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!
This is a common trend now on TikTok for any "creator" with a moderate follower count. The template goes something like "I'm bored, tell me the thing you bought that you can't do without". The creator doesn't have to do anything, the followers create the content for them in the comments.
Here's a theory why Scott went from funny to a bit weird alt right. For much of the time he was getting users sending office stories by email, but in more recent times was on twitter and getting info from the alt right bunch on there who push a lot of weird stuff. The reason he got banned from most papers was getting sucked into this stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white
A lot of people seem to have constructed a history of Adams where he suddenly got sucked into the Twitter alt-right sometime around the rise of MAGA, forgetting that his whole cartoonist origin story is white male resentment stemming from his belief that his progress in management was being hampered by women and minorities and that his decline from that low starting point was being remarked on long before the MAGA era, to the point that it was treated as a long-established fact around the time the term “alt-right” was coined.
It's been a while since I read dilbert in the papers, but.. really?
The comic I remember was overwhelmingly about the banalities of working as a corporate engineering type. One of his peers was black, another was a woman, and they were not the butt of the joke. Pointy hair boss was.
Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime. Your 2022 example only highlights the contrast.
The closest example I could think of from the 90s was a riff on whether you're supposed to open the door for women or not in these modern times, and it felt much more "confused everyman" rather than "aggrieved partisan".
> Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime.
The origin story being resentment over his perception his career was not advancing because of women and minorities isn't an inference from the fact that he is white, it's based on his own description of the reasons for his dissatisfaction with his career before becoming a full-time comic artist (and not descriptions which first emerged in the 2010s or later, though I think the his description of his final exit from Pacific Bell as "being fired for being white" was a later evolution, but his story of his perception that he was passed over for higher management at Crocker National Bank where he was already in management and, and passed over for any management opportunity at Pacific Bell, because of a preference for women and minorities came out much earlier.)
Consider alcoholism: some people never drink anyway, plenty of people can have one drink or a few drinks and then stop. But some people can't stop and destroy their lives. Consider gambling: similar distribution applies. Many people never gamble, many people have a little scratchcard or sport bet now and then, and some people get out of control and sink all the money they have into it.
Gambling is an idea that's a trap. Some people get like this with ideas on the internet. In fact there's an XKCD about it: "can't sleep, someone's wrong on the internet".
Usually there's a single atrocity or injustice that triggers it. Maybe it's real, maybe it's been subject to distorted reporting. But it becomes a monomania. You can't counter them with statistics or variations on "most people aren't like that".
People speculate this is what happened to Graham Linehan—I heard a funny story on a podcast in which somebody, a number of years ago, sent him an email saying that they were a big fan of the IT Crowd, but there was an episode that they felt used trans people as the butt of a mean joke in an unfair way…and he wrote back with a very thoughtful and sincere-sounding apology! But it’s easy to imagine questions like these being the start of the rabbit hole that he went down, starting to self-justify those aspects of his work, finding support from more radical people online, and ultimately transforming himself into a person with monomaniacal focus on this one issue, leading to the ruin of his professional life, the estrangement of his own family, and the loss of his own mental health.
Memetic viruses. Just like in biology, sometimes some people can fight em off, but others cant. The universe is not an emergent phenomena from random interactions of tiny billiard balls, ideas and memes actually exist in some plane of reality (IMHO of course)
If you look, there's a lot of articles and books about "anti-whiteness" and a crusade to both claim a "white race" doesn't exist and that it's also enslaving others. If you live in a segregated area, race relations from blacks to white people have significantly declined. Everyone's radicalized. Add to this the widespread promotion of violent crime statistics and innocent people being attacked and murdered. Unequal justice by juries etc.
Scott just quoted a study saying black people didn't want to be around white people. Whether or not you agree with the above, it doesn't change the reality. Obscuring the history of the Arab slave trade, whites being enslaved, Africans selling Africans into slavery, and dozens of other historical deceptions, have backfired and permanently divided people.
Dilbert was such a revolutionary comic strip in a lot of ways. Here are a few things related to Scott Adams and Dilbert that have stood out to me over the years. Apologize in advance if any of this sounds like it came from an LLM. Me and most of my family just like to info dump on subjects of interest.
I didn't understand it much as a kid, but later read an old copy of his book on how offices and office culture works (basically each chapter is Scott describing office did functionality with a liberal sprinkling of related Dilbert comics) and literally almost everything was 1:1 with the company I was at, only it was a good bit toned down of course. The beauty was that it was somehow generally applicable anywhere a company gets above a certain amount of employees. There was a lot of good information there such as how the company tries to get you to poop on yourself in your performance review in order to justify not giving you a raise or firing you (see - you yourself said that you needed improvement in working with others). There are many other insights as well that I found useful in my career. A lot of it is common sense, but it helped me come to terms with the irrationality of the corporate world. Every few years I reread it and find it more applicable than before.
He later wrote a book on why he thought Trump beat Hillary and it also had a ton of insights I didn't think about as I'm not a marketer. Anyone on Hilary's campaign team should read it. Of course it doesn't cover how Hilary was painted as some kind of evil queen from a fairy tale since the 90s. Scott kinda acts a bit nuts in this book though as he goes off on frequent tangents about being a trained hypnotist and how he recognized that Trump was doing the same thing. One of the many examples was that both of them went on SNL, but Trump attempted to act presidential, while Hilary was attempting to act more like the common person and it just didn't work and came off unprofessional. He also flew in a plane that looked like Air Force One and gave press conferences with a little fake Oval office desk.
Adams also came up with the term "confuseopoly" to describe companies that make it so hard to compare products and companies that you have to purchase on vibes. Economics textbooks use it now along with his blog example of trying to buy a truck. I see this dark pattern everywhere now.
I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish. I just attributed it to him running out of ideas for the comic and finding that grifting made him more money. I guess you really can see some of the shift in reading the more recent books, which is sad.
> I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish.
People were commenting on it long before 2016ish.
It’s been a long time since the name Scott Adams was associated with wit, subtlety, reason or honesty. But the Dilbert creator, men’s rights blowhard and world’s greatest imaginary fan of his own “certified genius” proved recently that as gross as you may already think Scott Adams is, he’s prepared to get even grosser.
— Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Scott Adams’ defense of rape mentality”, Salon, June 20, 2011
> 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
Isn’t that all comedy? It’s halting because it’s true. And sure, we may find striking truth through meditation. But it’s more likely to hit you in the real world.
You see it sometimes on Reddit in /r/comics, where someone will post a comic and then the idea for the next comic comes from a comment on the first one etc.
The IDE process at Motorola asked every employee to answer “yes” or “no” to six questions;
1. Do you have a substantive, meaningful, job that contributes to the success of Motorola?
2. Do you know the job behaviours and have the knowledge base to be successful?
3. Has training been identified and made available to continuously upgrade your skills?
4. Do you have a career plan, is it exciting, achievable and being acted on?
5. Have you received candid, positive or negative feedback within the last 30 days, which has helped in improving your performance or achieving your career plan?
6. Is adequate sensitivity shown by the company towards your personal circumstances, gender and culture?
This was done online every quarter and followed by a one-to-one with your boss to discuss how you could improve things together. Every manager in your reporting line could see your results and your own boss would expect to see your action plan to improve your team’s scores over time.
What do you think of this? A draconian measure or a positive statement of a minimum standard of expectation for all employees?
At the time of IDE being implemented, I was struck by the choice of language;
• INDIVIDUAL
• DIGNITY
• ENTITLEMENT
It’s a declaration of what we are choosing to become as an organisation; what we want the experience of being a Motorolan (and yes, that is a thing) to be. It’s universal and unbounded by grade, function or language and culture. It’s a clear message to every manager of the minimum expectation of them in relation to the people they lead. It humbles the role of “manager” to be in service of their employees’ entitlement to dignity at work.
Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.
The implementation of IDE was often painful. Employees worried about the consequences of saying “no”. Managers worried what consequences would arise from negative scores. Everyone was anxious about the one to one conversations.
>Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.
A classic bit of corporate bullshittery: Insist on giving employees questionnaires that supposedly enhance their "dignity" and help them feel more comfortable about working for you, but design it all in such a tone deaf way that it only, and very fucking obviously, will create more stress about how they should respond to please your bottom line.
I'm trying to imagine the entirety of my thoughts, dreams and feelings being reduced to binary choices on questions predefined by some corporate wanker - and it being called a dignity initiative.
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.
I remember reading this one in the late nineties. Never been able to find it again. It was probably in one of his books:
------------
pointy haired boss making making a presentation:
"research shows that customers want high-quality products at low-prices.
but we make low-quality products.
so we are going to sell them at high-prices and call it a strategy"
-------------
If anyone has a link to the original comic, please share it, I would like to see it again. It captures so many themes succinctly, and was very very astute for the late nineties when corps were doing crazy things and calling it a "strategy".
There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins and Dilbert says he won't know until he's done eating.
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.
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.
In most of the places I've worked, I would have assumed the same.
The thing is that there is no real technological solution that would instill trust in someone that doesn't already have trust. In the end, all such privacy solutions necessarily must boil down to "trust us" because it's not practical or reasonable to perform the sort of deep analysis that would be required to confirm privacy claims.
You may have provided the source, for instance, but that doesn't give reassurance that the binary that is executing was compiled from that source.
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.
When I was in high school I worked at the helpdesk for a small defense contractor. The developers there spent their down time building internal use IT tools. In those days they still wrote a lot of stuff in Lotus Domino, a tool that let you use a Notes database as the back-end for a SSR web app. Our ticketing system was written with it.
They later decided to adopt it for an annual IT satisfaction survey that they sent out to users. In an ideal world we wouldn't participate because the respondents were grading my team's performance but we got invites because we were part of the Exchange distro the message was sent to. I quickly discovered that the dev team had left a bunch of default routes enabled so we were able to view a list of all responses and see who submitted which. We knew our customers well enough that we could reliably attribute most of the negative responses via the free-text comments field anyhow but the fact that anybody could explicitly see everybody else's response wasn't great.
I suppose the NTLM-authenticated username in the server logs would convey the same info but at least that'd require CIFS/RDP access to the web server...
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 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.
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.
In college once I took a course that was being offered for the first time. They gave a midterm survey (usually we only had final surveys). I filled it out honestly, saying that my partner for our group projects was not pulling his weight. I had forgotten that I was in the only group of two (all the other groups were of three). The professor actually pulled me aside to let me know that he was aware our group wasn't working out - unfortunately there wasn't anything he could do.
I worked at a startup (that is still a startup going nowhere 12 years later) where the ceo and cto made a big show of the town hall and in particular the “open questions” part. Anyone could go on a little internal app, ask an “anonymous” question, and they’d answer all of this week’s questions each week.
In reality, they cherry picked the questions that they wanted to talk about and ignored the hard ones. We could tell because all asked questions were publicly visible in the app. But not all answered “ah we’re out of time”
So I once posted a question about why were the interns unpaid while writing code we shipped in production. I posted this question just after the previous town hall so that it would stay visible in the app for the longest time until the next town hall and would also be top of the list of pending questions.
For a couple weeks they said they wanted to answer it but needed to ask clarification questions to make sure they understood correctly, so could please the asker reveal themselves as it’s only fair. I never said it was me and nobody said it was them either. They couldn’t just delete the question like they usually did with unanswered questions before as this had stirred quite a little storm between employees. And it would clash with the “we’re open and fair” koolaid they were serving us.
Eventually, they deleted the question without annswering it “since the asker doesn’t have the courage to reveal themselves” and I was laid off which was “totally unrelated to the question you asked”.
Before leaving I dumped the database for that app out of curiosity. You bet that every single question also had an entry of who asked which question. They knew all along.
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
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’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.
I like to call it "radius of empathy". My spouse provides counseling and therapy services, and is amazed how some of her colleagues can show such genuine empathy to their clients, yet be so unconcerned with the suffering of others that result from the policies promoted by the people they vote for and vocally support.
Well said. And it is probably worth a point of clarification, since some of these replies are acting as if I said that conservatives can't be compassionate. That isn't what I'm saying. I'm specifically using a definition of empathy like the following (emphasis mine)[1]:
>the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation
It isn't a question of caring about people. It is a question of being able to put yourself in the shoes of a stranger with which you might not have anything in common. If you can do that, you will likely have general compassion for immigrants, the poor, the sick, minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, and really anyone who is being persecuted, oppressed, or unjustly burdened by something outside their control. That is fundamentally a more left leaning mindset.
If you need more direct experience (and that includes hearing a firsthand account from someone you are counseling) to engender that compassion, you are more likely to only extend this compassion to people who you share a lot with like your family, friends, and community (not just geographically), while people outside those groups wouldn't automatically be granted that compassion. This is fundamentally a more right leaning mindset.
The respective "radii of emapthy" are just different sizes.
"In my experience, the right wing is always asking 'What about me?' whereas the left wing asks 'What about them?' And that, in a nutshell, is why I will always lean to the left."
-Source unknown
EDIT: alternately, you could argue that the left simply has a more expansive definition of "in-group" than the right does, with fewer litmus tests as to who is granted membership. i.e. "I don't care about their skin color / sexual orientation / gender identity / disability status, they're still human beings and therefore we're on the same team." But it might be a distinction without a difference.
I think of it as being reactively empathetic instead of proactively empathetic. Comes from a place of incuriosity and probably fear of mortality and bursting the just world fallacy, among other things. It's a bummer so many are so stingy with their hearts, as though love is some finite resource.
I see it differently. There was a huge outpouring of sympathy from the right when Bidens news broke. I didn’t see a single unsympathetic comment.
Then compare it to mirror issues, when something bad happens to someone on the right. It may be the rage-bait algorithms steering things, but I seem to remember snark from the left after Trumps assassination attempt, the healthcare CEO shooting, Teslas stock decline, etc.
If you want to be this petty, this can be easily explained as american right not caring about Palestine specifically and simply hating him for other things. Please do not try to left/right this.
There is something crazy ugly going on on the left with all their 'happy he got an extremely painful cancer' that is not normal in American discourse and needs to have light shown on it. Please don't try to cover that up, it needs to stop/go away, or at the least be called out, not the calling out being silenced.
> All the people saying Biden's a genocider of Palestine and you shouldn't forget it just because he has cancer are on the left.
Well, they are from the crowd using leftist rhetoric to convince people that the most important thing in the world is to oppose the dominant center-right liberal wing of the Democratic Party at all costs, and which has continued to hold that position even when the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government, and most state governments, and is in the process dismantling the rule of law. A crowd which, incidentally, rapidly metastasized from a small fringe group to a well-funded, highly-visible network between the time that Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020 and the 2024 election.
Now, they could be genuine leftists with the worst imaginable praxis (certainly, truly effective praxis is too rare a commodity on the left), but there are other obvious explanations.
> Here, we tested this putative asymmetry using neuroimaging: we recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while 55 participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering... This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group.[0]
> Our large-scale investigation of the relation between political orientation and prosociality suggests that supporters of left-wing ideologies may indeed be more prosocial than supporters of right-wing ideologies... However, the relation between political orientation and prosociality is fragile, and discovering it may depend on the methods used to operationalize prosociality in particular... Nonetheless, we are confident that our investigation has brought us one step closer to solving the puzzle about whether our political orientation is intertwined with how prosocial we behave toward unknown others—which we cautiously answer in the affirmative.[1]
The second study are very clear that the results are mixed, weak, and dependent on how prosociality is measured and where (i.e, same study done in one country will give different result in an other). They explicitly note that you can not apply the results to the US because how different the political landscape is between Germany and US.
In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing, which the economic games that the study uses may have a bias against. That would contradict the simplistic conclusion that the prosocial behavior is unconditional.
> In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing
That supports the original comment, which asserted that right-wingers often only experience empathy for the ingroup while left-wingers also experience it for the outgroup:
> 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.
