily.” You had all the hours to think up and revise a response.
@Scildfreja The companion essay to the ‘person paper’ is ‘The Slippery Slope of Sexism,’ which is pretty enlightening. I think it’s in The Mind’s I (have never been able to find it online, unfortunately).
The Mind’s I is here, but that essay isn’t in it unfortunately. Will keep looking
Hahaha I found it!
http://leeclarke.com/courses/intro/readings/Hofstadter_Changes_in_Default-_Words_and_Images.pdf
This answers the question why ‘he’ can’t ever be gender neutral.
Well I kind of found it. The essay I remember had examples from Chinese.
The ‘Person Paper’ isn’t collected in The Mind’s I, but it is collected in Metamagical Themas, which is the collection of columns Hofstadter did for Scientific American. (Metamagical Themas being an anagram of Mathematical Games, the Martin Gardner column that previous ran in that slot.)
And yes, it is a good piece. The follow-up in Metamagical Themas also goes into some of the discovery process that led to that, including several of the translation issues that came up for Godel, Escher, and Back.
Lovely, guest, thank you. That sort of semantic-weighting argument is excellent and so true, and very well presented. The little diagrams made me grin :3
Here is more of it in the actual book it’s in (Metamagical Themas, not The Mind’s I):
https://ia801007.us.archive.org/22/items/MetamagicalThemas/Metamagical%20Themas,%20Hofstadter.pdf
But I swear the essay I remember ended with a dumb pun in Chinese. I wonder if my memory is somehow playing tricks on me.
Oh there it is, on page 149.
Well, guest gave better references than I did. (And how did I miss Bach/Back multiple times while checking it over?)
My uncle gave me a copy of GEB:EGB for my birthday back when it first came out. I need to go re-read it.