> This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something
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.
Your manager had a boss, too. She had to deal with the oddities and frustrations of corporate life and expectations, too.
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.
> my former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.
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.
I don't have stats to back it up, but many people claim that Office Space made a lot of people resign their cubicle jobs and this was a sharp effect on its release.
Great question. The best team I can name had these things going for them:
- 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.
I think everybody, with few exceptions, is in the system involuntarily. And also you can't say that that you don't want to be in the system. You have to fake it very hard if you want to "win". You have to demonstrate "passion" and such.
My boss refused to allow people to call him boss, for example. He really hated the system.
For those looking for a "successor theory" to the Dilbert Principle, I highly suggest Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle [0].
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)
There's also the Commander In-Chief of the German reichswehr quote about officers:
"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."
It's nice to see someone else (unsurprisingly) reached identical conclusions as me! I would like to try adding a 3rd reason: dumb subordinates don't upset the apple cart because they don't really have the capacity to do so, and people in power hate upsetting the apple cart as they love the status quo that puts them in power.
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.
The Gervais Principle is much more accurate in my experience. One of the important reasons middle management has to be "clueless" to drink the kool-aid and take on more responsibility for minimal extra compensation. The checked out employees of the world know their work is meaningless, but the clueless ascribe to it some greater meaning which makes them trustworthy.
>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]
When I ponder this, the "Isn't it obvious?" frame ends up cutting both ways: ex. isn't it obvious this isn't actually an active thought when people make these decisions? (to wit, the theory cited is based on The Office TV series, which also never depicts this)
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.
How very Dilbertian. If one were to compress the above post into a comic, it would star Dilbert wondering why people with towering intellects like Dilbert weren't running the world in the first panel and then humorously demonstrating in subsequent panels Dilbert's disastrous and irreparable lack of understanding of messy human interrelationships and motivations that have to be navigated to not implode as a leader.
> 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.
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.
It's pretty simple: those people are the absolute experts in their field, similar to those top chemists or whatever. That field is societal power systems.
Of course someone who dedicated his time to climbing and understanding power systems will have more power than someone who doesn't.
You got it backwards. We (which we?) don't need them, they need us. They can't play the games they like without massive resource extraction. If someone continually catches the flu, it doesn't mean they need the flu.
We don’t just use these people we create them. Since ancient Egypt the priest class of every society is employed to apply ritual trauma to psychologically prepare princes for their vocation of restless leadership.
>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.
I was caught off guard by how brutal this article was at points. I don't really follow Scott Alexander much, so I was pleasantly surprised by it. While I don't have the same relationship with Scott Adams... I can see parts of this in my relationship with Kanye.
Pretty easy to take pot shots at a dead guy who lacks the ability to punch back. Especially when the dead guy hosted a daily show and would have been thrilled to have him come on and debate! Why didnt Mr Codex get around to stating his opinion re: Adams for the past 10 years?
I really enjoyed How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
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 actually watched the podcast in question. As I saw it he made a very reasonable and 100% non-racist comment (in the context of the discussion the soundbytes were later taken out of), which related more to the inflammatory, caustic nature of the media narrative on black-white relationships, and whether as a white person it is even fruitful to be engaging in that narrative, if the end outcome is that your engagement will be used out of context to cause even more strife and division by the people pushing this narrative. I.e. you will make more of a difference as a white person by trying to improve the "systems" around you, in a manner that benefits everyone, rather than by engaging in pointless arguments and debates with people who are blinded by a very deliberately promoted agenda.
I very much agree with that point, and have experienced it myself. Ironically, if nothing else, this whole affair and the rush to cancel him and call him racist and disgraced, ultimately proved his very point. Just look at how the links you shared choose to word their posthumous articles.
If you really want an accurate source, just go watch the (entire) podcast. No better source than this. Best case scenario you'll disagree with my take, but now your take is informed rather than misinformed.
And to set the record straight, Adams was the very opposite of racist in my view. He had very nuanced and pragmatic views, including how the best thing the country could do to help black communities should be investing in education across the board, instead of funding and pandering to apologists who inflame the masses but then drain the money from the education system, perpetuating ghetto-like communities.
