Scott Adams discusses Gell-Mann amnesia, systems, and how to think vs what to think.
Nov 21 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7Q0wrA447g
1:02:03
According to the New York Post, Emily Crane, there's a
new report that warns that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated US colleges
and it aims to quote transform Western society from within and that it's
halfway done with its 100-year plan. So 50 of its 100-year plan has been done and
they claim to be about half done in conquering the West via the educational
systems.
Is that real? Do you believe that the inevitable future is
that Islam and let's say Muslim Brotherhood in particular because that's who
this is about.
Do you believe that the natural arc of history is that they
will infiltrate? They will they will reproduce slowly but methodically. they
will take over various institutions until the US is Islamic.
Well, unless there was a counterforce, I don't see how you
could stop it because Islam is a very, I'm going to try to use the most
respectful language.
1:03:16
So, you're going to watch me struggle here to to pick the
right words. But Islam is a very successful system.
Now, there I did it. I wanted to make it not sound like it
was biased.
Islam is a very successful design for a system. For example,
if you're in the more extreme elements and you tried to leave the religion,
they'd kill you, right? I mean, that's not the normies, but you know, for some
part of the Islamic world, you can't really leave.
And even if they're not going to kill you, it's not going to
be very fun. So it's a system that says if you leave, you're going to pay a
price. And if you're competing against, and when I say competing against, I
mean just trying to own the future.
If you're competing against some other religion or system
that lets you go in and out, if you like, in theory, the one that kills you for
leaving is going to do better in the long run. and has a number of other
advantages such as the high reproduction rates and, I won't get into all of it,
but if you were to design it on paper, on paper Islam would conquer the other
systems just by being introduced and then you wait.
Am I right?
That it would conquer all the other systems one at a time
just by being introduced.
Now it takes a while but its very design guarantees that it
dominates over time.
So, that's going to happen.
I would say we're probably halfway to that. And, if you were
going to ask me, Scott, is there any way the West can save itself to not be
destroyed by this superior system?
And the answer is there might be one way.
There might be one and only one way that the West could save
itself from an Islamic, just guaranteed system design takeover. Do you know
what that is?
What is the one system that could defend against that?
It's not Christianity because Christianity is a you are a
little too peace loving for that to work. I'll tell you what it is.
It's Elon Musk and it's AI. If AI becomes maximum truth seeking,
which is what Elon is after, he says it almost every day that the AI has to be
maximum truth seeking.
You can't give the AI morality. You can't program morality into
AI. That would just cause the potential for the biggest problems in the world.
But if you if you program it for ultimate truth, you could come up with
something that's just purely additive.
Ideally, we don't know, but it would be worth a shot.
So now imagine that it becomes a normal thing that half of
the country is teaching its own half to think better. My prior conversation.
(see below)
Do you think that that is also a system that can
reproduce? Yes. Yes. If you learn how to think better and you're sitting in the
room with somebody who doesn't know how to do it and an opportunity comes up
where you can kind of explain to them, you know, the way you should think about
this might be this way instead of that.
You'll do it.
So there's something about the common sense learning how to
think approach to life which would be Elon's and the other people I mentioned
as well.
That is in its in its own ways sticky and it doesn't require
a specific educational structure.
In fact, the whole college system might fall apart in 10
years. Who knows? But the idea of thinking better probably will just keep going
because it's good for everybody who's exposed to it and it's easy to teach the whole
technique of something being too on the nose. I haven't described that here but
it's really easy to teach somebody how to spot things using a certain set of
tools.
So that is a way that the west could possibly become immune
from any external systems be they Islam or anything else.
1:07:58
How's your brain doing?
_____
How to think.
42:56
Now, we're going to talk about Grokipedia. So, that's Elon Musk's version of Wikipedia. It is still under work but Elon was
talking about it and he said that it's going to be way better than Wikipedia
blah blah blah.
