Scott Adams' revolution was to get users to give him plot lines.
He was the first to publish an open way to communicate with him in order to out the corporate crazies, and readers did in droves, explaining the inanity of their workplace and getting secret retribution for stuff they clearly couldn't complain about publicly.
A good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom.
Doing this seems to require identifying with your readers and their concerns. That could be disturbing to the author if the tide turns, or to the readers if they find out their role model was gaming them or otherwise unreal, but I imagine it is pretty heady stuff.
I hope he (and anyone facing cancer) has people with whom he can share honestly, and has access to the best health care available.
> a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom
Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the author stating that when you're an author, people simply tell you stories and you don't need to come up with them anymore!
I found it hard to reconcile his charming and witty comic strips with some of the ugly things he wrote elsewhere. I would never usually throw a book away, but I made an exception for one of his books, because I didn't want anyone to see it on my bookshelf and I didn't want to give to anyone else.
I have a personal convention for books like that - I don't have any Dilberts on the shelf but a lot of Neil Gaimans, plus an artsy TTRPG book ("Maze of the Blue Medusa") that's also made by someone who is now widely considered a serial sexual assaulter - I don't (always) remove them from my shelves but I turn them upside down, like a flag indicating distress.
The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? I first saw people wrestle with this idea for Michael Jackson and recently it has been a big issue related to Kanye West.
The art was good. I remember Cat Stevens disappearing from the airwaves when Yusuf Islam emerged. You might feel differently about the art based on how it connects to the post-revelation artist. Michael Jackson was close to a genius. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
It doesn’t help that Yusuf Islam called for the murder of Salman Rushdie live on TV, which connects his odiousness to his work in a way the other artists transgressions often aren’t.
Growing up as a devout religious kid in the 80s, it was always understood in my household that rock stars were lascivious, immoral sex crazies and that Hollywood was a den of heathen propaganda. Nevertheless, we still listened to (some) music and watched (some) movies.
I'm mostly out of that environment now, but occasionally put myself in those shoes again and think how odd it would seem to me that people look up to and expect moral righteousness from these people.
I think most people recognize more states that 'moral righteousness' and 'immoral heathen'. I don't expect, e.g. christian bale to spend his life volunteering in a food pantry and washing prisoner's feet.
I do expect him not to rape, murder, commit fraud, and so on.
One of the things I occasionally notice about conversations in this area is that some people care more about actions that hurt people than property.
If our hyopthetical rockstar trashes a hotel room, wrecks his car and then has a heart attack from cocaine, that might be judged differently than one that joins the local nazi party and attempts to murder someone.
Art is relatively low stakes. We can always create more art. You should increase the stakes as a thought experiment.
The person who solved global warming/cancer/whatever turns out to be a terrible person? Should we throw away their work, and come to a different answer? Or wait a few generations so people forget and come to the same answer again but the people involved are “pure”?
There is some art that, to some people, is as important as anything else in their lives. For some, the stakes are that the artist who made the art that made them want to keep living after, say, being sexually assaulted, was himself credibly accused of serial sexual assault.
I’m not advocating a decision here, but I wouldn’t call that low stakes.
It was an awfully big thing. I had a number of his books along with a little Dilbert doll sitting on top of my desktop PC, and threw it all away for the same reason as the parent poster when I learned of the awful things he'd said.
Or you could keep it as a reminder that people can go alt-right, even if they were normal before. It could happen to you, too. Maybe it's preventable by avoiding Twitter? Maybe older people just don't have any built-in defenses against BS on the internet and become embroiled in it?
Consider that we wouldn't have the life we have today if cancel-culture was the norm several decades ago. Not everyone will be perfect at everything, so just take the good and ignore the rest. Genius and insanity tend to be very, very close.
I had "Defective People" in the 90s and it was effing crazy how the last chapter went off about how he could manifest reality. That's when I knew he was off his nut.
"Women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently." — Scott Adams
"You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles." -Scott Adams
Hundreds of newspapers across the country will stop running the “Dilbert” comic strip after its creator said on a YouTube livestream that Black people were “a hate group” and that white people should “just get the hell away from Black people".
In the video from Tuesday that led to backlash, Mr. Adams, who is white, said he had “started identifying as Black” years ago and then brought up a poll by Rasmussen Reports that found that 53 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s okay to be white.”
Mr. Adams said in the video that he took issue with Black Americans who were polled and who had not agreed with that statement.
“That’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” he said, adding that it “makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white.”
>"It's okay to be white" (IOTBW) is an alt-right slogan which originated as part of an organized trolling campaign on the website 4chan's discussion board /pol/ in 2017. A /pol/ user described it as a proof of concept that an otherwise innocuous message could be used maliciously to spark media backlash. Posters and stickers stating "It's okay to be white" were placed in streets in the United States as well as on campuses in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
>The slogan has been supported by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Media coverage of the event, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson asking "What's the correct position? That it's not okay to be white?", was seen as reacting in the way that the trolling campaign had intended.
Brooks, Marcus A. (November 1, 2020). "It's okay to be White: laundering White supremacy through a colorblind victimized White race-consciousness raising campaign". Sociological Spectrum. 40 (6): 400–416. doi:10.1080/02732173.2020.1812456. ISSN 0273-2173.
>txcwg002 0 minutes ago | parent | context | unflag | on: Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon ...
>WTF. It's not ok to be [color]?
You're falling for it hook line and sinker, or just being a performative racist troll. Read the Wikipedia article and the referenced articles. The explanation is there, spelled out quite clearly, with verifiable citations and references and evidence, nothing to "wtf" about. It's quite calculated and intentional manipulation, and your knee-jerk reaction is precisely how the white supremacists who spread that slogan intended to manipulate you into reacting.
Knighthack earnestly and curiously asked, "What "ugly things" exactly did he say?" and I answered his question truthfully. If you think it's disrespectful for me to quote Adams' own words, or don't want his words repeated with proper attribution and context, then your problem is with Adams, not me.
I didn't even get into the crazy self-aggrandizing sock puppet stuff, but thanks for reminding me -- his bizarre unhinged behavior goes way back:
Dilbert creator outed for using sock puppets on Metafilter and Reddit to talk himself up (he is also plannedchaos on reddit):
Thanks for the context. I hadn't heard about this before. Loved a lot of the comics but that does change my opinion about him.
To get a bit off-topic...
R.E. "It's okay to be white": I think this slogan is the perfect example of effective propaganda. Out of context, at face value, it appears mundane and uncontestable. But in context it holds a wildly different meaning. I definitely saw members of my family fall for this exact trap. Retired parents spending too much time watching "news" aren't so different from terminally online incels.
Important because it should remind us that when we think people are acting wildly obtuse that we should question if we are missing something. Seems like the best way to combat getting caught in those echo chambers and identify propaganda. I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning.
> I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning.
I don't understand what you mean. Political ideologies are real, most people aren't crazy or duped by propaganda. They aren't just haplessly regurgitating 'white lives matter', it's a slogan that aligns with their beliefs, we should take that seriously and not pretend like 'they just don't know what it actually means'.
I think death of his stepson might have impacted him deeply at personal level turning him into a bit of a racist. In Trump he saw a hero who would take up the cause.
Some of you cite your favorite strips. I will too.
Dilbert comes down to the caves where trolls (accountants) reside and gets a tour. The guide points to a troll sitting behind a desk, and mumbling in a stupor: "nine, nine, nine...".
Guide: And this is our random numbers generator.
Dilbert: Are you sure those are random?
Guide: That's the problem with randomness - you can never be sure.
Stray thought: Why 4 and 9? Because the joke is funniest if the number is completely ordinary.
0 and 1 are special and so are all prime numbers. 6 is out because it's the maximum die throw. And one figure is more ordinary than two figures, or negatives, or decimals. That leaves 4 and 9.
I actually had this happen back in high school. The teacher gave us “anonymous” surveys to gauge her performance. She analyzed the handwriting to determine which one was mine. I actively tried to change my handwriting as well, but I guess not well enough. I’ve never trusted a survey was actually anonymous after that.
The same thing happened to a friend of mind in junior highschool. The teacher even called him out in front of the whole class for giving her bad ratings. We all did, but she recognized his handwriting in particular:-D
We've been tasked by a client for 2 years to create an anonymized survey, and my mind has gone to great lengths to devise a survey where even our own employees (or superusers with full DB access) cannot figure out who a respondent is.
It's been a fun exercise in software architecture. Because I actually care about this.
But we keep pushing this annual survey another year since we never seem to be ready to actually implement it (due to other priorities)
I built a suggestion box for a team at work like this. It was pretty basic. The page had no login, and no tracking of any kind. The DB only had an index, the date, and the suggestion. The source was available to everyone who would use it, and if they wanted I would have shown them the DB. These people also had root access to the server it ran on, so if they were really paranoid they could clear any system logs. The site was also heavily used for the day to day work, so the noise from everyone on the page would obscure any ability to tie a single IP to a time stamp without a lot of effort and a large chance for error.
Over the course of 4 years I think it was only used 3 times. Most people assumed it was some kind of trap. It wasn’t, I genuinely wanted honest feedback, and thought some people were too shy to speak up in a group setting, so wanted to give options.
I have a few friends working at CultureAmp (who - amongst other things - do anonymous employee surveys).
Management can 'drill down' to get information on how specific teams responded.
One of the things they mentioned doing is using a statistical (differential privacy?) model to limit the depth, to prevent any specific persons responses being revealed unless it was shared with a substantial number of other responses.
Surprisingly difficult when you consider e.g. a team lead reading a statement like "of the 10 people in your team, one is highly dissatisfied with management" - they have personal knowledge of the situation and are going to know which person it is.
There's commercial service providers and open-source projects doing that already.
The thing is, as soon as you allow free-text entry, the exercise becomes moot assuming you got a solid training corpus of emails to train an AI on - basically the same approach that Wikipedia activists used to do two decades ago to determine "sockpuppet" accounts.
Zee theeng is, es suun es yuoo elloo free-a-text intry, zee ixerceese-a becumes muut essoomeeng yuoo gut a suleed treeening curpoos ooff imeeels tu treeen un EI oon - beseecelly zee seme-a eppruech thet Veekipedia ecteefists used tu du tvu decedes egu tu determeene-a "suckpooppet" eccuoonts.
Bork Bork Bork!
Good point, but also liable to get crucial informations and details lost or, worse, completely misunderstood by an AI which by definition lacks contextual knowledge.
When I quit a unicorn tech startup several years ago, they sent me an anonymous exit survey. It was was on a name-brand survey platform and the platform’s UI indicated the survey was anonymous. In my later in-person exit interview with a guy from HR, he had us go over a copy of my answers! Based on his demeanor, I don’t think he knew it was presented as anonymous.
When I was in grade 2 we had a secret santa, but it was the competitive variant, where the "winners" were able to guess who gave them the gift.
So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it.
They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.
I try to be careful about e.g. changing punctuation and spacing if I want anonymous feedback to stay anonymous.
After some shuffling at work, I ended up spending some time under an awful manager. She approached me after an anonymous round of feedback and said "I noticed you wrote _____." I had, in fact, not written that.
On some level, having her guess wrong seemed even worse, but it also felt nice to be able to honestly say "I did not." Hopefully taught her to respect anonymity next time.
That would explain his rather obvious lack of energy these days.
Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years. Regardless of what you think of him, as someone who has worked in Corporate America for over a decade, there really isn't anything quite like Dilbert to describe the sort of white collar insanity I've had to learn to take in stride. My first workplace as a junior developer was straight out of Dilbert and Office Space. I have a gigantic collection of digitized Dilbert strips that best describe office situations I've run into in real life – many of them including the pointy haired boss.
He's expressed a lot of what I would consider... stupid opinions these days, but I would be sad to learn he's no longer with us.
Dilbert also failed to keep up with the times. Despite publishing strips about AI or remote work or etc, you can still tell that he has spent so long away from that world that he no longer has any novel insight into it. All of the jokes come secondhand from anecdotes that he hears or reads about.
You had cubicles? Luxury! Im my day, we put our spare-parts laptop on an old door for a desk and sat on a rickety metal chair on a concrete floor in an unheated warehouse. And we loved it!
You had laptops and spare parts?! At my first job we had to build ourselves a desk out of 1's from the bit bucket to put the card puncher on, and a sort of beanbag chair from the 0's. And the old-timers said we were lucky--the old system did not even have ones, which made less satisfying desks. When we got upgraded card punchers that could do ASCII instead of just typing the raw instructions in hex, that was a happy day, let me tell you.
Oh you had a chair! In my day we had a desk scavenged from sticks and rocks. Our chair was a piece of pipe with a 2x4 on the end. You had to balance carefully lets you impaled yourself.
It's almost certainly hard to maintain the energy/inspiration needed for a daily comic strip/comic. I also think Scott Adams had trouble moving beyond the 1990s Pac Bell environment after he was no longer part of corporate (much less startup) life.
I find it mildly entertaining to watch someone called out as racist by someone else using the phrase "just call a spade a spade" considering that phrase has been deemed risky due to racists using the word "spade" as a derogatory term.
Just to be clear, I'm making zero value judgement about your assertion, I don't know (or care to know) Adams enough to form an option on his character.
> by someone else using the phrase "just call a spade a spade"
The phrase is referring to the tool. It is not a reference to the derogatory slang term at all. It dates back to Plutarch's Apophthegmata Laconica, and the earliest version of it that appeared in English was in 1542.
All of that was centuries before "spade" also became used as derogatory slang. The phrase is no more racist than "like white on rice".
I'll take your suggestion to heart and look into this term myself and see if I can't learn something new to better work within the present world. I'm more than happy to admit that I could very well have a blind spot for a sensitive term which I do not currently know about. I apologize to anyone if this was used offensively and thank you for bringing this to my attention.
He spoke at MIT (early 90s?) and I remember him talking about making fun of PacBell colleagues in his comic: They would recognize themselves, ask him to autograph the comic for them, and then go away happy (thus making fun of them a second time.)
>Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years.
He has had some questionable views all throughout his life. In his book "The Dilbert Future", which was from 1997, the last 2 chapters are some wacky stuff about manifesting - i.e if you write something down 100 times a day every day it will come true and other stuff like that.
And while that may seem a far cry from the alt-right stuff he eschews, its really not - inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.
Of course, you are not going to write down that you will win the lottery and then win.
But most people are their own worst enemy and self limiting to some extent. Focusing on what you want in life, and affirming it to yourself over and over, is effectively a way to brain wash yourself to change your own self limiting behavior and it’s not surprising that this is often successful.
As Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, millions of people probably prayed earnestly for God to save their king/queen, but kings and queens don't live beyond the average lifespans of humans...
To be fair, that is not a very valid argument, given that for any given King/Queen, they will be millions on the other side wanting this given person to die.
E.g when the Spanish Empire ruled the world, the British were not very happy about that. With the British Empire, the French and the Germans fought them with every opportunity.
>As Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, millions of people probably prayed earnestly for God to save their king/queen
Knowing how most kings and queens have behaved throughout history, I think Sagan suffered from a faulty premise. The queen everyone loved best made it to 96.
> ... millions of people probably prayed earnestly for God to save ...
Plausibly quite true. But given (1) how often the succession turned violent after a monarch died, and (2) how very little power the average person had - I'd say such prayers were entirely reasonable. If they made "life in the lower 99%" just 1% more bearable, that'd be a worthwhile RoI.
Demon-Haunted World is a book worth reading...but Carl often seems to forget that 99% of humans are neither huge science geeks (as he is), nor rationalist robots.
More like he says the affirmations result in stock market premonitions. For example, he said after his "I will get rich in the stock market" manifestation he woke up in the middle of the night thinking "buy Chrysler" before it went on a rally.
> he says the affirmations result in stock market premonitions
Not even that. He says that affirmations resulted in him having a premonition. He does not generalize or predict that this will happen for other people, or even himself in the future.
Are you sure he didn't write "I totally didn't inside trade on the basis of information leaked by an employee who thought he was just telling me a funny anecdote to use in my comic, I totally just manifested a premonition in a dream."?
I mean if the affirmations make your brain, both conscious and unconscious, fixate on thinking about market conditions and purchasing opportunities, this passes my smell test.
