Scott Adams' Blog

Terror is what the bad guys want. If we label the outcome as terror, we give them their win, and we remind the public to stay scared.

Calling a terrorist a coward might sound like a powerful insult, but it isn’t persuasive. No terrorist views sacrificing his life for his cause as cowardly. The word bounces right off. To make an impact, you have to use a word that has at least a grain of truth from your subject’s perspective. If your words can’t get a foothold, they are not persuasive.

President Trump -- who is better at persuasion than almost anyone -- labels these attackers “losers.” That’s a step in the right direction. And it also features Trump’s famous engineering for future confirmation bias. Every time ISIS loses territory they are reminded they are losers. That sinks in over time. People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state. President Trump correctly persuades to the trend, so events support the label of loser. Neither “terrorist” nor “coward” persuades to the trend.

I think we can do better. 

When a would-be terrorist considers his plans, he is probably 100% convinced that paradise awaits him, virgins and all. Our best counter-persuasion would involve injecting some doubt in that belief. Eternity is a long time to spend in Hell, so you might not want to take a five-percent chance of ending up there. A rational loser might risk a five-percent chance of prison, or even a five-percent chance of dying.  But a five-percent chance of burning in Hell for eternity is a scarier proposition.

It helps (a lot) to be visual in your persuasion because we are visual creatures. If the only visuals from an attack are the aftermath and the grieving, that is probably inspiring to terrorists. So consider this visual instead.

Instead of featuring a Christian leader calling the perpetrator a terrorist (which sounds like a form of success) and a coward (which bounces right off them as untrue), why not have one of the first voices after an attack of this sort a moderate cleric or Islamic scholar who brands the loser as both gullible and doomed to Hell. Add some scary images, and now you’ve injected some doubt. Remember, you don’t need much doubt. Five percent doubt might be enough when you’re talking about eternity in Hell.

With any sort of persuasion you need to test multiple approaches. I won’t claim the approach I described is the best. I only claim it makes sense from a persuasion perspective whereas our current approach is shooting blanks.

I also note that the perpetrator in the NYC attack had a paint gun instead of a real gun, in a country where obtaining real guns is easy. We are not talking about a competent player here. It might help to describe him as incompetent as well as gullible. This framing also highlights the trend from spectacular attacks beginning with 9/11 to the smaller (yet tragic) attacks we are more likely to see now. That framing reinforces the trend of their losing ways. The persuasion mistake would be to harp on how this sort of attack just migrated from Europe to the United States, suggesting progress for the bad guys.

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One small example is that startups are raising funds by creating and selling their own digital “tokens” or “coins,” using blockchain technology, that serve as the payment mechanisms within their products. The tokens have an advantage over regular money in part because you can program simple rules for them using distributed apps, or dAPPS, to add function to your product. And blockchain brings its own set of advantages I’ll mention below.

In the case of WhenHub, a dAPP will trigger an automatic payment when certain conditions are met. The effect is to eliminate billing and invoicing efforts for micro-contracts while creating a distributed record of each transaction that is impervious to manipulation. 

                                       View Full-size Image

My example doesn’t get at the full power of blockchain. It’s just one of the many things it can do. 

The reason people buy these digital tokens from startups is that they hope the value will rise as the startup adds customers. The tokens are artificially limited in quantity, so the value of each token increases with demand. Customers of the startup won’t notice the rise in token value because prices within the product are pegged to nominal “real money” value. In other words, if one token is worth a dollar today, but worth ten dollars tomorrow, the startup auto-adjusts the price within the product to ten-percent of a token. The customer always pays the same “real money” price even as token values rise. 

Tokens can easily be exchanged for Bitcoins or cash on websites that do that sort of thing. See Bitcoin Exchanges.

The process of creating digital tokens to raise funds is called an ICO (initial coin offering) when you do it the wild-west unregulated way. If you lawyer-up in advance, jumping through lots of (expensive) hoops to minimize future regulatory risks, your lawyers will tell you to call it a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT). A SAFT is a contract with the startup to issue you tokens if and when it is able to launch a network in which the token has utility value. That’s what WhenHub is announcing today. 

To be clear, ICOs and SAFTs are not investments, nor do they give the buyer equity in the startup. But they do provide an easy way -- compared to angel investing -- to share in whatever success the startup experiences. With SAFTs and ICOs the startup describes its plans in a white paper so any potential token buyers can evaluate the risks. WhenHub already has several products on the market, with more coming soon, but we describe in our white paper a proposed new product that is based on our existing scheduling platform and takes advantage of blockchain. The proposed product (WhenHub Interface) is the one that will use digital tokens.