And then Elon talks about the phenomenon where you would
know that Grokipedia is better than Wikipedia if you were a public figure or an
expert because you would understand your own domain and if you understood your
own domain and then you read about what Wikipedia said—this would be his claim—and
then you read what Grock said, Grokipedia, you would come away from it thinking
that Wikipedia was wrong and Grokipedia was closer to right more often.
Now, this is there's a name for this, the phenomenon I'm
describing. What is the name and watch this? Watch how many of you know the
answer to this question. What's the name for the phenomenon where you know that
the news is fake because you're an expert or the news is about you but the
rest of the world might not know that.
What's that called? I'm looking. There it is. It took like one
second for it to appear. It's a Gell-Mann amnesia. Now Gellman is a hyphenated
last name of a physicist. G E L L-M A N. I I always forget how many double
letters there are, but something like that.
So, here's the important part. Um, how many people have in
in the public mentioned gal man amnesia maybe without using the words, but
described it in a way that you knew that's what they were talking about
recently. I'll give you some examples.
So, uh, Elon Musk has talked about it a number of times.
I've talked about it a number of times.
45:02
Uh, Mike Cernovich has talked about it a number of times and
has properly credited Michael Crichton, the author. I think Michael Kiteon
might have also borrowed it. Somebody said there was some prior claim to it. It
doesn't really matter. Um, I'm just saying that a lot of smart people have
referenced it.
I'm pretty sure Greg Gutfeld has mentioned it on his show or
shows. Um, I've seen some other Silicon Valley people mention it, but you've also
seen Bill Murray.
Do you remember actor Bill Murray when he talked about his
own experience reading some stories about John Belushi? And he knew Belushi
personally and very well. So when he read the stories, he knew they were fake.
And then he had the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It was like,
wait, wait a minute. What are the odds that the only stories that are fake are
John Belalushi stories?
Because it happens to be one of the few things I'm an expert
on. What are the odds that's the only thing? Isn't it more likely that
everything's fake and the way you find out about it is being an expert in one
thing, you're like, "Hey, wait a minute. I am an expert in this. This stuff's
wrong."
Um, what about Bill Maher? I saw him recently, was it on his
Club Random or maybe the regular show? He's mentioned that because he's a public
figure, he has extra vision on this, the fact that the news is so often fake.
That wouldn't be obvious to people who are not public figures because they
don't read news about themselves like people like me and people like him do.
All right.
Now, so you've got Elon Musk, Joe Rogan's mentioned it, Bill
Murray's mentioned it on Joe Rogan show. Gutfeld, Fox News, me, my books, Cernovich,
etc.
This is teaching people a way to think and a way to see the
world.
If what comes out of all this Grokipedia stuff is simply
that more people understand what Gell-Mann amnesia is, it completely changes
how we see the world.
It will change how you see the Soros versus Musk. How in the
world could both of them exist if they have this view that that's just are
complete opposites?
So I say that what's different about the era you're in is
that the Trump supporting part of the world, not not all of it. Oh, somebody's
saying that Dr. Drew has mentioned Gell-Mann. I think he has. I think he
has. So you're probably all thinking of other examples right now.
If I went over to the Democrat influencers, how many of the
Democrat influencers have taught their audience the Gell-Mann amnesia? Any?
Any?
So what happens over time if one side of the political world
gets trained in how to think which is exactly what Elon Musk does every time he
talks to you. He also teaches you how to think, like how you should think of entering
AI.
How you should think of that risk etc
That's completely different than just telling you what to
think.
The right leaning or I'll just say Trump supporting common
sense part of the political world is really about teaching the other people
in it how to think about stuff.
That's all I do all day. I teach you how to think, not
necessarily what to think. All right.
So, what happens with that?
Do you think that the people on the political right are more
able to identify a hoax? Yes, they are. because they're actually trained on
what the hoaxes were, how they were created, and then how they were supported
by the media.
So, you've got an entire political class that while the
Democrats weren't paying attention, and this is the fun part, the Democrats
don't see this coming, that that half of the world has been trained to
recognize and the other half has been trained to accept it.
