My former manager used to have Dilbert comic strips on his wall. It always puzzled me - was it self deprecating humor? At a certain point though it became clear that in his mind the PHB was one layer ABOVE him in the management chain and not anyone at his level. I suspect it may be a recursive pattern.
> “Dilbert” was a war cry against the management class — the system of deluded jerks you work for who think they know better. Workers posted it on their cubicles like resistance fighters chalking V’s on walls in occupied Paris. But their bosses posted “Dilbert” in their offices too, since they also had a boss who was an idiot.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opinion/dilbert-scott-ada...
History does not repeat but it rhymes indeed
Did she just not get it? Or did she get it, and it was some weird flex making us watch it with her? I still don’t know.
Even your CEO has a board to deal with.
I always think it's strange when people draw a mental dividing line between ICs and managers and think people on the other side are living in totally different experiences of the world.
Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than being Peter Gibbons.
I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job like that.
Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.
Plenty of managers see the absurdity in a lot of what they have to do, but it's mandated by the people above them.
My boss refused to allow people to call him boss, for example. He really hated the system.
Probably not how you meant it but I chuckled.
- Constrained scope (they were the UI team on an internal product; by the time they got their marching orders the whole thing was a very well understood problem domain)
- Excellent manager (he has infinite calm, deep empathy for the fact that real people are messy and complicated, and an incredible nose for time estimates). There was basically no amount of pressure up-chain could put on him that would shake his cool; he seems to be completely confident internally that the worst-case scenario is he goes and lands on his feet somewhere else.
As a result, his team was basically always happy and high-performing and he consistently missed up-chain expectations set by project managers above him who had to consistently report that UI wasn't going to be delivered on the timeline they set because they had taken his estimates and shaved three weeks off of them, only to discover that the estimates were dead-on and they were the liars. He was insulated from this by (a) keeping consistently good notes on his initial estimates, everything that bumped them, and the final deliverable dates and (b) having skip-level meetings where he could present all of this to his boss's boss clearly.
Though some of my worst work periods was when I didn't have a manager either lol.
To use Dilbert terms: Adams would say that PHB is dumb and he is promoted into management as that's where he can do the least damage.
Rao would say that PHB is actually put there by upper management to be a combination of:
- fall guy/lightning rod to take blame for failed projects
- dumb subordinates are less likely to try to take your job (dumb doesn't mean unintelligent. Rather, Rao uses the term "clueless" to highlight smart people who are not political)
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
Smart, moral people have practically a compulsion to improve things, or at least call out idiocy.
I would also add the need for an actual reason to promote the PHB, and I would argue that one quantifiable way upper management can try to argue for a promotion of the PHB is how "hard they work" (regardless if they achieve results or not). Putting in many, many hours also help promote PHBs who will defer to authority.
It also helps explain the phenomenon where the manager class becomes soulless. Institutions that focus on preserving their own power rather than creating value will promote people (at least to middle management) who are willing to put their nose to the grindstone, sacrifice their health and relationship, producing nothing of value, all to walk on some concept of a career treadmill faster.
So to be lazy you start posturing, selling people how great you and your project is. The more projects you have under you, the higher the chance of something very successful too.
It works, suddenly they can work even less and get promoted.
Ofc this is horrible for the company, having the worst people doing the most “internal sales for positioning”. This also creates a giant middle management layer.
I wouldn’t say they are dumb, they just noticed that great work has no correlation with performance. What does have a correlation is how you act and speak. The All-In Chamaths of the world (not saying he is dumb, he isnt, but damn if boosting isn’t everything for him).
This is why Manifesting, was so popular for the management layer, suddenly it wasnt “being untruthful” it was “manifesting into existence”.
A transcendent theory past both is Komoroske's "Coordination Headwinds"
Why not just fire the incompetent employee? Isn't this obvious?
>The Peter Principle holds that people are promoted until they prove incompetent in their role, and then they remain there; competence is rewarded with promotion and incompetence is rewarded with the status quo.
