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Comment by ForRealsies | Hacker News Reader

For elaboration on how cognitive bias causes people to interpret the facts in different ways, I always recommend:

http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/08/17/how-to-know-youre-in-a-ma...

"We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight."

To be fair, the article is from August, two months before Papadopoulos pled guilty as the first in the investigation. Still, it doesn't exactly bode well for his guidelines to spot mass hysteria.

It saddens my that Adams blog has devolved into this. While this post has some good points, he hitches it to a partisan wagon so strongly that it's hard to take without feeling like the whole point is to try to persuade you instead of educate you, which makes it feel kind of gross.

The rest of the blog is some mix of how to persuade people (including a reading list for help on that, with his own book included), and more opining on current political events.

It's also leaked into a few of the comic strips in kind of a "gotcha" way.

Sorry Scott Adams, you didn't "get me". I get where you're coming from, but I disagree. That's not the same thing.

An example where he "gets you" by assuming that if you disagree you must have missed a word- no one could have disagreed if they truly understood his message:

http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/06/03/an-example-of-cognitive-d...

Ugh. The comic is fine, and highlights some of the over-vilification the left is known for, but the explanation for what it means is pretty extreme, and actually exhibits the same behavior he's calling out.

I continue to be unclear if he's playing some long con and these are just the easter eggs for the people that see it. Otherwise he's pretty self-unaware, to a frightening degree.

Man, it's too early in the morning to handle to unbelievable level of irony of this coming from Scott Adams of all people.

I can't help but think that his blog on persuasion is an attempt to lead the enlightened through work samples.

It almost feels like at some point he's going to turn around and be "I don't really believe all that, but I convinced you, and persuaded some of you of what I was saying. Buy my book on persuasion!"

I get a weird snake-oil vibe from his blog. It feels more like he's a PR department than an actual outside observer.

While it is clearly true that cognitive bias causes you to interpret facts in different ways, the article is really not very good at arguing it.

By the author's argument, anyone who believed the nazis were coming to power would have been deemed 'in a mass hysteria bubble'. I mean the ideas that ACTUAL NAZIS could come to power is clearly crazy... but it happened.

His argument almost sounds like a form of denial; "if it sounds really bad, it can't be true!"

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