A premonition is a fancy name for an unconscious prediction.
Now does are the predictions "good", that is a completely different story. Probably depends on the information going in.
> A premonition is a fancy name for an unconscious prediction
The problem with woo is you can always add more woo (bonus points if it has sciencey glitter). Goes from woowoo to woowoowoo.
Woo has no logical consistency and has nothing predictably predictive.
Ask manifestation believers why they are not successful or rich or whatever? You'll hear some fabulous reasons.
My neighbour paid money (I presume thousands) to do courses on learning how to unblock herself. The stated reason for the failure to manifest was due to blocks. Her explanation of the material was outrageous. I have yet to see the positive effect on her.
I don't manifest, yet I've got things others would like to manifest. Not sure there that fits in with the woo.
I knew a bunch of people who were really into the "Law of Attraction" woowoo manifestation stuff back in the mid-2000s. That was a good time for it, especially for suburban middle-class American folks like these, for whom life was generally pretty great. When your life is going great, believing that you manifested it just shows how awesome you are and how much the Universe likes you.
But after some time goes by and you get pinched in the mortgage crash, or your wife hits you with a divorce, or you get cancer, if you really believe you manifest everything into your life, then you have to believe you manifested the bad stuff too. So why did you do that to yourself? It's a rough belief system then.
To my mind, manifesting is just deciding, manifesting daily is focusing daily. I think the woo starts to come in when people either deliberately misconstrue or genuinely are not very intelligent and just followed a plan well. A couple comments above was talking about someone who woke up in the night and bought Chrysler, made me chuckle because I once woke up in the night remembering I'd forgotten to buy more $TWLO. I could tell this story as: I wanted to get rich playing the stock market, so I decided to write down I was going to do the stock market, every day I wrote down and research the stock market "manifesting" it more and more, once day I wrote into my manifest pad "I'm going to win the stock market!" for the 50th day in a row. That night I went to bed, and in the middle of the night I woke up and thought "I should buy more $TWLO!" - the next day I did, and a week later it rallied netting me $360,000.
Truly a master of manifesting my own reality, I suppose? heh. But seriously though, in think in the vain of the above, if "manifestation" is what someone needs to do as their trello or jira for themselves, more power to them.
He does. He basically argues that our thoughts can influence reality - the idea is that if we perceive something happening as truth, it will become truth (along with all the bullshit pseudo science to support it)
He does not. I can’t prove a negative, but you, being the one making an assertion, could provide a quote (with context) which shows your assertion correct. Please do so.
> If it's possible to control your environment through your thoughts or steer your perceptions (or soul if you prefer) through other universes, I'll bet the secret to doing that is a process called "affirmations."
> I first heard of this technique from a friend who had read a book on the topic. I don't recall the name of the book, so I apologize to the author for not mentioning it. My information came to me secondhand. I only mention it here because it formed my personal experience.
> The process as it was described to me involved visualizing what you want and writing it down fifteen times in a row, once a day, until you obtain the thing you visualized.
> The suggested form would be something like this:
> "I, Scott Adams, will win a Pulitzer Prize."
> The thing that caught my attention is that the process doesn't require any faith or positive thinking to work. Even more interesting was the suggestion that this technique would influence your environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goal. It was alleged that you would experience what seemed to be amazing coincidences when using the technique. These coincidences would be things seemingly beyond your control and totally independent of your efforts (at least from a visual view of reality).
He then goes on to discuss stock, him taking the GMAT, etc. He later continues:
> I used the affirmations again many times, each time with unlikely success. So much so that by 1988, when I decided I wanted to become a famous syndicated cartoonist, it actually felt like a modest goal.
Then he talks about syndicating Dilbert.
He doesn't say, "I can influence the stock market with affirmations," but if you read what he wrote, he is very clearly arguing that you can change reality with your thoughts.
> If it's possible to control your environment through your thoughts or steer your perceptions (or soul if you prefer) through other universes, I'll bet the secret to doing that is a process called "affirmations."
> Even more interesting was the suggestion that this technique would influence your environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goal.
> I don't know if there is one universe or many. If there are many, I don't know for certain that you can choose your path. And if you can choose your path, I don't know that affirmations are necessarily the way to do it. But I do know this: When I act as though affirmations can steer me, I consistently get good results.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I would say that "He basically argues that our thoughts can influence reality" is a fair description of these quotes and the rest of the chapter around it. Some of it is him referencing what other people told him, and he certainly hedges his statements a lot, but I certainly read it as him believing that his affirmations are directly influencing reality.
You call it “hedging”, I call it clarification. If he manages to get through a whole chapter without even once directly claiming what you think he claims, then it’s quite clear to me that he does not claim it directly, and that he does not want to.
To me, the quotes you give seems aimed at people with preexisting beliefs in multiple universes or quantum woo, and he seems to want to convince people that affirmations can be viewed as perfectly reasonable in their existing belief systems. This does not mean that he believes what they believe.
In a literal sense, I agree with almost everything you wrote. He does not want to directly make the claim that he believes affirmations are magically affecting reality. He aims the text at people predisposed to certain types of woo. And he wants to convince those people to try his other type of woo. He doesn't say what he himself actually believes.
Where I differ from you in my take on this is that I also weigh what isn't there. He doesn't provide any form of alternate explanation. Nowhere does he say anything that comes close to "I don't believe that affirmations work this way" or anything of the like. I also don't agree that his hedges clarify anything, rather they muddy the waters.
He presents a thesis, presents other people's arguments for that thesis, presents no arguments against, and then explains that he lives his life in a way consistent with believing in that thesis. The hedges fill one function: to make it harder to argue against him. If the arguments aren't his, the chapter stands even if the arguments fall.
To me, that is basically arguing for the thesis, but in a roundabout and quite defensive way. What other point would you say that that chapter conveys?
Looking it from that perspective, aren't we just describing agnosticism? The lack of "what isn't there" does indeed distinguish it between atheism, as that would be a "I don't believe in X", but it is also distinguishable from the religious beliefs of a true believer.
There is also the possible half point between atheism and agnosticism, where people self identify as atheism but will act according to some religious concept because they view it as important to their lives. To me it indicate strongly that beliefs, any beliefs, sits along a spectrum. A person can live their life in a way consistent with believing in something, either because they believe in it, or they don't know, or that they don't believe in it but still behave in that way because of a reason or an other.
If you were to actually read the chapters, its pretty clearly stated there.
He said he wanted to get rich on the stock market. Wrote an affirmation. Had a dream to by Chrysler stock. Bought stock, stock went up. By his conclusion, he manifested stock going up (because of how thoughts and perception can influence reality and e.t.c)
It has a degree of benefit in helping you identify focus, but much of the purported benefits come from having the skills required to obtain your goals being quite correlated with the ability to do a chosen task every single day.
A lot of time has past since I read Scott Adams view on manifesting. I got a decent way through before I realised it wasn't satire. It did seem clear to me that he was advocating a form of manifesting that went beyond either of those principles. That benefits came from manifesting in ways that no-other influence from yourself would be possible. That's essentially declaring it to be magic. Psychology I can believe, if you want me to believe in magic you're going to need a bit more.
From the point of view of an ADHD person, it doesn't surprise me at all that someone who had the ability to do a dumb task like manifesting would also have the ability to do meaningful things that that I find nearly impossible.
If you actually did it it would not be a simple affirmation for long, your mind will quickly start to wander as the act of writing the same thing over and over becomes more automatic and what your mind will wander towards is what you are writing and staring at. The brainwashing that is happening is that of brainwashing you to set aside a part of your day for sustained focused thought on your goals, something most people seem to have never learned, they learned to ask their guidance concealer and google and internet forums but never themselves.
I think the thing with "manifesting" is it's almost impossible to write something down a 100 times a day, everyday without also doing other things about the goal, as it's on your mind so much. Obviously if you write "I'm going to become an olympic athlete" but just sit on a chair nothing will happen. But if you're writing that daily you're going to end up doing more exercise because you're thinking about it. You might spot opportunities that you would otherwise miss because your brain stops skimming over it because it's such a repetitive pathway now.
And while that obviously has limits, and is far from the magical technique some might claim - it's very hard to argue against things that work.
get-rich-quick schemes have been the bread and butter of the self-help/manosphere/conservative environment for quite a while. Its not a mistake that most "famous" people in these circles are either selling courses to make you "rich" or supplements to make you "strong".
and with a population desperate for any improvement in life these things end up finding a place, just like all the betting platforms all over the place. the only reason to bet is if you think you'll win.
Lol, Garry Shandling "manifested" if you deeply care enough about something to actually spend the time to write it out 100 times in a day, you might also take some other actions...
I can't find anything super relevant while searching for Shandling and manifesting, but considering he was known for being a practicing Buddhist and a big proponent of meditation I wouldn't be surprised if he believed that writing down his goals is a good first step in achieving them.
Adams's version of manifesting is "if you write stuff down, it's more likely that outcomes outside of your control will help you achieve your goal."
This concept was popularized by the book The Secret.
The concept of the book, as I understand it, is focusing your consciousness on something you want ”will cause the universe to bring it to you”.
The concept is silly to me (it’s the steps that you take to actually achieve the goal that make the difference), but in a way, it is a prerequisite to achieving the goal.
My biggest complaint is this type of thinking usually accompanies lots of “woo” thinking.
It was well before he was a buddhist. Did you see The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling? There's pages and pages of him writing down how great he will be...
> Those are not the same thing.
Here's an idea: get informed on the basics of what you are discussing before you tell me what it is and isn't.
This is the correlation=causation fallacy in full force.
Basically, lets say that you naturally have the drive to do work that is valuable and can make you rich, but you are just not sure if it will.
Writing down 100 times a day that you want to become rich and then becoming rich is not really related - you were probably going to be rich anyways, or on the most charitable interpretation, the writing helped you stay focused.
Now imagine you tell someone with poor mental health who struggling at a low paying job that all you have to do is write something 100 times a day to make it happen.
It aligns very closely with conservative thinking - a lot of conservative people think they worked hard for what they have, not realizing that they have been given a massive runway (such as not having college loans to pay back, being in a good school district, having parents who aren't crazy busy with work to dedicate time to support them, and so on)
It was not a given that Garry's work was valuable.
>Now imagine you tell someone with poor mental health who struggling at a low paying job that all you have to do is write something 100 times a day to make it happen.
Sorry, did you think I was suggesting that it was good advice? Or that Doctor's should prescribe it?
> It aligns very closely with conservative thinking - a lot of conservative people think they worked hard for what they have, not realizing that they have been given a massive runway (such as not having college loans to pay back, being in a good school district, having parents who aren't crazy busy with work to dedicate time to support them, and so on)
The train has left the station. I do not think you were on it.
The claim that conservatism is rooted in an inability to process reality is a misrepresentation.
The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar. The danger arises when this instinct is hijacked by a rigid ideology that resists truth and seeks control rather than continuity.
Which is, you know, what the American right is doing.
Staunch adherence to the familiar in a changing world is dangerous in-and-of itself. It is inherently anti-science.
And "order" doesn't fully capture it either, because the concept it gestures at can be more accurately described as "hierarchy" - as Kirk puts it, "a conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions".
In other words, everyone has a proper place in society, with some above and others below, and any attempts to remove that hierarchy are moral wrongs which require the transgressors to be put back in their place.
You can see how that core belief is intrinsically dangerous, and how nearly every controversial conservative belief about social classes falls out of it.
(It's also worth noting that this explains why conservatism's earliest champions were supporters of the aristocracy, and also why conservatism is more beloved by the old-money wealthy than move-fast-and-break-things new-money tech.)
>in a world where half of all published "science" is fake or fraudulent (and dominated by leftists),
See here is the thing- you don't know this is true. You never actually went and looked at the science or verified how much of it is fake. And yet, at the same time, you benefited from this science when its convenient to you because you probably don't realize that a medication or something you are using came from left leaning university.
This is what I mean by being out of touch with reality.
Sigh. Stop. I read the parent's post and his concerns are not without merit.
<< See here is the thing- you don't know this is true. You never actually went and looked at the science or verified how much of it is fake.
Technically speaking, neither do you unless you went over said data yourself. That said, some people did[2] and found that a good chunk of current studies can't be replicated. What does that say about the state of said science? Does it support your position? Does it support parent's post?
<< something you are using came from left leaning university.
The problem is not with left leaning or even right leaning. It is with people who blindly proclaim "Science!", but, at best, are an equivalent of annoying fanboys and, at worst, dilettantes, who feel compelled to use power of the state to squash people, who, in their mind, undermine their POV[1].
<< This is what I mean by being out of touch with reality.
And somehow, just to top it all off, they feel superior.
> The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar.
... which inevitably breaks down when fundamental assumptions become disproven. And that's the point. Many "moderate" Conservatives still believe in the "trickle down" economy theory or that government debt is inherently bad and a government's budget needs to be balanced.
Both have been proven time and time again to be not just wrong, but outright disastrous in their consequences, and yet Germany voted that ideology into chancellorship, not to mention what is currently going on in the US.
I can't even tell what the current ideology of the US is. The current thought seems to be that debt doesn't matter but social programs are waste. So we must run up deficits while reducing spending.
The US seems to be combining the worst of both ideologies. I can't imagine what happens next.
Not much room to cut taxes for the rich without increasing the deficit which they've said must go down, so their great solution is to cut welfare programs to give a tax cut for the rich.
The term "conservative" is now just a fig leaf to hide the true aims of a radical fundamentalist agenda aimed at attacking most modern aspects of our society. Go find any commonly-held traditional definition of conservatism, and you will find Trumpists are directly and openly opposed to the bulk of it.
Basically, conservatives got increasingly angry (because things inevitably do change), so they decided to give up on conservatism and flip the table instead. This also ties into one of the tenets of fascism - invoking an idea of some imagined idyllic past, as a reason that the current society needs to be attacked and destroyed.
I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election until Biden 2020 and Harris 2024. I consider those solidly conservative votes, and attribute them due to my getting older.
> The issue is, you will never ever see me as being correct because in your brain you are incapable of realizing that you are wrong.
The insanity and narcissism in this statement must be satire right? The idea that you're right and anyone who doesn't see that is clearly just incapable of recognizing they are wrong seems hypocritical at best and the same line of thinking that has lead to some lovely historical movements at worst.
> And while that may seem a far cry from the alt-right stuff he eschews
The podcast If Books Could Kill manages to stumble on a fair amount of overlap between "power of positive thinking" / "The Secret" crap, and right wing politics in the books they review.
> inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.
It is absolutely not a unique failure to conservatives. But it does explain why there is so much interchange between crunchy granola hippies and qanon militias.
Pretty sure DOGE actually ended up costing the government more money than it saved. The entire venture was a disaster to highlight a meme. It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing.
More the 'vaccines cause autism', 'evolution isn't real' and 'jewish space lasers' crowds, and for good reason. Not all conservatives believes those things, but the people that do are overwhelmingly conservatives. May as well add in all the "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats!" people as well.
[EDIT] Which is unsurprising since the whole flat earth deal requires some sort of vast lizard-person conspiracy or whatever, and that's the kind of thing Qanon is, too.
That is misinformation. There is nothing in traditional conservative thinking which depends on inability to process information clearly or think in reality. Those mental deficits can be found across the political spectrum. We might not agree with conservative value systems but let's at least be intellectually honest in our criticisms instead of using strawman arguments.
It was a little sad to watch him get radicalized in real time. I really enjoyed reading his blog before this started to happen. But then a few publications started quoting blog posts of his out of context as rage bait -- I remember he was particularly butthurt about some Jezebel posts that took things he said out of context.
At this point, he basically started leaning into controversy for pageviews. He'd start linking to the controversial section of each post right at the top of the post. After a few months or so I had to unsubscribe, after years of reading his blog and Dilbert cartoons/books.
He's become such a gremlin that I won't be 100% sure he's serious about this until he actually dies.
Yeah I remember binging his blog while between classes in university - he wrote well and had interesting thoughts on marketability, mastery, business, etc., all things that I was interested in as someone learning to be an adult and find his place in the world. Then Trump ran for president, and honestly the blog was still good - Adams had some genuinely good insights about why Trump appealed, and suggested that he might be using the Republicans to get into power but he really doesn't share their values and will shake things up for the better. But then somehow Adams' identity got wrapped up in the idea of Trump not being as bad as people think and he just supported Trump more and more even when it became clear that Trump did not have a master plan to liberalize the Republican party.