A person don't need to go through a similar experience in order to consider themselves as part of an in-group. The commonly used example in social science of an in-group are sport fans who align themselves with a specific team. The fans may have no personal experience of the sport or being part of that team, but they still view themselves as part of the in-group.
Personal experience can definitively help to form identity, but it can also be completely abstract and arbitrary. In many situations there are just an abstract proxy of an implied shared experience that never happened.
Left and right-wing voters also divide the in-group and out-group categories differently, which adds an other dimension to studies looking at empathy towards in-group vs out-group based on political alignment, and they will definitively differ when looking across borders and culture. The in-group of a left voter in the US may be the in-group of a right voter in Germany.
Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
But empathy is a feeling that an individual feels, group or no group. In fact, a group (collective noun) can't feel - only people can. Social groups can't have feelings, nor can they know/think etc - these events occur internally/within living humans, who themselves may then identify as part of a group. But empathy cannot be a group activity.
And even if we accept the linguistic shortcut, and agreee that the individuals in some group purport to feel the same thing, how can one know whether they feel it to the same extent? And that they are all of one mind to do whatever action?
Politics and feelings are really worlds apart, and intermediated by one's perception of the world. If you believe it is the group that needs to feel and do, you will look for answers in entirely different places to someone who thinks that only individuals can feel and do.
> Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Empathy is one of the main prosocial traits that the second linked study analysed.
> Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
No it doesn’t, it means your individual behaviour benefits others. Empathy is one of the most obvious things to analyse when investigating prosociality because empathy motivates you to behave in ways that benefit others.
This is why I'm personally unimpressed by "I supported Trump until it personally affected me and my eyes were opened" narratives.
When I see these stories, it's clear that nothing about that person has fundamentally changed. They didn't care that this same thing was happening to others; in many cases they cheered it on. Only when that same injustice is personally turned against them do they actually care, and they will go back to no longer caring the moment their own pain ends.
In the case of George Wallace, he really did change. But like you're pointing out, it's not great if someone has to get shot before they realize they've been a jerk.
On the other hand...plenty of alcoholics know they're ruining their own and others lives but persist in their behavior.
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
> Second, many recommendations are based on resource limitations that simply don't exist for a POTUS.
AFAIK, the PSA one isn't based on resource limitations, though.
It's based on the specificity being low enough and the risks, especially with advancing age, of the follow up tests being high enough that at a certain point the test is perceived as having zero-to-negative value in terms of QALY for the patient.
Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not. The cost of performing the test is inconvenience (admittedly of a man whose time is very valuable), but the cost of missing a major health problem has geopolitical consequences. The health recommendations are definitely going to shift toward "better safe than sorry."
> Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not.
The recommendation is not based around the public impact of the patient's death, but around the expected utility of the test in improving the length and/or quality of the patient's life, which is fairly low in the best of times for PSA screening.
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."
Doctors are, unfortunately so far, people. And they're also gatekeepers to care.
It's naive to think they don't discriminate on all sorts of factors outside the guidelines, for instance when treating fellow doctors. Not that they'll admit to it. I know doctors who won't even admit to it to themselves. But they still do it: they'll just call it by a different name or make up an outside reason.
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.
>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.
Adams doesn't need to imply it when medical SOP implies it.
I understand why Biden would not want to share that info and think that he made the right call for the situation he was in at the time (even before you consider domestic politics it's generally unwise for heads of state to talk about medical problems unless they're imminently stepping down because of them) but every man in this country over 40 knows that this cancer is screened for and someone getting "head of state" level care doesn't just get surprised by this kind of cancer at this stage unless many people were negligent.
"admitting" could also be in the sense of "disclosing". I wouldn't expect anyone, even an elected leader, to immediately disclose a health issue that requires some amount of understanding and decision-making.
There's a segment of the population that thinks he knew while he was running for president but didn't disclose or "admit" the issue to the public. Given that this is an aggressively metastatic cancer, and Biden's campaign ended nearly 10 months ago, I think that's implausible to the point of being ludicrous.
> 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.
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.
And Adams failed to keep with himself with his fawning over who could be described as the pointy-headed-boss in chief.
Seriously, making your whole career deriding stupid, clueless, cruel top managers and then lionizing Trump... I guess there isn't a single mirror in his house.
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 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.)
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.
> 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.
OneFTE was brilliant, and the creator explicitly talked about what he was doing differently from Dilbert - that you could mock the absurdities while still acknowledging the positives of the corporate life. And then he took the whole thing down :(.
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.
That reminds me that he got lots of comments from upset readers because shortly after Mother Teresa died, one comic's punchline involved 100 nuns dying in a plane crash ( https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1997-09-13 ). He swears that he drew the comic months before, and had no real idea when it would run, but many readers thought the timing was too good to be accidental.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> Supporting the work is supporting the author so they can continue doing terrible author things.
This has always seemed like the flimsiest argument. It costs nothing for JK Rowling to tweet. On the flipside, the joy and wonder her books have produced for the world dwarf what else she has wrought and in the end her life will be a net-positive, more so than your vegan co-worker. Doesn't make her a good person, just a net-positive.
So, has any of that slowed down J.K. Rowling? These sorts of boycotts seem to be more of an attempt at controlling something in an uncontrollable situation rather than an actually effective means of change. “Voting with your wallet” is almost never effective.
>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.
I don't believe it, but it could also be the case that the God is wiser than everybody praying for their monarch to have an unnaturally long life, and knows that monarchs dying in a regular sort of way is best for the kingdom.
I'm an atheist, but many of the arguments put forth by atheists seem very lame to me.
That is what people seem to believe, coherent or not. I think you will find few Christians who believe their god is just some sort of mechanism to be commanded as they please.
If you want to persuade them to believe otherwise, then you have to come up with arguments which are actually persuasive from their perspective. This is a problem I see with a lot of smug atheist literature. It's also a problem I see with all the arguments from Christians about why I shouldn't be an atheist. I guess I seem approachable to them, I get a lot of well meant but totally fruitless conversion attempts. They are arguments which doubtlessly seem very sound to them, one who already believes, but totally fall flat to me, somebody who doesn't. Like telling me how many different people claimed to witness Jesus resurrection... that seems like compelling evidence if you already believe that the bible is reliable. Christians tell each other these arguments at Church, find it very convincing because they are already convinced and find it hard to imagine the frame of mind of somebody who doesn't believe, then with great earnestness present these arguments to nonbelievers and are puzzled when it doesn't work.
Well that's exactly what's going to happen when you confront most Christians with "Your god isn't real because he doesn't do as you command him to with your prayers." Prayer failing any empirical test of efficacy is convincing evidence to people who already don't believe but totally falls flat with people who do.
> 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
>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.
IIRC, European elites (nobility and royalty both, and royals more than lesser nobles) until something like the 17th-18th century overall lived shorter lives than the general population, largely because they spent more of their lives in cities, which were extremely unhealthy until fairly recently; more recently, though, British royalty has, for example, been living much longer [1] than the British population at large.
> ... 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."?
Email from an employee is also a plausible mechanism for how that idea might have come to him in a dream. Information not fully processed and turned over when awake can turn into clear ideas in dreams. By committing himself to get rich in the stock market when awake, he primes himself to think about related information when he sleeps. It could be that he never even consciously connected the two and believed it to be a premonition.
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.
> 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.
Earlier today I was reading your comment on mobile and thinking about the reply I would make. Now I am on a desktop making that reply. I'm pretty sure, therefore, that I can change reality with my thoughts, at least to some degree.
> 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.
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)
When I buy X, it is guaranteed that X will tank the next day. It usually takes about 2 months for the market to forget that I bought X, and X will return to normal.
When I sell X, it is guaranteed that I sold for the lowest price that day, and X will rise dramatically for the next 2 months.
This problem is why I rarely trade. I'll hold a stock for decades.
It sounds to me a lot like the power of positive thinking.
Let's say you're not a confident person. If you tell yourself that you are a confident person, and try to act like a confident person would, you will likely become a confident person.
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.
I always had trouble knowing what he actually believed and what he just said for fun/attention/as some sort of experiment in what he could get away with saying.
But I do think that the wild admiration of manipulative people was genuine.
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.
Respectfully, the replication crisis in science doesn’t invalidate scientific consensus. The stuff that actually is thoroughly checked and widely accepted still stands, and is a much stronger foundation because it has been challenged and verified many times.
It’s a misconception that every published paper must be true. Testing and invalidating results is a part of the process.
Talking about leftist ideology in science hints that you want to reject the consensus because it disagrees with your dearly held beliefs.
<< Respectfully, the replication crisis in science doesn’t invalidate scientific consensus.
Sure, but it does undermine it.
<< The stuff that actually is thoroughly checked and widely accepted still stands, and is a much stronger foundation because it has been challenged and verified many times.
Which part of replication crisis is hard to understand? If it cannot be reliably replicated, then the foundation itself is flimsy bordering on tenuous.
<< It’s a misconception that every published paper must be true.
Bold, but I will attempt to respond with a straight face. Sure, but the referenced crisis does not affect one or even two papers. The problem starts when it hits sufficient number to make people question how much of those papers are just academia level reach arounds.
<< Testing and invalidating results is a part of the process.
Yes, absolutely. After all, exception tests the rule. The problem starts when the exception becomes the norm.
<< Talking about leftist ideology in science hints that you want to reject the consensus because it disagrees with your dearly held beliefs.
I would encourage you to read what I wrote and consider hesitating on trying to decode language as it is not your forte. I am not rejecting consensus. I am rejecting your premise.
> 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.
Look at Germany: 16 years of austerity policy have left our infrastructure so thoroughly compromised it literally falls apart - we were damn lucky that that bridge collapse in Dresden end of last year didn't kill anyone!
And even in the US you see it with every presidential change: Democrat governments cut services and expenditures because the last Republican cut taxes for the wealthy, the frustration leads to people vote for Republicans who introduce yet another round of billionaire tax cuts and blow up the government debt by untold billions of dollars, rinse and repeat.
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.
It's the two Santa's since Reagan. Whenever Dems have power it's always about being fiscally responsible and not raising taxes. When they are they just ignore what they say and spend like a drunken Santa while cutting taxes for the rich.
The current usage of the term "conservative" is just a fig leaf to hide the less-palatable aims of a radical fundamentalist agenda aimed at attacking most modern aspects of our society. Go find any definition of conservatism written by traditional conservative intellectuals, and you will find Trumpists are directly opposed to most 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. One intellectual upstream of Trumpism is the writings of Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin), who laid out how mere conservatism wasn't enough because "Cthulhu swims left" still, and coined his philosophy "reactionary". This also ties into one of the commonly-described dynamics 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 actually-conservative votes, and partially attribute them to my getting older and more actually-conservative.
Thank you for the history of the shift. The past 3 presidential elections had candidates with real fundamental differences. Obama was the first time I voted for a major candidate.
At least for my lifetime, the reactionary hatemongering has always existed on talk radio. It was used by the larger Republican party to get people all riled up against the system, and our society as a whole, but then calm them down enough to get them into the voting booth to vote for the "less bad" status quo Republicans.
I grew up [second hand] listening to a lot of this, and as I came of age I could never understood why there was so much cynical condemnation of the system but yet the cognitive dissonance to keep voting for more of the system. But I guess farming this dissonant frustration was just the whole point. Another way of looking at it is that Trumpism is this populist monster escaping, devouring the Party traditionalists, and leaving Republicans with nothing but Trump.
In some sense I think that is large part of what's fueling the fascist energy is the fact that Trump is not a [traditional] Republican, a conservative, a moral person, a competent businessman, etc. So throwing your support behind him is already buying into a Big Lie where up is down, there are no values or morals, just purely allegiance to what Dear Leader has declared is true. That none of Trump's policy positions make sense is a feature for keeping that support in line - independent thinkers who would point out the contradictions are ostracized and othered. Essentially the worst social dynamics of "woke" most everyone was wary of, but we had/have forgotten how much worse they can be when power is wielded autocratically rather than bureaucratically.
> 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.
Why can't we examine factually the thinking that pushes policy affecting millions of citizens by repeateadly claiming "Americans won't pay tarriffs"? And does it over and ove again, on DEI, immigrants, transexuals, their politcal opposition, etc.?
Why should we always handle the topic with kiddy gloves when it is staring us in the face and breaking thousands of lives?
> 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.
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.
It's not about working hard. It's about working smart. For example,
1. stay in school
2. learn the material in school
3. don't do drugs
4. don't do crimes
5. go to college, picking a major that pays well
That is a ticket to the middle class, and just about everyone in the US can do this.
BTW, I paid back my college loans.
I'm also well aware that I missed the chance to be a billionaire several times. I know I'm missing another opportunity right now, but am not seeing it.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That is part of the problem your definition is not that snarky. I don't think supporting hierarchies is needed in the definition.
I would also say that honoring the status quo is a finer more nuanced definition.
The status quo is not that bad. Understanding one's actions might affect the status quo I think is a central conservative value.
The status quo sucks for a lot of people, and as far as I'm concerned conservatism's main defining goal is standing in the way of progress to make things better for everyone. Nothing else.
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.
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 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.
It's not controversial to believe one lying politician over the other. Approximately 50% of your country does that. 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. Now anarchists are a different breed but they're a ridiculed minority.
Just because the tech scene became this lefty hell circle, we should not consider controversial a thought that is so widespread in today's culture that it puts a president in the oval office twice.
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 appreciated Dilbert, but then he started showing up in my timeline amplifying pro-Gaza bombings tweets.
I was surprised and disappointed with that as those Hasbara takes were the geopolitical propoganda equivalent to pointy-hair boss's office politics speech balloons ("the only way to rescue the hostages is to bomb everything, including the captors... and the hostages").
smh at these people, Israel went full mask off and had the gall to blame "anti-semites" for... what exactly? Demanding justice for people they're bombing.
Wild disgusting times.
But Scott had gone full mask off a ways before that. It's very sad that people we once admired turned out to be disgusting.
I'm using my real first name here and I hope he uses his remaining time to contemplate the ethnic cleansing he has championed. He isn't done yet; I pray he reverses.
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.
This is why I've sold or will sell many of my more controversial books/authors for relatively cheap because, yeah, an extra used copy in circulation is possibly one or more fewer new book sales that author won't profit from. Some of them I don't mind if someone else enjoys that book itself for what it is/was at the time it was released, but it's nice to think that it next sale(s) might be a dollar or three the author won't see when they read that.
Most royalties are calculated on the initial sale of books to the store. This pettiness will have zero impact on the original author. You might harm some book stores by making it harder to move their purchased stock for which the royalty has already been paid.
Booksellers that overstocked the "wrong" books have ways to return stock to the publisher. Publishers will try to recoup losses from overstock in various ways, including withholding future royalties or dropping future projects from authors.
(The way of overstock returns I was most fascinated by as the type of kid who loved deep dives into weirder parts of the libraries is that some libraries have an "illegal" section of books that they literally dumpster dive local bookstores for. These books had their original covers removed, which is the simple, minimal way how the bookstore "marks" them as unsold/unsellable/"destroyed" before tossing them in a dumpster, because by that point even the publisher doesn't want the overstock physically back collecting dust in a warehouse, but also still needs a good relationship with bookstores. Many publishers still to this day have some form of wording in print books like "if this copy was found without its original cover it is to be destroyed and is illegal to be resold". The bookstore would get some form of partial refund on all the "destroyed" overstock.)
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.
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.
You are effectively pointing at the Overton Window. For your socially conservative household, almost everyone in the world lived outside of that local Overton Window.
Air Shaffer does a stand-up bit where he says that society gives a pass to extreme artists because we value their art and we don’t really care about (or we downplay) the other aspects of their life.
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.
Factual work remains true regardless of who discovered it. If they actually found the solution to global warming or cancer, then fine. It remains true and useful regardless of the person. But you might want to consider how to not pay them royalties for it.
