Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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e'll get as many as we need. I think we'll be fine there. Here's my math question for you. And I asked this this morning. I got a number of answers and I'm still not sure of my opinion on it. So help me form an opinion on it. It goes like this. If we had a normal virus that affected everybody about the same way every age group, then we're told that getting to 60, 70 percent herd immunity with vac…

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one of those things you should have on there. Now I've taken a course in statistics in college but it was a million years ago. I don't remember a lot of the math. But you can develop let's say a statistical intuition about things. You can get to the point where you could look at say this aspirin study and say, "Oh the number of people studied was small. The way they studied it is not as good statistically." So you would just have an intuition that you shouldn't trust it necessarily. And I think that's a really good thing to develop. And you don't need to do all the math to do it. Just spend enough time looking at the illusions of statistics. The things that you thought would be true but turned out if you do the math are not true. Every time you're fooled by statistics make a little note. Say, "Oh yeah that's one of those situations where it looks like it could be the case but if you do the math it's opposite." So develop, try to develop some kind of intuition about where things are credible and where they're not, independent of having the math.

Here's my most controversial idea of the day. We know that China is sending fentanyl to the cartels and the cartels are packaging it up in drugs that look like other kinds of drugs such as fake Xanax, shipping it to the United States. And 50 to 70,000 Americans per year are dying from this. We believe that China is pursuing this total war idea where it is completely intentional. And they could obviously stop it because we've actually told them the name of the person in China who's sending the fentanyl. We know the name. It's this gu

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y. China of course can find that guy, right? So there's no question about those two facts. We've told them who it is, who's the fentanyl kingpin in China. China knows where he is. They could stop him. Does anybody doubt that they can stop that guy? No, of course not. So we have to assume it's intentional and that they are killing 50 to 70,000 Americans per year intentionally as a plan. Now that's…

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