I liked his blog at first and thought it really declined with video and short form content. It’s like his written editing slowed him down and made him less clickbaity than when he could post a video with no editing in just minutes.
100% agree ^^^ He went full Elon Musk, before Elon Musk. But yeah, back in the 90s/2000s, when my career in Corporate America started to settle in, his Dilbert comics brought my loads of comic relief. My favorite character was Wally; he always seemed to "fail up". I recall Wally meeting with the pointy-haired boss to tell him he'd returned from his 3-week vacation. The boss said, "You were out on a 3-week vacation?" Wally, the master, replied, "Sorry, I misspoke. I'm leaving now for my 3-week vacation." LOL
Wally, totally relaxed, reading the newspaper, as everyone else is freaked out, trying to meet an upcoming deadline. Everyone later learns that all the current projects have been cancelled by the new VP, just to make the previous VP look bad. I believe this is when Asok, the intern, started calling Wally "the master", something like that.
The other, I can never seem to find. They're all in a meeting, and the Pointy Haired Boss says, "This next task is critical yet thankless and urgent, and will go to whoever next makes eye contact with me". Everyone stares at the desk, and then Alice pulls out a hand mirror and angles it between the PHB and Wally.
Back in the 90s, I worked on a "side project" that screen-scraped the daily Dilbert strip and added it to an internal "employee portal" website. A lot of people liked it, including all the pointy-haired middle managers. However, after about a week, I was told to remove it immediately, not because of the legal/ethical issues around screen-scraping (stealing) the strip, but rather because this particular day's strip was about Dilbert's company laying off a bunch of employees so the company's executives had more money to buy vacation homes (or something like that), and, by coincidence, our company announced a massive layoff on that exact same day. The timing was totally coincidental, but perfect. Executives were furious; my boss told me he got yelled at by our VP. I loved it.
Reminds me of when someone did an April Fools prank that printers would require payment to use, and then got in big trouble, but only because management was about to implement that policy for real: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43543743
Thanks, I couldn't remember where it was from but I find it so funny that he had to write a second apology, for claiming in the first that they didn't plan to do it.
As weird as he is, his claim that Trump uses a form of mass hypnosis is still the best explanation for Trump's success that I've heard. But why then Adams would support Trump, who is clearly the ultimate PHB, is something I never understood.
Don't underestimate the extent to which sexism and racism factored in to his victory also. The level of competence, integrity and patriotism between the two candidates was staggering, and yet...
If you've ever read Thinking Fast and Slow, Trump is great at appealing to System 1. He's spent his entire lifetime focusing on his branding and what people think of him. I dislike almost all of Trump's policies and his tactics; however, he's great at oversimplifying things and getting the visceral reactions he wants.
Chapelle's SNL monolog about Trump is pretty spot on too.
I grew up dreaming of being a cartoonist, and while Gary Larson, Berkely Breathed, and Bill Watterson were my holy trinity Dilbert wasn't far off. Always admired Adams and his humor - and like you even more so once I ended up in the corporate computer world.
Was sad to me to see someone so good at lampooning absurdity get sucked into such a toxic mindset, but I'll also be sad to hear he's gone and I'm sad to hear he's up against it.
My one "boomer" take: Something I wish the younger generation would learn is that it's useful to be able to separate a work from its author. Some of my favorite films were produced by Harvey Weinstein. They're still my favorite films. The fact that a slimeball was a force behind making them doesn't detract from their content. I like Robert Heinlein sci-fi, even though, judged by today's moral yardstick, some of his views were... questionable. I still like Harry Potter even though J. K. Rowling went totally bananas. Troubled and/or terrible people can make great art and music, and it's OK to like the art and question the artist.
I have to disagree with this, sadly. Supporting the work is supporting the author so they can continue doing terrible author things. This is why boycotts are effective and "oh well, I'll just keep buying it anyway" is not.
Depends on how you enjoy them. I'm re reading Harry Potter off and on. I already bought the books before JK Rowling expressed her views. My reading does not give her another dime.
Same thing with Blu-Ray of Pulp Fiction though I believe Weinstein Company has given up all rights to most of their movies.
I think these are two positions that don't inherently conflict. In most cases you can still enjoy art you loved before you knew the artist was problematic without continuing to give them money.
Don't stream it and don't buy a new copy unless someone completely unrelated owns it now, but you can still listen to, watch, or read the stuff you loved before you knew what was going. Whatever you already owned didn't suddenly become toxic. Used book/music/movie stores exist. Piracy is always an option.
That's not to say a few people haven't managed to ruin it beyond my ability to enjoy their content no matter how much I used to love them, but there's no reason to give up something you enjoy just because you learn the person or a key person behind it sucks.
One of Bernie Sanders campaign slogans in his first primary campaigns which started in 2015 was “Bernie Beats Trump” - the lack of enthusiasm around Hillary Clinton was palpable.
Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a vintage meme at this point. He may have been the most famous person to say what so many of us expected first, but it just means he paid attention.
oh hell, I shouldnt bother. But this isnt really how reality is shaping out and in fact one of techs biggest names is a sieg heiling member of a far right presidential admin.
Even if what you were saying is true (and its most certainly not), its funny how everyone who makes this argument always tends to fall on the conservative side, that in fact does significantly more lying as a verifiable statistic.
> “I’d like to extend my respect and compassion and sympathy for the ex president and his family, because they’re going to be going through an especially tough time,” Adams added.
That in and of itself puts him above what I've come to expect from this low-bar dip in American culture. Good for him.
Sure, but one wishes that it didn't need to arrive on the back of a face-to-face encounter with his own mortality. That understanding of a shared humanity is accessible in other ways, though cancer diagnoses do have a way of shoving it in your face.
We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
Except of course this other dig at Biden elsewhere in the article:
> “I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it – well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said.
The use of the word "admitted" implies that Biden is either lying about how far it has progressed, or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
I’m no doctor but I know PSA test would have identified its existence long before this stated progression. It’s a blood test that would be routine for any male his age, he’s probably had them at least annually for decades of his life at this point
The guideline to stop screening at 70 has nothing to do with financial cost. It’s that detecting it at that point is useless because you’ll generally be dead of other causes by the time it catches you.
Compounding the issue, the rate of false positives rises as you get older which then 1) freaks people out and 2) encourages them to get more invasive tests done which are themselves increasingly hazardous (and less valuable) with each passing day.
There are a lot of good reasons not to speculate about others' health decisions on the Internet, and avoiding a spotlight on your own basic ignorance is one of 'em!
Yes, because most men won't live to be 82, so on average it's not worth it. But presidents are not "most men." They're also
attended by personal physicians who can keep them from freaking out when informed accurately of their health.
I would appreciate less condescension about my supposed ignorance, but I guess that's unrealistic.
Doctors don't adjust how long they're trying to keep you alive based on your job title.
Doctors also don't believe that rich people are somehow immune to the psychological trauma of "you might have cancer → nvm all good → you might have cancer → nvm all good → you might have cancer → nvm all good."
Doesn't track when we are talking about a slow, years long chronic illness and someone who over the last 4 years has had personalized healthcare to the tune of 8 figures.
> or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
Which is probably true. And it's fine, he has no obligation to disclose this until he wants to. In contrast his dementia though ....... that's something he should have disclosed earlier.
Adams did such a great job exposing the absurdities of the American white collar workplace, as seen by the underlings. So it is puzzling how he went over to the dark side of the pointy haired Boss. And the Boss's masters.
I hope some pharma underling might have cooked up some good meds for Adams, despite all the pharma bosses and their backers.
If he expects this summer to be his demise, then it must have mutated and spread to vital organs. Metastatic cancer is the true killer. Cancer in your bones can linger for years without progression.
I wish they did, of course. I personally lost a close friend to prostate cancer last year. He was 41 and was, before the cancer, one of the healthiest and most athletic people I knew.
The first inkling he had that anything was wrong was a backache that wouldn't go away; a stage 4 diagnosis ensued. He held on for 21 months from the onset of symptoms before the cancer took him.
My dad is in his late 70s and has tested at very high PSA levels a few times. So far none of the biopsies have found cancer, but they've caused a lot of stress and discomfort for him.
I don't have a strong opinion about the tests either way, but I wasn't the one getting the biopsies.
That does sounds stressful. Sorry he had to go through that.
I have high psa levels. 17.
Had a biopsy. Turns out I have a really large prostate. My doctor said that some just naturally have larger prostates and the larger ones produce more psa. The psa density function put my levels at normal when taking in to consideration the size. The biopsy came back negative.
My understanding is that it's net negative to test too much.
A lot of men die with prostate cancer, because only very few die from it. And if you belong to the former group, knowing about it or doing any kind of intervention means a massive loss in quality of life. So the best course of action overall is to close our eyes and stop looking. And hope you don't belong to the latter group.
It's an indication that something's wrong with the system. We'd get better overall health outcomes if we tested everyone and told a large cohort of people "you do have cancer, and there are these possible treatments for it, but we recommend you don't take any of those treatments and just hope for the best". But between doctors and patients and other healthcare participants, we collectively can't do this - a large minority of people will freak out and demand treatment and the healthcare providers will feel compelled to go along with it.
Perhaps this plan just needs better marketing. Instead of dividing tumors into benign and malignant we could have a third category for malignant but slow-growing.
MRI machines need to be a) democratized so they're cheaper and everywhere and b) connected to trustworthy clinically-proven radiological AI to identify and watch growths. There's absolutely no rational reason any patients should end up with surprise terminal cancers or surprise coronary artery disease.
(Yes, yes whole body scans exist but these are largely pseudo-medical scams that don't deliver what they promise. I'm saying deliver on it, within reason.)
edit: Ah ok. Risk of over-treatment by broad scanning?
"Active surveillance aims to avoid unnecessary treatment of harmless cancers while still providing timely treatment for those who need it." according to NHS.
My doctor tells me that PSA testing has now shown to not be effective so they don't do it anymore. I am 58 and my dad died of prostate cancer so I am concerned.
It should be patient dependent. Screening everyone is not currently thought to be useful but those with risk factors should be screened after a discussion of risks/benefits. Your father having prostate cancer (especially if he was diagnosed before age 65) is a risk and I would advocate for it, especially if it something you are worried about and you understand that sometimes a PSA can be falsely elevated in benign conditions, which may mean you get a biopsy that ultimately wasn’t necessary, and the potential risks that could have.
Most people with prostates experience a rise in PSA levels as they age. There's no evidence that treatment, especially given how slow, growing prostate cancer usually is, results in a net positive benefit overall. The exception is younger people with aggressive cancer, but you can't exactly limit PSA screening only to young people with aggressive prostate cancer.
In addition to what other commenters have said, the growing market for telehealth finasteride means means that a decent portion of the male population are artificially below baseline PSA levels (and my understanding is that this has some degree of long term effect even if you stop taking the drug).
Which carriers are you referring to? Commercial health plans are subject to a minimum medical loss ratio so they don't get to keep any more money by denying coverage for PSA tests. The general issue is that with only a few exceptions, most cancer screening tests haven't been proven to improve patient outcomes.
I was never really reading the strips, but I fell in love with the cartoon. It had a very unique tone with the same famous satire.
Thankfully with all the voice actors and other talent that went into the show, it's easier to disconnect it from the hateful person Adams ended up revealing himself to be.
I have to admit, I'm not up to speed on anything he's been up to lately, but I absolutely read and enjoyed Dilbert way back when. I'm sorry to hear he's not long for the world.
Every time I see someone kitted out in VR gear, I think about his prediction that the Star Trek holodeck will be humanity's last invention and I'm very glad they don't have a button that can beam the next person waiting for their turn into a concrete wall.
I know this will sound dumb, but it's really hard to put into words how much I enjoyed Dilbert in its heyday. I mean at one time Dilbert was one of three web-comics that I read religiously. It was Dilbert, User Friendly, and Sluggy Freelance. The comics weren't just "comics", they mattered to me. Seriously.
Then UF quit publishing new episodes, and then Scott went all alt-right and Dilbert disappeared behind a paywall, and now only Sluggy is still standing. I guess. I have to admit, I quit reading regularly quite some time for reasons I can't even explain.
Anyway... not sure what the relevance of all of this is. Just reminiscing about a day when the 'Net felt a lot different I guess. At any rate, while I'd become less of a "Scott Adams fan" over the last few years, this news still makes me feel absolutely sick. I wouldn't wish prostate cancer on anyone. :-(
I interpreted this differently, because I’ve read a substantial amount of downright cruel comments regarding his life and this diagnosis. He was right about that, and I don’t fault him for wanting to try and reduce the amount of vitriol by holding off on announcing the diagnosis.
Why deal with six months of vicious comments alongside well intentioned pitiful condolences when you could only have to deal with one or two month’s worth?
I would have done the same thing. For what it’s worth, I think an exceedingly small number of people can actually refuse to let those who hate your guts “live rent free in your head”.
Scott Adams is basically a sort of older version of Chris Chan. A cartoonist whose unreliable narration of own life became part of the whole performance.
But thing is—boy who cried wolf—not sure if he actually has the prognosis of cancer he says he has? It sounds mean, I reckon he does have it, but his past descriptions of health problems were confusing enough that I wouldn't be surprised if he recovers next year and spins it into a story about how he found a cure.
you should probably chill out man. it's fine to be a skeptic but, of all ulterior motives to have, brushing up against death for gain is something no one sane person would do. 99% of people don't remember the political positions of the Whig party and no one will remember our views in 150 years either.
Scott Adams has such a tenuous grasp on reality, it's hard to say if this is real news or just some sort of weird boomer version of clout chasing. If it's real, I hope he has some medical choices left, but he's also a horrible person.
My dad was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer in late 2018. A few years before that, the medical community had switched away from PSA screening, as it was thought more harm than good was being done from early stage intervention.
My dad's still ok. He had some localized radiation to beat back the biggest tumors on his spine, then did a round of chemo. This past summer he did a fun immunotherapy treatment, not CAR-T... but something more like that than checkpoint inhibitors. Otherwise his tumors have been kept to almost nothing due to hormone therapy.
Unfortunately, what eventually happens is you accumulate enough hormone therapty resistant cancer cells that the tumors start growing again in a meaningful way, and then there's not much that can be done. I assume this is the stage that Scott Adams has had and that he's been battling it for many years by now. With President Biden, it seems likely that his prostate cancer will respond to treatment, and if this is the case then he will likely die of something else, as is usual now for old men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer.
I most enjoy his analysis of persuasion techniques and what works and doesn't work. When he first started writing about this, using Hillary v Trump as examples, Hillary suddenly changed her methods.
I remember his remark about Hillary's campaign logo looking like directions to the hospital.
damn . I wonder if it's possible for the cancer to spread fast enough that tests would not have helped, so from elevated PSA to metastatic cancer in the span of months, or a year? This could have been the case with Biden and Adams.
The PSA test is pretty bad, not much better than 50/50 accuracy. I had raised PSA myself but it seems a false alarm. I bought some shares in a company with a 94% accurate test but it doesn't seem to have take off as a business thing.
My understanding is that it's generally slow spreading, but it's also slow to show symptoms, so they could have had it for years without anything indicating that they're in trouble.
there's two types of prostate cancer - slow, so slow that you'll probably die of something else and fast. you don't want fast. even the chemical castration that they use won't stop the fast-type of prostate cancer if they don't catch it early enough.
Generalize almost any group in a derogatory way, get ready for downvotes. As if we can just group anyone and everyone whose employer's corporate policy favors cubicle layouts. Foolish.
IMO his support from the get-go was tainted. His original original justification was, "I know what master persuaders do, and Trump does it. Therefore he's going to win, therefore I support him."
The insight into persuasion was interesting (and clearly correct), but what a morally bankrupt rationale for supporting someone. If anything, a person with Scott Adams' interest (and skills?) in persuasion would be compelled to counteract those talents.
He would've been a lot more respectable if he said, "I like Trump and I'm glad for my own political purposes that he's a master persuader."
