The difficulty with analyzing the “insightfulness quotient” of comedians like Scott Adams or Jon Stewart is that there’s no reliable way of differentiating “things he sincerely believes” versus “things he means seriously at some level, but are not literally true” versus “things that are meant to be just throwaway jokes”. If you’re sympathetic to Scott Adams, you’re likely to interpret true statements or true predictions as “hits”, but classify false predictions as “just jokes”, and overestimate how insightful he is on average.
Which begs the question, why bother to seek insights from Scott Adams in the first place, if he deliberately mixes in false or misleading statements in with true statements. There are already enough “unwittingly false” statements in the media to keep us on our toes in the first place.
The difficulty with analyzing the “insightfulness quotient” of comedians like Scott Adams or Jon Stewart is that there’s no reliable way of differentiating “things he sincerely believes” versus “things he means seriously at some level, but are not literally true” versus “things that are meant to be just throwaway jokes”. If you’re sympathetic to Scott Adams, you’re likely to interpret true statements or true predictions as “hits”, but classify false predictions as “just jokes”, and overestimate how insightful he is on average.
Which begs the question, why bother to seek insights from Scott Adams in the first place, if he deliberately mixes in false or misleading statements in with true statements. There are already enough “unwittingly false” statements in the media to keep us on our toes in the first place.