>The Dilbert Principle, with more of a knowledge-worker focus, rings true to those of us who have seen terrible programmers promoted to project managers. It states that bad employees are promoted into management to prevent them from doing damage with their incompetence.
>The Gervais Principle gives a lot more credit to those at the very top (which, in my opinion, makes it far more accurate in its reasoning about corporate leadership); it says that the sociopaths that run the organization knowingly over-promote dedicated but relatively inept people into middle management [and this is done so execs can use them as canon fodder, buffer in interaction, and and avoid having their own jobs threatened]
We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.
Then look at our leadership class. Look at the leaders of the most powerful countries. Look at the most powerful leaders in finance and business.
Look at that contrast. It’s very clear where the actually smart people are.
But those actually smart people keep putting leaders like that in power. It’s not a conspiracy. We do it. We need them for some reason.
I have two hypotheses.
One is familiar: they are sacrificial lightning rods. Sacrifice the king when things don’t go well.
The other is what I call the dopamine donor hypothesis. Compared to the speed and complexity of the modern world, most human beings are essentially catatonic. Our dopamine systems are not calibrated for this. So we sit there and do nothing by default, or we play and invent but lack the intrinsic motivation to do the hardest parts.
So we find these freaks: narcissists, delusional manic prophets, psychopaths. They’re deeply dysfunctional people but we use them. We use the fact that they have tireless non stop motivation. Dopamine always on. Go go go.
We place them in positions of authority and let them drive us, even to the point of abuse, as a hack to get around the fact that our central nervous systems don’t natively do this.
Then of course if things go wrong, it’s back to their other purpose: sacrificial scapegoats.
So in a sense we are both victims of these people and exploiters of them. It’s a dysfunctional relationship.
If we could find ways to tweak our systems like amphetamine but without the side effects, we could perhaps replace this system with a pill.
It would be more compassionate for the freaks too. They’re not happy people. If we stopped using them this way they might get help and be happier.
Governance creates markets -> markets create innovation. These things have feedback loops into governance, but the tail ultimately does not wag the dog.
Engineers-- especially in the Bay where discussion of such is written off as mental illness-- often dismiss politics and governance as nonsense subjects that lack rules and are run by the mob/emotions. The reality however, is that these societal constructs have their own "physics" and operate like a (very complex and challenging to study) system just like everything else in the natural world.
The attitude itself is of course something has been designed and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.
There are a lot of smart and skilled people involved in making a cutting edge chip fab. It's not one ubermensch in a basement inventing a new TSMC process by thinking really hard. There's technicians, scientists, researchers in multiple disciplines. All of those people have to be organized.
I don't know where you think the "smart" people are, but maybe meditate on the fact that "smartness" is not a single variable that dictates a person's value or success. Someone who is an expert at researching extreme UV patterning isn't going to necessarily run a great chip manufacturer.
Of course someone who dedicated his time to climbing and understanding power systems will have more power than someone who doesn't.
>For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.
A+, no notes
I think you also have to mention along his talent stack, all his failed business ideas. He really seemed to give his ideas a shot even if they didn't make much sense. I don't think most people would even pursue the Dilbert idea.
I found the Dilbert principle book in my parents downstairs cloakroom (wedged between magazines and other generic bathroom reading material).
At a superficial level I just read the comic strips in the book and laughed, I thought to myself - haha look at those poor corporate workers, that won't happen to me.
In a way it didn't happen to me vis-a-vis cubicles, suits and water cooler gossip, TPS reports etc.
However, in other ways it did happen to me, the frustrations of working with incompetent people, working in teams who brainwash themselves that they are making something useful or being productive, hilarious executive decisions made without any scientific or rational thought. (startup - https://youtu.be/iwan0xJ_irU)
I still like to add Dilbert comic strips to closing slides in presentations, my go to one is this, when we are discussing new technologies to use.
https://tenor.com/nJfQSXLP8am.gif
We are in the Dilbert universe, it just keeps changing
p.s. if anyone is looking for Saturday TV binge material, all of the Dilbert TV show is on Youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7dgUq5Qe4
Still even half-height cubicle desks tended to give you a good sense of "your space" relative to the open concept rows of tables/flat desks.