The problem with unethical behavior in sciences is that you have to check - which you should be doing anyway, but once someone has been exposed as a fraud the community as a whole needs to go back and clean out all the fraud by checking all their work. Unethical behavior in someone's personal life doesn't necessarily invalidate that.
Although I don't see many people talking about ReiserFS these days.
We can't just throw art away. Once it's there, it is part of everyone who read/saw it. The idea of doing this (eliminating art from history because we don't like its creator) is not only nonsensical, it is also one step closer to fascism.
Fritz Haber has entered the chat. His first paragraph sounds pretty solid:
>Fritz Jakob Haber (German: [ˈfʁɪt͡s ˈhaːbɐ] ⓘ; 9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives.[4] It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population.[5][6] For this work, Haber has been called one of the most important scientists and industrial chemists in human history.[7][8][9] Haber also, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.
The second paragraph gives the context:
>Haber, a known German nationalist, is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. He first proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock during the Second Battle of Ypres. His work was later used, without his direct involvement,[10] to develop the Zyklon B pesticide used for the killing of more than 1 million Jews in gas chambers in the greater context of the Holocaust.
For individual people I don't think all art is just throwaway like that. Iconic music like Kanye or Michael Jackson were part of people's happy memories and experience living. They left a lasting impact on music and pop culture.
For your thought experiment, I don't think we as a whole threw away the scientific work of the nazis. We have a concrete answer to that
I don’t think people are always aware of just how much stuff is built by really terrible people or on the backs of really horrible things.
Sure, some people take art seriously. But throwing it away is super easy. You don’t alter your quality of life much if you burn all your Harry Potter books even if that was a defining part of your childhood. Removing technology from your life on the other hand is hard. Doing something that has little consequence to your life is kinda meaningless in the scheme of things.
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.
"His odiousness" was less a personal jihad to see Rushdie killed and more the end result of ill considered comments about what different systems of law state after being drawn in and questioned on the contentious issue live.
I have no feelings about him either way. I've read thru Islam's statements and gotten the best context I can. The adjective I would apply to all of it is hapless.
More than anything, Islam seems ill equipped to handle these matters. And to be fair, he indicated he is not the guy to come to for this topic.
I would bolster that to say that if someone truly wanted a substantive, educated opinion about fatwa, they would have gone to someone capable of giving them that.
The context for one of the two(?) TV statements on air was Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals.
Great TV factual, devilish, host led open panel discussion about hair trigger dilemmas of real life and law staged by an international QC (now KC) and human rights lawyer.
It was literally about exploring the gap between written law, law as practicied, morals and ethics, and circumstances that would test anyone.
Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam was a typical guest .. an everyman of no particular deep study into such things, just one of many on the Clapham omnibus.
Taking anything said by anyone on that particular show, sans context, as a literal statement of their core personal belief is tenuous at best.
Nonsense. Yusuf Islam is a Sunni Muslim and the fatwa wass issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shia cleric. So there was no reason for him to recognize the fatwa as legitimate, and he literally said "He must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear – if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."
There is no ambiguity here, Yusuf Islam called for Salman Rushdie's killing over a book that a Shia cleric claimed insulted the prophet. A book I might add that neither of them ever read. Later that year he again said Rushdie should be killed in a different context.
It's more interesting to not separate them while they are living even if you still enjoy the art. You know exactly where the money is going if you continue to pay
I don't really have an opinion on Wagner's music because he is dead. Michael Jackson similarly feels fine.
But it feels more and more terrible to stream Kanye, a contender for one of the best in producing and rapping, every time he opens his mouth because you know you're helping support his life style. But if you ripped his albums you can still enjoy the previous art.
But it's nice to know more about the riches finances and we should demand more. Papa John's fired their CEO for being racist, but he still holds significant stock, so I continue to avoid their pizza. Tesla could do the same and hopefully it still shouldn't matter without a complete sell off.
> The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible?
It's an interesting conundrum isn't it?
H.P. Lovecraft is a case in point - Lovecraftian horror is a special sort of literary genius, in my opinion, and massively influential on other writers to this day (I'm a big fan of The Laundry Files, for instance, which draw on it). But it's clear that he was massively racist, and significantly more so than just "well those were the times". Some people (some people here in this thread) say that we should "separate the art from the artist", but there's quite a bit of veiled and not-so-veiled racism in the art as well. Not to forget the misogyny.
So we decide to disavow him? No Cthulu for anyone! Well, that doesn't seem like a good option either. There's no easy, feel-good answer here other than to understand that flawed people sometimes create great art, to understand we don't have to (probably shouldn't) make idols of artists, and to be nuanced in our appreciation of their output.
In this vein I did enjoy reading "Lovecraft Country" a while ago, which both explored the horror of racism and embraced mythos-style themes.
Scott Adams gave us Dilbert. In the 90s I found it amazing. By the 00s I'd stopped paying attention, and then he started saying some somewhat less wonderful things which, if you squint, you could see foreshadowed in how uncharitable he was to people in his earlier writings. Another imperfect human, who gave us some good fun and insight, and in the end didn't live up to everyone's expectations. We shouldn't gloss over it, but perhaps we shouldn't pile those expectations on them anyway.
I had a decent lunch at Stacy's that time though...
Understand and it and celebrate the art when acknowledge the shortcomings of it creator. A lot of great creations, inventions and discoveries are made by otherwise insufferable assholes. Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR is known to be a prime one. You can’t stop using PCR in biology just because the character of the person who discovered it.
Many painters, singers, composers and CEO’s are known to be horrible people. Unless they are actively harming humanity with the power they acquired, this is nothing
more than a curiosity that is only relevant for people around him.
We certainly don't hide it away from the public ever being able to (legally) see it again. That's what the Simpson's rightsholders did when they removed the episode Jackson guest starred in from streaming services.
People also like to be selective about which artists they try to memoryhole. John Lennon was a wife beater, an adulterer, and a deadbeat dad but people still love his music (though I personally think his solo career was worse than Paul's).
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.
Truly hard to understand the pigeonhole mentality of people who discard all the creations, that they obviously took pleasure from, of someone because they later don't like that person's opinions of something unrelated.
Enjoyment is a different thing than admiration. Folks who initially enjoyed Adams' work, later found they couldn't.
His work had become associated with his opinions and folks were unhappy with having his remarks return to their mind again and again. Losing his books stopped that cycle.
I've gotten rid of stuff that had negative associations for me. It was good for me.
I always found the bitterness and resentment underlying (but clearly coming through in) the comics in perfect tune with the rest of the works, even if the comics were more prone to focus on areas of life where the bitterness and resentment were more common and less divisive.
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.
> "It's okay to be white": I think this slogan is the perfect example of effective propaganda.
It's so effective because negative polarization is so powerful. People see something that makes them mad on the internet and then make it their whole mission in life to fight it. That slogan was designed to bait people into saying "it's not OK to be white", which is obviously absurd and guaranteed to cause white people to get angry and say racist things in response. Magnifying the Internet race war that they want to break out.
> 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 don't think it's nearly so easy to disentangle a person's ideology from the propaganda they have been exposed to. The way propaganda works is by nudging ideology.
This goes for all of us. Some people do a worse and some a better job of separating out the truth from the manipulation, but everyone is susceptible to some degree.
"It’s just easier this way for everyone. 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."
My takeaway of the point was there are situations in which you will end up in an unsympathetic quagmire of "well, actually..."
You can see it in this thread, and I guess I'm walking into the trap in this very post
> "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.
And boy were they right about that. Nobody on earth is easier to bait than journalists.
The way the statement "it's okay to be white" has been vilified, by associating it with racist groups, supports the narratives pushed by people like Adams.
It would help if the mainstream culture admitted that racism against white people exists too, and that it is unacceptable, as every other form of racism is.
You have to go one level deeper. Not all racism has equal consequences and white people enjoy a privileged position in our society. Focusing on anti-white racism while we still have an overwhelming problem of racism against non-white people hurts the cause of racial equality.
Saying "it's okay to be white" is innocent statement only if you ignore any societal context around it.
Either racism is bad or it’s not. Whether the consequence of it is better or worse for one group or another is irrelevant if the principle that racism is bad is adhered to.
And I’d argue the consequences aren’t that different. If someone is passed over for a job, pulled over by cops, denied the ability to purchase a house, those all have equal levels of consequence for the person on the receiving end.
I think the statement as art was brilliant. It forced those who play lip service to “all men are created equal” to put themselves and try to explain why a rather uncontroversial statement was so controversial. It was wild seeing them twist themselves into a knot trying to explain why it was so bad.
Disagree. All racism is unacceptable and it's not at all evident that there is less systemic racism against white people.
Example:
Participants across experiments were twenty five more likely to shoot unarmed White suspects than unarmed Black or Hispanic suspects, and were more likely to fail to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White or Hispanic suspects
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.
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.
'Cancel culture' was the norm several decades ago. And several centuries before that.
Just in semi-recent history we had mccarthy 'cancelling' people for purportedly being linked to communism, and that was a whole lot more serious than some modern publisher refusing to buy your book or twitter banning you.
A few decades before that, it wasn't real uncommon that if your neighbors objected to who you were or what you said, for them to hang you by your neck from a convenient tree until you were quite dead.
Humans have always suffered penalties for being on the wrong side of their neighbor's majority opinions. These days the penalties are frankly pretty minor.
Encouraging other people to not buy something is ALSO not censorship. It is the exact opposite of censorship: it is making a case that people are free to listen to (or not).
Is it censorship, though? When is the last time "cancel culture" actually banned a thing?
It seems so strange to me what this politicized bubble has become. So far it's an (attempt at) collaborative "vote with your wallet" [0] and one political party is loudly saying "not like that". But the political party most complaining about "cancel culture" is also the party most actually trying to ban things, yet that's not "cancel culture" it is "think of the children" (and it's not "vote with your wallet", it is town hall grandstanding and letter writing campaigns and lobbyists).
It is such a fascinating example of hypocrisy in our society right now. To entirely strawman it: "You can't tell me what to do [with my cash], but I can tell the libraries what you shouldn't be allowed to read. You are the real monster telling me what to do with my cash. Censorship of libraries is in the best interests of the children! Think of the children! They could be reading filth, oh no! Freedom of speech doesn't apply to children, just to me!"
I know in many cases not everyone that hates "cancel culture" also wants to ban library books, but the intersection seems large enough that it is concerning.
[0] Which carries its own terrible baggage. "Vote with your wallet" just means that the rich "deserve" more votes. That's not Democracy. Which isn't to say that boycotts and general strikes don't work or don't have some power in our economy, but that it isn't always the power you think it is, and to wield that power correctly takes collective effort (large enough boycotts and general strikes to hit a bottom line figure), not individualism.
The sitcom Rosanne was removed from my Apple library purchases after the actress went on a racist tirade. Was it banned by the government? No, but my access to the material was taken away. I think that there is censorship beyond government censorship, especially when competition is limited, as it typically is with art under copyright (as well as payment processors, etc).
Apple TV/iTunes shows every season of Roseanne, including the controversial 10th and final season during which she made such racist tirades that led to the spin-off/soft-reboot (The Conners) is on sale today.
If you lost previous purchases, that sounds like an account question between you and Apple. Other than your anecdote here I don't see complaints come up in web searches that they removed it from people's libraries.
Ah yes, the "extremists" who just happen to be consistently voted into office.
Also I agree 100% with you that "one side" trying to pass laws to control access to books in libraries is exactly the same as the "other side" going around telling people not to buy tesla cars. Definitely not something to worry about.
It's preventable by closing your eyes, but you need to be very persistent. Some people manage to keep their eyes closed for decades, which I find impressive. The rest of us just come to terms with reality.
I'm probably misunderstanding your post, but it sounds like you're implying that most people are alt right. Most people are not alt right. Not even close.
Most of the things that alt right people talk about as though they're some amazing truth bombs, are - in fact - the basic realisations of adulthood. There's a reason there's such an overrepresentation of teens and young adults in that loud but tiny political segment.
Whether you take the hard facts of life and build an identity around lifting other people up - or whether you use those same facts to build an identity around cutting them down - is a reflection on you and you alone.
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.
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.
> 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.
Adams was an MBA, a manager that was resentful that his advancement in management was not as fast as he thought it should been when he left Crocker National Bank for Pacific Bell, and then resentful that he couldn't break into management at Pacific Bell, even while publicly mocking Pacific Bell management (I don't mean indirectly in the comics he was writing while working there, but directly in the media interviews he gave about the comics.)
His only problem with the PHB was always that it was someone else sitting behind that desk, and not him.
Oh no, I'm sorry to hear that. In the early 90s, my family didn't get the newspaper, so my friend who lived in town would save the comics page for me to read every week. Dilbert was one of the big ones! It was funny and subversive, and I'll remember all the laughs Scott Adams has given me.
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.
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 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 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.
You have a direct genetic history of prostate cancer, thus you are at higher risk than most men. At age 57 I had no family history and no symptoms, yet my primary care doc suggested I be tested anyway. My PSA was in fact elevated. I got a biopsy and found my prostate was 80% cancerous. I got it surgically removed just in time. 10 years later I'm still cancer free.
Every day I five thanks that my doctor did NOT follow the standard medical advice back then NOT to test. Forewarned is forearmed.
This may sound like a silly question, but are there men who just have the prostate removed as a preventative measure? Some women have their breasts removed who have a high risk of breast cancer.
That said, if nerve-sparing surgery were done early instead of doing NON-nerve-sparing surgery later (a standard radical prostatectomy), perhaps that might diminish some of the typical side-effects of the standard surgery like impotence or incontinence. But I'm only speculating.
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.
Sample size of 2 from my family but PSA tests led to biopsy and treatment with full recovery so far (knocks wood). It seems like low hanging fruit in the case where PSA levels spike.
Think of how full of shit most software developers are. Now think of how much worse their advice would be if they could be sued for wrong answers, but were given all of ten minutes to look at a code base and come up with a recommendation. That's a doctor.
I agree with the sibling advice to insist on PSA labs. You are your own advocate. The primary job of a doctor is actually to be a bureaucrat, the first line of offense for the health management companies whose whole function is to deny healthcare. They can easily rubber stamp a few labs once you change their risk calculus of not doing it, by explicitly laying out your risk factors.
Sure, "in the US". Obviously you don't want to be as ham-fisted as to directly reference the liability dynamic, or to pop the doctor's ego by reminding them that most of their job is pushing paperwork. The point is to take the medical system off the pedestal in your own mind, such that there is one less thing holding you back as you have to repeatedly advocate for yourself. And I would think the need to advocate for yourself applies everywhere (Sturgeon's law), regardless of whether the system is as antagonistic as the one in the US or not. The US system just drastically increases the possible damage from failing to do so.
"the need to advocate for yourself" isn't the only thing you said. I was referring to "the first line of offense for the health management companies whose whole function is to deny healthcare" doesn't apply everywhere. I also don't think it particularly applies in the US, although I'm happy to see evidence of that.
Despite all that, as you say, you won't be sued for saying that stuff.
"Evidence" is a pretty high bar to clear, especially considering one of the reasons the healthcare industry was able to get so callous is exactly by focusing on top-down whole-cohort metrics while ignoring individual patients. I'm sure everything looks great from inside the system.
Anecdotally, healthcare management companies insist on individuals getting referrals from "primary care providers", who take several weeks to provide an appointment, a few weeks more to issue a referral, and will only do one referral at a time even for unknown problems despite it taking several months to get an appointment with a specialist. And finding an available new primary doctor is most certainly not easy, either. This has been my experience for myself and a handful of other people I've advocated for, across several different "insurance" companies. Obviously none of those requirements are necessary, except for expanding the bureaucracy to meet the needs of the ever expanding bureaucracy, but it has the net effect of constructively denying healthcare.