Like the author I was fortunate enough to be exposed to Dilbert as a teenager, before I got caught up in the rush of the university-professional-yuppie-industrial-complex.
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.
I haven't seen full height cubicles since my 2006-2011 job.
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!
Cubicles are terrible. Especially the full height ones. They have all the same noisy neighbor problems as open spaces but you’re stuck in a tiny box all day. You get a tiny modicum of privacy but not enough to make up for feeling like you’re stuck in a gray box all day.
I found Dilbert in 2013, when I was working in a dead end dev job in a small software company. Felt nice to see others seem to have the same issues.
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.
I’m not the person you’re asking the question from but I’m a consultant that has been to well over a hundred organisations big and small.
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.
> Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion / hypnosis.”
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.
This article keeps saying that Adams was more clever than the others.
What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not.
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.
Yes, he was an idiot, but that doesn't contradict that he was smart. In his own words, from The Dilbert Principle book:
"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."
Not sure this really obvious analysis really helps. I've seen a lot of people thinking they are really smart for saying that everyone including them are idiots. Adams made a lot of declarations or actions that shows that he really thought of himself as "able to see what the idiot sheeple were not able to see", and this quote is not out of character at all: "you idiots don't even realise that everyone is an idiot including me".
> What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not.
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'."
I don't really identify with any particular movement, but it's important to note that there are plenty of people who legitimately oppose the core concept of rationalism, the idea that reason should be held above other approaches to knowledge, this being put aside from other criticisms leveled at the group of people that call themselves rationalists. Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.
In theory, the name is supposed to imply that they're pursuing rational thinking and philosophies, not that their decisions are the rational choice.
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.
Well, I agree but think it is even worse than this. Anyone who hasn't got wind of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism is squarely placing themselves in a very ancient thought-space, more Plato than Kant, no Popper, no modernity.
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.
You don't look for smart people by looking for people who don't do stupid things, because you won't find any. You look for smart people by finding people who do smart things because stupid people don't do smart people things.
I'm not saying Adams is not smart because he has done stupid things, I'm saying that Adams has probably thought of himself as very smart while not smart at all in field X because it is pretty clear he has done that in fields Y and Z (which is the first clue).
The second clue is about the fact that the "smart thing" he came up with is quite simplistic.
I think the article explains that Adams "turned bad" because it is the sad consequence of him being smarter than the rest of the people. I'm pretty sure that someone who has time to lose can got through the article and pick up all of the quotes about how Adams was clever and the managers were so dum.
Reminds me of my stoner friends in high school who would watch a few videos by Carl Sagan and then become convinced that they know everything about physics and come up with convoluted and ultimately silly “theories” for physics.
Makes me wonder if Adams was a frequent drug user.
Scott Adams was more clever than most because, as the article says more than once, he was named "Scott A." and so was the author, to whom an elementary school teacher said he was going to "cure cancer", whatever that means. Maybe the teacher was sincere -- or maybe he was trying to be nice and got misunderstood.
J. W. Goethe was obsessed with "Farbenlehre" [0], which is so weird that it is "not even wrong". I don't think it detracts from his intelligence. It was just his blind corner, so to say.
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.
The example I gave what about Adams being convinced to "know better" while it was clearly not true, which is to me a clue that when it comes to his view on society and business, which already looks pretty simplistic to me, the idea that he "knew better" is more probably the result of him thinking that and managing to convince others people who also like to see themselves as smarter than others.
I thought the joke for Garfield is that some crazy annoying shit happens to him on Mondays, and as such he uses the same “I hate mondays” that a person might, just for different reasons.
I also read Dilbert books years before joining the workforce. Though the framing of the strip is the workplace, it averages out to all the people in one's life who are wrong but have authority. As a rebellious little shit, I could identify with how Dilbert's boss (PHB) was wrong in ways that I recognized in adults around me plus my inability to do anything about it.
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 had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show.
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.
> he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White
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).
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.
> 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 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?
> Scott Adams based Dilbert on his career at Pacific Bell in the 80s. Can you imagine quitting Pacific Bell in the 80s to, uh, found your own Pacific Bell?