Currently I go to the office once a week, where I sit at a tiny mobile desk pressed against the side of someone else's cubicle. I'm almost "in" a walkway. Can't imagine how that interferes with focus!
I also don’t like WFH, I wonder if people who like open plans also like RTO
Scott Adams was basically a classic Sophist, believing that rhetoric was the only thing worth cultivating. Nobody special; snake oil salesmen are up there with prostitutes and mercenaries in oldness of profession.
I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.
I quit that job and started freelancing. Not only because of those comics, but at least they didn't give me any doubts about that endeavour.
What I learned: engineering skills give you power, but it's not the only thing you can be nerdy at.
You can be nerdy about anything.
It just happens to be that software engineering is something that people with much money are willing to pay for.
Just imagine you're history nerd. Not much options to profit quickly from that.
Same goes the other direction. If you happen to really like financial markets and math, you might find ways to make even more money with less work than an engineer.
Employee happiness and team success is essentially random. More accurately: you can go to two “identical” companies directly competing in the same industry at the same scale and they can still be wildly different internally. One can be a depressing march to retirement and death, the other a place where people literally(!) sing with joy in the corridors.
Everything is likely to also be totally different: procedures (or lack thereof), policy, tools, training, etc…
Despite this, all organisations above a certain size are filled with people that are certain that their way is the only way things are done. They’ll argue until they’re blue in the face that nothing else could possibly work… with someone who was at their totally different competitor last week and saw that in fact a different approach is massively superior.
This variability is greatest for small scale workplace practices as typically decided by a “pointy haired boss” (PHB).
They also tend to be most convinced of their own methods, and the most resistant to change.
As clues it is the case: 1) Adams came up with very stupid easily proven wrong physics theories and still was convinced it was correct, which is not what a clever will do, 2) as said in other comment here, some people who identifies themselves as "clever like Adams" were also incapable to get their head around the fact that their own boss was displaying dilbert comics, as if they were not clever enough to understand that the manager see themselves as "dilbert" the same way they do.
"People are idiots.
Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot. That's the central premise of this scholarly work. I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time."
Anyone who identifies as a rationalist is immediately suspect. The name itself is a bad joke. "Ah yes, let me name my philosophy 'obviously correctism'."
That said, I was surrounded by rationalists in my younger years by pure coincidence and spent some time following the blog links they sent and later reading the occasional LessWrong thread or SSC comment section that they were discussing each day in chat.
It's pretty easy to see that the movement attracts a lot of people who have made up their minds but use rationalisim as a way to build a scaffold underneath their pre-determined beliefs in a way that sounds correct. The blogs and forums celebrate writing of a certain style that feels correct and truthy. Anyone who learns how to write in that style can get their ideas accepted as fact in rationalist communities by writing that way. You can find examples throughout history where even the heroes of the rationalist movement have written illogical things, but they've done it in the correct way that makes it appear to be "first principals" thinking with a "steelmanning" of the other side along with appropriate prose to sound correct to rationalists.
https://parksandrecreation.fandom.com/wiki/The_Reasonabilist...
They are basically outing themselves as either having little curiosity, or as having had very limited opportunity to learn... Still if they expound on it, the curiosity deficit is the most likely explanation.
Intelligent people are sometimes very, very weird. Grothendieck and Gödel come to mind as well. It is not smart to die of hunger because your wife is hospitalized, every lizard knows better than that; but that is precisely how Gödel met his end.
I think that's a bit harsh? Goethe's color theory is taught in every art school to this day.