If you are new to this field, I hope I just gave you a toe-hold for understanding it. And I would be delighted if you share this post with friends. 

Our tokens are only available in Australia, Canada, European Economic Area, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Russian Federation, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States (excluding New York State). If you are in the United States, you need to be an Accredited Investor (meaning kinda rich) to participate. Outside the United States, regulatory restrictions are lower.

Our Pre-sale is now in progress and our Public Sale starts on Nov. 10, 2017. During the Pre-sale, the minimum purchase amount is $50,000 and participants get an Early Bird bonus of 30%. For the Public Sale the minimum amount is $250, and the the Early Bird discount starts at 20% and decreases to none in two weeks.

Here’s the executive summary from our white paper. A link to the full paper is at the end. 

--- Executive Summary ---

WhenHub proposes to build a mobile app for connecting consumers to experts of all kinds via two-way video streams, text, audio, or in person. The app will be part of a larger service ecosystem called the WhenHub Interface Network (WIN) (Patent Pending). 

The service will use dAPPS (distributed apps) running on the Ethereum blockchain to create secure micro-contracts – that can be as short as 15 minutes – as well as to provide frictionless billing and payment service. At the end of each micro-contract, payment in the form of WHEN Tokens will be automatically transferred to the expert. No paperwork or billing is involved. 

Users buy WHEN Tokens using a credit card or with Bitcoins at an online exchange via the WhenHub Interface app. The tokens are used within the app to pay experts for their time. 

For privacy, your phone number and address are not shared with experts. 

Our partners will provide verification services on participating experts to give consumers confidence. 

No international billing and currency issues when WHEN Tokens are involved. 

Pricing for experts can be fixed or auction-based. 

In the gig economy, think of this product as a “long tail” market for expert advice. Experts of all kinds can display their availability whenever they like, for as short a window as 15 minutes. 

The WhenHub Interface app will use the existing commercial WhenHub API for scheduling and geofencing features. 

WhenSense is our proposed technology for allowing third-party sites to host ads about our participating experts’ availability and share in the income from completed contracts. Site owners paste our HTML code into their site to participate. 

WHEN Tokens are not an investment vehicle, but because they will be artificially limited in quantity, their value is expected to fluctuate based on customer demand for the WhenHub Interface app. 

But within minutes the publication pivoted to this headline:

Now the headline no longer says “crooked,” as in “Crooked Hillary.”

And that’s how you know President Trump is in your head.

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Step 3: Buy a pant suit wherever-the-hell Hillary Clinton shops.

Step 4: Smile like you just smoked a doobie and executed a close relative.

Step 5: Nailed it!

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The problem, as I see it, is psychology more than weaponry. As long as North Korea sees the United States as a military threat, expect North Korea to keep upgrading their nuclear arsenal.

So what would it take to “reframe” the situation from two mortal enemies on the brink of war to something less dangerous? 

Perhaps we should look at the same reframing strategy President Trump is using to apparent success with ISIS. The president reframed our involvement from temporary to permanent. Then he added a momentum change courtesy of General Mattis. Under President Obama, ISIS probably saw the U.S. military involvement as a temporary problem because that’s exactly how it was framed. Now they see it as permanent . . . and they observe themselves losing. The “permanent loser” frame is a different framing than before, and it might be the reason we see more surrenders. (Or we might be seeing more alleged surrenders because exaggerated reports of that type would be good persuasion too.)

At the moment, North Korea sees the economic sanctions as temporary. They also see our threats as temporary until they have full nuclear deterrent. The temporary frame is a losing frame for the United States.

On top of the temporary frame, things look personal between the U.S. and North Korea. Dignity is in the game. Ego is in the game. Those things need to be reframed out of the situation to get any kind of solution.

So consider the following reframe. Imagine depersonalizing the North Korean situation by pushing for a United Nations rule that any not-yet-fully-nuclear country building nukes and ICBMS is permanently barred from any form of global commerce. Ever. Period. And it’s not personal to North Korea. It’s just the new rule.

It’s the “ever” part, along with depersonalizing things to a generic rule that creates the new frame. In this frame, there is no winning to be had for North Korea. They can build their nukes, but only at the expense of permanent and total economic collapse, courtesy of the the rest of the world as expressed by the United Nations. 

I don’t think total economic ruin of North Korea was ever a realistic strategy option until recently. But China seems to be onboard. And President Trump is unlikely to take his boot off Little Rocket Man’s tiny wallet anytime soon. I can’t imagine President Trump backing off until he gets what he wants. But we haven’t framed it as permanent. And we could, with the help of the United Nations.