Might there be some regional healthcare system in the US where patients are seen promptly and where the bureaucratic procedures create efficiency rather than functioning as mechanisms to stonewall and run down the clock? Sure, of course. But given the terrible dynamics that are allowed to fester, it feels like a working system is the exception rather than the norm.
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).
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.
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.
Scott Adam is the reason why I chose not to pursue a career in IT, despite my love for computers.
Today I am an on site high voltage test engineer. People respect what I do and let me do my work in peace, mostly.
Reading the horror stories I so often see coming from the IT world, I am grateful to use my computer skills mostly as a hobby. Although my computer and networking skills do come in useful in my profession, I’m glad it’s not the source of my income.
In the 2000s at least, many cubicles had at least one Dilbert up. If you worked there for a while, you probably knew the story and it could get a chuckle out of you. Some people had two. More than four visible Dilberts, however, was a terrible sign.
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.
Always was a fan of Dilbert, but I especially enjoyed a short story he wrote called God’s Debris when I discovered it as a young undergrad. Sad news indeed.
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.
I'd say that if you have lethal cancer, then you're allowed to be self-centred. I can see how $some_famous_person getting the same cancer as I have might be the trigger to share my own story.
(No comment on whether it's truthful or now; I'm dimly aware Adams is the creator of Dilbert and has "gone Trump" over the last few years, and my knowledge stops there)
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.
Once I became a software developer my mom gave me a Dilbert desk calendar every xmas. She had worked in tech startups since 1979 and loved Dilbert. She was the type of person to always try and bring the positive, never complain. I like to think that Dilbert gave he a chance to release some things/commiserate with me.
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”.
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.
A lot of comments here mention his comics or his controversial pro-Trump opinions in the last 10 years, but I would like to emphasize and point out his influence he had over the lifes of so many people with his life strategies and explanations, microlessons, memes and ways to look at the world. Like
* systems over goals: the theory that you shouldn't set yourself specific goals, but instead just find a system how to work towards your goals regularly
* talent stacks: the theory that, in order to succeed in life, you don't need to be the best in one skill, but good enough in a useful combination of several skills that can be used together
* the idea that managing your energy is more important than managing your time
* the Adams rule of slow moving disasters: any kind of disaster that takes many years to manifest can be overcome by humanity. Scary are those disasters that don't give you enough time to react.
* rewiring your brain: that by finding the right way to look at something, you can modify your own behavior. He wrote a whole book full of recipes to change your behavior and feelings.
* despite not listening to Rap, a long time ago when Kanye West had one of his first successful songs, someone sent Adams the lyrics to some song and by looking at the lyrics Adams recognized West as a unique genius
* you should never trust a video as proof of anything, if you can't see what happened before or after. It's most likely taken out of context. Just like most quotes are worthless without context.
* "perception is reality": that how someone perceives a fact is more important than what actually happened
* "simultaneous realities": realities are shaped by how people perceive them. And two people can disagree on something, while both are right at the same time, because they view the same thing through two different lenses and thus live in different realities.
* TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome): the observation that many people hate Trump so much that they lose the capability of rational thought and either just shut their brain down when talking about anything related to Trump, or want to do the opposite of what Trump wants
* "word-thinking": when someone find labels for things or people, and then forms opinions based on the label
* detecting cognitive dissonance: when someone just shuts down their brain because the experienced reality doesn't match their expectation
* "tells for lies", like analyzing people on TV and looking for clues that they lie
* coining the term "fine people hoax" for a video snippet that was constantly repeated on media to show Trump having one opinion, even though when watching the whole video it was clear that he meant the opposite.
* "logic doesn't win arguments", the rules of persuasion, and the theory of 'master persuaders'
* he predicted Trump winning the 2016 election when Trump had just announced his campaign, long before the primaries, because he recognized a 'master persuader' in him.
And there are probably many more things I don't remember right now, but his books and blog shaped my way of thinking, and I am using his way of looking at the world every day.
I must admit I didn't really follow 'Coffee with Scott Adams' - I think he kind of jumped the shark when having to fill at least 30 minutes every day, and I am not that interested in politics. But that doesn't diminish his accomplishments.
I've always thought the definition of TDS was completely backwards. I've too often seen legitimate criticisms of Trump deflected with claims of TDS. Certainly it's the zealous cult-like worshipping of Trump that's deranged.
It can certainly also be used the other way round by people who defend Trump no matter what. But I have seen enough people who clearly weren't even able to discuss Trump's policy because the thought that Trump could be right about anything was unacceptable to them. And often that thought caused a very emotional reaction.
That fits the pattern of projection that crowd tends to engage in. Same thing for the "Woke Mind Virus" actually being the infection that affects them.
> TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome): the observation that many people hate Trump so much that they lose the capability of rational thought and either just shut their brain down when talking about anything related to Trump, or want to do the opposite of what Trump wants
This isn't a real thing, it's just something his zealots throw at critics to dismiss them.
It's the equivalent of responding on Reddit with "straw man". It's meant to be a conversation finisher where the writer declares victory. But they aren't saying anything at all.
Kinda wild how no comments here suggest that this person's disingenuous nature has made many believe that this is made up. It will be discouraging to find out.
As Scott Adams would tell you, it doesn't matter whether he made it up. If you believe him, that's your reality. If you don't believe him, your reality is that he's faking it. You can chose your reality and that act upon it.
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.
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.
Same here. The casting in the cartoon was just about perfect, I can only hear Larry Miller when reading Point Haired Boss, and Chris Elliot as Dogbert.
My username is in no small part a reference to the Dilbert cartoon.
I still love Dilbert. For years Dilbert and Userfriendly.org was part of my morning coffee. Working for a Telco Dilbert was crazy relatable, as a colleague pointed out: I'm fairly sure Scott Adams has a camera in our office.
It's easy to say that he should have just shut up, done Dilbert and enjoyed the money, but if he honestly believe the things he's been saying I can understand it's hard to keep quite. Still, I can't help feel like something dramatic happened in his life, causing him to go completely of the rails.
I'm not one of those guys who thinks he should shut up or be censored or something. I do think he's fairly nuts, but that doesn't invalidate the whole body of his work.
>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 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.
What I don't understand is spending your days shitposting on Twitter about it. I'm not sure if that applies to Adams, but it definitely applies to Musk and Rowling.
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 think many people view it as a "four lights" situation. How many lights there are isn't really consequential, when you see four lights and you're being commanded to say there are five lights or else, you're going to have some people dig in their heels and refuse to submit no matter how much it hurts them. In fact, rich people who can insulate themselves from the hurt are in the best position to obstinately stick to their version of things.
> 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.
No it's not. Latest tweet is a retweet about the assisted dying bill going through Parliament. Next is about women's rights to single-sex spaces in context of the recent Supreme Court ruling.
Three tweets down is a retweet about an LGB conference. The tweet before that is about her taking legal action against libellous statements.
A few more tweets down from that is something about a man who fought a polar bear off with a saucepan.
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
Yes, I am aware that the commenter I replied to is framing JKR's advocacy for women's rights, some of which she conducts on social media, as "culture war nonsense".
I commented because I disagree with this dismissive and condescending presentation of her work in this area.
It's culture war nonsense because transwomen are not a threat to women. Why would men pretend to be transwomen to prey upon women when transwomen are treated with more suspicion and hate than men?
I think there's a nuanced conversation to be had about ciswomen-exclusive shelters for abuse victims, because as much as a transwoman is a woman, depending on the stage of their transition, they can be unfortunately very man-like which can trigger women who have been the victims of violence committed by men. That's unfortunate, important, and it matters, however that real issue is being drowned in a sea of misgendering and nonsensical reactionary hate for people already dealing with systemic abuse.
If you cannot assert your womanhood without trying to tear other's away like so many crabs in a bucket, you lose the right to be confused when said others tell you to get bent.
Of course, because they are men. Being a man who calls himself a woman is the defining factor of "transwoman".
Most of these men intrude upon or demand access to women's spaces despite knowing that this will cause distress to women and despite having been told no.
It is a particularly threatening type of man that chooses to do this. The only reason that anyone lets these men get away with it is because they call themselves women and, because of misogynistic attitudes, their demands are valued more than women's needs.
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.
FWIW I don't subscribe to memes as a way to construct arguments. I didn't care what that person said the first time around and I don't care about it now either.
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!
This is a common trend now on TikTok for any "creator" with a moderate follower count. The template goes something like "I'm bored, tell me the thing you bought that you can't do without". The creator doesn't have to do anything, the followers create the content for them in the comments.
Here's a theory why Scott went from funny to a bit weird alt right. For much of the time he was getting users sending office stories by email, but in more recent times was on twitter and getting info from the alt right bunch on there who push a lot of weird stuff. The reason he got banned from most papers was getting sucked into this stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white
A lot of people seem to have constructed a history of Adams where he suddenly got sucked into the Twitter alt-right sometime around the rise of MAGA, forgetting that his whole cartoonist origin story is white male resentment stemming from his belief that his progress in management was being hampered by women and minorities and that his decline from that low starting point was being remarked on long before the MAGA era, to the point that it was treated as a long-established fact around the time the term “alt-right” was coined.
It's been a while since I read dilbert in the papers, but.. really?
The comic I remember was overwhelmingly about the banalities of working as a corporate engineering type. One of his peers was black, another was a woman, and they were not the butt of the joke. Pointy hair boss was.
> One of his peers was black
AFAIK, the only non-White recurring Dilbert character was Asok the Intern, who was Indian.
A black character (who Adams himself described as the first black character in Dilbert) did appear in 2022, but, well...
https://www.reddit.com/r/onejoke/comments/ugunog/after_33_ye...
Ahh, yeah, misremembered, I was thinking of Asok.
Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime. Your 2022 example only highlights the contrast.
The closest example I could think of from the 90s was a riff on whether you're supposed to open the door for women or not in these modern times, and it felt much more "confused everyman" rather than "aggrieved partisan".
> Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime.
The origin story being resentment over his perception his career was not advancing because of women and minorities isn't an inference from the fact that he is white, it's based on his own description of the reasons for his dissatisfaction with his career before becoming a full-time comic artist (and not descriptions which first emerged in the 2010s or later, though I think the his description of his final exit from Pacific Bell as "being fired for being white" was a later evolution, but his story of his perception that he was passed over for higher management at Crocker National Bank where he was already in management and, and passed over for any management opportunity at Pacific Bell, because of a preference for women and minorities came out much earlier.)
> getting sucked into
I've come to believe that infohazards are real.
Consider alcoholism: some people never drink anyway, plenty of people can have one drink or a few drinks and then stop. But some people can't stop and destroy their lives. Consider gambling: similar distribution applies. Many people never gamble, many people have a little scratchcard or sport bet now and then, and some people get out of control and sink all the money they have into it.
Gambling is an idea that's a trap. Some people get like this with ideas on the internet. In fact there's an XKCD about it: "can't sleep, someone's wrong on the internet".
Usually there's a single atrocity or injustice that triggers it. Maybe it's real, maybe it's been subject to distorted reporting. But it becomes a monomania. You can't counter them with statistics or variations on "most people aren't like that".
People speculate this is what happened to Graham Linehan—I heard a funny story on a podcast in which somebody, a number of years ago, sent him an email saying that they were a big fan of the IT Crowd, but there was an episode that they felt used trans people as the butt of a mean joke in an unfair way…and he wrote back with a very thoughtful and sincere-sounding apology! But it’s easy to imagine questions like these being the start of the rabbit hole that he went down, starting to self-justify those aspects of his work, finding support from more radical people online, and ultimately transforming himself into a person with monomaniacal focus on this one issue, leading to the ruin of his professional life, the estrangement of his own family, and the loss of his own mental health.
Memetic viruses. Just like in biology, sometimes some people can fight em off, but others cant. The universe is not an emergent phenomena from random interactions of tiny billiard balls, ideas and memes actually exist in some plane of reality (IMHO of course)
If you look, there's a lot of articles and books about "anti-whiteness" and a crusade to both claim a "white race" doesn't exist and that it's also enslaving others. If you live in a segregated area, race relations from blacks to white people have significantly declined. Everyone's radicalized. Add to this the widespread promotion of violent crime statistics and innocent people being attacked and murdered. Unequal justice by juries etc.
Scott just quoted a study saying black people didn't want to be around white people. Whether or not you agree with the above, it doesn't change the reality. Obscuring the history of the Arab slave trade, whites being enslaved, Africans selling Africans into slavery, and dozens of other historical deceptions, have backfired and permanently divided people.
Dilbert was such a revolutionary comic strip in a lot of ways. Here are a few things related to Scott Adams and Dilbert that have stood out to me over the years. Apologize in advance if any of this sounds like it came from an LLM. Me and most of my family just like to info dump on subjects of interest.
I didn't understand it much as a kid, but later read an old copy of his book on how offices and office culture works (basically each chapter is Scott describing office did functionality with a liberal sprinkling of related Dilbert comics) and literally almost everything was 1:1 with the company I was at, only it was a good bit toned down of course. The beauty was that it was somehow generally applicable anywhere a company gets above a certain amount of employees. There was a lot of good information there such as how the company tries to get you to poop on yourself in your performance review in order to justify not giving you a raise or firing you (see - you yourself said that you needed improvement in working with others). There are many other insights as well that I found useful in my career. A lot of it is common sense, but it helped me come to terms with the irrationality of the corporate world. Every few years I reread it and find it more applicable than before.
He later wrote a book on why he thought Trump beat Hillary and it also had a ton of insights I didn't think about as I'm not a marketer. Anyone on Hilary's campaign team should read it. Of course it doesn't cover how Hilary was painted as some kind of evil queen from a fairy tale since the 90s. Scott kinda acts a bit nuts in this book though as he goes off on frequent tangents about being a trained hypnotist and how he recognized that Trump was doing the same thing. One of the many examples was that both of them went on SNL, but Trump attempted to act presidential, while Hilary was attempting to act more like the common person and it just didn't work and came off unprofessional. He also flew in a plane that looked like Air Force One and gave press conferences with a little fake Oval office desk.
Adams also came up with the term "confuseopoly" to describe companies that make it so hard to compare products and companies that you have to purchase on vibes. Economics textbooks use it now along with his blog example of trying to buy a truck. I see this dark pattern everywhere now.
I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish. I just attributed it to him running out of ideas for the comic and finding that grifting made him more money. I guess you really can see some of the shift in reading the more recent books, which is sad.
> I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish.
People were commenting on it long before 2016ish.
It’s been a long time since the name Scott Adams was associated with wit, subtlety, reason or honesty. But the Dilbert creator, men’s rights blowhard and world’s greatest imaginary fan of his own “certified genius” proved recently that as gross as you may already think Scott Adams is, he’s prepared to get even grosser.
— Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Scott Adams’ defense of rape mentality”, Salon, June 20, 2011
EDIT: forgot to link the article, https://www.salon.com/2011/06/20/scott_adams_dilbert_rape_re...
Oh dang. I didn't see that one. Thanks for adding more background.
> 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
Isn’t that all comedy? It’s halting because it’s true. And sure, we may find striking truth through meditation. But it’s more likely to hit you in the real world.
You see it sometimes on Reddit in /r/comics, where someone will post a comic and then the idea for the next comic comes from a comment on the first one etc.
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?
Found this on an ex-Motorola employee's blog:
The IDE process at Motorola asked every employee to answer “yes” or “no” to six questions;
1. Do you have a substantive, meaningful, job that contributes to the success of Motorola?
2. Do you know the job behaviours and have the knowledge base to be successful?
3. Has training been identified and made available to continuously upgrade your skills?
4. Do you have a career plan, is it exciting, achievable and being acted on?
5. Have you received candid, positive or negative feedback within the last 30 days, which has helped in improving your performance or achieving your career plan?
6. Is adequate sensitivity shown by the company towards your personal circumstances, gender and culture?
This was done online every quarter and followed by a one-to-one with your boss to discuss how you could improve things together. Every manager in your reporting line could see your results and your own boss would expect to see your action plan to improve your team’s scores over time.