Goethe and science is an interesting one. In some sense he may have been a Newton of another, separate (and in some sense orthogonal) approach towards a science of nature [0]. One that takes primarily an intuitive/integrative/phenomenological approach to the world, rather than a mathematical/analytical. Somewhat analogous to continental vs analytical philosophy (or German vs British, if you want to be reductive).
The latter showed its strength once the industrial revolution rolled around and it gave the tools to understand and design ever more impressive technology, with the Goethean approach becoming ever more fringe. And after WW1+2 the cultural sphere that nurtured it was basically done.
The second clue is about the fact that the "smart thing" he came up with is quite simplistic.
Makes me wonder if Adams was a frequent drug user.
"I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books."
There’s a fan theory that Garfield hates Mondays because he just spent two days with Jon and now Jon is leaving him alone again.
I do wonder if Scott Alexander means this in the sense that he watched a few shows because Adams had died, or if there were the first episodes of Adams' shows he had watched. Dying does reveal some interesting things about a person - in Adams' case he was doing his live podcasts right up to about the end. I tuned in to one out of ghoulish interest and he seemed to be the sickest person I'd ever seen. He was clearly doing that show because he loved it.
If he had his time over, he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White because of the disastrous impact on the Dilbert empire, but I do think Alexander has fundamentally misread what Adams believed it meant to be successful. He wasn't that motivated by commercial success since at least the 2010s, although he had achieved it. He seemed a lot more interested in getting ideas out there and making a difference to people's lives.
Off-topic: English is not classical formal logic. NOT("It's okay to be white") does not have the same meaning as "It's not okay to be white": it merely means "I reject what is communicated by the phrase 'It's okay to be white'". This observation fits quite well into any analysis of slogans: if he hadn't committed to the uncharitable misinterpretation, I'd expect him to write about this (though I'm not so sure he'd have used this particular example).
Alternatively, he achieved enough commercial success and then was satisfied.
Part of me knew a comment like this would show up. The trend itself is greater than Dilbert and not new, but it has certainly become more pronounced. What is interesting that while 'Dilbert empire' fell in the process for not accepting white inferiority, full blown resistance marketing market is taking ( or maybe has taken already ) shape fueled largely by highly polarized populace.
I am not looking forward to it, because it requires keeping abreast of currents I do not care for or even understand.
I must be daft. There must be some cultural context I'm missing so that I don't even understand what you're saying. Accepting white inferiority? Full blown resistance marketing market? Huh?
This is why every level of worker can see themselves as Dilbert and their superiors as the management who "don't get it." I bet there are even C-suite execs who identify with Dilbert and see their CEO or board of directors as PHBs incarnate. This was part of the appeal of the strip before it went off the deep end; almost everyone taking orders believes they know better than at least one of the people telling them what to do.
I'm surprised I don't see this acknowledged more.
When you start your own business, though, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Adams, Musk, Andreesen, Stephen Miller, Chappelle, Maher. They're everywhere.
Now you're the institution
How's it feel to be the man?
It's no fun to be the man."
- Ben Folds, "The Ascent of Stan" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caCuRqedslY
With that said it's not exclusively a Gen-X thing to go from counterculture to establishment while preserving the same root personality driver of narcissism and selfishness. It's obviously recognizable as the trajectory of the Woodstock generation as well.
And Eminem tone policing what people say because it might be hurtful.
The funniest thing I’ve read all week. Was anyone here lucky enough to eat one?
Idk man, imagine quitting HP in the 70s to make your own HP or IBM. Inconceivable
I think the lack of friends (heightened by his Titanic wealth) contributed to his isolation. Like how we all kinda got out of practice talking with people during COVID isolation. That then kinda spiraled him into algorithmicly fed nonsense as he didn't have anyone he could trust to tell him he was wrong. Just sycophants and fans and golddiggers.
Cicero is still right, a friend is the best thing to have, no question.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/cicero-on-friendship-de-a...
Eulogies are such good reading for those of us left here. They really drive the points home. Life isn't the grind, it's a journey. We're all just here for each other
At least in the technology sector, work has changed a lot in some regards since the days when Scott Adams was in the workforce.