Idk man, imagine quitting HP in the 70s to make your own HP or IBM. Inconceivable
Quitting Fairchild to make your own semiconductor manufacturer (twice), quitting Intel to make your own CPU manufacturer, etc. The point isn’t that people didn’t do it if brave/desperate enough, the point is that it wasn’t a Thing You Can Do in the collective consciousness. Also, relatedly, that the societal infrastructure to support(/profit from) this category of people wasn’t yet in place, so you needed to be wealthy or connected (even more so than now).
Ok but what is this question trying to say? I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect"; it's entirely possible the universe we're in is a toy made for the amusement of an evil god-child, like we have ant farms, and they enjoy having meteorites and black holes and whatnot. It's not especially likely -- but it's not less likely than any of the other mainstream religious myths.
"I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect""
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.
I'm remembering it not because it makes a good point, trying to reason about God is futile and pointless, but because it's funny both alone and because of its central role in the novel as saving humanity from a global holy war. Like that's just hilarious.
I can relate to the author. Really loved the strip when I was younger and before I actually worked anywhere. The TV show on UPN was pretty decent too, it's a shame it didn't catch on more. Adams seemed to have a smart everyman quality to him and was doling out nuggets of wisdom like candy. His later years really troubled me because it difficult to relate the earlier idea I had of Adams to the later. It's a lesson in mortality and how much a person can change (not that I knew Adams or anything, maybe he was always like that). There are many other examples out there.
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.
it is an admittedly long read but i could sense it. i have a few fallen heroes myself and id be able to write diatribes of why i loved them and simultaneously hold their nuts to the fire in modern times.
In the world of rationalist blogs, writing anything too negative about someone is dismissed as a "hit piece" which is license to ignore it. The only way to write negatively about a person is to write a both-sides style evaluation where you sandwich the criticism in between praise for the person. It's a way of signaling that you're a nice person who isn't just being mean, before you get to the meat of the issue.
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.
An author who "actually wanted to write about" how Adams was a terrible person, but feels obligated to include some praise to pacify the Politeness Police, probably would not write these words:
"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 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].
Great eulogy and art, What saddens me is the lack of a friends around him, seems like he got isolated in the politics of 2015 and then got radicalized.
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.
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
> But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job - become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to love it.
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.
Beautifully stated. A lot of the comics still apply, but certainly not directly to my job. I imagine government workers find it very relatable, however.
I’ve spent most of my career in the cushy Silicon Valley startup style work cultures you’ve described. Obviously I greatly prefer them… but the stodgy business casual+ 9-5 cube farms still exist, and in great numbers. I’ve worked in them out of necessity here and there, and they’re more common than one might believe reading HN. If the desperate recruiters in my metro are anything to judge by, it seems just about everything manufacturing and financial services firm is run by a Pointy Haired Boss or two.
There is still plenty of need for Dilbert strips in the workforce.
Software and computers is not all there is to technology. There are plenty of other STEM fields that didn't enjoy a decades long surge in demand. Dilbert still very much applies there.
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.
> As another self-hating nerd writer put it, “through all these years I make experiment if my sins or Your mercy greater be.”
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.
I was also curious about this quote, and it sounded to me too like Donne (or Pascal or Robert Boyle, a bit).
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:
(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.
For those who haven't read it, Scott Alexander's "Unsong" (https://unsongbook.com/) is a very fun piece of historical fiction / religious fantasy. Basic premise is that the world is incredibly shocked when the Apollo 10 mission crashes into the Dome of the Sky and (a) proves that the Biblical cosmology was the true cosmology this whole time and (b) damages reality. It includes the idea that there is a whole cottage industry of people trying to apply technology to deciphering the True Name of God by essentially Mechanical Turking it ("If we divide up all possible syllable combinations into tranches and pay folks minimum wage to sit around reciting every syllable combination possible, we're bound to hit it sometime!").
The book is okay (I think I gave it three stars on Goodreads?) but in my opinion it suffers from Neal Stephenson syndrome: the book kinda just ends without a whole lot of anticlimax or resolution. The pacing is all over the place and the supporting cast are more like character sketches than characters.