I thought it was pretty clear from the start that his observations about Trump's persuasive talents, although valid, weren't his real reasons for supporting Trump (the real reasons being that Scott Adams is wealthy and apparently a bit racist.)
"Clear" in the sense of inferable, yes, but usually people's stated rationalizations are quite a bit more defensible. In this case the excuse was morally abhorrent even if you accepted it at face value.
The man is all about "persuasion" so I have to assume that lying about his motives is part of his toolbox.
Like a used car salesman who tells you that he's motivated by helping people get the best car they need, instead of being motivated to make lots of money by getting people to spend as much money on a car as they can bare.
He's become so weird in recent years that I'm not even sure if I believe him or if this is another one of his weird spooky meme fortune teller stunts or something.
I liked the comic ok, but I was actually a much bigger fan of the cartoon series that came out in the late 90's. It has, in my opinion, one of the most underrated opening title sequences out of any show.
I love that show enough to where I actually bought an animation cel from it a few years ago, and it hangs in my basement office.
>I just can't fucking fathom being so rich as to never need to work again and then jumping into culture war
If you get rich through putting in consistent "work", you absolutely HAVE to do this through a fundamental belief in what you are doing, where it doesn't feel like work.
Your brain is programed to do a certain thing, and you have no choice but to do this thing - no amount of money can reprogram your brain. This is why so many well off people end up going off the deep end.
There is also a factor in the things that you buy as a rich person actually influencing you in ways that you don't even understand.
> I'd buy a reasonably sized/somewhat large home in the middle of fucking nowhere with a huge garage, and I'd spend my days tinkering on my cars, playing videogames, and working on passion projects.
And being isolated like that is just as likely to make you fall into ideological traps. You think that you can keep yourself happy by doing things you like, but the key thing to consider is why you like them. What purpose do you have for doing the things you do. A lot of times, this purpose is misguided (with cars, its not really about the car as much about the attention you get from others), and when you have the monetary capability to do the thing, you quickly find out that its not what you though it was.
Some people believe in things and aren’t minmaxing their life based on what gives them the best return.
Of course, they can be wrong. But I always find it odd when people say “I don’t understand” when it seems so obvious to me. They see things as right vs wrong and want to make things right even if it hurts them.
I have not seen any indication that Rowling, Musk, or Adams assert that trans people are categorically a "major threat". That said, these folks do view trans people as a "major threat" to those athletes who compete in the category that once was exclusive to humans distinguished by having XX chromosomes. They believe, and rightly so in my opinion, that this athletic competition category should remain exclusive to those humans scientifically established (usually pretty obvious at birth) to have XX chromosomes.
>those humans scientifically established (usually pretty obvious at birth) to have XX chromosomes
It is entirely possible your heart is in the right place, but this specific comment gives it away that you haven't actually looked at this issue too closely. There are "scientifically established" reasons why this issue is a lot more complicated than the anti-trans folks always make it out to be, even if we completely ignore the existence of trans people. Look up Swyer Syndrome[1] for example.
The obvious indication is that they’re putting a huge amount of time and money into this issue. If they don’t think it’s a major threat then what are they even doing?
> I don't understand believing that trans people (or whatever other belief) are a major threat, but I understand getting heavily involved in policies around trans people if one were to somehow believe that trans people are a major threat.
You are presenting a strawman argument, and then declaring you can't believe that others believe this. The truth is, they don't believe that.
What women like J.K Rowling argue is that women's and girl's rights are harmed by insisting that trans people be treated for all purposes as their declared gender without regard to their birth sex. They argue that women and girls by virtue of their sex need single-sex facilities where males aren't admitted, no matter how that male self-identifies. They argue that treating adolescents expressing gender confusion with puberty blockers and surgery is extremely harmful and morally wrong.
And it's clear from recent surveys and polls that clear majorities in most western countries agree. An example of this is a recent poll in the UK regarding its recent Supreme Court judgement on the interpretation of its Equality Act. [1][2]
Regardless of the position you take on this, nothing is to be gained by not engaging with what others are actually saying and arguing.
I’m trying to be charitable. The alternative is that these people are spending a ton of their personal time and wealth on a problem that is not a major threat, which is a much worse look for them.
Are they spending a ton of their time and wealth. Rowling has tweeted like 20 times in 5 years. It doesn’t seem like a big part of her life, just something she’s talked about.
It’s like I comment about oatmeal raisin cookies. I like them and will engage in conversation every few months or so. But it’s not a ton of my life. I don’t wake up and go to bed thinking of cookies.
Huh? I checked her account to see how many times she’s tweeted in the past day, but I got bored and stopped after 20. And every. Single. One. Is about trans stuff.
That's a fair rebuttal. I guess what I don't understand is the reflexive nature to double-triple-quadruple down into stuff that's like... not even overly difficult to discern as being wrong? Like to come back to Scott Adams, he seems to have a lifelong set of issues around socializing, and is a bit racist. But like, he managed a successful career that got around those things. So why come back in his twilight years to be really racist in public, even as people asked him to not? Even has a lot of his fans asked him to not?
I think if you ask Scott Adam’s if he’s racist, he doesn’t think so. So the hill to die on is something to the effect of what he thinks is right and he doesn’t see that as racist.
Many people are incapable of leaving others alone. They think they are right and people who disagree are wrong and must be corrected. Both rich and poor people can be like this. Even if someone else has absolutely no impact on their lives whatsoever, if they are "wrong" they must be demonized.
Rich people have the resources to shout over poorer people and buy influence.
The richest man I know sold his business in an all-cash transaction for $114 million in 2011 when he was in his late 50s. He divided the after-tax sum in half and used one half to write checks based on weeks of service to all of his employees and kept the other half. (I was one of those employees.)
He stuck around for six months making sure the transition was smooth then he fucked off to a beach house in Key West and has spent the last decade fishing and working on vintage Corvettes.
He would look at a trans person, go "well ain't that something" and move on with his life.
He would not wage an international media campaign to demonize them.
I can hear him in my head muttering "what in the hell do they gotta do with me?" just thinking about him being asked about a cultural issue.
Some people (both rich and poor, but you only hear about the poor ones) seethe with hatred and it's sad.
> The richest man I know sold his business in an all-cash transaction for $114 million in 2011 when he was in his late 50s. He divided the after-tax sum in half and used one half to write checks based on weeks of service to all of his employees and kept the other half.
That sounds like a lot of unnecessary double tax being paid.
>He would look at a trans person, go "well ain't that something" and move on with his life.
The problem, is that mountains of these kind of people say they are fine with trans people, but voted for this administration, and when you ask, they say "Kamala was going to gender change our kids" or some such bullshit.
So the culture war was fine to them, they just hadn't heard a hateful argument that touched their button yet.
My dad talked for like an entire year about how he's been newly dealing with non-binary and trans folk at the grocery store he was (at the time) managing, and how he thinks they are great and such nice people and their gender or whatever is not a work problem and he thinks "that people just need to have more patience with each other" but he voted for Trump
Because the liberals "have gone too far" with the "DEI stuff" and commented that he was worried that helicopter pilot from that accident was "rushed into someone else's spot"
Because she's a woman. And obviously we don't have like a hundred year history of talented and capable women pilots or anything. And it's not like women have been pilots in American commercial Aviation for decades with a clear trend of increasing safety. And obviously he has always had this consistent worry about woman pilots and feeling like he can't trust their ability and this totally isn't something that Fox News manufactured out of thin air these past couple years.
Which is funny because there is an actual, genuine, air traffic control scandal where a Black institution had perverted some pre-screening to give members of that Black institution an unfair advantage in screening. But even that horrible situation never put an unqualified or undertrained person on the job. It just made more of the members of the incoming training class black.
But that's the actual problem they don't like. DEI doesn't involve passing someone who should have failed, even in the blatant scandal I mentioned above
JKR is doing wonderful work in upholding women's rights and helping women in need.
Some of this is her advocacy on social media but most of it is material contributions like starting a centre to help female survivors of sexual violence, donating hundreds of millions of pounds to charities that help vulnerable women and children, and funding court cases that have helped protect women's sex-based rights in law.
Maybe to you this is just "culture war nonsense" but consider how much positive and meaningful impact she's made for so many with her philanthropy.
Scott Adams' revolution was to get users to give him plot lines.
He was the first to publish an open way to communicate with him in order to out the corporate crazies, and readers did in droves, explaining the inanity of their workplace and getting secret retribution for stuff they clearly couldn't complain about publicly.
A good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom.
Doing this seems to require identifying with your readers and their concerns. That could be disturbing to the author if the tide turns, or to the readers if they find out their role model was gaming them or otherwise unreal, but I imagine it is pretty heady stuff.
I hope he (and anyone facing cancer) has people with whom he can share honestly, and has access to the best health care available.
> a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom
Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the author stating that when you're an author, people simply tell you stories and you don't need to come up with them anymore!
Remember this one?
https://dynamicsgptipsandtraps.wordpress.com/wp-content/uplo...
"The clue meter is reading zero."
Everyone at Motorola recognized it immediately.
Why, what’s the backstory?
They had a program called Individual Dignity Entitlement as well as mandatory drug testing.
I found it hard to reconcile his charming and witty comic strips with some of the ugly things he wrote elsewhere. I would never usually throw a book away, but I made an exception for one of his books, because I didn't want anyone to see it on my bookshelf and I didn't want to give to anyone else.
I have a personal convention for books like that - I don't have any Dilberts on the shelf but a lot of Neil Gaimans, plus an artsy TTRPG book ("Maze of the Blue Medusa") that's also made by someone who is now widely considered a serial sexual assaulter - I don't (always) remove them from my shelves but I turn them upside down, like a flag indicating distress.
The problem with taking them out of circulation is one less copy at the used book store and one more potential sale of a new copy.
It’s 2025. That book is getting pirated before anyone goes out and buys a new copy.
[dead]
People aren’t just one thing. They can be right about one thing and wrong about other things.
We already know that.
The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? I first saw people wrestle with this idea for Michael Jackson and recently it has been a big issue related to Kanye West.
The art was good. I remember Cat Stevens disappearing from the airwaves when Yusuf Islam emerged. You might feel differently about the art based on how it connects to the post-revelation artist. Michael Jackson was close to a genius. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
It doesn’t help that Yusuf Islam called for the murder of Salman Rushdie live on TV, which connects his odiousness to his work in a way the other artists transgressions often aren’t.
Growing up as a devout religious kid in the 80s, it was always understood in my household that rock stars were lascivious, immoral sex crazies and that Hollywood was a den of heathen propaganda. Nevertheless, we still listened to (some) music and watched (some) movies.
I'm mostly out of that environment now, but occasionally put myself in those shoes again and think how odd it would seem to me that people look up to and expect moral righteousness from these people.
I think most people recognize more states that 'moral righteousness' and 'immoral heathen'. I don't expect, e.g. christian bale to spend his life volunteering in a food pantry and washing prisoner's feet.
I do expect him not to rape, murder, commit fraud, and so on.
One of the things I occasionally notice about conversations in this area is that some people care more about actions that hurt people than property.
If our hyopthetical rockstar trashes a hotel room, wrecks his car and then has a heart attack from cocaine, that might be judged differently than one that joins the local nazi party and attempts to murder someone.
Art is relatively low stakes. We can always create more art. You should increase the stakes as a thought experiment.
The person who solved global warming/cancer/whatever turns out to be a terrible person? Should we throw away their work, and come to a different answer? Or wait a few generations so people forget and come to the same answer again but the people involved are “pure”?
There is some art that, to some people, is as important as anything else in their lives. For some, the stakes are that the artist who made the art that made them want to keep living after, say, being sexually assaulted, was himself credibly accused of serial sexual assault.
I’m not advocating a decision here, but I wouldn’t call that low stakes.
The answer is: nothing. It doesn't matter.
You seperate the work from the author.
It was an awfully big thing. I had a number of his books along with a little Dilbert doll sitting on top of my desktop PC, and threw it all away for the same reason as the parent poster when I learned of the awful things he'd said.
It basically says more about us than it does about the other person we "admire."
Basically, what do you value more and what can you excuse?
Or you could keep it as a reminder that people can go alt-right, even if they were normal before. It could happen to you, too. Maybe it's preventable by avoiding Twitter? Maybe older people just don't have any built-in defenses against BS on the internet and become embroiled in it?
Consider that we wouldn't have the life we have today if cancel-culture was the norm several decades ago. Not everyone will be perfect at everything, so just take the good and ignore the rest. Genius and insanity tend to be very, very close.
> so just take the good and ignore the rest
That's how we have the life we have today. People now seem to be taking it to the extreme, ignoring the rest, even when there is no hint of any good.
He really let fame go to his head...
Was it the pool or the burritos that tipped you off?
I had "Defective People" in the 90s and it was effing crazy how the last chapter went off about how he could manifest reality. That's when I knew he was off his nut.
What "ugly things" exactly did he say?
Just search for "Scott Adams racist posts". There's no need for more links to it.
"Women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently." — Scott Adams
"You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles." -Scott Adams
Hundreds of newspapers across the country will stop running the “Dilbert” comic strip after its creator said on a YouTube livestream that Black people were “a hate group” and that white people should “just get the hell away from Black people".
In the video from Tuesday that led to backlash, Mr. Adams, who is white, said he had “started identifying as Black” years ago and then brought up a poll by Rasmussen Reports that found that 53 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s okay to be white.”
Mr. Adams said in the video that he took issue with Black Americans who were polled and who had not agreed with that statement.
“That’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” he said, adding that it “makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white
>"It's okay to be white" (IOTBW) is an alt-right slogan which originated as part of an organized trolling campaign on the website 4chan's discussion board /pol/ in 2017. A /pol/ user described it as a proof of concept that an otherwise innocuous message could be used maliciously to spark media backlash. Posters and stickers stating "It's okay to be white" were placed in streets in the United States as well as on campuses in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
>The slogan has been supported by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Media coverage of the event, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson asking "What's the correct position? That it's not okay to be white?", was seen as reacting in the way that the trolling campaign had intended.
Brooks, Marcus A. (November 1, 2020). "It's okay to be White: laundering White supremacy through a colorblind victimized White race-consciousness raising campaign". Sociological Spectrum. 40 (6): 400–416. doi:10.1080/02732173.2020.1812456. ISSN 0273-2173.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02732173.2020.1...
"Dilbert comic strip dropped: What is the 'It's Okay to be White' slogan used by Scott Adams?". Firstpost. February 28, 2023. Retrieved March 1, 2023.
https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/dilbert-dropped-its-oka...
"'It's Okay To Be White' Was A Planned Hate Crime From 4chan Internet Trolls"
https://web.archive.org/web/20180625104237/http://www.cfwera...
"The 'It's Okay to Be White' meme was backed by neo-Nazis and David Duke"
https://www.newsweek.com/neo-nazi-david-duke-backed-meme-was...
Edit:
>txcwg002 0 minutes ago | parent | context | unflag | on: Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon ...
>WTF. It's not ok to be [color]?
You're falling for it hook line and sinker, or just being a performative racist troll. Read the Wikipedia article and the referenced articles. The explanation is there, spelled out quite clearly, with verifiable citations and references and evidence, nothing to "wtf" about. It's quite calculated and intentional manipulation, and your knee-jerk reaction is precisely how the white supremacists who spread that slogan intended to manipulate you into reacting.
Knighthack earnestly and curiously asked, "What "ugly things" exactly did he say?" and I answered his question truthfully. If you think it's disrespectful for me to quote Adams' own words, or don't want his words repeated with proper attribution and context, then your problem is with Adams, not me.
I didn't even get into the crazy self-aggrandizing sock puppet stuff, but thanks for reminding me -- his bizarre unhinged behavior goes way back:
Dilbert creator outed for using sock puppets on Metafilter and Reddit to talk himself up (he is also plannedchaos on reddit):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452527
https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Educatio...
https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/gqzgx/dilbert_creat...
"How many people think I'm actually Scott Adams writing about myself in third person?" -Scott Adams as "plannedchaos" sock puppet
"Is it Adams' enormous success at self-promotion that makes you jealous and angry?" -Scott Adams as "plannedchaos" sock puppet
Thanks for the context. I hadn't heard about this before. Loved a lot of the comics but that does change my opinion about him.
To get a bit off-topic...