Let’s call this the “I’ll just take my ball and go home” strategy. And it works best if we reduce military presence to something more obviously defensive. In this model, it’s not personal. It’s just a rule the UN agreed on.

There is great persuasive power in saying something is a general rule as opposed to a specific action against one player. It takes ego out of the game and it has a non-negotiable feel from the start.

Note: My main topic for this blog lately is persuasion. I’m not an expert on North Korea or international affairs. I don’t expect anyone to take my noodling on this topic today too seriously. If you learned something about persuasion by reading this far, that’s all I’m hoping to achieve here.

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During the 2016 campaign, my haters mocked me mercilessly on Twitter for predicting that a candidate with insanely low approval ratings could ever get elected president of the United States. I said it wouldn’t be the problem people thought it would be. And it wasn’t. Part of the reason is that Hillary Clinton also had low ratings. But I also suspected there were so-called shy Trump supporters who held private opinions that were different from what the pollsters could suss out.

Now we see a similar situation shaping up. I don’t know whether or not President Trump will seek a second term. But if he ran for reelection today, I expect he would win by a larger margin than the first time, no matter who ran against him. To put it another way, approval ratings aren’t as predictive as you would expect. But consumer confidence is probably close to 100% predictive. Ask Bill Clinton. He’ll tell you It’s the economy, stupid.

Prior to President Trump’s inauguration day I predicted we’d see this story arc play out in the media:

Spring 2017: “Trump is Hitler!”

Summer 2017: “Okay, Trump isn’t Hitler. But he’s incompetent!”

End of year 2017: “Crap. He’s effective. But we don’t like it.”

Consumer confidence is peaking while the president’s approval rating is in the cellar. That means people expect him to be effective on the big stuff. But they don’t like him because of the other stuff.

Right on schedule.

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The Vegas gunman used bump stocks on semi-automatic rifles. Those were totally legal. They are also a poor choice of weapons, or so I am told by gun experts. In fact, they are so inaccurate at the distance involved in the Vegas incident that professional snipers say Paddock could have done more damage with a single-shot weapon and some aiming. 

The gun experts I talked to (informally) also agree that the shooter would have killed more than a hundred additional people had he used a fully-automatic weapon. You can legally buy an automatic weapon that was made prior to 1986, for about $15-20K. The shooter was a millionaire, and he seemed to know a lot about guns. He would have known a fully-automatic rifle is designed to not jam the way his bump stock rifles did. He would have known they fire more bullets per second and more accurately. The death toll would have been much higher had the Vegas gunman used the right weapon.

He knew a fully automatic rifle would be more lethal than a bump stock rifle.

He was rich enough to afford the fully automatic weapon.

He had months to plan and prepare.

He was smart.

And yet he didn’t use a fully-automatic weapon in the attack.

The probable reason is that a fully-automatic weapon is harder to obtain and it raises some flags. I believe even private transactions with those weapons require some government paperwork. 

I’m speculating, of course, but it seems to me that the ban on fully-automatic weapons did, over time, create enough friction for the Vegas gunman that he decided to settle for relatively worse weapons.

Ask a gun expert how many more people would be dead if automatic weapons were as easy to procure as bump stocks. My estimate of a hundred extra dead in Vegas is probably low. 

Gun control apparently worked in this case, at least to an important degree. The tragedy could have been far bigger. A little bit of friction for obtaining a fully automatic weapon probably saved lives. We can’t know for sure what was in the mind of a madman, but we do know that any kind of friction causes some people to change plans. That’s probably what happened here. 

My hypothesis is that crazy people will use whatever weapon is the most effective killing device they can obtain at acceptable cost (friction). Gun laws introduce friction. They are not intended to stop every type of crime or to deter every type of criminal. But it looks like they helped a bit in Vegas. Had there been no friction to procuring fully automatic weapons, it is likely the Vegas gunman would have used them. Why wouldn’t he?

If you want to read my argument for why I am pro-gun, see the end of this prior post.

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Many pro-gun people in the debate seem to be confused about the purpose of laws in general. Laws are not designed to eliminate crime. Laws are designed to reduce crime. The most motivated criminals will always find a way, and law-abiding citizens will avoid causing trouble in the first place. Laws are only for the people in the middle who might -- under certain situations -- commit a crime. Any friction you introduce to that crowd has a statistical chance of making a difference. 