What do you think of this? A draconian measure or a positive statement of a minimum standard of expectation for all employees?
At the time of IDE being implemented, I was struck by the choice of language;
• INDIVIDUAL
• DIGNITY
• ENTITLEMENT
It’s a declaration of what we are choosing to become as an organisation; what we want the experience of being a Motorolan (and yes, that is a thing) to be. It’s universal and unbounded by grade, function or language and culture. It’s a clear message to every manager of the minimum expectation of them in relation to the people they lead. It humbles the role of “manager” to be in service of their employees’ entitlement to dignity at work.
Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.
The implementation of IDE was often painful. Employees worried about the consequences of saying “no”. Managers worried what consequences would arise from negative scores. Everyone was anxious about the one to one conversations.
>Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.
A classic bit of corporate bullshittery: Insist on giving employees questionnaires that supposedly enhance their "dignity" and help them feel more comfortable about working for you, but design it all in such a tone deaf way that it only, and very fucking obviously, will create more stress about how they should respond to please your bottom line.
I'm trying to imagine the entirety of my thoughts, dreams and feelings being reduced to binary choices on questions predefined by some corporate wanker - and it being called a dignity initiative.
They had a program called Individual Dignity Entitlement as well as mandatory drug testing.
There were plenty of cartoons in the paper that solicited ideas from readers. There Ought To Be a Law comes to mind, but I'm sure there were others.
https://archive.jsonline.com/greensheet/there-oughta-be-a-la...
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>
I keep this taped on my cubicle: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2008-02-12
Not because somebody did that to me, but I had to migrate two racks of systems in one night under literal and proverbial heat due to former one.
You can think pointy haired as the embodiment of Murphy of Murphy's laws.
I remember reading this one in the late nineties. Never been able to find it again. It was probably in one of his books:
------------
pointy haired boss making making a presentation: "research shows that customers want high-quality products at low-prices.
but we make low-quality products.
so we are going to sell them at high-prices and call it a strategy"
-------------
If anyone has a link to the original comic, please share it, I would like to see it again. It captures so many themes succinctly, and was very very astute for the late nineties when corps were doing crazy things and calling it a "strategy".
One of my favorites.
Also the one where Wally insists his towel gets cleaner every time he uses it: https://br.omega.com/dilbert/311.html
There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins and Dilbert says he won't know until he's done eating.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe...
Dilbert is trapped in the bowels of Accounting.
Dogbert: I understand you have Dilbert. Free him, or else...
Troll: Or else what?
Dogbert: Or else I will put this cap on my head backwards! Your little hardwired accounting brain will explode just looking at it!
Dilbert: What was that popping sound?
Dogbert: A paradigm shifting without a clutch.
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...
I still have my Etch-a-Sketch as laptop mouse pad.
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.
Everyone knows that six is the most boring number. https://youtu.be/G4OTRRmyTAA?feature=shared
That makes 4 and 9 the only two uninteresting numbers, which is interesting, so they’re out too!
Douglas Adams said the same about 42. It’s the answer because it’s completely banal.
How come prime numbers are special but squares aren’t? 4 and 9 both being squares seems to be a more striking commonality than your logic here…
The perfect squares are the most ordinary?
What about 8?
8, 16, 32, 64 pop up a lot in computer circles.
Maximum throw for a battle axe in 5e d&d, of course.
I dunno actually. Maybe because 4*2=8? The two picks have the property of not being related really.
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.
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.
> Most people assumed it was some kind of trap.
In most of the places I've worked, I would have assumed the same.
The thing is that there is no real technological solution that would instill trust in someone that doesn't already have trust. In the end, all such privacy solutions necessarily must boil down to "trust us" because it's not practical or reasonable to perform the sort of deep analysis that would be required to confirm privacy claims.
You may have provided the source, for instance, but that doesn't give reassurance that the binary that is executing was compiled from that source.
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.
Couldn't this be lessened by intentionally introducing false information, e.g. specifying that 10% of the time the response will be randomized?
When I was in high school I worked at the helpdesk for a small defense contractor. The developers there spent their down time building internal use IT tools. In those days they still wrote a lot of stuff in Lotus Domino, a tool that let you use a Notes database as the back-end for a SSR web app. Our ticketing system was written with it.
They later decided to adopt it for an annual IT satisfaction survey that they sent out to users. In an ideal world we wouldn't participate because the respondents were grading my team's performance but we got invites because we were part of the Exchange distro the message was sent to. I quickly discovered that the dev team had left a bunch of default routes enabled so we were able to view a list of all responses and see who submitted which. We knew our customers well enough that we could reliably attribute most of the negative responses via the free-text comments field anyhow but the fact that anybody could explicitly see everybody else's response wasn't great.
I suppose the NTLM-authenticated username in the server logs would convey the same info but at least that'd require CIFS/RDP access to the web server...
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 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.
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.
In college once I took a course that was being offered for the first time. They gave a midterm survey (usually we only had final surveys). I filled it out honestly, saying that my partner for our group projects was not pulling his weight. I had forgotten that I was in the only group of two (all the other groups were of three). The professor actually pulled me aside to let me know that he was aware our group wasn't working out - unfortunately there wasn't anything he could do.
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.
I worked at a startup (that is still a startup going nowhere 12 years later) where the ceo and cto made a big show of the town hall and in particular the “open questions” part. Anyone could go on a little internal app, ask an “anonymous” question, and they’d answer all of this week’s questions each week.
In reality, they cherry picked the questions that they wanted to talk about and ignored the hard ones. We could tell because all asked questions were publicly visible in the app. But not all answered “ah we’re out of time”
So I once posted a question about why were the interns unpaid while writing code we shipped in production. I posted this question just after the previous town hall so that it would stay visible in the app for the longest time until the next town hall and would also be top of the list of pending questions.
For a couple weeks they said they wanted to answer it but needed to ask clarification questions to make sure they understood correctly, so could please the asker reveal themselves as it’s only fair. I never said it was me and nobody said it was them either. They couldn’t just delete the question like they usually did with unanswered questions before as this had stirred quite a little storm between employees. And it would clash with the “we’re open and fair” koolaid they were serving us.
Eventually, they deleted the question without annswering it “since the asker doesn’t have the courage to reveal themselves” and I was laid off which was “totally unrelated to the question you asked”.
Before leaving I dumped the database for that app out of curiosity. You bet that every single question also had an entry of who asked which question. They knew all along.
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
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
I personally knew someone who gave a course, and handed out anonymous feedback forms. All subtly unique.
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.
My absolute fave is somewhere along the lines of “I hope to someday solve a problem that isn’t caused by leadership”.
Link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2010-09-01>
> “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.
I like to call it "radius of empathy". My spouse provides counseling and therapy services, and is amazed how some of her colleagues can show such genuine empathy to their clients, yet be so unconcerned with the suffering of others that result from the policies promoted by the people they vote for and vocally support.
Well said. And it is probably worth a point of clarification, since some of these replies are acting as if I said that conservatives can't be compassionate. That isn't what I'm saying. I'm specifically using a definition of empathy like the following (emphasis mine)[1]:
>the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation
It isn't a question of caring about people. It is a question of being able to put yourself in the shoes of a stranger with which you might not have anything in common. If you can do that, you will likely have general compassion for immigrants, the poor, the sick, minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, and really anyone who is being persecuted, oppressed, or unjustly burdened by something outside their control. That is fundamentally a more left leaning mindset.
If you need more direct experience (and that includes hearing a firsthand account from someone you are counseling) to engender that compassion, you are more likely to only extend this compassion to people who you share a lot with like your family, friends, and community (not just geographically), while people outside those groups wouldn't automatically be granted that compassion. This is fundamentally a more right leaning mindset.
The respective "radii of emapthy" are just different sizes.
[1] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/empathy
I've heard it neatly summed up this way:
"In my experience, the right wing is always asking 'What about me?' whereas the left wing asks 'What about them?' And that, in a nutshell, is why I will always lean to the left."
-Source unknown
EDIT: alternately, you could argue that the left simply has a more expansive definition of "in-group" than the right does, with fewer litmus tests as to who is granted membership. i.e. "I don't care about their skin color / sexual orientation / gender identity / disability status, they're still human beings and therefore we're on the same team." But it might be a distinction without a difference.
I think of it as being reactively empathetic instead of proactively empathetic. Comes from a place of incuriosity and probably fear of mortality and bursting the just world fallacy, among other things. It's a bummer so many are so stingy with their hearts, as though love is some finite resource.
I see it differently. There was a huge outpouring of sympathy from the right when Bidens news broke. I didn’t see a single unsympathetic comment.
Then compare it to mirror issues, when something bad happens to someone on the right. It may be the rage-bait algorithms steering things, but I seem to remember snark from the left after Trumps assassination attempt, the healthcare CEO shooting, Teslas stock decline, etc.
> I didn’t see a single unsympathetic comment.
Literally from the president[1], his son[2], and his VP[3]. Do these conspiracy theories about Biden hiding his diagnosis sound sympathetic to you?
>Teslas stock decline
So you want us to be empathetic to the guy who has directly said that "The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy"?[4]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DrhLWbWiPU&t=147s
[2] - https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-jr-escalates-disgust...
[3] - https://www.13abc.com/2025/05/20/vance-questions-whether-bid...
[4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV_FBiHiag&t=7s
Time to take off your blinders? Trump accused Biden of hiding his cancer diagnosis and conservatives are running with that narrative.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1kqlri6/they_...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-jr-mocks-jill-230953...
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/19/nx-s1-5403887/trump-biden-can...
All the people saying Biden's a genocider of Palestine and you shouldn't forget it just because he has cancer are on the left.
You need to stop ignoring your side's bad behaviour.
Or, better yet, don't pick a side.
If you want to be this petty, this can be easily explained as american right not caring about Palestine specifically and simply hating him for other things. Please do not try to left/right this.
There is something crazy ugly going on on the left with all their 'happy he got an extremely painful cancer' that is not normal in American discourse and needs to have light shown on it. Please don't try to cover that up, it needs to stop/go away, or at the least be called out, not the calling out being silenced.
> All the people saying Biden's a genocider of Palestine and you shouldn't forget it just because he has cancer are on the left.
Well, they are from the crowd using leftist rhetoric to convince people that the most important thing in the world is to oppose the dominant center-right liberal wing of the Democratic Party at all costs, and which has continued to hold that position even when the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government, and most state governments, and is in the process dismantling the rule of law. A crowd which, incidentally, rapidly metastasized from a small fringe group to a well-funded, highly-visible network between the time that Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020 and the 2024 election.
Now, they could be genuine leftists with the worst imaginable praxis (certainly, truly effective praxis is too rare a commodity on the left), but there are other obvious explanations.
You think one's political opinions determine whether someone has empathy? Wow.
Other way round. Politics are downstream of whose suffering you're OK with.
> Here, we tested this putative asymmetry using neuroimaging: we recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while 55 participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering... This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group.[0]
> Our large-scale investigation of the relation between political orientation and prosociality suggests that supporters of left-wing ideologies may indeed be more prosocial than supporters of right-wing ideologies... However, the relation between political orientation and prosociality is fragile, and discovering it may depend on the methods used to operationalize prosociality in particular... Nonetheless, we are confident that our investigation has brought us one step closer to solving the puzzle about whether our political orientation is intertwined with how prosocial we behave toward unknown others—which we cautiously answer in the affirmative.[1]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10281241/
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19485506241298341
*0.5 likelihood of reproducibility
The second study are very clear that the results are mixed, weak, and dependent on how prosociality is measured and where (i.e, same study done in one country will give different result in an other). They explicitly note that you can not apply the results to the US because how different the political landscape is between Germany and US.
In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing, which the economic games that the study uses may have a bias against. That would contradict the simplistic conclusion that the prosocial behavior is unconditional.
> In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing
That supports the original comment, which asserted that right-wingers often only experience empathy for the ingroup while left-wingers also experience it for the outgroup:
> 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.
A person don't need to go through a similar experience in order to consider themselves as part of an in-group. The commonly used example in social science of an in-group are sport fans who align themselves with a specific team. The fans may have no personal experience of the sport or being part of that team, but they still view themselves as part of the in-group.
Personal experience can definitively help to form identity, but it can also be completely abstract and arbitrary. In many situations there are just an abstract proxy of an implied shared experience that never happened.
Left and right-wing voters also divide the in-group and out-group categories differently, which adds an other dimension to studies looking at empathy towards in-group vs out-group based on political alignment, and they will definitively differ when looking across borders and culture. The in-group of a left voter in the US may be the in-group of a right voter in Germany.
Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
But empathy is a feeling that an individual feels, group or no group. In fact, a group (collective noun) can't feel - only people can. Social groups can't have feelings, nor can they know/think etc - these events occur internally/within living humans, who themselves may then identify as part of a group. But empathy cannot be a group activity.
And even if we accept the linguistic shortcut, and agreee that the individuals in some group purport to feel the same thing, how can one know whether they feel it to the same extent? And that they are all of one mind to do whatever action?
Politics and feelings are really worlds apart, and intermediated by one's perception of the world. If you believe it is the group that needs to feel and do, you will look for answers in entirely different places to someone who thinks that only individuals can feel and do.
> Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Empathy is one of the main prosocial traits that the second linked study analysed.
> Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
No it doesn’t, it means your individual behaviour benefits others. Empathy is one of the most obvious things to analyse when investigating prosociality because empathy motivates you to behave in ways that benefit others.
The cruelty is the point of Trumpism.
But right back at you: you really don't think Communists or Fascists' political leaning doesn't alter their empathy?
This is why I'm personally unimpressed by "I supported Trump until it personally affected me and my eyes were opened" narratives.
When I see these stories, it's clear that nothing about that person has fundamentally changed. They didn't care that this same thing was happening to others; in many cases they cheered it on. Only when that same injustice is personally turned against them do they actually care, and they will go back to no longer caring the moment their own pain ends.
In the case of George Wallace, he really did change. But like you're pointing out, it's not great if someone has to get shot before they realize they've been a jerk.
On the other hand...plenty of alcoholics know they're ruining their own and others lives but persist in their behavior.
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...
I sincerely hope our presidents' care isn't limited common practice.
I don't think being a current or former president materially changes the rationale for that recommendation.
I think it does. For one, there are major 3rd party consequences of illness that are unparalleled.
Second, many recommendations are based on resource limitations that simply don't exist for a POTUS.
Last, and similarly, standard of care is based on standard doctors, treatment, and hospitals. They go out the window when these aren't true.
> Second, many recommendations are based on resource limitations that simply don't exist for a POTUS.
AFAIK, the PSA one isn't based on resource limitations, though.
It's based on the specificity being low enough and the risks, especially with advancing age, of the follow up tests being high enough that at a certain point the test is perceived as having zero-to-negative value in terms of QALY for the patient.
Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not. The cost of performing the test is inconvenience (admittedly of a man whose time is very valuable), but the cost of missing a major health problem has geopolitical consequences. The health recommendations are definitely going to shift toward "better safe than sorry."
> Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not.
The recommendation is not based around the public impact of the patient's death, but around the expected utility of the test in improving the length and/or quality of the patient's life, which is fairly low in the best of times for PSA screening.
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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."
> Doctors don't adjust how long they're trying to keep you alive based on your job title.
Of course they do
Hmm, must’ve just slipped past me when reviewing the medical guidelines that inform almost all of a doctor’s decision-making.
Doctors are, unfortunately so far, people. And they're also gatekeepers to care.
It's naive to think they don't discriminate on all sorts of factors outside the guidelines, for instance when treating fellow doctors. Not that they'll admit to it. I know doctors who won't even admit to it to themselves. But they still do it: they'll just call it by a different name or make up an outside reason.
Uh huh… and how exactly does this demonstrate that Biden would’ve gotten PSA screening after 70 against the guidelines?
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.