R.E. "It's okay to be white": I think this slogan is the perfect example of effective propaganda. Out of context, at face value, it appears mundane and uncontestable. But in context it holds a wildly different meaning. I definitely saw members of my family fall for this exact trap. Retired parents spending too much time watching "news" aren't so different from terminally online incels.
Important because it should remind us that when we think people are acting wildly obtuse that we should question if we are missing something. Seems like the best way to combat getting caught in those echo chambers and identify propaganda. I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning.
> I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning.
I don't understand what you mean. Political ideologies are real, most people aren't crazy or duped by propaganda. They aren't just haplessly regurgitating 'white lives matter', it's a slogan that aligns with their beliefs, we should take that seriously and not pretend like 'they just don't know what it actually means'.
[flagged]
I think death of his stepson might have impacted him deeply at personal level turning him into a bit of a racist. In Trump he saw a hero who would take up the cause.
He went off the deep end at least a decade before that.
After reading his other work, I can’t really enjoy his comics anymore (and I’m a die hard HP Lovecraft fan, FFS).
Anyway, I recommend not looking his other stuff up.
Some of you cite your favorite strips. I will too.
Dilbert comes down to the caves where trolls (accountants) reside and gets a tour. The guide points to a troll sitting behind a desk, and mumbling in a stupor: "nine, nine, nine...".
Guide: And this is our random numbers generator.
Dilbert: Are you sure those are random?
Guide: That's the problem with randomness - you can never be sure.
Edit: Found it here: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-rand....
And thank you, Scott - many laughs thanks to you.
The following[0] is my favorite because my company is hardening security by making everything difficult and painful, especially single-sign on:
[Mordac] "Security is more important than usability. In a perfect world, no one would able able to use anything."
[Asok's computer screen]: "To complete login procedure, stare directly at the sun."
[0]: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2007-11-16
I especially like this one:
https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-08-24
It has hit home a time or two when the "managers" hire in a "consultant".
He also covered the opposite extreme:
https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-03-25
This is a classic and probably my favorite https://devhumor.com/media/dilbert-s-team-writes-a-minivan
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2001-10-25>
Hardware happiness - I've enjoyed checking in to these specs every few years...
35" monitor 20 megs of ram 1.2 gigabytes of hard disk space
https://web.archive.org/web/20150205042406/https://dilbert.c...
That reads like a XKCD comic disguised as a Dilbert strip.
Very nice.
And also, what a cool read that was, thanks for sharing the article.
XKCD has a different random number: https://xkcd.com/221/
Stray thought: Why 4 and 9? Because the joke is funniest if the number is completely ordinary.
0 and 1 are special and so are all prime numbers. 6 is out because it's the maximum die throw. And one figure is more ordinary than two figures, or negatives, or decimals. That leaves 4 and 9.
The perfect squares are the most ordinary?
[dead]
Pointy-haired boss: "According to the anonymous online employee survey, you don't trust management. What's up with that?"
<Dilbert looks back with a blank stare>
---
Godspeed Scott. Thank you for all the laughs.
I actually had this happen back in high school. The teacher gave us “anonymous” surveys to gauge her performance. She analyzed the handwriting to determine which one was mine. I actively tried to change my handwriting as well, but I guess not well enough. I’ve never trusted a survey was actually anonymous after that.
The same thing happened to a friend of mind in junior highschool. The teacher even called him out in front of the whole class for giving her bad ratings. We all did, but she recognized his handwriting in particular:-D
We've been tasked by a client for 2 years to create an anonymized survey, and my mind has gone to great lengths to devise a survey where even our own employees (or superusers with full DB access) cannot figure out who a respondent is.
It's been a fun exercise in software architecture. Because I actually care about this.
But we keep pushing this annual survey another year since we never seem to be ready to actually implement it (due to other priorities)
I built a suggestion box for a team at work like this. It was pretty basic. The page had no login, and no tracking of any kind. The DB only had an index, the date, and the suggestion. The source was available to everyone who would use it, and if they wanted I would have shown them the DB. These people also had root access to the server it ran on, so if they were really paranoid they could clear any system logs. The site was also heavily used for the day to day work, so the noise from everyone on the page would obscure any ability to tie a single IP to a time stamp without a lot of effort and a large chance for error.
Over the course of 4 years I think it was only used 3 times. Most people assumed it was some kind of trap. It wasn’t, I genuinely wanted honest feedback, and thought some people were too shy to speak up in a group setting, so wanted to give options.
I have a few friends working at CultureAmp (who - amongst other things - do anonymous employee surveys).
Management can 'drill down' to get information on how specific teams responded.
One of the things they mentioned doing is using a statistical (differential privacy?) model to limit the depth, to prevent any specific persons responses being revealed unless it was shared with a substantial number of other responses.
Surprisingly difficult when you consider e.g. a team lead reading a statement like "of the 10 people in your team, one is highly dissatisfied with management" - they have personal knowledge of the situation and are going to know which person it is.
There's commercial service providers and open-source projects doing that already.
The thing is, as soon as you allow free-text entry, the exercise becomes moot assuming you got a solid training corpus of emails to train an AI on - basically the same approach that Wikipedia activists used to do two decades ago to determine "sockpuppet" accounts.
Just run it through encheferizer.
Zee theeng is, es suun es yuoo elloo free-a-text intry, zee ixerceese-a becumes muut essoomeeng yuoo gut a suleed treeening curpoos ooff imeeels tu treeen un EI oon - beseecelly zee seme-a eppruech thet Veekipedia ecteefists used tu du tvu decedes egu tu determeene-a "suckpooppet" eccuoonts. Bork Bork Bork!
unless you add a step where you ask an ai to paraphrase what this message is about.
Good point, but also liable to get crucial informations and details lost or, worse, completely misunderstood by an AI which by definition lacks contextual knowledge.
When I quit a unicorn tech startup several years ago, they sent me an anonymous exit survey. It was was on a name-brand survey platform and the platform’s UI indicated the survey was anonymous. In my later in-person exit interview with a guy from HR, he had us go over a copy of my answers! Based on his demeanor, I don’t think he knew it was presented as anonymous.
When I was in grade 2 we had a secret santa, but it was the competitive variant, where the "winners" were able to guess who gave them the gift.
So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it.
They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.
Yes, 100% this. I learned a similar lesson and will never risk trusting that any survey is anonymous again.
I've seen the pattern repeat with other data collection as well -- "anonymous" data collection or "anonymized" data almost never is.
Great teacher gave you an invaluable life lesson.
In the same way that pickpockets give you a great lesson in not keeping your wallet in your back pocket
A simple trick is to write with your non-dominant hand :-)
Incomprehensible hen-scratch is pretty anonymous.
I try to be careful about e.g. changing punctuation and spacing if I want anonymous feedback to stay anonymous.
After some shuffling at work, I ended up spending some time under an awful manager. She approached me after an anonymous round of feedback and said "I noticed you wrote _____." I had, in fact, not written that.
On some level, having her guess wrong seemed even worse, but it also felt nice to be able to honestly say "I did not." Hopefully taught her to respect anonymity next time.
I routinely steal quotes from coworkers in meetings and use them in my surveys I never express my sentiments, just the sentiments of others.
Link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2010-09-01>
That would explain his rather obvious lack of energy these days.
Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years. Regardless of what you think of him, as someone who has worked in Corporate America for over a decade, there really isn't anything quite like Dilbert to describe the sort of white collar insanity I've had to learn to take in stride. My first workplace as a junior developer was straight out of Dilbert and Office Space. I have a gigantic collection of digitized Dilbert strips that best describe office situations I've run into in real life – many of them including the pointy haired boss.
He's expressed a lot of what I would consider... stupid opinions these days, but I would be sad to learn he's no longer with us.
Dilbert also failed to keep up with the times. Despite publishing strips about AI or remote work or etc, you can still tell that he has spent so long away from that world that he no longer has any novel insight into it. All of the jokes come secondhand from anecdotes that he hears or reads about.
I think Dilbert's cubicle nightmare frozen in time is somewhat charming.
Imagine the luxury of a cubicle in 2025.
You had cubicles? Luxury! Im my day, we put our spare-parts laptop on an old door for a desk and sat on a rickety metal chair on a concrete floor in an unheated warehouse. And we loved it!
You had laptops and spare parts?! At my first job we had to build ourselves a desk out of 1's from the bit bucket to put the card puncher on, and a sort of beanbag chair from the 0's. And the old-timers said we were lucky--the old system did not even have ones, which made less satisfying desks. When we got upgraded card punchers that could do ASCII instead of just typing the raw instructions in hex, that was a happy day, let me tell you.
Oh you had a chair! In my day we had a desk scavenged from sticks and rocks. Our chair was a piece of pipe with a 2x4 on the end. You had to balance carefully lets you impaled yourself.
Headphones are the cubicle of 2025. Or maybe VR goggles.
I always wondered if you could file for worker's-comp for hearing damage from turning up your headphones loud enough to drown out the office.
Sometime in the late 90s Dilbert pretty much became Pluggers but without the attribution to the readers sending in their ideas.
That's true.
Dilbert is about the 90s.
It's almost certainly hard to maintain the energy/inspiration needed for a daily comic strip/comic. I also think Scott Adams had trouble moving beyond the 1990s Pac Bell environment after he was no longer part of corporate (much less startup) life.
>He's expressed a lot of what I would consider... stupid opinions these days,
He's a racist. "Stupid" is putting it gently. Let's just call a spade a spade. Racist. You can say it with me.
I find it mildly entertaining to watch someone called out as racist by someone else using the phrase "just call a spade a spade" considering that phrase has been deemed risky due to racists using the word "spade" as a derogatory term.
Just to be clear, I'm making zero value judgement about your assertion, I don't know (or care to know) Adams enough to form an option on his character.
> by someone else using the phrase "just call a spade a spade"
The phrase is referring to the tool. It is not a reference to the derogatory slang term at all. It dates back to Plutarch's Apophthegmata Laconica, and the earliest version of it that appeared in English was in 1542.
All of that was centuries before "spade" also became used as derogatory slang. The phrase is no more racist than "like white on rice".
Oh, *I* am fully aware of the provenance of the phrase. I personally find it's push into the "best not used" category to be highly annoying.
I'll take your suggestion to heart and look into this term myself and see if I can't learn something new to better work within the present world. I'm more than happy to admit that I could very well have a blind spot for a sensitive term which I do not currently know about. I apologize to anyone if this was used offensively and thank you for bringing this to my attention.
> collection of digitized Dilbert strips that best describe office situations I've run into in real life
Probably also because, like e.g. "Yes (Prime) Minister", part of the depicted did come from anecdotes, instead of fantasy.
> part of the depicted did come from anecdotes
He spoke at MIT (early 90s?) and I remember him talking about making fun of PacBell colleagues in his comic: They would recognize themselves, ask him to autograph the comic for them, and then go away happy (thus making fun of them a second time.)
>Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years.
He has had some questionable views all throughout his life. In his book "The Dilbert Future", which was from 1997, the last 2 chapters are some wacky stuff about manifesting - i.e if you write something down 100 times a day every day it will come true and other stuff like that.
And while that may seem a far cry from the alt-right stuff he eschews, its really not - inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.
Manifesting is not that wacky.
Of course, you are not going to write down that you will win the lottery and then win.
But most people are their own worst enemy and self limiting to some extent. Focusing on what you want in life, and affirming it to yourself over and over, is effectively a way to brain wash yourself to change your own self limiting behavior and it’s not surprising that this is often successful.
Figuring on what you actually want in life and working towards that is productive, yes.
But that's mild compared to what he says. He basically says he can influence the stock market with affirmations.
You should read the chapters. https://www.scribd.com/doc/156175634/the-dilbert-future-pdf. Starts on 218.
As Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, millions of people probably prayed earnestly for God to save their king/queen, but kings and queens don't live beyond the average lifespans of humans...
If you want to read a book that's closer to how the universe actually works, and how your mind should operate, read it: https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-709
To be fair, that is not a very valid argument, given that for any given King/Queen, they will be millions on the other side wanting this given person to die.
E.g when the Spanish Empire ruled the world, the British were not very happy about that. With the British Empire, the French and the Germans fought them with every opportunity.
That's true, for every prayer I say for my monarch I include a note asking for my enemy's monarch to die!
I can see this being true, but so many monarchs were related, it's kind of weird.
Just think how young they would've died otherwise. ;)
>As Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, millions of people probably prayed earnestly for God to save their king/queen
Knowing how most kings and queens have behaved throughout history, I think Sagan suffered from a faulty premise. The queen everyone loved best made it to 96.
> ... millions of people probably prayed earnestly for God to save ...
Plausibly quite true. But given (1) how often the succession turned violent after a monarch died, and (2) how very little power the average person had - I'd say such prayers were entirely reasonable. If they made "life in the lower 99%" just 1% more bearable, that'd be a worthwhile RoI.
Demon-Haunted World is a book worth reading...but Carl often seems to forget that 99% of humans are neither huge science geeks (as he is), nor rationalist robots.
> He basically says he can influence the stock market with affirmations.
He does not say that.
> Starts on 218.
Actually it’s page 246.
More like he says the affirmations result in stock market premonitions. For example, he said after his "I will get rich in the stock market" manifestation he woke up in the middle of the night thinking "buy Chrysler" before it went on a rally.
> he says the affirmations result in stock market premonitions
Not even that. He says that affirmations resulted in him having a premonition. He does not generalize or predict that this will happen for other people, or even himself in the future.
Are you sure he didn't write "I totally didn't inside trade on the basis of information leaked by an employee who thought he was just telling me a funny anecdote to use in my comic, I totally just manifested a premonition in a dream."?
I mean if the affirmations make your brain, both conscious and unconscious, fixate on thinking about market conditions and purchasing opportunities, this passes my smell test.
A premonition is a fancy name for an unconscious prediction.
Now does are the predictions "good", that is a completely different story. Probably depends on the information going in.
> A premonition is a fancy name for an unconscious prediction
The problem with woo is you can always add more woo (bonus points if it has sciencey glitter). Goes from woowoo to woowoowoo.
Woo has no logical consistency and has nothing predictably predictive.
Ask manifestation believers why they are not successful or rich or whatever? You'll hear some fabulous reasons.
My neighbour paid money (I presume thousands) to do courses on learning how to unblock herself. The stated reason for the failure to manifest was due to blocks. Her explanation of the material was outrageous. I have yet to see the positive effect on her.
I don't manifest, yet I've got things others would like to manifest. Not sure there that fits in with the woo.
I knew a bunch of people who were really into the "Law of Attraction" woowoo manifestation stuff back in the mid-2000s. That was a good time for it, especially for suburban middle-class American folks like these, for whom life was generally pretty great. When your life is going great, believing that you manifested it just shows how awesome you are and how much the Universe likes you.
But after some time goes by and you get pinched in the mortgage crash, or your wife hits you with a divorce, or you get cancer, if you really believe you manifest everything into your life, then you have to believe you manifested the bad stuff too. So why did you do that to yourself? It's a rough belief system then.
To my mind, manifesting is just deciding, manifesting daily is focusing daily. I think the woo starts to come in when people either deliberately misconstrue or genuinely are not very intelligent and just followed a plan well. A couple comments above was talking about someone who woke up in the night and bought Chrysler, made me chuckle because I once woke up in the night remembering I'd forgotten to buy more $TWLO. I could tell this story as: I wanted to get rich playing the stock market, so I decided to write down I was going to do the stock market, every day I wrote down and research the stock market "manifesting" it more and more, once day I wrote into my manifest pad "I'm going to win the stock market!" for the 50th day in a row. That night I went to bed, and in the middle of the night I woke up and thought "I should buy more $TWLO!" - the next day I did, and a week later it rallied netting me $360,000.
Truly a master of manifesting my own reality, I suppose? heh. But seriously though, in think in the vain of the above, if "manifestation" is what someone needs to do as their trello or jira for themselves, more power to them.
He does. He basically argues that our thoughts can influence reality - the idea is that if we perceive something happening as truth, it will become truth (along with all the bullshit pseudo science to support it)
> He does.
He does not. I can’t prove a negative, but you, being the one making an assertion, could provide a quote (with context) which shows your assertion correct. Please do so.