No suits and ties needed, show up in a tee-shirt and denim jeans. Flexible work hours, and work-from-home. Top 2% salary. Free food. Clean, well-maintained, offices. No request for annual leave ever denied. Pick the work you like from the top of the backlog. No bosses sending interns to get them coffee or any nonsense like that. Go ahead, play some foosball or table tennis on the clock. Is two screens enough, you can have a third if it'd boost your productivity?
And senior leaders try to project the image of "Stanford CS PhD dropout" rather than "Wall Street Harvard MBA" - they're "just like us", look at that hoodie he's wearing.
The world of Dilbert, meanwhile, is trapped in amber. And the wry insights that fax machines are hard to use don't really land like they did in 1995.
There is still plenty of need for Dilbert strips in the workforce.
Aside from that, all the things you list are perks and benefits. The same old problems with BS budgets, hallucinated requirements, convoluted bureaucracy (seen at the tech giants), and mismanagement are evergreen problems even in the software industry.
My understanding from reading the bible while I was still christian is pretty much, that in the older parts, god was indeed not almighty. He was just the god of a desert tribe. And of course a stronger god than the other gods of the inferior tribes ... slowly evolving to obviously the strongest god up to the point that there was only one god. And there can be only one god if he is almighty. Or, so powerful that the difference does not matter anymore.
Anyway, the logical fallacy of the "almighty" thing was the main thing for me to give up on the concept. I cannot accept a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven), eternal damnation (or salvation) for being who I was made to be, influenced by an environment also totally controlled by the creator.
Thank you Scott A.
Based on this article, somehow I really doubt that.
One thing I think people make the mistake of is taking a look at a person as they are now and then retroactively applying that to their past persona. I think there is something more to learn from the idea that we all can change substantially over time, even without major life incidents. The mind is very complex and sometimes it can go down some dark paths.
This blog fits that format: It starts with praise for the person, some signaling about being their biggest fan, and then gets into the topic he actually wanted to write about.
When articles started coming out about the author of this blog and some of his problematic past with reactionaries and race science, the common tactic to dismiss any criticisms was to claim they were "hit pieces" and therefore could be ignored. In this community, you have to write in both-sides style and use "steelmanning" to pretend to support something before you're allowed to criticize it.
"I loved Scott Adams. Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself."
You seem to think the only thing that matters is Adams' engagement with right-wing politics and race; all else is fluff that OP only writes under duress, to not get canceled by the rationalist community's weird norms.
That is a complex hypothesis; here's a simpler one: OP is writing his honest thoughts. He sees Adams as a complicated, flawed person who should not be wholly defined by their worst comments or bad decisions. Adams isn't an evil villain worthy of dismissal and contempt. He's more of a tragic anti-hero who made bad choices -- but very understandable ones if you know his character sheet, backstory, the times he lived in, and the immediate pressures. Or at least that's the way OP views him.
It's a careful, nuanced article. It's fine with me if you don't agree with the author's viewpoint! But I do object to your accusations of disingenuousness for what appears to me to be a sincere, heartfelt eulogy.
Were you perhaps hoping for an article along the lines of, "He said that about black people, he is the enemy, when we think about him we should have nothing but fury and contempt in our hearts, and the righteous should rejoice in his death"? Are you thinking "Of course every community has cancel-cudgel-wielding norm enforcers that everybody carefully censors their words to avoid, this community must just have different censorship rules than the ones I'm used to, because the possibility of a community that doesn't immediately ostracize people for wrongthink is absurd"?
If so, I...was going to make a snarky comment about how this blog and the rationalist community are not places for you, but actually, I just feel bad for you; the politics of the 2010s and 2020s has traumatized [1] you and a lot of other people. You need to spend more time in places like this, not less -- communities where people try to keep their discourse on higher rungs [2] [3].
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-traum...