Humans are lazy and stupid, on average. If you make something 20% harder to do, a lot of humans will pass. It doesn’t matter what topic you are discussing; if you introduce friction, fewer people do it. With that in mind, let’s look at the least-rational gun control arguments I am seeing lately.

Chicago Example

Gun advocates like to point out that Chicago has strict gun control laws yet high murder rates. This is an irrational argument. The only valid comparison would be Chicago with gun laws in 2017 versus Chicago without gun laws in 2017. Any comparison to other cities, or to other time frames, is pure nonsense. Nothing is a rational comparison to Chicago. There is only one Chicago. And because Chicagoans can easily buy guns from nearby places, the gun ban is probably useless in that case.

Gun opponents use a similarly irrational argument. For example, anti-gun folks might point out that London bans guns and has fewer gun crimes. That’s as irrational as the Chicago argument. There is only one London in 2017. You can’t compare it to anything.

In general, any argument that says, “Look at that one city” is irrational, anecdotal thinking. It has no place in policy decisions.

Criminals Will Break Gun Laws Anyway

As I explained up front, laws are not designed to stop the most motivated criminals. We’ve never seen a law in any realm that stopped all crime. At best, laws discourage the people on the margin. Gun control is no different. The objective is to add some friction and reduce the risk that someone angry enough to pick up an AR doesn’t also have a bump stock in the house.

The Vegas gunman had over 40 guns yet he used bump stocks on his weapons instead of buying illegal fully-automatic weapons in the first place. He also did not purchase grenade launchers, which would have been ideal for his purposes. The reason in both cases is that there was more friction for acquiring the illegal weapons. It wasn’t impossible. It was just harder.

You can Make a Bump Stock on a 3D Printer

No, I can’t. I don’t own a 3D printer. Neither do most criminals. What you mean is that the few people who own 3D printers and have the skill to use them can print bump stocks. Chances are, you’re not one of those people. Again, laws are not designed to stop the most motivated super-criminals. They have lots of ways to get weapons. A 3D printer might be an ideal solution for a few super-criminals. But it won’t have much impact for a number of years on the average person who flips out and wants to start shooting today.

Rubber Bands and other Bump Stock Workarounds

Yes, I know you saw on Youtube a video in which someone rigged an AR with a rubber band on the trigger, or some other clever device that increased the firing speed. I’m no weapons engineer, but I’m fairly certain the rubber band method is less reliable than the bump stock method. And the other workarounds have either more friction (it takes some talent and tools to make anything of that nature) or they are less reliable. I remind you that the goal is not to stop all crime; we’re just trying to add friction to discourage the lazy and less-resourceful types, of which there are many. And perhaps we can add some unreliability to their choice of weapons.

Yes, clever people can create bump stock workarounds that function well enough for making a Youtube video. But most people are not clever, and not terribly resourceful, and they probably haven’t personally tested the rubber band trick. Even a dumb mass murderer wants more reliability than a rubber band suggests. Personally, if I flipped out and decided to kill everyone in my workplace, and I had never tested the rubber band trick, I wouldn’t even consider using it for a real crime, no matter how cool it looked on Youtube.

That’s friction.

Hardly Anyone Has Ever Been Killed by Bump Stock Guns

True. Even if you include the Vegas tragedy, the total percentage of people killed by bump stock-modified guns is tiny. But many people apparently don’t realize that laws are not designed to change the past. Laws are forward-looking devices. And after the Vegas tragedy, 100% of adults have been trained by news organizations on how to procure and use a bump stock. We even know we need multiple rifles because they jam. Compared to last week, the friction for modifying a semi-automatic to an automatic just went from "some” to non-existent. The idea of passing a law banning bump stocks is to add friction to reduce future crimes, not to change the past.

Keep in mind that North Korea might nuke us in the future even though they have no record of nuking us in the past. Policies and laws are not designed to address past risks, only future risks. And our future risk from bump stocks just went through the roof because they are now universally known and also top of mind.

And before you say you already knew how to get a bump stock, just imagine me laughing at you for saying it. I know you already knew how to do that. You are not representative of the entire population of potential killers. No one is suggesting passing laws directed at you personally.

A Guy in Japan Once Killed 30 People With a Knife

The argument here is that motivated killers will find a way to do damage with or without a gun. But does anyone think the guy in Japan killed more people with a knife than he could have with an armory of automatic weapons? And I remind you (again and again) that laws are not designed to stop the most motivated criminals, such as the Japanese stabber. Laws are designed to add friction to the less-clever and less-motivated.