Here is what he puts forth:
> If it's possible to control your environment through your thoughts or steer your perceptions (or soul if you prefer) through other universes, I'll bet the secret to doing that is a process called "affirmations."
> I first heard of this technique from a friend who had read a book on the topic. I don't recall the name of the book, so I apologize to the author for not mentioning it. My information came to me secondhand. I only mention it here because it formed my personal experience.
> The process as it was described to me involved visualizing what you want and writing it down fifteen times in a row, once a day, until you obtain the thing you visualized.
> The suggested form would be something like this:
> "I, Scott Adams, will win a Pulitzer Prize."
> The thing that caught my attention is that the process doesn't require any faith or positive thinking to work. Even more interesting was the suggestion that this technique would influence your environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goal. It was alleged that you would experience what seemed to be amazing coincidences when using the technique. These coincidences would be things seemingly beyond your control and totally independent of your efforts (at least from a visual view of reality).
He then goes on to discuss stock, him taking the GMAT, etc. He later continues:
> I used the affirmations again many times, each time with unlikely success. So much so that by 1988, when I decided I wanted to become a famous syndicated cartoonist, it actually felt like a modest goal.
Then he talks about syndicating Dilbert.
He doesn't say, "I can influence the stock market with affirmations," but if you read what he wrote, he is very clearly arguing that you can change reality with your thoughts.
> If it's possible to control your environment through your thoughts or steer your perceptions (or soul if you prefer) through other universes, I'll bet the secret to doing that is a process called "affirmations."
> Even more interesting was the suggestion that this technique would influence your environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goal.
> I don't know if there is one universe or many. If there are many, I don't know for certain that you can choose your path. And if you can choose your path, I don't know that affirmations are necessarily the way to do it. But I do know this: When I act as though affirmations can steer me, I consistently get good results.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I would say that "He basically argues that our thoughts can influence reality" is a fair description of these quotes and the rest of the chapter around it. Some of it is him referencing what other people told him, and he certainly hedges his statements a lot, but I certainly read it as him believing that his affirmations are directly influencing reality.
You call it “hedging”, I call it clarification. If he manages to get through a whole chapter without even once directly claiming what you think he claims, then it’s quite clear to me that he does not claim it directly, and that he does not want to.
To me, the quotes you give seems aimed at people with preexisting beliefs in multiple universes or quantum woo, and he seems to want to convince people that affirmations can be viewed as perfectly reasonable in their existing belief systems. This does not mean that he believes what they believe.
In a literal sense, I agree with almost everything you wrote. He does not want to directly make the claim that he believes affirmations are magically affecting reality. He aims the text at people predisposed to certain types of woo. And he wants to convince those people to try his other type of woo. He doesn't say what he himself actually believes.
Where I differ from you in my take on this is that I also weigh what isn't there. He doesn't provide any form of alternate explanation. Nowhere does he say anything that comes close to "I don't believe that affirmations work this way" or anything of the like. I also don't agree that his hedges clarify anything, rather they muddy the waters.
He presents a thesis, presents other people's arguments for that thesis, presents no arguments against, and then explains that he lives his life in a way consistent with believing in that thesis. The hedges fill one function: to make it harder to argue against him. If the arguments aren't his, the chapter stands even if the arguments fall.
To me, that is basically arguing for the thesis, but in a roundabout and quite defensive way. What other point would you say that that chapter conveys?
Looking it from that perspective, aren't we just describing agnosticism? The lack of "what isn't there" does indeed distinguish it between atheism, as that would be a "I don't believe in X", but it is also distinguishable from the religious beliefs of a true believer.
There is also the possible half point between atheism and agnosticism, where people self identify as atheism but will act according to some religious concept because they view it as important to their lives. To me it indicate strongly that beliefs, any beliefs, sits along a spectrum. A person can live their life in a way consistent with believing in something, either because they believe in it, or they don't know, or that they don't believe in it but still behave in that way because of a reason or an other.
Why didn’t I have you in my English classes peer reviewing my papers. Nicely done.
Thank you, that’s very kind.
If you were to actually read the chapters, its pretty clearly stated there.
He said he wanted to get rich on the stock market. Wrote an affirmation. Had a dream to by Chrysler stock. Bought stock, stock went up. By his conclusion, he manifested stock going up (because of how thoughts and perception can influence reality and e.t.c)
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Page 246
And yes, that is basically what he says.
With infinite possible universes, you can guide which universe becomes your reality through affirmations.
Wacky perhaps, but the philosophies of consciousness and quantum mechanics are kinda wacky too...
---
On a relevant point, he talks about curing cancer.
Can you provide some quotes?
Copy paste into LLM and let it do that for you.
He basically argues that you can alter reality with affirmations.
Don’t give people homework, give them URLs to back your assertions. Surely one friggin’ quote isn’t too much to ask.
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Until you provide some substantiation you are just making baseless claims.
Edit: BTW, you can’t copy the text on that PDF.
It has a degree of benefit in helping you identify focus, but much of the purported benefits come from having the skills required to obtain your goals being quite correlated with the ability to do a chosen task every single day.
A lot of time has past since I read Scott Adams view on manifesting. I got a decent way through before I realised it wasn't satire. It did seem clear to me that he was advocating a form of manifesting that went beyond either of those principles. That benefits came from manifesting in ways that no-other influence from yourself would be possible. That's essentially declaring it to be magic. Psychology I can believe, if you want me to believe in magic you're going to need a bit more.
From the point of view of an ADHD person, it doesn't surprise me at all that someone who had the ability to do a dumb task like manifesting would also have the ability to do meaningful things that that I find nearly impossible.
I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!
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If you actually did it it would not be a simple affirmation for long, your mind will quickly start to wander as the act of writing the same thing over and over becomes more automatic and what your mind will wander towards is what you are writing and staring at. The brainwashing that is happening is that of brainwashing you to set aside a part of your day for sustained focused thought on your goals, something most people seem to have never learned, they learned to ask their guidance concealer and google and internet forums but never themselves.
Depends on how well trained your mind is.
Some minds only think when asked to.
Also telling other people can help as some of them may be able to help you get there.
I think the thing with "manifesting" is it's almost impossible to write something down a 100 times a day, everyday without also doing other things about the goal, as it's on your mind so much. Obviously if you write "I'm going to become an olympic athlete" but just sit on a chair nothing will happen. But if you're writing that daily you're going to end up doing more exercise because you're thinking about it. You might spot opportunities that you would otherwise miss because your brain stops skimming over it because it's such a repetitive pathway now.
And while that obviously has limits, and is far from the magical technique some might claim - it's very hard to argue against things that work.
Or, quantum physics might actually be onto something.
Visualization is a thing, something happens when you can see it happening.
I mean, you can also do enough shrooms to pretty much "experience" anything as reality.
> you write something down 100 times a day every day it will come true
If you are writing "Repetitive Strain Injury".
This could have been a punchline in a Dilbert comic.
get-rich-quick schemes have been the bread and butter of the self-help/manosphere/conservative environment for quite a while. Its not a mistake that most "famous" people in these circles are either selling courses to make you "rich" or supplements to make you "strong".
and with a population desperate for any improvement in life these things end up finding a place, just like all the betting platforms all over the place. the only reason to bet is if you think you'll win.
I think you meant “espouses” not “eschews”.
"eschews" means "To avoid, shun" (https://www.oed.com/dictionary/eschew_v1?tab=meaning_and_use...)
I suppose they meant to say "espouses".
Lol, Garry Shandling "manifested" if you deeply care enough about something to actually spend the time to write it out 100 times in a day, you might also take some other actions...
I can't find anything super relevant while searching for Shandling and manifesting, but considering he was known for being a practicing Buddhist and a big proponent of meditation I wouldn't be surprised if he believed that writing down his goals is a good first step in achieving them.
Adams's version of manifesting is "if you write stuff down, it's more likely that outcomes outside of your control will help you achieve your goal."
Those are not the same thing.
This concept was popularized by the book The Secret.
The concept of the book, as I understand it, is focusing your consciousness on something you want ”will cause the universe to bring it to you”.
The concept is silly to me (it’s the steps that you take to actually achieve the goal that make the difference), but in a way, it is a prerequisite to achieving the goal.
My biggest complaint is this type of thinking usually accompanies lots of “woo” thinking.
It was well before he was a buddhist. Did you see The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling? There's pages and pages of him writing down how great he will be...
> Those are not the same thing.
Here's an idea: get informed on the basics of what you are discussing before you tell me what it is and isn't.
This is the correlation=causation fallacy in full force.
Basically, lets say that you naturally have the drive to do work that is valuable and can make you rich, but you are just not sure if it will.
Writing down 100 times a day that you want to become rich and then becoming rich is not really related - you were probably going to be rich anyways, or on the most charitable interpretation, the writing helped you stay focused.
Now imagine you tell someone with poor mental health who struggling at a low paying job that all you have to do is write something 100 times a day to make it happen.
It aligns very closely with conservative thinking - a lot of conservative people think they worked hard for what they have, not realizing that they have been given a massive runway (such as not having college loans to pay back, being in a good school district, having parents who aren't crazy busy with work to dedicate time to support them, and so on)
It was not a given that Garry's work was valuable.
>Now imagine you tell someone with poor mental health who struggling at a low paying job that all you have to do is write something 100 times a day to make it happen.
Sorry, did you think I was suggesting that it was good advice? Or that Doctor's should prescribe it?
> It aligns very closely with conservative thinking - a lot of conservative people think they worked hard for what they have, not realizing that they have been given a massive runway (such as not having college loans to pay back, being in a good school district, having parents who aren't crazy busy with work to dedicate time to support them, and so on)
The train has left the station. I do not think you were on it.
> inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.
Can we not do this kind of thing please?
Sorry man. This is the new HN. It is a shame, but things do change.
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The claim that conservatism is rooted in an inability to process reality is a misrepresentation.
The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar. The danger arises when this instinct is hijacked by a rigid ideology that resists truth and seeks control rather than continuity.
Which is, you know, what the American right is doing.
> The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar.
Yeah, that actually is an inability to process reality. Stuff changes, and things have never been stable or orderly.
Not every change is good, so we should be cautious. That's also a cornerstone of conservatism.
Fear is quite distinct from caution, conservatism consistently seems to be defined by the former and not the latter.
Not every status quo is good.
Staunch adherence to the familiar in a changing world is dangerous in-and-of itself. It is inherently anti-science.
And "order" doesn't fully capture it either, because the concept it gestures at can be more accurately described as "hierarchy" - as Kirk puts it, "a conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions".
In other words, everyone has a proper place in society, with some above and others below, and any attempts to remove that hierarchy are moral wrongs which require the transgressors to be put back in their place.
You can see how that core belief is intrinsically dangerous, and how nearly every controversial conservative belief about social classes falls out of it.
(It's also worth noting that this explains why conservatism's earliest champions were supporters of the aristocracy, and also why conservatism is more beloved by the old-money wealthy than move-fast-and-break-things new-money tech.)
Ah yes, in a world where half of all published "science" is fake or fraudulent (and dominated by leftists), being conservative is "anti-science".
>in a world where half of all published "science" is fake or fraudulent (and dominated by leftists),
See here is the thing- you don't know this is true. You never actually went and looked at the science or verified how much of it is fake. And yet, at the same time, you benefited from this science when its convenient to you because you probably don't realize that a medication or something you are using came from left leaning university.
This is what I mean by being out of touch with reality.
Sigh. Stop. I read the parent's post and his concerns are not without merit.
<< See here is the thing- you don't know this is true. You never actually went and looked at the science or verified how much of it is fake.
Technically speaking, neither do you unless you went over said data yourself. That said, some people did[2] and found that a good chunk of current studies can't be replicated. What does that say about the state of said science? Does it support your position? Does it support parent's post?
<< something you are using came from left leaning university.
The problem is not with left leaning or even right leaning. It is with people who blindly proclaim "Science!", but, at best, are an equivalent of annoying fanboys and, at worst, dilettantes, who feel compelled to use power of the state to squash people, who, in their mind, undermine their POV[1].
<< This is what I mean by being out of touch with reality.
And somehow, just to top it all off, they feel superior.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
> The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar.
... which inevitably breaks down when fundamental assumptions become disproven. And that's the point. Many "moderate" Conservatives still believe in the "trickle down" economy theory or that government debt is inherently bad and a government's budget needs to be balanced.
Both have been proven time and time again to be not just wrong, but outright disastrous in their consequences, and yet Germany voted that ideology into chancellorship, not to mention what is currently going on in the US.
I can't even tell what the current ideology of the US is. The current thought seems to be that debt doesn't matter but social programs are waste. So we must run up deficits while reducing spending.
The US seems to be combining the worst of both ideologies. I can't imagine what happens next.
Not much room to cut taxes for the rich without increasing the deficit which they've said must go down, so their great solution is to cut welfare programs to give a tax cut for the rich.
That is not my confusion. My confusion is that they are labeled conservative.
The term "conservative" is now just a fig leaf to hide the true aims of a radical fundamentalist agenda aimed at attacking most modern aspects of our society. Go find any commonly-held traditional definition of conservatism, and you will find Trumpists are directly and openly opposed to the bulk of it.
Basically, conservatives got increasingly angry (because things inevitably do change), so they decided to give up on conservatism and flip the table instead. This also ties into one of the tenets of fascism - invoking an idea of some imagined idyllic past, as a reason that the current society needs to be attacked and destroyed.
I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election until Biden 2020 and Harris 2024. I consider those solidly conservative votes, and attribute them due to my getting older.
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> The issue is, you will never ever see me as being correct because in your brain you are incapable of realizing that you are wrong.
The insanity and narcissism in this statement must be satire right? The idea that you're right and anyone who doesn't see that is clearly just incapable of recognizing they are wrong seems hypocritical at best and the same line of thinking that has lead to some lovely historical movements at worst.
> And while that may seem a far cry from the alt-right stuff he eschews
The podcast If Books Could Kill manages to stumble on a fair amount of overlap between "power of positive thinking" / "The Secret" crap, and right wing politics in the books they review.
There's nothing unique to right wing politics about it.
The sheer volume of "woo" and positive affirmation manifestation among my friends is vastly higher on the left side of the spectrum than the right.
Perhaps it's more to do with extreme personalities and wishful thinking.
> The sheer volume of "woo" and positive affirmation manifestation
That stuff is mostly harmless speculation/belief, and isn't equivalent to outright denying reality and seeking 'alternate facts'.
> inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.
It is absolutely not a unique failure to conservatives. But it does explain why there is so much interchange between crunchy granola hippies and qanon militias.
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Are you equating conservatism with flat earth crowd?
Flat earthers do tend to favor specific types of politicians.
The problem I see with this question is that people currently claiming the conservative mantle in the US don't demonstrate conservative values.
How conservative was DOGE's effort to save money. The story was conservative but the actions were radical.
I wouldn't equate conservatism with the flat earth crowd. I would equate the current majority closer to flat earthers than Columbus.
Pretty sure DOGE actually ended up costing the government more money than it saved. The entire venture was a disaster to highlight a meme. It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing.
More the 'vaccines cause autism', 'evolution isn't real' and 'jewish space lasers' crowds, and for good reason. Not all conservatives believes those things, but the people that do are overwhelmingly conservatives. May as well add in all the "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats!" people as well.
A lot of flat earthers shifted over to Qanon.
[EDIT] Which is unsurprising since the whole flat earth deal requires some sort of vast lizard-person conspiracy or whatever, and that's the kind of thing Qanon is, too.
For every fringe conservative conspiracy theory you can find an equivalent stupid left wing version. Not being able to see that says a lot.
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Tell me how you know the women you see walking down the street are real women.
That is misinformation. There is nothing in traditional conservative thinking which depends on inability to process information clearly or think in reality. Those mental deficits can be found across the political spectrum. We might not agree with conservative value systems but let's at least be intellectually honest in our criticisms instead of using strawman arguments.
I noticed you wrote “traditional conservative thinking”, while the comment above wrote “conservative thinking”. Therein lies a difference.
It was a little sad to watch him get radicalized in real time. I really enjoyed reading his blog before this started to happen. But then a few publications started quoting blog posts of his out of context as rage bait -- I remember he was particularly butthurt about some Jezebel posts that took things he said out of context.