I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.
I read the whole thing and enjoyed both the premise and the writing, but yeah, it would have benefited considerably from the attention of a professional editor and a couple of rounds of rewrites.
I imagine them coming together at some Bay Area house party on copious amounts of LSD or MDMA. One, the world’s greatest comic writer, who more than anything else wanted to succeed in business. The other, the world’s greatest businessman, who more than anything else wanted people to think that he’s funny.
Story of our times: Gen-X counterculture jerk grows up railing against The Man. Grows up, gets rich, famous, becomes The Man. His mind, however, is stuck in the past, still thinks he's a rebel, still thinks he's railing against The Man. In reality, he has become a sadistic asshole hurting others for his self-righteous pleasure. But no amount of pain inflicted on others will make him feel good, he dies a miserable crank.
Adams, Musk, Andreesen, Stephen Miller, Chappelle, Maher. They're everywhere.
While a little reductive and caricatured, as a Gen-X counterculture type myself I can confirm that there's quite a bit of accuracy in this comment. And a lot more examples in more boring parts of the world than these famous people you are mentioning.
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.
Yeah, probably unfair to name GenX exclusively - more of a late boomer/early gen-x phenomenon. Perhaps it's just the new mid-life crisis, "corvette in your 40s" is beyond silly these days, but rich, powerful 50-60 year olds thinking they're badass rebels is super common.
At the end of the day Dilbert was entertainment...
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
<And the most successful parasites are always those which can alter their host environment to be more amenable to themselves, and if you’re a parasite taking the form of a bad idea, that means hijacking your host’s rationality.>
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.
I was a long time Scott Adams fan with the Dilbert Principle being one of my favorite books.
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.
Interestingly, Adams also pointed out the persuasion flaws in Hillary's campaign. Evidently, the Hillary team noticed this and changed their messaging, which Adams then commented on.
I think many who dislike Trump (myself included) don't really want to think of him as having skills of any sort.
But I think it's more so that he does absolutely have certain skills such as persuasion or, some argue, charisma. He just doesn't have any of that pesky morality or sense of responsibility to the greater good, the entire citizenship, etc. that often gets in the way of such ambitions.
So we're left with a master manipulator who will hurt a great number of people, maybe benefit a few if necessary, but ultimately a subset of people think he's genius and a net positive. And I can't help but think that the only ones who think he's a "net positive" are either personally benefiting, or have been persuaded to believe it, despite reality painting a different picture.
I dunno if the "just paraphrasing [...] Fox" works as an explanation for success. It sounds like you believe he just keeps unaccountably stumbling into piles of cash and power?
Mostly seems like yet another case of snorting one's own tailpipe to the very end. It's a shame, the comics were great. But so many who experience success like that begin to consider themselves chosen ones and it only goes downhill from there unless you're a clown genius (tm).
> His next venture (c. 1999) was the Dilberito, an attempt to revolutionize food via a Dilbert-themed burrito with the full Recommended Daily Allowance of twenty-three vitamins. I swear I am not making this up. A contemporaneous NYT review said it “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste”
The funniest thing I’ve read all week. Was anyone here lucky enough to eat one?
Prediction: Dilbert will be bought by Paramount, all the old books will stop being published, and not-funny Woke Dilbert will get a Barbie movie treatment, a new not funny comic strip syndicated in daily newspapers only boomers read, a set of long books about social justice that have no comics in them, bad jokes, boring rehashed social justice narratives and just a picture of Dilbert on the cover to sell it. It will be called something like : "Dilbert’s Official Apology, Expanded Edition"
I think this article really nails it. Adams' ego and self-satisfaction contributed to his susceptibility to the forces of the internet. It could happen to anyone.
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.
Think he was always unusually susceptible to the feedback loop of social media.
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...
(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.
TPOT is "this part of Twitter", a loose community of (roughly) post-rat affiliated people; the "squishy half" is presumably referring to the fact that a substantial number of such people end up quite big into woo of various sorts.
The weird thing about Adams was that he believed Trump was Dogbert, not the pointy-haired boss.