As mentioned, it is not access to healthcare that determines PSA screening guidelines.
It would be cool if you would stop purposefully taking the stupidest possible interpretations of my posts.
Okay, then you tell me how having a personal physician means you certainly are getting PSA checked beyond 70 y/o.
Lay out the logic step by step.
>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.
Adams doesn't need to imply it when medical SOP implies it.
I understand why Biden would not want to share that info and think that he made the right call for the situation he was in at the time (even before you consider domestic politics it's generally unwise for heads of state to talk about medical problems unless they're imminently stepping down because of them) but every man in this country over 40 knows that this cancer is screened for and someone getting "head of state" level care doesn't just get surprised by this kind of cancer at this stage unless many people were negligent.
"admitting" could also be in the sense of "disclosing". I wouldn't expect anyone, even an elected leader, to immediately disclose a health issue that requires some amount of understanding and decision-making.
There's a segment of the population that thinks he knew while he was running for president but didn't disclose or "admit" the issue to the public. Given that this is an aggressively metastatic cancer, and Biden's campaign ended nearly 10 months ago, I think that's implausible to the point of being ludicrous.
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.
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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.
Isn’t that exactly how Amazon started?
Yes, that’s the meta-joke.
And Facebook too, which is the META-meta-joke.
Headphones are the cubicle of 2025. Or maybe VR goggles.
You'll quickly find that working in "Virtual Reality" constitutes remote work since you inhabit a different reality and is not allowed.
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.
Or from the shitty office chairs that break your back day in day out.
Dream on.
Sometime in the late 90s Dilbert pretty much became Pluggers but without the attribution to the readers sending in their ideas.
Some of the recent stuff is ok. For example https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
That's true.
Dilbert is about the 90s.
And Adams failed to keep with himself with his fawning over who could be described as the pointy-headed-boss in chief.
Seriously, making your whole career deriding stupid, clueless, cruel top managers and then lionizing Trump... I guess there isn't a single mirror in his house.
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.
> 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.)
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.
>[Trump] will shake things up for the better.
Well, that was already the first sign of senility. Trump, at that point, was already a know quantity for decades: a crook and a con man.
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.
> 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.
OneFTE was brilliant, and the creator explicitly talked about what he was doing differently from Dilbert - that you could mock the absurdities while still acknowledging the positives of the corporate life. And then he took the whole thing down :(.
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.
That reminds me that he got lots of comments from upset readers because shortly after Mother Teresa died, one comic's punchline involved 100 nuns dying in a plane crash ( https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1997-09-13 ). He swears that he drew the comic months before, and had no real idea when it would run, but many readers thought the timing was too good to be accidental.
I did the same thing, scraping those via telnet, before the company (Texas Instruments) supported HTTP to the world wild web. Fun, and simpler, times.
"Wally, you're in charge of supporting the legacy system. How long will it take to add this feature?"
"Remind me, when are we planning to finish switching over to the new system, again?"
"six months"
"I estimate that it will take 8 months to deliver your feature"
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.
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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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...
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.
That slogan is from his 2020 primary campaign.
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.
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.
> Supporting the work is supporting the author so they can continue doing terrible author things.
This has always seemed like the flimsiest argument. It costs nothing for JK Rowling to tweet. On the flipside, the joy and wonder her books have produced for the world dwarf what else she has wrought and in the end her life will be a net-positive, more so than your vegan co-worker. Doesn't make her a good person, just a net-positive.
So, has any of that slowed down J.K. Rowling? These sorts of boycotts seem to be more of an attempt at controlling something in an uncontrollable situation rather than an actually effective means of change. “Voting with your wallet” is almost never effective.
> Voting with your wallet” is almost never effective.
It's far more effective than apathy. Just look at how the tariffs are going
Eh - if you extend this mode of thinking to all of your purchases, you would have to withdraw from nearly all economic activity.
Additionally, boycotting is one of the vanishing rare ways we have influence over anyone richer or more powerful than us.
> it's OK to like the art and question the artist.
And then the artist takes his fortune and his fame to get laws voted against you and your friends and family.
The supreme court ruling on the meaning of gender demonstrates that in fact everyone except JK Rowling and likeminded people “went totally bananas”.
>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.
I don't believe it, but it could also be the case that the God is wiser than everybody praying for their monarch to have an unnaturally long life, and knows that monarchs dying in a regular sort of way is best for the kingdom.
I'm an atheist, but many of the arguments put forth by atheists seem very lame to me.
Aha.. because of course "God probably ignores prayers and does what She wants, but pray anyway" is a coherent message.
That is what people seem to believe, coherent or not. I think you will find few Christians who believe their god is just some sort of mechanism to be commanded as they please.
If you want to persuade them to believe otherwise, then you have to come up with arguments which are actually persuasive from their perspective. This is a problem I see with a lot of smug atheist literature. It's also a problem I see with all the arguments from Christians about why I shouldn't be an atheist. I guess I seem approachable to them, I get a lot of well meant but totally fruitless conversion attempts. They are arguments which doubtlessly seem very sound to them, one who already believes, but totally fall flat to me, somebody who doesn't. Like telling me how many different people claimed to witness Jesus resurrection... that seems like compelling evidence if you already believe that the bible is reliable. Christians tell each other these arguments at Church, find it very convincing because they are already convinced and find it hard to imagine the frame of mind of somebody who doesn't believe, then with great earnestness present these arguments to nonbelievers and are puzzled when it doesn't work.
Well that's exactly what's going to happen when you confront most Christians with "Your god isn't real because he doesn't do as you command him to with your prayers." Prayer failing any empirical test of efficacy is convincing evidence to people who already don't believe but totally falls flat with people who do.
Just think how young they would've died otherwise. ;)
> 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
Have you seen the Sumerian King List?
>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.
IIRC, European elites (nobility and royalty both, and royals more than lesser nobles) until something like the 17th-18th century overall lived shorter lives than the general population, largely because they spent more of their lives in cities, which were extremely unhealthy until fairly recently; more recently, though, British royalty has, for example, been living much longer [1] than the British population at large.
[1] https://theconversation.com/long-live-the-monarchy-british-r...
> ... 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.
This seems very pedantic. The original comment's criticism remains valid with this description of what he says.
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."?
Email from an employee is also a plausible mechanism for how that idea might have come to him in a dream. Information not fully processed and turned over when awake can turn into clear ideas in dreams. By committing himself to get rich in the stock market when awake, he primes himself to think about related information when he sleeps. It could be that he never even consciously connected the two and believed it to be a premonition.
Or it could be as you say. No way for us to know.
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.
> 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.
Earlier today I was reading your comment on mobile and thinking about the reply I would make. Now I am on a desktop making that reply. I'm pretty sure, therefore, that I can change reality with my thoughts, at least to some degree.
> 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.
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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?
Why didn’t I have you in my English classes peer reviewing my papers. Nicely done.
Thank you, that’s very kind.
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)
I have long believed I control the stock market.
When I buy X, it is guaranteed that X will tank the next day. It usually takes about 2 months for the market to forget that I bought X, and X will return to normal.
When I sell X, it is guaranteed that I sold for the lowest price that day, and X will rise dramatically for the next 2 months.
This problem is why I rarely trade. I'll hold a stock for decades.
> By his conclusion, he manifested stock going up
He does not say that.
It sounds to me a lot like the power of positive thinking.
Let's say you're not a confident person. If you tell yourself that you are a confident person, and try to act like a confident person would, you will likely become a confident person.
You changed your reality.
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?
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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.
Real quantum physics of the sort done by physicists doesn't predict that sort of thing.
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.
I think you meant “espouses” not “eschews”.
I always had trouble knowing what he actually believed and what he just said for fun/attention/as some sort of experiment in what he could get away with saying.
But I do think that the wild admiration of manipulative people was genuine.
> inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.
Ye be needing a mirror, lad. A mirror to help ye pull out the log in yer eye.
"eschews" means "To avoid, shun" (https://www.oed.com/dictionary/eschew_v1?tab=meaning_and_use...)
I suppose they meant to say "espouses".
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.)
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>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
Respectfully, the replication crisis in science doesn’t invalidate scientific consensus. The stuff that actually is thoroughly checked and widely accepted still stands, and is a much stronger foundation because it has been challenged and verified many times.
It’s a misconception that every published paper must be true. Testing and invalidating results is a part of the process.
Talking about leftist ideology in science hints that you want to reject the consensus because it disagrees with your dearly held beliefs.
<< Respectfully, the replication crisis in science doesn’t invalidate scientific consensus.
Sure, but it does undermine it.
<< The stuff that actually is thoroughly checked and widely accepted still stands, and is a much stronger foundation because it has been challenged and verified many times.
Which part of replication crisis is hard to understand? If it cannot be reliably replicated, then the foundation itself is flimsy bordering on tenuous.
<< It’s a misconception that every published paper must be true.
Bold, but I will attempt to respond with a straight face. Sure, but the referenced crisis does not affect one or even two papers. The problem starts when it hits sufficient number to make people question how much of those papers are just academia level reach arounds.
<< Testing and invalidating results is a part of the process.
Yes, absolutely. After all, exception tests the rule. The problem starts when the exception becomes the norm.
<< Talking about leftist ideology in science hints that you want to reject the consensus because it disagrees with your dearly held beliefs.
I would encourage you to read what I wrote and consider hesitating on trying to decode language as it is not your forte. I am not rejecting consensus. I am rejecting your premise.
edit: removed otherwise antagonizing language
> 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.
> government debt is inherently bad and a government's budget needs to be balanced
We're going to find out if that is true or not.
For heavens sake WE ALREADY HAVE FOUND THAT OUT.
Look at Germany: 16 years of austerity policy have left our infrastructure so thoroughly compromised it literally falls apart - we were damn lucky that that bridge collapse in Dresden end of last year didn't kill anyone!
And even in the US you see it with every presidential change: Democrat governments cut services and expenditures because the last Republican cut taxes for the wealthy, the frustration leads to people vote for Republicans who introduce yet another round of billionaire tax cuts and blow up the government debt by untold billions of dollars, rinse and repeat.
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.
It's the two Santa's since Reagan. Whenever Dems have power it's always about being fiscally responsible and not raising taxes. When they are they just ignore what they say and spend like a drunken Santa while cutting taxes for the rich.
The current usage of the term "conservative" is just a fig leaf to hide the less-palatable aims of a radical fundamentalist agenda aimed at attacking most modern aspects of our society. Go find any definition of conservatism written by traditional conservative intellectuals, and you will find Trumpists are directly opposed to most 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. One intellectual upstream of Trumpism is the writings of Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin), who laid out how mere conservatism wasn't enough because "Cthulhu swims left" still, and coined his philosophy "reactionary". This also ties into one of the commonly-described dynamics 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 actually-conservative votes, and partially attribute them to my getting older and more actually-conservative.
Thank you for the history of the shift. The past 3 presidential elections had candidates with real fundamental differences. Obama was the first time I voted for a major candidate.
At least for my lifetime, the reactionary hatemongering has always existed on talk radio. It was used by the larger Republican party to get people all riled up against the system, and our society as a whole, but then calm them down enough to get them into the voting booth to vote for the "less bad" status quo Republicans.
I grew up [second hand] listening to a lot of this, and as I came of age I could never understood why there was so much cynical condemnation of the system but yet the cognitive dissonance to keep voting for more of the system. But I guess farming this dissonant frustration was just the whole point. Another way of looking at it is that Trumpism is this populist monster escaping, devouring the Party traditionalists, and leaving Republicans with nothing but Trump.
In some sense I think that is large part of what's fueling the fascist energy is the fact that Trump is not a [traditional] Republican, a conservative, a moral person, a competent businessman, etc. So throwing your support behind him is already buying into a Big Lie where up is down, there are no values or morals, just purely allegiance to what Dear Leader has declared is true. That none of Trump's policy positions make sense is a feature for keeping that support in line - independent thinkers who would point out the contradictions are ostracized and othered. Essentially the worst social dynamics of "woke" most everyone was wary of, but we had/have forgotten how much worse they can be when power is wielded autocratically rather than bureaucratically.
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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.
> 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.
Why can't we examine factually the thinking that pushes policy affecting millions of citizens by repeateadly claiming "Americans won't pay tarriffs"? And does it over and ove again, on DEI, immigrants, transexuals, their politcal opposition, etc.?
Why should we always handle the topic with kiddy gloves when it is staring us in the face and breaking thousands of lives?
Isn't that literaly "political correctness"?
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> 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.
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.
What it can do is change your perception of reality, and then you can see the path to getting what you want.
Our perceptions of reality are nearly always wrong.
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.
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It's not about working hard. It's about working smart. For example,
1. stay in school
2. learn the material in school
3. don't do drugs
4. don't do crimes
5. go to college, picking a major that pays well
That is a ticket to the middle class, and just about everyone in the US can do this.
BTW, I paid back my college loans.
I'm also well aware that I missed the chance to be a billionaire several times. I know I'm missing another opportunity right now, but am not seeing it.
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.
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.
> 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'.
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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.
Is there a "conservative value" other than preserving the status quo and supporting hierarchies?
This is snark but also genuine, so far in my life I've seen a lot of different things called conservative...
That is part of the problem your definition is not that snarky. I don't think supporting hierarchies is needed in the definition.
I would also say that honoring the status quo is a finer more nuanced definition. The status quo is not that bad. Understanding one's actions might affect the status quo I think is a central conservative value.
The status quo sucks for a lot of people, and as far as I'm concerned conservatism's main defining goal is standing in the way of progress to make things better for everyone. Nothing else.
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.
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.
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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.
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It's not controversial to believe one lying politician over the other. Approximately 50% of your country does that. 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. Now anarchists are a different breed but they're a ridiculed minority.
Just because the tech scene became this lefty hell circle, we should not consider controversial a thought that is so widespread in today's culture that it puts a president in the oval office twice.
> 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
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.
> 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 have to squint to read your post because it is so greyed-out
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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....
Sucks for him, I hope he recovers or manages somehow. On the other hand, he is not a good guy. If you want to go deeper, there are some episodes on Behind the Bastards dedicated to him. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
I appreciated Dilbert, but then he started showing up in my timeline amplifying pro-Gaza bombings tweets.
I was surprised and disappointed with that as those Hasbara takes were the geopolitical propoganda equivalent to pointy-hair boss's office politics speech balloons ("the only way to rescue the hostages is to bomb everything, including the captors... and the hostages").
smh at these people, Israel went full mask off and had the gall to blame "anti-semites" for... what exactly? Demanding justice for people they're bombing.
Wild disgusting times.
But Scott had gone full mask off a ways before that. It's very sad that people we once admired turned out to be disgusting.
I'm using my real first name here and I hope he uses his remaining time to contemplate the ethnic cleansing he has championed. He isn't done yet; I pray he reverses.
oh, he was problematic waaaaayy before that, but that tracks.
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.
This is why I've sold or will sell many of my more controversial books/authors for relatively cheap because, yeah, an extra used copy in circulation is possibly one or more fewer new book sales that author won't profit from. Some of them I don't mind if someone else enjoys that book itself for what it is/was at the time it was released, but it's nice to think that it next sale(s) might be a dollar or three the author won't see when they read that.
Most royalties are calculated on the initial sale of books to the store. This pettiness will have zero impact on the original author. You might harm some book stores by making it harder to move their purchased stock for which the royalty has already been paid.
Booksellers that overstocked the "wrong" books have ways to return stock to the publisher. Publishers will try to recoup losses from overstock in various ways, including withholding future royalties or dropping future projects from authors.
(The way of overstock returns I was most fascinated by as the type of kid who loved deep dives into weirder parts of the libraries is that some libraries have an "illegal" section of books that they literally dumpster dive local bookstores for. These books had their original covers removed, which is the simple, minimal way how the bookstore "marks" them as unsold/unsellable/"destroyed" before tossing them in a dumpster, because by that point even the publisher doesn't want the overstock physically back collecting dust in a warehouse, but also still needs a good relationship with bookstores. Many publishers still to this day have some form of wording in print books like "if this copy was found without its original cover it is to be destroyed and is illegal to be resold". The bookstore would get some form of partial refund on all the "destroyed" overstock.)