At this point, he basically started leaning into controversy for pageviews. He'd start linking to the controversial section of each post right at the top of the post. After a few months or so I had to unsubscribe, after years of reading his blog and Dilbert cartoons/books.
He's become such a gremlin that I won't be 100% sure he's serious about this until he actually dies.
Yeah I remember binging his blog while between classes in university - he wrote well and had interesting thoughts on marketability, mastery, business, etc., all things that I was interested in as someone learning to be an adult and find his place in the world. Then Trump ran for president, and honestly the blog was still good - Adams had some genuinely good insights about why Trump appealed, and suggested that he might be using the Republicans to get into power but he really doesn't share their values and will shake things up for the better. But then somehow Adams' identity got wrapped up in the idea of Trump not being as bad as people think and he just supported Trump more and more even when it became clear that Trump did not have a master plan to liberalize the Republican party.
I liked his blog at first and thought it really declined with video and short form content. It’s like his written editing slowed him down and made him less clickbaity than when he could post a video with no editing in just minutes.
100% agree ^^^ He went full Elon Musk, before Elon Musk. But yeah, back in the 90s/2000s, when my career in Corporate America started to settle in, his Dilbert comics brought my loads of comic relief. My favorite character was Wally; he always seemed to "fail up". I recall Wally meeting with the pointy-haired boss to tell him he'd returned from his 3-week vacation. The boss said, "You were out on a 3-week vacation?" Wally, the master, replied, "Sorry, I misspoke. I'm leaving now for my 3-week vacation." LOL
Wally not washing towels because when he uses them he's the cleanest thing in the house, so logically they should get cleaner every time . . .
Wally, totally relaxed, reading the newspaper, as everyone else is freaked out, trying to meet an upcoming deadline. Everyone later learns that all the current projects have been cancelled by the new VP, just to make the previous VP look bad. I believe this is when Asok, the intern, started calling Wally "the master", something like that.
Since we're posting favorites, here's one about lawyers, which I show to my contract-drafting students every semester:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230301101359/https://dilbert.c...
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2008-08-28>
Two of my favorites:
Catbert on work life balance: "Give us some balance, you selfish hag" https://steemitimages.com/p/7258xSVeJbKnFEnBwjKLhL15SoynbgJK...
The other, I can never seem to find. They're all in a meeting, and the Pointy Haired Boss says, "This next task is critical yet thankless and urgent, and will go to whoever next makes eye contact with me". Everyone stares at the desk, and then Alice pulls out a hand mirror and angles it between the PHB and Wally.
> Catbert on work life balance: "Give us some balance, you selfish hag"
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-05-05>
> The other, I can never seem to find.
Here you are: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-08-30>
Thankyou!
Back in the 90s, I worked on a "side project" that screen-scraped the daily Dilbert strip and added it to an internal "employee portal" website. A lot of people liked it, including all the pointy-haired middle managers. However, after about a week, I was told to remove it immediately, not because of the legal/ethical issues around screen-scraping (stealing) the strip, but rather because this particular day's strip was about Dilbert's company laying off a bunch of employees so the company's executives had more money to buy vacation homes (or something like that), and, by coincidence, our company announced a massive layoff on that exact same day. The timing was totally coincidental, but perfect. Executives were furious; my boss told me he got yelled at by our VP. I loved it.
Reminds me of when someone did an April Fools prank that printers would require payment to use, and then got in big trouble, but only because management was about to implement that policy for real: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43543743
Thanks, I couldn't remember where it was from but I find it so funny that he had to write a second apology, for claiming in the first that they didn't plan to do it.
As weird as he is, his claim that Trump uses a form of mass hypnosis is still the best explanation for Trump's success that I've heard. But why then Adams would support Trump, who is clearly the ultimate PHB, is something I never understood.
Don't underestimate the extent to which sexism and racism factored in to his victory also. The level of competence, integrity and patriotism between the two candidates was staggering, and yet...
If you've ever read Thinking Fast and Slow, Trump is great at appealing to System 1. He's spent his entire lifetime focusing on his branding and what people think of him. I dislike almost all of Trump's policies and his tactics; however, he's great at oversimplifying things and getting the visceral reactions he wants.
Chapelle's SNL monolog about Trump is pretty spot on too.
He seems to play the media like a fiddle. It's insane how gullible so much of the media establishment is nowadays and play right into it.
It's not gullibility; it's a symbiotic relationship.
They like it because he's good for views, and because US politics media runs on Murc's law (anything bad is the Democrats' fault for not stopping it).
I haven't read it yet, but I've got it right here, and I just finished my previous book.
It's such a great book. You can skip the first few chapters as the evidence for those chapters on priming hasn't been replicated: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
However, the fundamental ideas of System 1 and 2 have made me rethink so many things.
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I grew up dreaming of being a cartoonist, and while Gary Larson, Berkely Breathed, and Bill Watterson were my holy trinity Dilbert wasn't far off. Always admired Adams and his humor - and like you even more so once I ended up in the corporate computer world.
Was sad to me to see someone so good at lampooning absurdity get sucked into such a toxic mindset, but I'll also be sad to hear he's gone and I'm sad to hear he's up against it.
I was a Dilbert fanatic for a long time.
Adams, himself? Not so much. I think he tends to have a rather nasty outlook on humanity, and I had a hard time reconciling it.
I do know that he was/is pretty much about as far away from Diamond Joe* as you can get. Interesting that they seem to be fighting the same battle.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_(The_Onion)
My one "boomer" take: Something I wish the younger generation would learn is that it's useful to be able to separate a work from its author. Some of my favorite films were produced by Harvey Weinstein. They're still my favorite films. The fact that a slimeball was a force behind making them doesn't detract from their content. I like Robert Heinlein sci-fi, even though, judged by today's moral yardstick, some of his views were... questionable. I still like Harry Potter even though J. K. Rowling went totally bananas. Troubled and/or terrible people can make great art and music, and it's OK to like the art and question the artist.
I have to disagree with this, sadly. Supporting the work is supporting the author so they can continue doing terrible author things. This is why boycotts are effective and "oh well, I'll just keep buying it anyway" is not.
Depends on how you enjoy them. I'm re reading Harry Potter off and on. I already bought the books before JK Rowling expressed her views. My reading does not give her another dime.
Same thing with Blu-Ray of Pulp Fiction though I believe Weinstein Company has given up all rights to most of their movies.
I think these are two positions that don't inherently conflict. In most cases you can still enjoy art you loved before you knew the artist was problematic without continuing to give them money.
Don't stream it and don't buy a new copy unless someone completely unrelated owns it now, but you can still listen to, watch, or read the stuff you loved before you knew what was going. Whatever you already owned didn't suddenly become toxic. Used book/music/movie stores exist. Piracy is always an option.
That's not to say a few people haven't managed to ruin it beyond my ability to enjoy their content no matter how much I used to love them, but there's no reason to give up something you enjoy just because you learn the person or a key person behind it sucks.
Additionally, boycotting is one of the vanishing rare ways we have influence over anyone richer or more powerful than us.
He's also the earliest person to predict a Trump win in 2015, and was ridiculed for it, but turned out to be right.
One of Bernie Sanders campaign slogans in his first primary campaigns which started in 2015 was “Bernie Beats Trump” - the lack of enthusiasm around Hillary Clinton was palpable.
My quick search suggests that slogan only showed up in 2019.
Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a vintage meme at this point. He may have been the most famous person to say what so many of us expected first, but it just means he paid attention.
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> If you squint you'll see that both parties are an expression of the same statist ideology and there's very little difference between them.
If you squint so hard your eyes are closed, maybe
>tech is a lefty hell circle
oh hell, I shouldnt bother. But this isnt really how reality is shaping out and in fact one of techs biggest names is a sieg heiling member of a far right presidential admin.
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it was some kind of roman salute, from the heart lol
It is a Roman salute! It's just 1920s Rome....
Even if what you were saying is true (and its most certainly not), its funny how everyone who makes this argument always tends to fall on the conservative side, that in fact does significantly more lying as a verifiable statistic.
I have to squint to read your post because it is so greyed-out
> Just because the tech scene became this lefty hell circle
Nah there’s plenty of Trumpers in tech. Go on Blind, you’ll see.
> “I’d like to extend my respect and compassion and sympathy for the ex president and his family, because they’re going to be going through an especially tough time,” Adams added.
That in and of itself puts him above what I've come to expect from this low-bar dip in American culture. Good for him.
Sure, but one wishes that it didn't need to arrive on the back of a face-to-face encounter with his own mortality. That understanding of a shared humanity is accessible in other ways, though cancer diagnoses do have a way of shoving it in your face.
We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
Except of course this other dig at Biden elsewhere in the article:
> “I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it – well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said.
The use of the word "admitted" implies that Biden is either lying about how far it has progressed, or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
I’m no doctor but I know PSA test would have identified its existence long before this stated progression. It’s a blood test that would be routine for any male his age, he’s probably had them at least annually for decades of his life at this point
The implied timelines don’t match.
Not routine at age 82: "most organizations recommend stopping the screening around age 70" https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/psa-test/in-dept...
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The guideline to stop screening at 70 has nothing to do with financial cost. It’s that detecting it at that point is useless because you’ll generally be dead of other causes by the time it catches you.
Compounding the issue, the rate of false positives rises as you get older which then 1) freaks people out and 2) encourages them to get more invasive tests done which are themselves increasingly hazardous (and less valuable) with each passing day.
There are a lot of good reasons not to speculate about others' health decisions on the Internet, and avoiding a spotlight on your own basic ignorance is one of 'em!
Yes, because most men won't live to be 82, so on average it's not worth it. But presidents are not "most men." They're also attended by personal physicians who can keep them from freaking out when informed accurately of their health.
I would appreciate less condescension about my supposed ignorance, but I guess that's unrealistic.
Doctors don't adjust how long they're trying to keep you alive based on your job title.
Doctors also don't believe that rich people are somehow immune to the psychological trauma of "you might have cancer → nvm all good → you might have cancer → nvm all good → you might have cancer → nvm all good."
That might be true in a triage/ER context.
Doesn't track when we are talking about a slow, years long chronic illness and someone who over the last 4 years has had personalized healthcare to the tune of 8 figures.
There is a NYT article up right now pondering the same question: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/us/politics/biden-cancer-...
> or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
Which is probably true. And it's fine, he has no obligation to disclose this until he wants to. In contrast his dementia though ....... that's something he should have disclosed earlier.
Edit: "Several doctors told Reuters that cancers like this are typically diagnosed before they reach such an advanced stage." from https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bidens-cancer-diagnosis-pro...
That’s not a dig at Biden. It’s just [almost certainly] true.
Adams did such a great job exposing the absurdities of the American white collar workplace, as seen by the underlings. So it is puzzling how he went over to the dark side of the pointy haired Boss. And the Boss's masters.
I hope some pharma underling might have cooked up some good meds for Adams, despite all the pharma bosses and their backers.
If he expects this summer to be his demise, then it must have mutated and spread to vital organs. Metastatic cancer is the true killer. Cancer in your bones can linger for years without progression.
I am a big fan of Dilbert and really liked one of his books "how to fail at everything and still win big".
I don’t understand why PSA levels aren’t included as part of the standard blood work done with check ups.
Current evidence is that PSA tests don't actually save lives:
https://thennt.com/nnt/psa-test-to-screen-for-prostate-cance...
I wish they did, of course. I personally lost a close friend to prostate cancer last year. He was 41 and was, before the cancer, one of the healthiest and most athletic people I knew.
The first inkling he had that anything was wrong was a backache that wouldn't go away; a stage 4 diagnosis ensued. He held on for 21 months from the onset of symptoms before the cancer took him.
My dad is in his late 70s and has tested at very high PSA levels a few times. So far none of the biopsies have found cancer, but they've caused a lot of stress and discomfort for him.
I don't have a strong opinion about the tests either way, but I wasn't the one getting the biopsies.
That does sounds stressful. Sorry he had to go through that.
I have high psa levels. 17.
Had a biopsy. Turns out I have a really large prostate. My doctor said that some just naturally have larger prostates and the larger ones produce more psa. The psa density function put my levels at normal when taking in to consideration the size. The biopsy came back negative.
My understanding is that it's net negative to test too much.
A lot of men die with prostate cancer, because only very few die from it. And if you belong to the former group, knowing about it or doing any kind of intervention means a massive loss in quality of life. So the best course of action overall is to close our eyes and stop looking. And hope you don't belong to the latter group.
It's an indication that something's wrong with the system. We'd get better overall health outcomes if we tested everyone and told a large cohort of people "you do have cancer, and there are these possible treatments for it, but we recommend you don't take any of those treatments and just hope for the best". But between doctors and patients and other healthcare participants, we collectively can't do this - a large minority of people will freak out and demand treatment and the healthcare providers will feel compelled to go along with it.
Perhaps this plan just needs better marketing. Instead of dividing tumors into benign and malignant we could have a third category for malignant but slow-growing.
It does depend a bit what the next step is; you can MRI as the 1st step, and that at least is harmless.
MRI machines need to be a) democratized so they're cheaper and everywhere and b) connected to trustworthy clinically-proven radiological AI to identify and watch growths. There's absolutely no rational reason any patients should end up with surprise terminal cancers or surprise coronary artery disease.
(Yes, yes whole body scans exist but these are largely pseudo-medical scams that don't deliver what they promise. I'm saying deliver on it, within reason.)
Why wouldn't whole-body scans satisfy your criterion in the first paragraph (for those who can afford them, anyway?)
It would help if they weren't damn slow; taking up an expensive machine for an hour is not a way to be cheap!
Do you mean most would recover by them self?
edit: Ah ok. Risk of over-treatment by broad scanning? "Active surveillance aims to avoid unnecessary treatment of harmless cancers while still providing timely treatment for those who need it." according to NHS.
My doctor tells me that PSA testing has now shown to not be effective so they don't do it anymore. I am 58 and my dad died of prostate cancer so I am concerned.
It should be patient dependent. Screening everyone is not currently thought to be useful but those with risk factors should be screened after a discussion of risks/benefits. Your father having prostate cancer (especially if he was diagnosed before age 65) is a risk and I would advocate for it, especially if it something you are worried about and you understand that sometimes a PSA can be falsely elevated in benign conditions, which may mean you get a biopsy that ultimately wasn’t necessary, and the potential risks that could have.
For a good short overview: https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet
And read “is the PSA test recommended…”
Most people with prostates experience a rise in PSA levels as they age. There's no evidence that treatment, especially given how slow, growing prostate cancer usually is, results in a net positive benefit overall. The exception is younger people with aggressive cancer, but you can't exactly limit PSA screening only to young people with aggressive prostate cancer.
Not a doctor, but I thought that part of the issue is that PSA tests aren't terribly accurate, and have a lot of false positives.
In addition to what other commenters have said, the growing market for telehealth finasteride means means that a decent portion of the male population are artificially below baseline PSA levels (and my understanding is that this has some degree of long term effect even if you stop taking the drug).
Today, my local news station said they used to. My guess is, carriers decided to keep the money instead.
Which carriers are you referring to? Commercial health plans are subject to a minimum medical loss ratio so they don't get to keep any more money by denying coverage for PSA tests. The general issue is that with only a few exceptions, most cancer screening tests haven't been proven to improve patient outcomes.
I was never really reading the strips, but I fell in love with the cartoon. It had a very unique tone with the same famous satire.
Thankfully with all the voice actors and other talent that went into the show, it's easier to disconnect it from the hateful person Adams ended up revealing himself to be.
I have to admit, I'm not up to speed on anything he's been up to lately, but I absolutely read and enjoyed Dilbert way back when. I'm sorry to hear he's not long for the world.
Every time I see someone kitted out in VR gear, I think about his prediction that the Star Trek holodeck will be humanity's last invention and I'm very glad they don't have a button that can beam the next person waiting for their turn into a concrete wall.
Wow. Very sad news. :-(
I know this will sound dumb, but it's really hard to put into words how much I enjoyed Dilbert in its heyday. I mean at one time Dilbert was one of three web-comics that I read religiously. It was Dilbert, User Friendly, and Sluggy Freelance. The comics weren't just "comics", they mattered to me. Seriously.
