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 is about the 90s.
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.
Probably also because, like e.g. "Yes (Prime) Minister", part of the depicted did come from anecdotes, instead of fantasy.
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.)
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.
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.
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 :(.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230301101359/https://dilbert.c...
"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"
Chapelle's SNL monolog about Trump is pretty spot on too.
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.
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.
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.
If you are writing "Repetitive Strain Injury".
Ye be needing a mirror, lad. A mirror to help ye pull out the log in yer eye.
Can we not do this kind of thing please?
But I do think that the wild admiration of manipulative people was genuine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 so hard your eyes are closed, maybe
Nah there’s plenty of Trumpers in tech. Go on Blind, you’ll see.
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.
Basically, what do you value more and what can you excuse?
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't have a strong opinion about the tests either way, but I wasn't the one getting the biopsies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For a good short overview: https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet
And read “is the PSA test recommended…”
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.
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.
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.
[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."
https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-08-24
It has hit home a time or two when the "managers" hire in a "consultant".
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.
35" monitor 20 megs of ram 1.2 gigabytes of hard disk space
https://web.archive.org/web/20150205042406/https://dilbert.c...
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.
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.
> There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins
This one: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1994-10-29>
------------
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".
Very nice.
And also, what a cool read that was, thanks for sharing the article.
<Dilbert looks back with a blank stare>
---
Godspeed Scott. Thank you for all the laughs.
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)
So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it.
They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.
I've seen the pattern repeat with other data collection as well -- "anonymous" data collection or "anonymized" data almost never is.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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".
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.
https://dynamicsgptipsandtraps.wordpress.com/wp-content/uplo...
"The clue meter is reading zero."
Everyone at Motorola recognized it immediately.
https://archive.jsonline.com/greensheet/there-oughta-be-a-la...
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
The implied timelines don’t match.
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.
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.
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...
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").
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.
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.
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”.
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 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.
* 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.
This isn't a real thing, it's just something his zealots throw at critics to dismiss them.
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
I hope some pharma underling might have cooked up some good meds for Adams, despite all the pharma bosses and their backers.
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.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/dilbert-creator-scott-ad...
I hope all of those Republicans feel safe now that the mean Biden administration stopped deporting them to torture prisons./s
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.
Every time I see someone kitted out in VR gear, I think about his prediction that the Star Trek holodeck will be humanity's last invention and I'm very glad they don't have a button that can beam the next person waiting for their turn into a concrete wall.
I know this will sound dumb, but it's really hard to put into words how much I enjoyed Dilbert in its heyday. I mean at one time Dilbert was one of three web-comics that I read religiously. It was Dilbert, User Friendly, and Sluggy Freelance. The comics weren't just "comics", they mattered to me. Seriously.
Then UF quit publishing new episodes, and then Scott went all alt-right and Dilbert disappeared behind a paywall, and now only Sluggy is still standing. I guess. I have to admit, I quit reading regularly quite some time for reasons I can't even explain.
Anyway... not sure what the relevance of all of this is. Just reminiscing about a day when the 'Net felt a lot different I guess. At any rate, while I'd become less of a "Scott Adams fan" over the last few years, this news still makes me feel absolutely sick. I wouldn't wish prostate cancer on anyone. :-(
If the hypothesis turns out to be true, prostate cancer could be easily defeated before it has a chance to take a hold.
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.
Thankfully with all the voice actors and other talent that went into the show, it's easier to disconnect it from the hateful person Adams ended up revealing himself to be.
I wonder what he has been up to the last couple years.
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.
I remember his remark about Hillary's campaign logo looking like directions to the hospital.
I'll miss him.