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.
In another way Trump is actually rather like Adams himself: his one great talent is as an entertainer and self-publicist, but he feels that he deserves success in business and leadership, so that he can be hailed as a great builder and decision-maker. Trump does have the personal charisma and feel for manipulation which Adams longed for, though. (Though it does help Trump that he started with the charisma boosts of inherited megawealth and the associated upbringing.)
Once the article made the claim that the was the greatest comic author of all time, it became clear that the article is overanalyzing the man. one aspect proving the overanalysis is the wild length of the article beyond that point.
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.
>Can we talk about how he in the end buried himself in vile racist politics?
Can you point to anything other than the single post that he made saying “white should get/stay away from black people”?
I’ve seen how he lost his way, or fell, or whatever. But all I’ve seen anyone post is one tweet one time. And every single time it leaves out the context that he was replying to a poll of black people saying the same about white people.
There was also one comic strip that was actually a correct and decently good take on the failure/intersection of postmodernism and DEI. I don’t count that as it wasn’t a bad faith take it was on point.
There is a no-joke they’re serious effort to link gym and fitness with conservative values.
People on the left point to statistics and a study or two showing decent correlation. People on the right readily agree regardless of their fitness saying it’s because of discipline and personal responsibility.
I think it’s funny to see people on the left lean into it.
> The amount of comments about white superiority/inferiority with no awareness of how absurd it is...
I haven't seen any. Could you give me an example?
> Is this site now a nazi bar? Damn.
Please don't turn Hacker News into a site for endlessly regurgitating lame social media "gotchas" or tropes. There are already many, many websites for that.
That isn't how I understood Dilbert. Dilbert is a normal guy and PHB is actually mentally retarded.
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.
Scott Adams had a take on that. The "Dilbert Principle" (his version of the Peter Principle) is that useless engineers that are promoted away from doing real work to keep them from messing it up.
I have a much darker hypothesis about it - when people are left to compete, they often resort to badmouthing those who they think could outcompete them.
Thus, the reputation of the most competent gets destroyed, while the village idiot remains as the only one left unscathed.
This article is great but it is insanely long and suffers from having no scroll bar on mobile. I read for over an hour, falling asleep at least three times, and wondering the entire time how far I was from finishing. Eventually I flicked the page upward to find out and could not believe how far I scrolled. I gave up at that point.
Regardless of how you feel about him, a good litmus test to go by is how Jews perceived him. This is the second article by a Jew throwing shade at the man.
We've had almost 100 years of the Talmudic dialectic, culturally speaking. Tiresome is not even the word for it anymore, it's time to give it a rest. We get it.
> This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something
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.
From a recent NYTimes article about his passing:
> “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...
https://archive.is/9JVkU
I used to say seeing Dilbert strips in the office is a warning sign. People shouldn’t identify with Dilbert.
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And while we don't have cubicles and TPS reports anymore, people have different grievances and ways of expressing their cynicism.
History does not repeat but it rhymes indeed
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My former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.
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.
Your manager had a boss, too. She had to deal with the oddities and frustrations of corporate life and expectations, too.
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.
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> my former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.
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.
I don't have stats to back it up, but many people claim that Office Space made a lot of people resign their cubicle jobs and this was a sharp effect on its release.
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Did you not realize we’ve built a system where everyone is both oppressor and oppressed. Did you not think she too had an idiot boss?
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Perhaps she just had a good sense of humor? It's a great movie after all..
Well, PHB is not about simply being a manager, but about being a certain type of manager, so he might very well be justified in his wall decoration.
People can play a role and clearly see the role they play as well.
Plenty of managers see the absurdity in a lot of what they have to do, but it's mandated by the people above them.
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It's PHBs all the way up.
Did you ever encounter a well managed (or well functioning) team(s)? If so, why do you think they performed so well?
The manager has decision making power, a well paid senior team, and a clear goal. I have seen it work like a dream.
I had a period where I was on a team like that. We didn't have a manager.
Though some of my worst work periods was when I didn't have a manager either lol.
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Great question. The best team I can name had these things going for them:
- 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.
PHB?
