Comment by rsynnott
2 days ago
I read one of his books once, written in the 90s or so. It included the idea that affirmations could literally change reality ("law of attraction"), and an _alternative theory of gravity_. At the time, I thought that these were probably attempts at jokes that didn't land very well, but... Once you believe one thing which is totally outside the pale, it is often very easy to start believing others.
After reading that book I found it a lot less easy to be amused by Dilbert. That experience contributed to my actively trying not to learn things about artists I enjoy. It's that "don't meet your heroes" cliche, I guess.
I had this exact experience. Growing up I had nothing but good memories of reading Dilbert over my breakfast cereal, and then laughing as I got into the workforce and realized how accurate the satire was. And then seeing what "he" was actually like just completely threw me for a loop.
I had an opposite experience. I found his comics not-funny when I was a kid, but then as a grown-up who had worked in a corporate environment, I found many of them funny.
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At some point he had a mailinglist called Dogbert's New Ruling Class (DNRC) which would soon come to rule the world. In it he wrote lots of really weird, unhinged, occasionally funny stuff. At the time I thought it was all one massive joke, layers of irony and trolling. But more recently I've been wondering if he was actually serious.
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I had that same epiphany when reading a biography of Ernest Hemingway.
Another type of work I avoid are "the making of ..." documentaries/accounts of classic works of film, music, and TV shows. Pulling back the curtain really destroys the magic.
I had this same feeling. Same with reading a biography of Kurt Vonnegut. Before reading it, I thought of them in idealistic ways. They had multiple affairs and weren't such great people, even though they both wrote really, really well.
Unless it's about the moving forced perspective shot in Bilbo's home, right? That's impressive AF.
That didn't change if I enjoyed his strip, but it definitely made sure I didn't take anything else he said seriously.
In general, if an "entertainer" has no "offstage" persona, they're batshit and it's not a bit.
I try and also never actually listen to the lyrics of songs, like 90% of the time I'm disappointed and it ruins the song for me.
Opposite of my experience. I love reading the lyrics and Genius annotations on songs I like. Vampire Weekend has a lot of good lyrics. Reading the annotations for The Black Keys' Turn Blue album was kinda eye-opening, and Kanye has a lot of great memorable lyrics as well. I feel it helps me appreciate the songs more deeply on later listens. Also it kinda bugs me if I can't quite catch some words in a song in the live-listen.
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I remember those, i think they were in the appendix of The Dilbert Principal. I thought the gravity one was particularly strange. I bet he had one of those perfect storm personalities that just go completely crazy when hooked into a sufficiently large social media network.
btw, affirmations is a pretty common thing in a lot of religions and other superstitions. Every single Catholic mass is pretty much just the same affirmations/mantra/rituals over and over with a bible story at the end. They even publish the schedule on an annual basis iirc. (my wife briefly converted to Catholicism when we were getting married)
>bible story at the end
Unless they've revamped the format since I've last been, the bible stories (plural) are at the start and middle of mass.
This is not what a Catholic mass is. It’s a recapitulation of a Jewish Temple sacrifice.
Affirmations and law of attraction stuff are just repackaged version of prayers for the "not religious, but spiritual" crowd.
That book killed Dilbert for me. I enjoyed every Dilbert book up until that one, then it just faded away for me.
His theory of gravity (everything in the universe is exponentially growing in size at a continuous rate, shrinking the gaps between things) was a fascinating thought experiment for me as a kid and I enjoyed thinking through how it could work and why it wouldn't work. Finding out later that he at least at one point took it seriously as a potential explanation for how the universe works was very surprising to me.
> shrinking the gaps between things
Hubble showed the opposite is the case, though...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law
> and an _alternative theory of gravity_
For people who haven't read The Dilbert Future: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32627/has-anyone...
It's a weird book and not in a great way. He presents a bunch of very strange "theories" in a way where he kind of says "haha just a silly lil thought... unless it's true", which I remember seeing in some of his early Trump stuff too.
My youth experiences left me with zero desire to ever work anywhere near a tech company. But when I was still in grade school, I once flipped through a Scott Adams book that my father had borrowed from the local library. There's one line that I remember particularly clearly, directed at any woman who felt uncomfortable or ignored in the workplace:
Google tells me this is from "The Dilbert Future", 1997, pg. 146 under "Prediction 38". It's presented as the explanation for when a woman speaks in a meeting, and male coworkers don't listen to, quote, "the woman who is generating all that noise".
Adams more or less tells female readers to just deal with it, while also telling male readers that they're broken/lying if they're not engaged in a constant sexual fantasy about their female coworkers.
To be honest, this did real damage to how I felt about sexuality and gender. Not a huge amount on its own, but it's just such a distorted take from a respected author, whose books my father kept checking out, that I read at a young age.
Scott Adams clearly lived an atypical life. Most people don't quit their jobs to write comics about corporate culture. If I had to guess why he took such a hard turn later on, I think, maybe it's something that happens when a humorist can't compartmentalize their penchant for absurdity and need for attention from real life, they can tell jokes that resonate with a lot of people, but at the same time their serious views also end up becoming ungrounded...
You have to remember, it is theorized that Scott Adams is the 'Cartoonist' from the Pick Up Artist book "The Game".
If you aren't familiar with it, well I was once given a copy by a friend who said they used it to 'get their partner'.
I tried reading it, found it despicable (its basically everything we hate about manipulation in the attention economy,) also the person who loaned it to me had bad narcissistic tendencies; the only time I saw them cry was when someone died that they didnt get to bang.
> the person who loaned it to me had bad narcissistic tendencies; the only time I saw them cry was when someone died that they didnt get to bang.
Do you normally see people cry a lot? I don't think I've seen any of my friends cry more than once.
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He has ... very problematic ... perspectives on females. "If you take away my ability to hug, I will kill people. I'm deadly serious and I won't apologize for it. I like hugging more than killing, but I will become a suicide bomber."
and "Learning hypnotism has been my Jedi mind trick to sleep with more women".
Yeah likewise. The book I read had a completely wrong “explanation” of Bell’s inequalities that said that FTL transmission of information was going to be happening in the future as soon as we’d got some of the technical details around entanglement ironed out. It wasn’t a joke it was pseudo—scientific magical thinking. I knew then that he had either always been, or had turned into, a crank.
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"Theory of positive affirmations" and related ideas have been floating around for a long time. There is some scientific research around this (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-age-of-overindul...) but there are also some culty groups that use it for indoctrination or as sales tools.