Out of curiosity I searched this quote in Google, DDG and Claude and none of them found any source. Anyone know who the other self-hating nerd writer is? Sounds a bit like John Donne.
But Gemini 3.0 knew what it was, and it is from Omar Khayyám like the sibling commenter said, but from the little-known E. H. Whinfield translation (1883) rather than the more famous Fitzgerald one:
—-
221. (395.)
Such as I am, Thy power created me,
Thy care hath kept me for a century!
Through all these years I make experiment,
If my sins or Thy mercy greater be.
——-
Link to the actual page in Google books:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NN_TAAAAMAAJ&q=Experimen...
(Edited on reading more closely) Or possibly some fan work, since this "Extended Rubaiyat" isn't entirely from Omar Khayyam. So this doesn't pin down the provenance of the phrase.
What I remember that is notable about Scott Adams is way back he had The Dilbert Blog and it was pioneering in it's early adoption of the internet. Adams wrote his takes and theories back then, too. But he once wrote that he was going to scale those back, because they were not productive: he would lose followers for being controversial. But later something happened with the feedback loop of social media, because he eventually started to court controversy. I do think that the internet sucked him in.
Long before he was trying to be a political figure, criticism of his book resulted in this glorious piece of peak internet forum nonsense in which he responded to criticism by registering an anonymous account to say things like "I hate Adams for his success too" and "he's a certified genius which is hard to hide" until the mods decided to call him out...
https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Educatio...
What I found most interesting about him was around the time Trump was running for president the first time, Adams was one of the first people to point out that Trump was, to use Adams' terms, a "master persuader". No one else at the time seemed to be talking about this and it was fascinating to see a humorist have this take/insight.
And SA was weird as f who made money bye filling a niche.
His political views and other snippets made that quite clear.
And let's be honest just creating cartoons about our corporate capitalistic shit hole was easy enough hit a nerve but more than a chuckle was Dilbert never.
It became cultural because it was printed everywhere and it was fun enough for it's format
Every child is hypomanic, convinced of their own specialness. Even most teenagers still suspect that, if everything went right, they could change the world.
It’s not just nerds. Everyone has to crash into reality. The guitar player who starts a garage band in order to become a rockstar. The varsity athlete who wants to make the big leagues. They all eventually realize, no, I’m mediocre. Even the ones who aren’t mediocre, the ones with some special talent, only have one special talent (let’s say cartooning) and no more.
I don’t know how the musicians and athletes cope. I hear stories about washed-up alcoholic former high school quarterbacks forever telling their girlfriends about how if Coach had only put them in for the last quarter during the big game, things would have gone differently. But since most writers are nerds, it’s the nerds who dominate the discussion, so much so that the whole affair gets dubbed “Former Gifted Kid Syndrome”.
Every nerd who was the smartest kid in their high school goes to an appropriately-ranked college and realizes they’re nothing special. But also, once they go into some specific field they find that intellect, as versatile as it is, can only take them so far. And for someone who was told their whole childhood that they were going to cure cancer (alas, a real quote from my elementary school teacher), it’s a tough pill to swallow.
This sort of false expectation setting and feeling of exceptionalism eventually hits the cold hard reality of the limits of your capability somewhere and that can really break you
Reminds me especially of some people I saw in university who were absolutely brilliant, but so deeply affected by that one mistake they made or limit they had found where they had not expected one
Heck I felt the same, coming to terms with ones limits is a deeply challenging experience even if it is a very humanising one, I wasn't expecting to have that fall into my lap today
There's a few things I enjoy about reading Scott Alexander, he's got some really good takes now and again that in my eyes make reading his essays worth it
-[0]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184503512/its-not-funny-if-...
Just like how Jim Davis stumbled upon a reasonably funny, widely relatable gag that can be repeated for decades with minimal consequences, the success in Dilbert was being the first newspaper comic to live in the topic of corporate bureaucracy.
