Comment by sanity
2 days ago
If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account. I’ve listened to him for years and find it credible. Also, for a long time there was a strong taboo against white men complaining about discrimination, which makes it easy to imagine it never happened—regardless of whether it did.
Adams was insanely narcissistic. Inventing reverse racism to avoid confronting his own short comings is completely on brand.
> Adams was insanely narcissistic.
A claim based on what?
That time he showed up on metafilter with a sock puppet and talked about himself in the third person.
https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Educatio...
"As far as Adams' ego goes, maybe you don't understand what a writer does for a living. No one writes unless he believes that what he writes will be interesting to someone. Everyone on this page is talking about him, researching him, and obsessing about him. His job is to be interesting, not loved. As someone mentioned, he has a certified genius I.Q., and that's hard to hide." - Scott Adams, as plannedchaos
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> If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account.
You can believe something with all your heart and that believe can be a lie. People are not machines.
The idea that a manager will go "hey, we are DEI hiring Asians" in the 80s in the bank sector... No offense but that is mixing modern 2020's politics and trying to transplant it to the 80's.
Fact is, you only have one source of this "truth", and have historical data that disproves this idea of DEI hires in the 80s (unless your white and male, then yes, there was a LOT of DEI hires and promotions that bypassed women and/or people of color).
And this is still happening today. But nobody wants to talk about that too much because that is considered the traditional family and god given right to the white male ;)
I am betting your a white male, that lissen to a lot of conservative podcast/twitter etc. You can prove me wrong but we both know the truth ;)
> The idea that a manager will go ‘hey, we are DEI hiring Asians’ in the 80s
No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking. The terminology has changed; the existence of compliance-driven hiring and promotion pressures has not.
> You only have one source of this ‘truth’.
When the question is what someone believes happened to them, their own account is inevitably the primary source. You can argue he was mistaken or self-serving, but dismissing the account outright because it doesn’t fit your expectations isn’t evidence.
> I am betting you’re a white male
And that assumption rather neatly illustrates why, for a long time, it was socially risky for white men to even claim discrimination without having their motives or identity used to invalidate the argument.
> No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking.
This is true.
What is false is a blanket "We're not hiring or promoting white men" as a result during that time period.
That was an era when lip service was given to affirmative action and literal token hires were made as window dressing .. but the fundementals scarcely changed and extremely rarely at board room and actual upper management levels for jobs that included keys to levers of power.
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