A week ago, a potential killer with low skills and motivation might not figure out how to turn an AR into an automatic rifle. Today -- thanks to the news -- almost every adult knows how to do it. The existing friction disappeared. You would need to make bump stocks illegal to reintroduce some friction.

Slippery Slope

Gun owners sometimes say banning any weapon leads to banning all of them. In general, the slippery slope argument is nonsense no matter what topic you are discussing. Things do lead to other things, but every decision stands on its own, and should. Banning personal use of grenade launchers did not lead to confiscation of hunting knives, and probably never will. The slippery slope idea inspires fear in gun lovers -- because creeping regulations feel like a risk -- but in the real world, each decision stands alone. The slippery slope is an irrational fear, not a reasonable factor in policy-making.

The President Can’t Ban Gun Stocks by Executive Order

Sure he can, but it might not be legal. Does that matter?

You think it matters, but it doesn’t. When the Commander-in-Chief makes a thoughtful military decision, and the decision is clearly in the interest of temporarily plugging a security hole during a time of war (with ISIS), that’s defensible no matter what the Constitution says. And you want it that way.

The Constitution grants the Commander-in-Chief a lot of power to make quick decisions on homeland security because speed often matters in such things. As time allows, Congress can do its work. Banning bump stocks until Congress can look into it would be pure Commander-in-Chiefing. It would be public and temporary. Would the Supreme Court overturn the illegal ban? Maybe, but not right away. Remember that the Constitution gives real power to We the People. As long as We the People see our Commander-in-Chief acting responsibly, we’re going to give him a pass, especially for something temporary until Congress gets going.

I acknowledge that the President has no legal authority to ban the sale of legal items. But he could do it anyway. And We the People would largely back him on it so long as it was temporary and clearly intended to give Congress time to address the question.

That’s how Thomas Jefferson would have played it. But he might have looked for a technical way to make his executive order seem legal. I’m sure such an argument exists because lawyers.

Update: The Vegas Killer Would Have Been MORE Deadly Without Bump Stocks

The argument here is that bump stocks make the weapon harder to aim, therefore less lethal. That probably makes sense in some instances, such as a sniper situation. It does not make sense when spraying a dense crowd from above, at long distance. In that case, speed beats accuracy every time. 

In summary, I have genuine respect for both sides of the gun control debate. But the arguments I listed above should not be part of the conversation if we are trying to be rational about it.

Update: Readers asked me to describe the best argument in favor of the 2nd amendment. So I will.

Gun ownership protects citizens against the risk of a tyrant trying to take over. 

At this point in the reading of this blog, half of you are laughing out loud because you imagine the massive U.S. military squaring off against some rag-tag militia group with rubber bands on their AR triggers. Not exactly a fair fight. 

It’s also not the point.

The way private gun ownership protects citizens is by being a credible threat against all the civilians who might be in any way associated with a hypothetical tyrannical leader who uses the military against citizens. Citizens probably can’t get close to the leaders in such a scenario, but it would take about an hour to round up their families, and the families of supporters. 

That would do it.

America is unconquerable. 

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Stop right there. I know what you are thinking. You’re thinking it is far too soon to be thinking about a robot takeover of labor. But you might not know that Sam is heavily invested in robot startups. He’s seen things you haven’t seen. If he’s planning for a robot takeover of labor, get worried. He’s not guessing.

This is the sort of experiment your government should be doing but doesn’t know how to do. So Sam is doing it. And his results could easily inform government decisions when the robot revolution kicks into high gear.

I’ve said before in this blog, and on Periscope, that our old system of government -- the republic -- has already been replaced by citizen influencers. Thanks to social media, the best ideas go viral, and our elected representatives end up being more like followers of good ideas than leaders with their own plans. If Sam’s experiment shows us something we didn’t know, and the results can be reproduced, it will inform public policy on one of humanity’s greatest inflection points.

A smart investor always insists on small-scale tests of big ideas before committing big dollars. In the world of business, this is standard practice. Compare that to the current GOP healthcare plan that involves granting all the federal money for that cause to the states so they can work it out.

Dumb.

The responsible approach would be to test some healthcare ideas in a few states or counties and then work with what we learned. A wholesale change such as transferring responsibility to the states is reckless and, in my opinion, unethical. The unethical part is that moving funding to the states is little more than a political trick to protect Republicans in the 2018 election. It has nothing to do with helping citizens.

Regular readers of this blog know I am forgiving of politicians who intentionally exaggerate and ignore facts, so long as their intentions appear to be directed at the greater good. But shifting money for healthcare to the states is for the benefit of Congress, not the greater good. 

