Quotes from Scott Adams

Make a claim that is directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration or factual error in it. Wait for people to notice the exaggeration or error and spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is. When you dedicate focus and energy to an idea, you remember it. And the things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as though they are high in priority, even if they are not. That's persuasion.

There are two types of people in the world, my young friend. One type is people-oriented. When they make conversation, it is about people—what people are doing, what someone said, how someone feels. The other group is idea-oriented. When they make conversation, they talk about ideas and concepts and objects.

If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You'll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.

You often hear advice from successful people that you should follow your passion. That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it.

Our language and our minds are too limited to deal with anything but a fixed reality, regardless of whether such a thing exists. The best we can do is to update our delusions to fit the times. We live in an increasingly rational, science-based society. The religious metaphors of the past are no longer comforting. Science is whittling at them from every side. Humanity needs a metaphor that allows God and science to coexist, at least in our minds, for the next thousand years.

For example, if every time you eat popcorn, one hour later you fart so hard that it inflates your socks, you can reasonably assume popcorn makes you gassy.

What does it mean to feel something similar to the way God feels? Is that like saying a pebble is similar to the sun because both are round?" he responded. "Maybe God designed our brains to feel love the same way he feels it. He could do that if he wanted to.

Okay, I can accept the idea that God doesn't have a personality exactly like people. Maybe we just assume God has a personality because it's easier to talk about it that way. But the important point is that something had to create reality. It's too well-designed to be an accident.

How can something that doesn't exist in physical form have influence over the things that do?

Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen.

Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness

about finding evidence of the past) And when you get that confirmation, it would instantly become the past itself. So in effect, you would be using the past, which does not exist, to confirm something else from the past. And if you repeat the process a thousand times, with a thousand different pieces of evidence, together they would still be nothing but impressions of the past supporting other impressions of the past.

Confirmation bias looks exactly like knowledge gained from doing your own research.

No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day.

making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.

one of the primary factors in determining your energy level, and therefore your mood, is what you've eaten recently.*

I'm saying that people claim to believe in God, but most don't literally believe. They only act as though they believe because there are earthly benefits in doing so. They create a delusion for themselves because it makes them happy.

If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I'm not satisfied knowing that I'll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again.*

Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.

To be fair to Nietzsche, he probably meant the word 'stronger' to include anything that makes you more capable. I'd ask him to clarify, but ironically he ran out of things that didn't kill him.

If you mine the data hard enough, you can also find messages from God. [Dogbert]

Trump ignores facts whenever they are inconvenient. I know you don't want to think this works in terms of persuasion. But it does. I want to be clear that I'm not expressing a preference for ignoring facts. I'm simply saying that a Master Persuader can do it and still come out ahead, no matter how many times the media points out the errors.

Normal people believe that, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth. Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.