In case we all forget how newspaper comics work in a digital world of curated content, they are all successful based on broad appeal. Each newspaper has approximately two pages of funny content and each strip has to appeal to a large subset of readers if not all of them.
Family Circus is a perfect example. Dog funny. Reader like dog. Dog funny. Kids say funny thing with dog. Reader has kids and dog.
The topic of “my boss is incompetent” is just as widely appealing as “my cat is lazy and selfish.”
With all that context established we have to acknowledge that Scott Adams was a pretty normal guy with no particularly strong skills.
So as the article points out, when he pivoted his life to other endeavors, his limitations are strikingly apparent.
This is where I start not liking the guy. He had a smarter than thou attitude especially later in life when in reality, he was not himself particularly smart. I would stop short of calling him a narcissist but some vibes are there. He got lucky to be the guy who got a syndication deal at the right time making a specific type of comic. If he was born 20 years later he’d be a nobody, as the comic industry has completely changed.
His craft was largely surpassed by web comic authors with more specific audiences and more intelligent writing.
I agree. I found the style tedious and the length exhausting. I'd occasionally read pieces from the author, and now I expected better. :/
(1) It doesn't give Adams enough credit for his work on WhenHub. I was reading Scott Adams's posts about WhenHub contemporaneously as he worked through the startup's various pivots. He had a really good idea that people would want to see a map with a little live-location icon of where their friends & acquaintances were on the map and he pushed really hard on different ways of getting this idea towards reality. We have this now (in various other social map apps) and he showed good product sense.
(2) It gives Adams too little credit for the sincerity of his views.
> There’s a passage in the intro to one of Adams books where he says that, given how he’s going to blow your mind and totally puncture everything you previously believed, perhaps the work is unsuitable for people above fifty-five, whose brains are comparatively sclerotic and might shatter at the strain. This is how I feel about post-2016 politics. Young people were mostly able to weather the damage. As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
This is not fair. Adams knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what he was getting into for all of 2015-2026. He was an extremely smart guy. We should treat him seriously, not infantilize him. He was not a Nobel Prize winning chemist or Fields Medal winning mathematician coming up with wacky perpeutal-motion machines or cranky Riemann Hypothesis solutions that everyone politely agrees to ignore. His hypnosis stuff and all the rest were genuinely what he really believed -- it's not like Sir Michael Atiyah's Todd function.
Adams was in the prime of his life, he was doing what mattered most to him, and we should take him at his word that he genuinely believed what he said and we should judge what he said on its merits.
(3) I don't really have a disagreement but I am fascinated by the implication in the last 1/3 of the eulogy slatestarcodex view that Scott Adams was trying to establish a guru cult community - in convergent evolution with the sort of thing that the squishy half of TPOT tends to sprout in the East Bay. It's an interesting observation which tells me something about what is going on with Bay Area rationalism, though I don't know quite what.
I thought that many of the things that happened to Adams -- especially his family troubles with his stepson, but also his illness -- were really sad. I'm sorry things didn't turn out differently and grateful for the cartoons.
After reading this, I thought, damn he just described the current administration. Then I kept reading and saw:
<It all led, inexorably, to Trump.>
Yeah(!), I think I'm gonna bookmark that site and reread it a few more times.
It's essentially gallows humor for a world where, for no apparent reason, blithering idiots often seem to be the only people who wield any decision making power.
Thus, the reputation of the most competent gets destroyed, while the village idiot remains as the only one left unscathed.
If he'd stayed apolitical people would have kept clipping his strips and putting them up on cubical walls. Dogbert was not an appealing character. His sharper edge kept the sharp edges of Dilbert and the other engineers more out of one's attention. Then Adams revealed that he believed Dogbert was the one to emulate and tried to prove his theories (and he said black people were scary -- there was that) and he polarized himself. Much of his audience recoiled. He gained new, more ICE-esque followers, and then still more of his audience recoiled.
To his credit he pioneered the PR death spiral later made famous by Kanye and Rowlings. This was not the career capper he was looking for.