If you just fast forward that tape, let's see. One half of
the country trained to accept as the truth. The other half of the country
trained to identify as soon as they see it and to avoid it as quickly as
possible.
Fast forward that. Where do you end up?
The where you end up is what you observe right now, which is
the team that can't avoid the hoaxes just goes right off the cliff.
What happened to the Democrats this year?
They went off the cliff, did they not? Right now, are you
having the feeling that I was hoping that you would have right about now? If
I'm doing this right, and I think I am, the feeling that many of you are having
right now is, wait a minute, did you just connect all the dots?
Is that the fact that one part of the country has learned
how to think, how to, for example, if if I use the phrase too on the nose, how
many of you would know what I'm talking about if I said that story, it's too
on the nose.
You tell me in the comments. You tell me. How many of you
would know exactly what I meant?
How many Democrats would know what I meant?
None. There wouldn't be any Democrats who know what that
meant because again, too on the nose is teaching you how to spot BS.
It's just one of many ways.
So there's this entire, I don't want to say army because
then you know what the Democrats will say if I say army, but in the very
conceptual way an army of people who have been trained to spot hoaxes and even
to know specifically why there's a whole bunch of them.
You have been trained in persuasion, right? That you
actually know what works and what doesn't and it's not an accident. and the
other part of the country is just flailing poop at you, I guess, because they
don't have training in that domain.
And I I think people always imagined before I came on the
scene, people imagined that persuasion was something you're either born with
or, you know, maybe you just have it. It was not really thought of as a learnable
skill, but I'm here to tell you it's a learnable skill. and I've watched people
learn it and then I've watched them employ it and then I've watched them succeed,
get elected, get promotions, get the get the partner they wanted.
52:10
Now, let's take this a little bit further.
When Grokipedia becomes sort of the standard for and I think
it will become the standard for checking things then Elon will I think come
close to completing one of the greatest reframes of all time which is the reframe
is Democrats teach you what to think and Republicans teach you how to think.
Do you feel it?
Democrats tell you what to think. And at least in 2025, this
was not always the case. This was not historically true at the moment.
And I would say that Musk is primarily the, you know, the reason
for this is that we've all been taught how to think and a lot of it comes from
him.
I think there were probably three probably three separate stories I saw today that all were some little clip of Elon explaining how to think about a thing, how to think about the, let's say, the economics of space. How many of you understood before, let's say, this year, uh, the importance of reusable rocket ships?
And it wasn't just that you learned that, you know, there's
a thing called reusable spaceships. It's that you learned that that's
important enough that if you don't understand that part of the question, you
can't really see what's coming.
How many of you knew that if you put your solar panels in
space, you didn't have to worry about cooling them being blocked by clouds
or or that it's night? Well, now you know. And it's because you've learned how
to sort of look at things like an engineer.
That's what Elon does more than anything else. Looks at it
like an engineer. Once you learn that, it becomes your go-to. So, all right.
What would an engineer do in this case? Changes everything.
All right. So, I'm going to I'm going to call the the
reframe.
We have now entered the golden age. And one of the defining
factors of the golden age is that the left is being told what to think and the
right is being taught how.
And how is going to beat what every time, eventually, but
every time.
Mission accomplished. All right.
Did I give you something to think about today?
You know, the we're closer to the beginning of this teaching
people how to think, but if you look at my books, you know, I I've got five
books that are sort of in that domain of teaching you how to think. systems
over goals. That's exactly right.
Gell-Mann Amnesia definition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Crichton first described the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia
effect" in an April 2002 speech about speculation to the International Leadership Forum:[1]
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as
follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In
Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see
the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the
issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story
backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause
rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the
multiple errors in a story—and then turn the page to national or international
affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was
somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you
just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does
not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently
exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court,
there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus,
which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the
media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read
other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only
possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
— Michael
Crichton, "Why Speculate?" (2002)[2]
He explained that he had chosen the name ironically, because
he had once discussed the effect with physicist Murray Gell-Mann, "and by
dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect,
than it would otherwise have"