It’s 2025. That book is getting pirated before anyone goes out and buys a new copy.
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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.
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.
However if a rockstar were to protest peacefully and shout “Black Lives Matters” then throw a rock through a police car window..
…I’d assume that would be judged differently than an attempted murder and trashing a hotel room.
The question is what would be the judgement for all three?
I'm genuinely confused what the question is.
Shouting "black lives matter" at a protest is a fairly minor virtuous action. Throwing a rock at a police car is a pretty minor sin.
Attempted murder is generally a pretty major sin, modulo quibbles about legal vs moral definitions of murder.
> one that joins the local nazi party and attempts to murder someone.
Name and address of your local nazi party. I bet there isn't one.
What a non-sequitur.
You are effectively pointing at the Overton Window. For your socially conservative household, almost everyone in the world lived outside of that local Overton Window.
Air Shaffer does a stand-up bit where he says that society gives a pass to extreme artists because we value their art and we don’t really care about (or we downplay) the other aspects of their life.
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.
Factual work remains true regardless of who discovered it. If they actually found the solution to global warming or cancer, then fine. It remains true and useful regardless of the person. But you might want to consider how to not pay them royalties for it.
The problem with unethical behavior in sciences is that you have to check - which you should be doing anyway, but once someone has been exposed as a fraud the community as a whole needs to go back and clean out all the fraud by checking all their work. Unethical behavior in someone's personal life doesn't necessarily invalidate that.
Although I don't see many people talking about ReiserFS these days.
We can't just throw art away. Once it's there, it is part of everyone who read/saw it. The idea of doing this (eliminating art from history because we don't like its creator) is not only nonsensical, it is also one step closer to fascism.
Fritz Haber has entered the chat. His first paragraph sounds pretty solid:
>Fritz Jakob Haber (German: [ˈfʁɪt͡s ˈhaːbɐ] ⓘ; 9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives.[4] It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population.[5][6] For this work, Haber has been called one of the most important scientists and industrial chemists in human history.[7][8][9] Haber also, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.
The second paragraph gives the context:
>Haber, a known German nationalist, is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. He first proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock during the Second Battle of Ypres. His work was later used, without his direct involvement,[10] to develop the Zyklon B pesticide used for the killing of more than 1 million Jews in gas chambers in the greater context of the Holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
For individual people I don't think all art is just throwaway like that. Iconic music like Kanye or Michael Jackson were part of people's happy memories and experience living. They left a lasting impact on music and pop culture.
For your thought experiment, I don't think we as a whole threw away the scientific work of the nazis. We have a concrete answer to that
I don’t think people are always aware of just how much stuff is built by really terrible people or on the backs of really horrible things.
Sure, some people take art seriously. But throwing it away is super easy. You don’t alter your quality of life much if you burn all your Harry Potter books even if that was a defining part of your childhood. Removing technology from your life on the other hand is hard. Doing something that has little consequence to your life is kinda meaningless in the scheme of things.
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.
Picasso absolutely was called that and worse. His treatment of women in his life and some of his children was far from decent.
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.
"His odiousness" was less a personal jihad to see Rushdie killed and more the end result of ill considered comments about what different systems of law state after being drawn in and questioned on the contentious issue live.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens%27_comments_about_...
I have no feelings about him either way. I've read thru Islam's statements and gotten the best context I can. The adjective I would apply to all of it is hapless.
More than anything, Islam seems ill equipped to handle these matters. And to be fair, he indicated he is not the guy to come to for this topic.
I would bolster that to say that if someone truly wanted a substantive, educated opinion about fatwa, they would have gone to someone capable of giving them that.
The context for one of the two(?) TV statements on air was Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals.
Great TV factual, devilish, host led open panel discussion about hair trigger dilemmas of real life and law staged by an international QC (now KC) and human rights lawyer.
It was literally about exploring the gap between written law, law as practicied, morals and ethics, and circumstances that would test anyone.
Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam was a typical guest .. an everyman of no particular deep study into such things, just one of many on the Clapham omnibus.
Taking anything said by anyone on that particular show, sans context, as a literal statement of their core personal belief is tenuous at best.
Good show concept though, pity it's not around anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Robertson#Media_caree...
Nonsense. Yusuf Islam is a Sunni Muslim and the fatwa wass issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shia cleric. So there was no reason for him to recognize the fatwa as legitimate, and he literally said "He must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear – if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."
There is no ambiguity here, Yusuf Islam called for Salman Rushdie's killing over a book that a Shia cleric claimed insulted the prophet. A book I might add that neither of them ever read. Later that year he again said Rushdie should be killed in a different context.
Very nice Repo Man reference. Well done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI-gt7GrNAA
Could've been an OG Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers reference . . .
lot of Road Runner and Wheels on the Bus fans out there still.
It's more interesting to not separate them while they are living even if you still enjoy the art. You know exactly where the money is going if you continue to pay
I don't really have an opinion on Wagner's music because he is dead. Michael Jackson similarly feels fine.
But it feels more and more terrible to stream Kanye, a contender for one of the best in producing and rapping, every time he opens his mouth because you know you're helping support his life style. But if you ripped his albums you can still enjoy the previous art.
But it's nice to know more about the riches finances and we should demand more. Papa John's fired their CEO for being racist, but he still holds significant stock, so I continue to avoid their pizza. Tesla could do the same and hopefully it still shouldn't matter without a complete sell off.
> The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible?
It's an interesting conundrum isn't it?
H.P. Lovecraft is a case in point - Lovecraftian horror is a special sort of literary genius, in my opinion, and massively influential on other writers to this day (I'm a big fan of The Laundry Files, for instance, which draw on it). But it's clear that he was massively racist, and significantly more so than just "well those were the times". Some people (some people here in this thread) say that we should "separate the art from the artist", but there's quite a bit of veiled and not-so-veiled racism in the art as well. Not to forget the misogyny.
So we decide to disavow him? No Cthulu for anyone! Well, that doesn't seem like a good option either. There's no easy, feel-good answer here other than to understand that flawed people sometimes create great art, to understand we don't have to (probably shouldn't) make idols of artists, and to be nuanced in our appreciation of their output.
In this vein I did enjoy reading "Lovecraft Country" a while ago, which both explored the horror of racism and embraced mythos-style themes.
Scott Adams gave us Dilbert. In the 90s I found it amazing. By the 00s I'd stopped paying attention, and then he started saying some somewhat less wonderful things which, if you squint, you could see foreshadowed in how uncharitable he was to people in his earlier writings. Another imperfect human, who gave us some good fun and insight, and in the end didn't live up to everyone's expectations. We shouldn't gloss over it, but perhaps we shouldn't pile those expectations on them anyway.
I had a decent lunch at Stacy's that time though...
What do we do with the honey of the bees that sting us?
The answer is: nothing. It doesn't matter.
Understand and it and celebrate the art when acknowledge the shortcomings of it creator. A lot of great creations, inventions and discoveries are made by otherwise insufferable assholes. Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR is known to be a prime one. You can’t stop using PCR in biology just because the character of the person who discovered it.
Many painters, singers, composers and CEO’s are known to be horrible people. Unless they are actively harming humanity with the power they acquired, this is nothing more than a curiosity that is only relevant for people around him.
You seperate the work from the author.
We certainly don't hide it away from the public ever being able to (legally) see it again. That's what the Simpson's rightsholders did when they removed the episode Jackson guest starred in from streaming services.
People also like to be selective about which artists they try to memoryhole. John Lennon was a wife beater, an adulterer, and a deadbeat dad but people still love his music (though I personally think his solo career was worse than Paul's).
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.
Truly hard to understand the pigeonhole mentality of people who discard all the creations, that they obviously took pleasure from, of someone because they later don't like that person's opinions of something unrelated.
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?
Enjoyment is a different thing than admiration. Folks who initially enjoyed Adams' work, later found they couldn't.
His work had become associated with his opinions and folks were unhappy with having his remarks return to their mind again and again. Losing his books stopped that cycle.
I've gotten rid of stuff that had negative associations for me. It was good for me.
He really let fame go to his head...
Was it the pool or the burritos that tipped you off?
I always found the bitterness and resentment underlying (but clearly coming through in) the comics in perfect tune with the rest of the works, even if the comics were more prone to focus on areas of life where the bitterness and resentment were more common and less divisive.
What "ugly things" exactly did he say?
Just search for "Scott Adams racist posts". There's no need for more links to it.
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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.
> "It's okay to be white": I think this slogan is the perfect example of effective propaganda.
It's so effective because negative polarization is so powerful. People see something that makes them mad on the internet and then make it their whole mission in life to fight it. That slogan was designed to bait people into saying "it's not OK to be white", which is obviously absurd and guaranteed to cause white people to get angry and say racist things in response. Magnifying the Internet race war that they want to break out.
> 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 don't think it's nearly so easy to disentangle a person's ideology from the propaganda they have been exposed to. The way propaganda works is by nudging ideology.
This goes for all of us. Some people do a worse and some a better job of separating out the truth from the manipulation, but everyone is susceptible to some degree.
I don't know Mr. Adams but my father was born in 1943 to a rural balkan community and this sounds just like him.
Except the focus on black americans, being most of his life in europe he mostly hates the gypsys and serbians.
But no worries, he's older than Biden and he'll be gone soon and we can make the world what we want it to be.
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Ok, can you help me understand what he's saying? I don't get it.
The rest of the quote is:
"It’s just easier this way for everyone. 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."
My takeaway of the point was there are situations in which you will end up in an unsympathetic quagmire of "well, actually..."
You can see it in this thread, and I guess I'm walking into the trap in this very post
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> "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.
And boy were they right about that. Nobody on earth is easier to bait than journalists.
The way the statement "it's okay to be white" has been vilified, by associating it with racist groups, supports the narratives pushed by people like Adams.
It would help if the mainstream culture admitted that racism against white people exists too, and that it is unacceptable, as every other form of racism is.
You have to go one level deeper. Not all racism has equal consequences and white people enjoy a privileged position in our society. Focusing on anti-white racism while we still have an overwhelming problem of racism against non-white people hurts the cause of racial equality.
Saying "it's okay to be white" is innocent statement only if you ignore any societal context around it.
Either racism is bad or it’s not. Whether the consequence of it is better or worse for one group or another is irrelevant if the principle that racism is bad is adhered to.
And I’d argue the consequences aren’t that different. If someone is passed over for a job, pulled over by cops, denied the ability to purchase a house, those all have equal levels of consequence for the person on the receiving end.
I think the statement as art was brilliant. It forced those who play lip service to “all men are created equal” to put themselves and try to explain why a rather uncontroversial statement was so controversial. It was wild seeing them twist themselves into a knot trying to explain why it was so bad.
Disagree. All racism is unacceptable and it's not at all evident that there is less systemic racism against white people.
Example:
Participants across experiments were twenty five more likely to shoot unarmed White suspects than unarmed Black or Hispanic suspects, and were more likely to fail to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White or Hispanic suspects
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/results-...
"More than a third of white students lie about their race on college applications, survey finds"
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/57...
Instead of trying to tally up the racism against each group to decide which group is more victimized, all forms of racism should be abolished.
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Vilifying anyone complaining about racism against white people as racist is exactly what I'm referring to.
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.
That book contains nothing about manifesting.
You're right it is the other one: The Dilbert Future.
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.
'Cancel culture' was the norm several decades ago. And several centuries before that.
Just in semi-recent history we had mccarthy 'cancelling' people for purportedly being linked to communism, and that was a whole lot more serious than some modern publisher refusing to buy your book or twitter banning you.
A few decades before that, it wasn't real uncommon that if your neighbors objected to who you were or what you said, for them to hang you by your neck from a convenient tree until you were quite dead.
Humans have always suffered penalties for being on the wrong side of their neighbor's majority opinions. These days the penalties are frankly pretty minor.
Pretty much anywhere you look, you find instances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollipop_(1958_song)
> 'Cancel culture' was the norm several decades ago.
Yeah. Hanoi Jane and Beatles Burnings quickly come to mind.
Just because something bad like censorship happened in the past, it doesn't mean we need to excuse it in our own times.
Refusing to buy something is not censorship.
Encouraging other people to not buy something is ALSO not censorship. It is the exact opposite of censorship: it is making a case that people are free to listen to (or not).
When you're a monopolist, like Netflix or Google, then it is definitely censorship.
As I type this, my above comment is at 0 karma. Have I been cancelled?
If I say the comment I'm replying to is stupid, have I just cancelled someone?
> If I say the comment I'm replying to is stupid, have I just cancelled someone?
No, you would just be lying.
Is it censorship, though? When is the last time "cancel culture" actually banned a thing?
It seems so strange to me what this politicized bubble has become. So far it's an (attempt at) collaborative "vote with your wallet" [0] and one political party is loudly saying "not like that". But the political party most complaining about "cancel culture" is also the party most actually trying to ban things, yet that's not "cancel culture" it is "think of the children" (and it's not "vote with your wallet", it is town hall grandstanding and letter writing campaigns and lobbyists).
It is such a fascinating example of hypocrisy in our society right now. To entirely strawman it: "You can't tell me what to do [with my cash], but I can tell the libraries what you shouldn't be allowed to read. You are the real monster telling me what to do with my cash. Censorship of libraries is in the best interests of the children! Think of the children! They could be reading filth, oh no! Freedom of speech doesn't apply to children, just to me!"
I know in many cases not everyone that hates "cancel culture" also wants to ban library books, but the intersection seems large enough that it is concerning.
[0] Which carries its own terrible baggage. "Vote with your wallet" just means that the rich "deserve" more votes. That's not Democracy. Which isn't to say that boycotts and general strikes don't work or don't have some power in our economy, but that it isn't always the power you think it is, and to wield that power correctly takes collective effort (large enough boycotts and general strikes to hit a bottom line figure), not individualism.
What do you mean by "banned" exactly?
The sitcom Rosanne was removed from my Apple library purchases after the actress went on a racist tirade. Was it banned by the government? No, but my access to the material was taken away. I think that there is censorship beyond government censorship, especially when competition is limited, as it typically is with art under copyright (as well as payment processors, etc).
Apple TV/iTunes shows every season of Roseanne, including the controversial 10th and final season during which she made such racist tirades that led to the spin-off/soft-reboot (The Conners) is on sale today.
If you lost previous purchases, that sounds like an account question between you and Apple. Other than your anecdote here I don't see complaints come up in web searches that they removed it from people's libraries.
but the intersection seems large enough that it is concerning.
The extremists on both sides are what you hear the most of, but the rest of the population is far more moderate.
Ah yes, the "extremists" who just happen to be consistently voted into office.
Also I agree 100% with you that "one side" trying to pass laws to control access to books in libraries is exactly the same as the "other side" going around telling people not to buy tesla cars. Definitely not something to worry about.
> 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.
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Hateful against who?
It's preventable by closing your eyes, but you need to be very persistent. Some people manage to keep their eyes closed for decades, which I find impressive. The rest of us just come to terms with reality.
I'm probably misunderstanding your post, but it sounds like you're implying that most people are alt right. Most people are not alt right. Not even close.
Most of the things that alt right people talk about as though they're some amazing truth bombs, are - in fact - the basic realisations of adulthood. There's a reason there's such an overrepresentation of teens and young adults in that loud but tiny political segment.
Whether you take the hard facts of life and build an identity around lifting other people up - or whether you use those same facts to build an identity around cutting them down - is a reflection on you and you alone.
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.
> I would never usually throw a book away
"I would never judge a book by it's cover."
> because I didn't want anyone to see it on my bookshelf
"Yet I am worried that someone else might."