My bottom line is that I can support a government plan that involves testing small before going big. But going big on an untested idea is not leadership. It is just bad management, or worse.

I don’t know if Sam Altman’s test of free money will tell us something important or not. But I do know it is a sensible and responsible approach to leading. Maybe someday our elected officials will learn how it’s done.

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Speaking of leading, you might enjoy pre-ordering my book, Win Bigly, because it is filled with pages.

Visual Persuasion: President Trump describes border security (a concept) with the word "wall" because you can visualize it. Our visual sense is our most persuasive path for influence. It would be weak persuasion to talk about border security as a concept without a visual.

Simplicity: Border security is a big topic, and the method you use to secure it will depend on the terrain and other factors. If President Trump mentioned all of that complexity each time he talked about border security it would be a big yawn. Simple messages such as "build a wall" always beat complicated (but accurate) conceptual arguments.

Strategic Ambiguity: In hypnosis class we learned to omit any details the subject might find objectionable. Following good form, President Trump doesn't get too specific about the type of wall he wants. He lets us see the wall that makes the most sense to us.

We see the same strategic ambiguity after his famous dinner "agreement" with Pelosi and Schumer. The Democratic leaders got to announce "no wall" while the President says "yes wall." The reality is that both sides agree on spending for border improvements, some of which will undoubtedly be wall-ish sometime in the next few years. We citizens get to pick which version of reality we like best: wall or no wall. The ambiguity supports both views. And it is intentional.

Big First Demand: A good negotiator starts with an aggressive first demand so there is plenty of room to negotiate toward the middle. President Trump started his campaign promising to deport every undocumented immigrant. That first demand was so extreme that he has plenty of room to negotiate toward a reasonable center, such as allowing DACA folks to stay.

Likewise, the "Wall" idea is seen by many Trump critics and supporters alike to mean a solid wall for the entire border with Mexico. This was never a practical idea, and candidate Trump said so directly at least once, but he wisely didn't emphasize the full range of solutions for the border. Now it will seem totally reasonable to build a solid wall wherever border security is most problematic, so long as it is not extended to the entire border.

Thinking Past the Sale: In this case, the "sale" is President Trump's desire to tighten border security. Now both sides assume the border will be tightened and they are only debating the budget and the details. This is classic persuasion. The President never allowed the country to spend time debating whether or not we wanted better border control. Instead, he made us focus on how to do it. He made the sale before the country thought it had anything to buy.

Trading Imaginary Assets for Real Ones: If we believe initial reports from Pelosi, Schumer, and Trump, there will be some sort of deal for greater border security in exchange for allowing DACA folks to stay in the country. But realistically, the DACA folks couldn't have been rounded up and deported without a civil war. So President Trump traded an imaginary asset (the idea of deporting the DACA folks) for something potentially real in terms of greater border security funding.

Pacing and Leading: Pacing refers to matching your subject in some way, either physically, verbally, or in terms of philosophy. Candidate Trump paced (matched) his base on immigration until he got elected. Now the base trusts that he is philosophically aligned with them. So if he finds he can't do all the things they demand, they are likely to let him lead to whatever is practical and doable simply because they trust him on the topic. People don't expect a politician to be magic, or to do the impossible. But they do want politicians to "get" them and to care about them and to fight for what they want. President Trump paced his supporters by understanding their needs and fighting for them. That group is likely to trust him when he says some form of "This is the best we can do for now."

High Ground Maneuver: The high ground maneuver involves taking an argument out of the weeds and up to a level where everyone agrees. In this case, the weeds include a discussion of how best to handle DACA folks. President Trump tweeted that some are military veterans. The military is the high ground in the U.S., and any reference to them is likely to be a high ground play. In other words, President Trump is committing to keeping the DACA folks in this country. He just doesn't want to say it until he gets his budget for border security.

Likewise, at some point soon President Trump will pivot from "the wall everywhere" to "effective border control." Effective border control, and the job improvement for Americans that might come with it, are the high ground. The details of how to do it are the weeds.

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My new book, Win Bigly, is available for preorder. This blog post is a taste of the sort of things I teach you in the book, with a backdrop of my weird-and-wonderful story about predicting Trump's election win.

The quick answer is maybe, but climate scientists will need a lot more data and probably a few more years to know whether we are seeing a blip or a trend. From a persuasion perspective, the fascinating thing to me is that the climate science “sides” have reversed because of the storms. And here I am only talking about non-scientists on social media. 