Then UF quit publishing new episodes, and then Scott went all alt-right and Dilbert disappeared behind a paywall, and now only Sluggy is still standing. I guess. I have to admit, I quit reading regularly quite some time for reasons I can't even explain.
Anyway... not sure what the relevance of all of this is. Just reminiscing about a day when the 'Net felt a lot different I guess. At any rate, while I'd become less of a "Scott Adams fan" over the last few years, this news still makes me feel absolutely sick. I wouldn't wish prostate cancer on anyone. :-(
So sad! Love you Scott!
67 is too young to go from cancer.
“All my enemies — people who are Democrats mostly — are going to come after me pretty hard. So I have to put up with that," he said.
Sad that this man is dying of cancer and letting his “enemies” live rent free in his head. I hope he can find some peace before he passes.
I interpreted this differently, because I’ve read a substantial amount of downright cruel comments regarding his life and this diagnosis. He was right about that, and I don’t fault him for wanting to try and reduce the amount of vitriol by holding off on announcing the diagnosis.
Why deal with six months of vicious comments alongside well intentioned pitiful condolences when you could only have to deal with one or two month’s worth?
I would have done the same thing. For what it’s worth, I think an exceedingly small number of people can actually refuse to let those who hate your guts “live rent free in your head”.
Scott Adams is basically a sort of older version of Chris Chan. A cartoonist whose unreliable narration of own life became part of the whole performance.
But thing is—boy who cried wolf—not sure if he actually has the prognosis of cancer he says he has? It sounds mean, I reckon he does have it, but his past descriptions of health problems were confusing enough that I wouldn't be surprised if he recovers next year and spins it into a story about how he found a cure.
Lol, the things you read on the site nowadays ...
I don't think he's making that up.
I absolutely don't think, 100%, not a chance in hell he's making this up.
But I appreciate your comment, it's more data for me to engulf, you never stop learning about the human mind.
This. Scott Adams has become such a wingnut, he took this moment to make Biden's diagnosis about himself.
Even if he is being 100% truthful, this is kind of crappy behavior - the kind we expect from him.
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you should probably chill out man. it's fine to be a skeptic but, of all ulterior motives to have, brushing up against death for gain is something no one sane person would do. 99% of people don't remember the political positions of the Whig party and no one will remember our views in 150 years either.
hug your family and spend more time with them.
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1924477866915315722
Dilbert was as much an era as he was an icon. Good luck in the great cube farm in the sky, Scott.
Scott Adams has such a tenuous grasp on reality, it's hard to say if this is real news or just some sort of weird boomer version of clout chasing. If it's real, I hope he has some medical choices left, but he's also a horrible person.
Like many artists, it's hard to separate the art from the artist.
Although I thought his comics growing up were quirky, I was probably too young to appreciate them (xkcd was more my thing anyway).
Knowing more about him and what he says / thinks turns me off Dilbert entirely.
I doubt he'll go as he says. Sounds like a plead for sympathy / attention.
Bummer. Despite his recent controversy I have enjoyed his humor for decades and will continue to remember him for this.
My dad was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer in late 2018. A few years before that, the medical community had switched away from PSA screening, as it was thought more harm than good was being done from early stage intervention.
My dad's still ok. He had some localized radiation to beat back the biggest tumors on his spine, then did a round of chemo. This past summer he did a fun immunotherapy treatment, not CAR-T... but something more like that than checkpoint inhibitors. Otherwise his tumors have been kept to almost nothing due to hormone therapy.
Unfortunately, what eventually happens is you accumulate enough hormone therapty resistant cancer cells that the tumors start growing again in a meaningful way, and then there's not much that can be done. I assume this is the stage that Scott Adams has had and that he's been battling it for many years by now. With President Biden, it seems likely that his prostate cancer will respond to treatment, and if this is the case then he will likely die of something else, as is usual now for old men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer.
I most enjoy his analysis of persuasion techniques and what works and doesn't work. When he first started writing about this, using Hillary v Trump as examples, Hillary suddenly changed her methods.
I remember his remark about Hillary's campaign logo looking like directions to the hospital.
I'll miss him.
damn . I wonder if it's possible for the cancer to spread fast enough that tests would not have helped, so from elevated PSA to metastatic cancer in the span of months, or a year? This could have been the case with Biden and Adams.
The PSA test is pretty bad, not much better than 50/50 accuracy. I had raised PSA myself but it seems a false alarm. I bought some shares in a company with a 94% accurate test but it doesn't seem to have take off as a business thing.
Check your prostate yearly past 45-50. Through check with ultrasound.
My physician stopped recommending any testing when I turned 50.
I still ask for the PSA test. I've never been offered ultrasound.
My understanding is that it's generally slow spreading, but it's also slow to show symptoms, so they could have had it for years without anything indicating that they're in trouble.
there's two types of prostate cancer - slow, so slow that you'll probably die of something else and fast. you don't want fast. even the chemical castration that they use won't stop the fast-type of prostate cancer if they don't catch it early enough.
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That pure hate of yours. :/ Ugly.
far less than dealt by the source. i'll take ugly, and i don't wish cancer on anyone. my thoughts are with his family.
Ahem:
> and i don't wish cancer on anyone.
vs
> Get yourself a better doctor [in the context of: "Here's a nickel, Kid. Go buy yourself a real computer."]
Do own your statements, Kid.
it's a play on a dismissive character from the comic strip i linked in my post.
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Same feeling. I found him repetitive and formulaic. After you read his 5th strip you've read all of them.
It says a lot about his "humor" that the only people who found him funny were the unfunny people that work in cubicles.
But these people are over-represented here in HN, so get ready for down-votes.
Generalize almost any group in a derogatory way, get ready for downvotes. As if we can just group anyone and everyone whose employer's corporate policy favors cubicle layouts. Foolish.
Agreed. Humans are only worthwhile if they are non-formulaic and aren't repetitive.
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IMO his support from the get-go was tainted. His original original justification was, "I know what master persuaders do, and Trump does it. Therefore he's going to win, therefore I support him."
The insight into persuasion was interesting (and clearly correct), but what a morally bankrupt rationale for supporting someone. If anything, a person with Scott Adams' interest (and skills?) in persuasion would be compelled to counteract those talents.
He would've been a lot more respectable if he said, "I like Trump and I'm glad for my own political purposes that he's a master persuader."
I thought it was pretty clear from the start that his observations about Trump's persuasive talents, although valid, weren't his real reasons for supporting Trump (the real reasons being that Scott Adams is wealthy and apparently a bit racist.)
"Clear" in the sense of inferable, yes, but usually people's stated rationalizations are quite a bit more defensible. In this case the excuse was morally abhorrent even if you accepted it at face value.
The man is all about "persuasion" so I have to assume that lying about his motives is part of his toolbox.
Like a used car salesman who tells you that he's motivated by helping people get the best car they need, instead of being motivated to make lots of money by getting people to spend as much money on a car as they can bare.
Absolutely agree. Despicable, I would call it.
And to my point, and if we took his argument at face value, he also would have supported Hitler. He was also very good at persuasion.
FWIW, Mike Godwin - the "Godwin's Law" guy - has said it's quite alright to compare this administration to that guy.
> quite already
?
Oops, sorry, typo. Fixed it, thanks.
speedrun the hitler reference
So only data that leads to a predetermined result should count?
he said, dressed as a sea lion
You see this all the time especially on Hacker News. People won't say X or Y but they will use all the numbers they can to dance around it.
He's become so weird in recent years that I'm not even sure if I believe him or if this is another one of his weird spooky meme fortune teller stunts or something.
Dilbert was a good comic though.
I liked the comic ok, but I was actually a much bigger fan of the cartoon series that came out in the late 90's. It has, in my opinion, one of the most underrated opening title sequences out of any show.
I love that show enough to where I actually bought an animation cel from it a few years ago, and it hangs in my basement office.
Thank you for mentioning the series. I confess didn't know about it -- it's brilliant!
"We think you have missed an important demographic — Consumers."
I have three of the cells, framed in my office. I adored the TV show.
He looks fairly gaunt and hairless in the photo. Seems plausible.
Well, I enjoyed Dilbert for years, in any case. It shares the throne with "Office Space" for representing the pre-remote-work era of corporate IT.
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>I just can't fucking fathom being so rich as to never need to work again and then jumping into culture war
If you get rich through putting in consistent "work", you absolutely HAVE to do this through a fundamental belief in what you are doing, where it doesn't feel like work.
Your brain is programed to do a certain thing, and you have no choice but to do this thing - no amount of money can reprogram your brain. This is why so many well off people end up going off the deep end.
There is also a factor in the things that you buy as a rich person actually influencing you in ways that you don't even understand.
> I'd buy a reasonably sized/somewhat large home in the middle of fucking nowhere with a huge garage, and I'd spend my days tinkering on my cars, playing videogames, and working on passion projects.
And being isolated like that is just as likely to make you fall into ideological traps. You think that you can keep yourself happy by doing things you like, but the key thing to consider is why you like them. What purpose do you have for doing the things you do. A lot of times, this purpose is misguided (with cars, its not really about the car as much about the attention you get from others), and when you have the monetary capability to do the thing, you quickly find out that its not what you though it was.
I really respect Jim Davis, believe it or not. Draw the cat, collect the money, keep mouth shut.
I'm somewhat familiar with J.K. Rowling's story and she does it because she feels it needs doing for the good of society.
Well, nobody aspires to be the bad guy in their own life narrative, do they?
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Some people believe in things and aren’t minmaxing their life based on what gives them the best return.
Of course, they can be wrong. But I always find it odd when people say “I don’t understand” when it seems so obvious to me. They see things as right vs wrong and want to make things right even if it hurts them.
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I have not seen any indication that Rowling, Musk, or Adams assert that trans people are categorically a "major threat". That said, these folks do view trans people as a "major threat" to those athletes who compete in the category that once was exclusive to humans distinguished by having XX chromosomes. They believe, and rightly so in my opinion, that this athletic competition category should remain exclusive to those humans scientifically established (usually pretty obvious at birth) to have XX chromosomes.
>those humans scientifically established (usually pretty obvious at birth) to have XX chromosomes
It is entirely possible your heart is in the right place, but this specific comment gives it away that you haven't actually looked at this issue too closely. There are "scientifically established" reasons why this issue is a lot more complicated than the anti-trans folks always make it out to be, even if we completely ignore the existence of trans people. Look up Swyer Syndrome[1] for example.
[1] - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/swyer-syndrom...
CAIS is a better example. Even then it's overrepresented in athletic competition compared to the general population.
Swyer syndrome isn't a condition compatible with an athletic career because of the bone weakening caused by hormone deficiency.
The obvious indication is that they’re putting a huge amount of time and money into this issue. If they don’t think it’s a major threat then what are they even doing?
> I don't understand believing that trans people (or whatever other belief) are a major threat, but I understand getting heavily involved in policies around trans people if one were to somehow believe that trans people are a major threat.
You are presenting a strawman argument, and then declaring you can't believe that others believe this. The truth is, they don't believe that.
What women like J.K Rowling argue is that women's and girl's rights are harmed by insisting that trans people be treated for all purposes as their declared gender without regard to their birth sex. They argue that women and girls by virtue of their sex need single-sex facilities where males aren't admitted, no matter how that male self-identifies. They argue that treating adolescents expressing gender confusion with puberty blockers and surgery is extremely harmful and morally wrong.
And it's clear from recent surveys and polls that clear majorities in most western countries agree. An example of this is a recent poll in the UK regarding its recent Supreme Court judgement on the interpretation of its Equality Act. [1][2]
Regardless of the position you take on this, nothing is to be gained by not engaging with what others are actually saying and arguing.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/supreme-cour...
[2] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/half-of-labour-...
I’m trying to be charitable. The alternative is that these people are spending a ton of their personal time and wealth on a problem that is not a major threat, which is a much worse look for them.
Are they spending a ton of their time and wealth. Rowling has tweeted like 20 times in 5 years. It doesn’t seem like a big part of her life, just something she’s talked about.
It’s like I comment about oatmeal raisin cookies. I like them and will engage in conversation every few months or so. But it’s not a ton of my life. I don’t wake up and go to bed thinking of cookies.
Huh? I checked her account to see how many times she’s tweeted in the past day, but I got bored and stopped after 20. And every. Single. One. Is about trans stuff.
https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...
https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/my-article-for-the-sunday...
https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/my-article-for-the-times-...
I recommend reading these if you haven't already.
Definitely sounds like she thinks this is a major threat.
That's a fair rebuttal. I guess what I don't understand is the reflexive nature to double-triple-quadruple down into stuff that's like... not even overly difficult to discern as being wrong? Like to come back to Scott Adams, he seems to have a lifelong set of issues around socializing, and is a bit racist. But like, he managed a successful career that got around those things. So why come back in his twilight years to be really racist in public, even as people asked him to not? Even has a lot of his fans asked him to not?
It's such a bizarre hill to die on.
I think if you ask Scott Adam’s if he’s racist, he doesn’t think so. So the hill to die on is something to the effect of what he thinks is right and he doesn’t see that as racist.
It's very simple.
Many people are incapable of leaving others alone. They think they are right and people who disagree are wrong and must be corrected. Both rich and poor people can be like this. Even if someone else has absolutely no impact on their lives whatsoever, if they are "wrong" they must be demonized.
Rich people have the resources to shout over poorer people and buy influence.
The richest man I know sold his business in an all-cash transaction for $114 million in 2011 when he was in his late 50s. He divided the after-tax sum in half and used one half to write checks based on weeks of service to all of his employees and kept the other half. (I was one of those employees.)
He stuck around for six months making sure the transition was smooth then he fucked off to a beach house in Key West and has spent the last decade fishing and working on vintage Corvettes.
He would look at a trans person, go "well ain't that something" and move on with his life.
He would not wage an international media campaign to demonize them.
I can hear him in my head muttering "what in the hell do they gotta do with me?" just thinking about him being asked about a cultural issue.
Some people (both rich and poor, but you only hear about the poor ones) seethe with hatred and it's sad.
> The richest man I know sold his business in an all-cash transaction for $114 million in 2011 when he was in his late 50s. He divided the after-tax sum in half and used one half to write checks based on weeks of service to all of his employees and kept the other half.
That sounds like a lot of unnecessary double tax being paid.
>He would look at a trans person, go "well ain't that something" and move on with his life.
The problem, is that mountains of these kind of people say they are fine with trans people, but voted for this administration, and when you ask, they say "Kamala was going to gender change our kids" or some such bullshit.
So the culture war was fine to them, they just hadn't heard a hateful argument that touched their button yet.
My dad talked for like an entire year about how he's been newly dealing with non-binary and trans folk at the grocery store he was (at the time) managing, and how he thinks they are great and such nice people and their gender or whatever is not a work problem and he thinks "that people just need to have more patience with each other" but he voted for Trump
Because the liberals "have gone too far" with the "DEI stuff" and commented that he was worried that helicopter pilot from that accident was "rushed into someone else's spot"
Because she's a woman. And obviously we don't have like a hundred year history of talented and capable women pilots or anything. And it's not like women have been pilots in American commercial Aviation for decades with a clear trend of increasing safety. And obviously he has always had this consistent worry about woman pilots and feeling like he can't trust their ability and this totally isn't something that Fox News manufactured out of thin air these past couple years.
Which is funny because there is an actual, genuine, air traffic control scandal where a Black institution had perverted some pre-screening to give members of that Black institution an unfair advantage in screening. But even that horrible situation never put an unqualified or undertrained person on the job. It just made more of the members of the incoming training class black.
But that's the actual problem they don't like. DEI doesn't involve passing someone who should have failed, even in the blatant scandal I mentioned above
Stupid ideology is still ideology, and people are well-known to do all kinds of crazy, uneconomical things for ideology.
Markus "notch" Persson is another example.
JKR is doing wonderful work in upholding women's rights and helping women in need.
Some of this is her advocacy on social media but most of it is material contributions like starting a centre to help female survivors of sexual violence, donating hundreds of millions of pounds to charities that help vulnerable women and children, and funding court cases that have helped protect women's sex-based rights in law.
Maybe to you this is just "culture war nonsense" but consider how much positive and meaningful impact she's made for so many with her philanthropy.