I read the whole book, not just the cover. Some of it made me uncomfortable, and not in a good way.
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.
> 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.
Adams was an MBA, a manager that was resentful that his advancement in management was not as fast as he thought it should been when he left Crocker National Bank for Pacific Bell, and then resentful that he couldn't break into management at Pacific Bell, even while publicly mocking Pacific Bell management (I don't mean indirectly in the comics he was writing while working there, but directly in the media interviews he gave about the comics.)
His only problem with the PHB was always that it was someone else sitting behind that desk, and not him.
I thought he was going to be hunted for being a Republican. That's what he told us.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/dilbert-creator-scott-ad...
I can't believe Joe Biden personally gave Scott Adams cancer and accidentally gave it to himself, too!
I hope all of those Republicans feel safe now that the mean Biden administration stopped deporting them to torture prisons./s
Oh no, I'm sorry to hear that. In the early 90s, my family didn't get the newspaper, so my friend who lived in town would save the comics page for me to read every week. Dilbert was one of the big ones! It was funny and subversive, and I'll remember all the laughs Scott Adams has given me.
I am a big fan of Dilbert and really liked one of his books "how to fail at everything and still win big".
If you or anyone in your family history has had prostate, its worth keeping an eye on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801906
If the hypothesis turns out to be true, prostate cancer could be easily defeated before it has a chance to take a hold.
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.
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.
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. :-(
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.
i thought only cancerous cells dump out PSA into serum. is that not true?
Yeah, not true.
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.)
It would help if they weren't damn slow; taking up an expensive machine for an hour is not a way to be cheap!
> MRI machines need to be a) democratized so they're cheaper
What does this mean?
I'd also like to know how one "democratizes" a multi-million dollar machine that's also extremely expensive to maintain.
Why wouldn't whole-body scans satisfy your criterion in the first paragraph (for those who can afford them, anyway?)
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.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/prostate-cancer/detectio...
You have a direct genetic history of prostate cancer, thus you are at higher risk than most men. At age 57 I had no family history and no symptoms, yet my primary care doc suggested I be tested anyway. My PSA was in fact elevated. I got a biopsy and found my prostate was 80% cancerous. I got it surgically removed just in time. 10 years later I'm still cancer free.
Every day I five thanks that my doctor did NOT follow the standard medical advice back then NOT to test. Forewarned is forearmed.
This may sound like a silly question, but are there men who just have the prostate removed as a preventative measure? Some women have their breasts removed who have a high risk of breast cancer.
Yes, but I have no personal knowledge about radical prophylactic prostatectomy. You might start here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361217707_The_role_...
I've read very little about choosing radical prostatectomy very early after detection, but it's likely that it does little to improve survivability:
https://medicine.washu.edu/news/surgery-early-prostate-cance...
That said, if nerve-sparing surgery were done early instead of doing NON-nerve-sparing surgery later (a standard radical prostatectomy), perhaps that might diminish some of the typical side-effects of the standard surgery like impotence or incontinence. But I'm only speculating.
> prostate was 80% cancerous
surprised that it didn't escape prostate with that high load.
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…”
If you’re 58 and your dad died of prostate cancer, I’d insist on PSA tests in your checkups if I were you.
The harm is not the PSA test but in overtreatment too early on—a lot of prostate cancer is slow. Fighting it when it’s stage 4 is no fun, though.
Sample size of 2 from my family but PSA tests led to biopsy and treatment with full recovery so far (knocks wood). It seems like low hanging fruit in the case where PSA levels spike.
Think of how full of shit most software developers are. Now think of how much worse their advice would be if they could be sued for wrong answers, but were given all of ten minutes to look at a code base and come up with a recommendation. That's a doctor.
I agree with the sibling advice to insist on PSA labs. You are your own advocate. The primary job of a doctor is actually to be a bureaucrat, the first line of offense for the health management companies whose whole function is to deny healthcare. They can easily rubber stamp a few labs once you change their risk calculus of not doing it, by explicitly laying out your risk factors.
I would make sure you scope your advice to the health system of the person you're replying to, even if you can't be sued for wrong answers.
Sure, "in the US". Obviously you don't want to be as ham-fisted as to directly reference the liability dynamic, or to pop the doctor's ego by reminding them that most of their job is pushing paperwork. The point is to take the medical system off the pedestal in your own mind, such that there is one less thing holding you back as you have to repeatedly advocate for yourself. And I would think the need to advocate for yourself applies everywhere (Sturgeon's law), regardless of whether the system is as antagonistic as the one in the US or not. The US system just drastically increases the possible damage from failing to do so.
"the need to advocate for yourself" isn't the only thing you said. I was referring to "the first line of offense for the health management companies whose whole function is to deny healthcare" doesn't apply everywhere. I also don't think it particularly applies in the US, although I'm happy to see evidence of that.
Despite all that, as you say, you won't be sued for saying that stuff.
"Evidence" is a pretty high bar to clear, especially considering one of the reasons the healthcare industry was able to get so callous is exactly by focusing on top-down whole-cohort metrics while ignoring individual patients. I'm sure everything looks great from inside the system.
Anecdotally, healthcare management companies insist on individuals getting referrals from "primary care providers", who take several weeks to provide an appointment, a few weeks more to issue a referral, and will only do one referral at a time even for unknown problems despite it taking several months to get an appointment with a specialist. And finding an available new primary doctor is most certainly not easy, either. This has been my experience for myself and a handful of other people I've advocated for, across several different "insurance" companies. Obviously none of those requirements are necessary, except for expanding the bureaucracy to meet the needs of the ever expanding bureaucracy, but it has the net effect of constructively denying healthcare.
Might there be some regional healthcare system in the US where patients are seen promptly and where the bureaucratic procedures create efficiency rather than functioning as mechanisms to stonewall and run down the clock? Sure, of course. But given the terrible dynamics that are allowed to fester, it feels like a working system is the exception rather than the norm.
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).
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.
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.
Scott Adam is the reason why I chose not to pursue a career in IT, despite my love for computers.
Today I am an on site high voltage test engineer. People respect what I do and let me do my work in peace, mostly.
Reading the horror stories I so often see coming from the IT world, I am grateful to use my computer skills mostly as a hobby. Although my computer and networking skills do come in useful in my profession, I’m glad it’s not the source of my income.
67 is too young to go from cancer.
Every age is too young to go from cancer. Once we're done with it, we'll look back in confusion about how anyone could think otherwise.
In the 2000s at least, many cubicles had at least one Dilbert up. If you worked there for a while, you probably knew the story and it could get a chuckle out of you. Some people had two. More than four visible Dilberts, however, was a terrible sign.
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1924477866915315722
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.
So sad! Love you Scott!
Always was a fan of Dilbert, but I especially enjoyed a short story he wrote called God’s Debris when I discovered it as a young undergrad. Sad news indeed.
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.
I’ll admit the same thought crossed my mind until I saw a recent video of him.
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I'd say that if you have lethal cancer, then you're allowed to be self-centred. I can see how $some_famous_person getting the same cancer as I have might be the trigger to share my own story.
(No comment on whether it's truthful or now; I'm dimly aware Adams is the creator of Dilbert and has "gone Trump" over the last few years, and my knowledge stops there)
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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.
Dilbert was as much an era as he was an icon. Good luck in the great cube farm in the sky, Scott.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZIm_2MgdeA seems relevant
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.
Once I became a software developer my mom gave me a Dilbert desk calendar every xmas. She had worked in tech startups since 1979 and loved Dilbert. She was the type of person to always try and bring the positive, never complain. I like to think that Dilbert gave he a chance to release some things/commiserate with me.
“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”.
Terminally ill and terminally online is it then?
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.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1159580425/newspapers-have-dr...
I wonder what he has been up to the last couple years.
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.
A lot of comments here mention his comics or his controversial pro-Trump opinions in the last 10 years, but I would like to emphasize and point out his influence he had over the lifes of so many people with his life strategies and explanations, microlessons, memes and ways to look at the world. Like
* systems over goals: the theory that you shouldn't set yourself specific goals, but instead just find a system how to work towards your goals regularly
* talent stacks: the theory that, in order to succeed in life, you don't need to be the best in one skill, but good enough in a useful combination of several skills that can be used together
* the idea that managing your energy is more important than managing your time
* the Adams rule of slow moving disasters: any kind of disaster that takes many years to manifest can be overcome by humanity. Scary are those disasters that don't give you enough time to react.
* rewiring your brain: that by finding the right way to look at something, you can modify your own behavior. He wrote a whole book full of recipes to change your behavior and feelings.
* despite not listening to Rap, a long time ago when Kanye West had one of his first successful songs, someone sent Adams the lyrics to some song and by looking at the lyrics Adams recognized West as a unique genius
* you should never trust a video as proof of anything, if you can't see what happened before or after. It's most likely taken out of context. Just like most quotes are worthless without context.
* "perception is reality": that how someone perceives a fact is more important than what actually happened
* "simultaneous realities": realities are shaped by how people perceive them. And two people can disagree on something, while both are right at the same time, because they view the same thing through two different lenses and thus live in different realities.
* TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome): the observation that many people hate Trump so much that they lose the capability of rational thought and either just shut their brain down when talking about anything related to Trump, or want to do the opposite of what Trump wants
* "word-thinking": when someone find labels for things or people, and then forms opinions based on the label
* detecting cognitive dissonance: when someone just shuts down their brain because the experienced reality doesn't match their expectation
* "tells for lies", like analyzing people on TV and looking for clues that they lie
* coining the term "fine people hoax" for a video snippet that was constantly repeated on media to show Trump having one opinion, even though when watching the whole video it was clear that he meant the opposite.
* "logic doesn't win arguments", the rules of persuasion, and the theory of 'master persuaders'
* he predicted Trump winning the 2016 election when Trump had just announced his campaign, long before the primaries, because he recognized a 'master persuader' in him.
And there are probably many more things I don't remember right now, but his books and blog shaped my way of thinking, and I am using his way of looking at the world every day.
I must admit I didn't really follow 'Coffee with Scott Adams' - I think he kind of jumped the shark when having to fill at least 30 minutes every day, and I am not that interested in politics. But that doesn't diminish his accomplishments.
> TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome)
I've always thought the definition of TDS was completely backwards. I've too often seen legitimate criticisms of Trump deflected with claims of TDS. Certainly it's the zealous cult-like worshipping of Trump that's deranged.
https://imgur.com/a/n1MjXxI
It can certainly also be used the other way round by people who defend Trump no matter what. But I have seen enough people who clearly weren't even able to discuss Trump's policy because the thought that Trump could be right about anything was unacceptable to them. And often that thought caused a very emotional reaction.
That fits the pattern of projection that crowd tends to engage in. Same thing for the "Woke Mind Virus" actually being the infection that affects them.
> TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome): the observation that many people hate Trump so much that they lose the capability of rational thought and either just shut their brain down when talking about anything related to Trump, or want to do the opposite of what Trump wants
This isn't a real thing, it's just something his zealots throw at critics to dismiss them.
It's the equivalent of responding on Reddit with "straw man". It's meant to be a conversation finisher where the writer declares victory. But they aren't saying anything at all.
Bummer. Despite his recent controversy I have enjoyed his humor for decades and will continue to remember him for this.
Kinda wild how no comments here suggest that this person's disingenuous nature has made many believe that this is made up. It will be discouraging to find out.
As Scott Adams would tell you, it doesn't matter whether he made it up. If you believe him, that's your reality. If you don't believe him, your reality is that he's faking it. You can chose your reality and that act upon it.
There are certain things that when you stop believing in them, they don't go away, and cancer is one of them.
I considered it when watching his podcast today. Low change, but if he was it would be for a noble cause.
Maybe he's been recruited to work for a secret organization taking over the world and has to fake his death to quietly exit public life. /s
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.
Strange, that is what I was recommended while in Germany.
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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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 have three of the cells, framed in my office. I adored the TV show.
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."
Absolutely, the cartoon was great. Ever since I have read Dilbert comics with the voices from the cartoon.
Same here. The casting in the cartoon was just about perfect, I can only hear Larry Miller when reading Point Haired Boss, and Chris Elliot as Dogbert.
My username is in no small part a reference to the Dilbert cartoon.
I still love Dilbert. For years Dilbert and Userfriendly.org was part of my morning coffee. Working for a Telco Dilbert was crazy relatable, as a colleague pointed out: I'm fairly sure Scott Adams has a camera in our office.
It's easy to say that he should have just shut up, done Dilbert and enjoyed the money, but if he honestly believe the things he's been saying I can understand it's hard to keep quite. Still, I can't help feel like something dramatic happened in his life, causing him to go completely of the rails.
I'm not one of those guys who thinks he should shut up or be censored or something. I do think he's fairly nuts, but that doesn't invalidate the whole body of his work.
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.
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 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.
What I don't understand is spending your days shitposting on Twitter about it. I'm not sure if that applies to Adams, but it definitely applies to Musk and Rowling.
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 think many people view it as a "four lights" situation. How many lights there are isn't really consequential, when you see four lights and you're being commanded to say there are five lights or else, you're going to have some people dig in their heels and refuse to submit no matter how much it hurts them. In fact, rich people who can insulate themselves from the hurt are in the best position to obstinately stick to their version of things.
Gotta love HN. Being asked to call people what they prefer to be called is equivalent to being tortured by fascists.
> 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.
No it's not. Latest tweet is a retweet about the assisted dying bill going through Parliament. Next is about women's rights to single-sex spaces in context of the recent Supreme Court ruling.
Three tweets down is a retweet about an LGB conference. The tweet before that is about her taking legal action against libellous statements.
A few more tweets down from that is something about a man who fought a polar bear off with a saucepan.
I don’t see those. Given the intense pace at which she posts stuff, maybe I just didn’t go far enough.
Women’s rights to single-sex spaces and LGB conferences are definitely about trans issues. I bet the libelous statements thing is too.
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.
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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I really respect Jim Davis, believe it or not. Draw the cat, collect the money, keep mouth shut.
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.
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You know EXACTLY what they meant by "culture war nonsense" but decided to pretend not to.
Why?
Yes, I am aware that the commenter I replied to is framing JKR's advocacy for women's rights, some of which she conducts on social media, as "culture war nonsense".
I commented because I disagree with this dismissive and condescending presentation of her work in this area.
It's culture war nonsense because transwomen are not a threat to women. Why would men pretend to be transwomen to prey upon women when transwomen are treated with more suspicion and hate than men?
I think there's a nuanced conversation to be had about ciswomen-exclusive shelters for abuse victims, because as much as a transwoman is a woman, depending on the stage of their transition, they can be unfortunately very man-like which can trigger women who have been the victims of violence committed by men. That's unfortunate, important, and it matters, however that real issue is being drowned in a sea of misgendering and nonsensical reactionary hate for people already dealing with systemic abuse.
If you cannot assert your womanhood without trying to tear other's away like so many crabs in a bucket, you lose the right to be confused when said others tell you to get bent.
> unfortunately very man-like
Of course, because they are men. Being a man who calls himself a woman is the defining factor of "transwoman".
Most of these men intrude upon or demand access to women's spaces despite knowing that this will cause distress to women and despite having been told no.
It is a particularly threatening type of man that chooses to do this. The only reason that anyone lets these men get away with it is because they call themselves women and, because of misogynistic attitudes, their demands are valued more than women's needs.
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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.
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FWIW, Mike Godwin - the "Godwin's Law" guy - has said it's quite alright to compare this administration to that guy.
FWIW I don't subscribe to memes as a way to construct arguments. I didn't care what that person said the first time around and I don't care about it now either.
> quite already
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Oops, sorry, typo. Fixed it, thanks.
speedrun the hitler reference
What's wrong with Hitler references? He says he supporting anyone that's persuasive and Hitler was persuasive.
So only data that leads to a predetermined result should count?
That's what he does, yes.
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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.