Last winter I saw climate skeptics (or deniers in some cases) proclaiming climate change a hoax because it was cold outside. The scientists and pro-climate-change folks mocked those poor souls for not understanding the difference between anecdotal evidence and science. You can’t determine a long term trend by looking out the window, say all scientists. And if you think you can, you’re being a big dope who doesn’t know the first thing about science.

If you don’t understand that anecdotal data in isolation is generally useless to scientists, you don’t understand anything about science. A year ago, that described a lot of climate skeptics who were looking out their windows, seeing snow, and declaring climate change a hoax.

But that was last year. This week the sides reversed. Now I keep seeing climate alarmists on social media looking at the hurricanes and declaring them strong evidence of climate change. They might be right. But if they are, it is by coincidence and not by science. Scientists say it is too early to tell. So now we have a bizarre situation in which the pro-science side is disagreeing with the scientists on their own side. That’s what confirmation bias gets you. Both sides see anecdotal evidence as real. Both sides think they respect and understand the basics of science. Both sides are wrong.

Please excuse my generalities here. Obviously there are plenty of smart people on both sides who understand that anecdotal information is not confirmation of anything. But in terms of what I see on social media, the hurricanes have turned a lot of people on the pro-science side into believers in anecdotal evidence. Here’s one example. Read from bottom up.

And this brings me to my topic of the day: How do you know when to trust experts? My hypothesis is that people who have the most experience in the real world trust experts the least. To make that point, allow me to give you a brief tour of my experience with experts.

Nutrition

When I was a kid, scientists seemed to agree on what constituted good nutrition. They even put that knowledge into a handy visual aid involving a food pyramid, and provided it to every school. We now understand the science behind it to be bunk.

Fitness

I’m old enough to have observed fitness experts revising their advice countless times. I’m no longer sure if stretching is good or bad. And the exercise experts also had the nutrition stuff wrong, along with the rest of the world, for most of my lifetime. 

Psychology

When I was a kid, Sigmund Freud was considered the leading expert on psychology even though he was dead. Now the experts in psychology considers Freud a fraud. His science wasn’t science at all.

Finance

When I was young, I assumed experts could pick stocks better than a monkey with a dart board. It turns out I was wrong. Index funds with no experts whatsoever routinely outperform the expert stock-pickers. 

I have a degree in economics and an MBA from UC Berkeley. I did financial projections for a living, first at a major bank and later at the local phone company. People considered me an expert in that narrow field. In a number of cases, I got to track how my projections compared to actual results. They were rarely close. As an expert, I deserved no credibility whatsoever. And for a good reason. My projections required human judgment on lots of variables, so the output was little more than guessing and massaging the numbers to meet my boss’s expectations.

Medical

Some of you know I lost my ability to speak for over three years because of a bizarre disorder called spasmodic dysphonia. The experts almost unanimously agreed that the source of the spasmodic dysphonia is in the brain, not the vocal cords. I ended up diagnosing myself correctly after my primary care doctor and his recommended specialists were totally stumped. (I figured it out using Google.) Once I knew the problem, I found the one surgeon in the world who claimed he could fix my problem by rewiring the nerve pathways in my neck. The operation was a success, and I recovered from an “incurable” problem. Had I listened to 99% of the experts who said the problem was in my brain, I would not have considered an operation on my neck.

I could go on like this for hours, but I think you start to see my point. At my age, and given my type of experience, I have seen experts get the big stuff wrong lots of times, even when that seemed deeply unlikely. 

That brings us to climate change. The experts are strongly aligned on one side. If you have neither the age nor the experience to know how often experts can be wrong, you probably assume the experts are credible. But if you have my type of experience, watching the fields of finance, diet, exercise, psychology, and medicine get the big stuff wrong, you start from a place of skepticism. Ideally, we would look at the details in any given situation to make our final decisions on the credibility of experts because no two cases are alike. Unfortunately, we humans are not good at using facts and reason. We tend to use our biases and then rationalize them later.

So how do we know when to trust experts and when to be skeptical? Here are the red flags you should look for in order to know how much credibility to assign to the experts.

Money Distortion

When the players have money on the line, the truth gets distorted. In climate science, money influences both sides of the debate. That’s a red flag.

Complexity with Assumptions

Whenever you see complexity, that is a red flag. Complexity is often used to deceive. And complexity invites human error. When you see complex models that claim to predict the future, stay skeptical, especially when humans are making assumptions that influence the results.

The exceptions are planetary predictions and other straightforward physics. We can predict the future location of planets without any human assumptions. That is just math and physics. But in the fields of finance and climate science, to name just two, humans are influencing the models with assumptions. That is always a red flag. I am aware of no complex prediction model populated with human assumption-tweaking that is credible, in any field. Is climate science the first exception? Maybe. But it would be unusual in my experience.