Pointy Haired Boss :)
It speaks to a general lack of self awareness people have about class/power structures.
I think everybody, with few exceptions, is in the system involuntarily. And also you can't say that that you don't want to be in the system. You have to fake it very hard if you want to "win". You have to demonstrate "passion" and such.
My boss refused to allow people to call him boss, for example. He really hated the system.
"I'm a regular boss, I'm a cool boss. You can just call me Stan"
Probably not how you meant it but I chuckled.
For those looking for a "successor theory" to the Dilbert Principle, I highly suggest Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle [0].
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)
0 - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
There's also the Commander In-Chief of the German reichswehr quote about officers:
"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://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
It's nice to see someone else (unsurprisingly) reached identical conclusions as me! I would like to try adding a 3rd reason: dumb subordinates don't upset the apple cart because they don't really have the capacity to do so, and people in power hate upsetting the apple cart as they love the status quo that puts them in power.
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.
Scott Alexander reviewed it:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
The Gervais Principle is fascinating and a bit too inflexibly nihilistic in my mind.
A transcendent theory past both is Komoroske's "Coordination Headwinds"
https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/
The Gervais Principle is much more accurate in my experience. One of the important reasons middle management has to be "clueless" to drink the kool-aid and take on more responsibility for minimal extra compensation. The checked out employees of the world know their work is meaningless, but the clueless ascribe to it some greater meaning which makes them trustworthy.
The PHB is not middle management. Middle management is at least one level above the PHB.
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I found https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/ has a good comparison
>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]
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.
Why not just fire the incompetent employee? Isn't this obvious?
When I ponder this, the "Isn't it obvious?" frame ends up cutting both ways: ex. isn't it obvious this isn't actually an active thought when people make these decisions? (to wit, the theory cited is based on The Office TV series, which also never depicts this)
Look at the contrast.
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.
The order is wrong here:
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.
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How very Dilbertian. If one were to compress the above post into a comic, it would star Dilbert wondering why people with towering intellects like Dilbert weren't running the world in the first panel and then humorously demonstrating in subsequent panels Dilbert's disastrous and irreparable lack of understanding of messy human interrelationships and motivations that have to be navigated to not implode as a leader.
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> 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.
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.
It's pretty simple: those people are the absolute experts in their field, similar to those top chemists or whatever. That field is societal power systems.
Of course someone who dedicated his time to climbing and understanding power systems will have more power than someone who doesn't.
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You got it backwards. We (which we?) don't need them, they need us. They can't play the games they like without massive resource extraction. If someone continually catches the flu, it doesn't mean they need the flu.
We don’t just use these people we create them. Since ancient Egypt the priest class of every society is employed to apply ritual trauma to psychologically prepare princes for their vocation of restless leadership.
I disliked Adams, but this is a good eulogy.
>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 was caught off guard by how brutal this article was at points. I don't really follow Scott Alexander much, so I was pleasantly surprised by it. While I don't have the same relationship with Scott Adams... I can see parts of this in my relationship with Kanye.
Pretty easy to take pot shots at a dead guy who lacks the ability to punch back. Especially when the dead guy hosted a daily show and would have been thrilled to have him come on and debate! Why didnt Mr Codex get around to stating his opinion re: Adams for the past 10 years?
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Adams says that his comic skills are nothing more than a talent stack of multiple only-slightly-above-average skills.
I really enjoyed How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
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.
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Yes, that guy.
"Consider the source".
I actually watched the podcast in question. As I saw it he made a very reasonable and 100% non-racist comment (in the context of the discussion the soundbytes were later taken out of), which related more to the inflammatory, caustic nature of the media narrative on black-white relationships, and whether as a white person it is even fruitful to be engaging in that narrative, if the end outcome is that your engagement will be used out of context to cause even more strife and division by the people pushing this narrative. I.e. you will make more of a difference as a white person by trying to improve the "systems" around you, in a manner that benefits everyone, rather than by engaging in pointless arguments and debates with people who are blinded by a very deliberately promoted agenda.