The Important Fact Left Out

When people have the facts on their side, they are quick to point it out. When a key fact is glaringly omitted, that’s a red flag.

In the world of climate science, most of you would not know the answer to this key question: Are the temperature measurements peer reviewed?

You probably assumed the temperature measurements are peer reviewed. Maybe some, or most, are. All I know for sure is that climate scientist Michael Mann says his temperature data is proprietary. He refused to release it to a Canadian court for that reason. is that a common situation, that data measurements are “secret.” I don’t know. Neither do you. That’s a red flag. It is conspicuous that you and I don’t know the answer to that basic question. Because if the raw temperature data is not peer reviewed, is it really science?

To be perfectly clear here, I don’t know the state of peer review for temperature measurements. But it is such a key question it raises a red flag as to why scientists aren’t making sure we know the raw data is clean and widely reviewed. 

Conflation of Credibility

Whenever you see someone conflate a credible thing (such as the peer review system in science) with a less-credible thing (long term prediction models), that’s a red flag. If you question the accuracy of climate models, someone will mention the gold standard of peer review, even though that doesn’t address climate models that involve human assumptions. Conflation of credibility is a red flag.

My view on climate science is that different elements have different levels of earned credibility. Like this:

Basic Science: The chemistry and physics of climate change seem solid. When you add CO2 to an environment, expect some extra heat, all other things being equal.

Temperature Measurements: The temperature measurements used by climate scientists might be solid. But the way science has so far communicated this topic does not inspire confidence. I think you have to put a lower credibility on the temperature measurements than on the basic science, simply because of the way the topic is presented to the public. If the measurements are credible, why not tell us all about the peer review process that has validated them? And why would Michael Mann even have “proprietary” data? Isn’t everyone looking at the same stuff?

Climate Models: As soon as you hear that someone has a complicated prediction model, that’s red flag. If you hear that the model involves human assumptions and “tweaking,” that’s a double red flag. If you hear there are dozens of different models, that’s a triple red flag. If you hear that the models that don’t conform to the pack are discarded, and you don’t know why, that is a quadruple red flag. And if you see people conflating climate projections with economic models to put some credibility on the latter, you have a quintuple red flag situation.

To be fair, none of the so-called flags I mentioned means the models are wrong. But they do mean you can’t put the same credibility on them as you would the basic science.

Economic Models

Have you noticed that I seem to be the only person talking about economic models when it comes to climate change? That’s because there is a tendency to assume the economic decision is so obvious no study is needed.

That’s the sort of thinking that no economist would find credible. Moreover, economists don’t believe anyone can forecast the future with long term economic models. Science might tell us we have a big problem, but economists have to tell us when to start addressing it and how hard. That part is missing.

I have seen some economic guesses of how much damage would be caused by climate change. But I have not seen one that considered opportunity cost, or the benefit of waiting for better technology. No economist would respect a prediction that ignored those two enormous variables. And those variables are deeply unpredictable by their nature. 

The One Sided Argument

When I see climate scientists in the media, they are never accompanied by skeptical scientists who can check their statements in real time. Likewise, articles by and about skeptics are usually presented without simultaneous debunking by the experts on the other side. Those are red flags. Any presentation of one side without the simultaneous fact-checking by the other is useless and almost certainly designed for persuasion, not truth. The problem here is that both sides of the climate debate are 100% persuasive when viewed without the other in attendance. If you think your side is the smart side, check out the other side. They look just as smart, at least to non-scientists such as me.

I’ll summarize by reminding readers that I am not a scientist and I don’t have the tools to evaluate the credibility of climate scientists. If you think you do have that ability as a non-scientist, my guess is that you are younger than me or you have less experience of the type I described above. 

When I present this sort of framing to climate change believers, they generally retreat to Pascal’s Wager, which says in this case that we should treat any risk of catastrophe as if it is likely, so we aggressively address the risk and eliminate it. That makes sense in a world where resources are not constrained. But our world is the opposite. Everything we do is at the expense of something else we wanted to do. And I am aware of no economic model that considers the opportunity cost of spending a trillion dollars for perhaps a half-degree temperature improvement. 

Climate change isn’t our only mortal threat. We have pandemics, terrorism, nuclear war, the singularity, asteroids, and probably a dozen more threats I don’t even know. If we could eliminate all of those threats and have money left over, I say let’s do it. But if resources are limited (and they are), I need a strong argument to put a trillion dollars into any one of the risks.

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