I very much agree with that point, and have experienced it myself. Ironically, if nothing else, this whole affair and the rush to cancel him and call him racist and disgraced, ultimately proved his very point. Just look at how the links you shared choose to word their posthumous articles.
If you really want an accurate source, just go watch the (entire) podcast. No better source than this. Best case scenario you'll disagree with my take, but now your take is informed rather than misinformed.
And to set the record straight, Adams was the very opposite of racist in my view. He had very nuanced and pragmatic views, including how the best thing the country could do to help black communities should be investing in education across the board, instead of funding and pandering to apologists who inflame the masses but then drain the money from the education system, perpetuating ghetto-like communities.
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Like the author I was fortunate enough to be exposed to Dilbert as a teenager, before I got caught up in the rush of the university-professional-yuppie-industrial-complex.
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
For someone who has only been exposed to open office landscapes those cubicles seem like a dream.
I haven't seen full height cubicles since my 2006-2011 job.
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!
Personally I hated them they felt dehumanizing, and loved my first open floor company
I also don’t like WFH, I wonder if people who like open plans also like RTO
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Cubicles are terrible. Especially the full height ones. They have all the same noisy neighbor problems as open spaces but you’re stuck in a tiny box all day. You get a tiny modicum of privacy but not enough to make up for feeling like you’re stuck in a gray box all day.
I found Dilbert in 2013, when I was working in a dead end dev job in a small software company. Felt nice to see others seem to have the same issues.
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.
Are you still in freelancing? Did you ever discover any companies or teams that worked well together?
I’m not the person you’re asking the question from but I’m a consultant that has been to well over a hundred organisations big and small.
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.
> Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion / hypnosis.”
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.
This article keeps saying that Adams was more clever than the others. What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not.
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.
Yes, he was an idiot, but that doesn't contradict that he was smart. In his own words, from The Dilbert Principle book:
"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."
Not sure this really obvious analysis really helps. I've seen a lot of people thinking they are really smart for saying that everyone including them are idiots. Adams made a lot of declarations or actions that shows that he really thought of himself as "able to see what the idiot sheeple were not able to see", and this quote is not out of character at all: "you idiots don't even realise that everyone is an idiot including me".
White collar men are all fascists in waiting, after all.
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> What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not.
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'."
I don't really identify with any particular movement, but it's important to note that there are plenty of people who legitimately oppose the core concept of rationalism, the idea that reason should be held above other approaches to knowledge, this being put aside from other criticisms leveled at the group of people that call themselves rationalists. Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.
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In theory, the name is supposed to imply that they're pursuing rational thinking and philosophies, not that their decisions are the rational choice.
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.
Right up there with calling your group "The Good Guys"
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Or naming your cult “The Reasonabilists”
https://parksandrecreation.fandom.com/wiki/The_Reasonabilist...
Well, I agree but think it is even worse than this. Anyone who hasn't got wind of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism is squarely placing themselves in a very ancient thought-space, more Plato than Kant, no Popper, no modernity.
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.
You don't look for smart people by looking for people who don't do stupid things, because you won't find any. You look for smart people by finding people who do smart things because stupid people don't do smart people things.
I'm not saying Adams is not smart because he has done stupid things, I'm saying that Adams has probably thought of himself as very smart while not smart at all in field X because it is pretty clear he has done that in fields Y and Z (which is the first clue).
The second clue is about the fact that the "smart thing" he came up with is quite simplistic.
I suggest you read the article, it states the exact opposite and agrees with you
I think the article explains that Adams "turned bad" because it is the sad consequence of him being smarter than the rest of the people. I'm pretty sure that someone who has time to lose can got through the article and pick up all of the quotes about how Adams was clever and the managers were so dum.
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Reminds me of my stoner friends in high school who would watch a few videos by Carl Sagan and then become convinced that they know everything about physics and come up with convoluted and ultimately silly “theories” for physics.
Makes me wonder if Adams was a frequent drug user.
Scott Adams was more clever than most because, as the article says more than once, he was named "Scott A." and so was the author, to whom an elementary school teacher said he was going to "cure cancer", whatever that means. Maybe the teacher was sincere -- or maybe he was trying to be nice and got misunderstood.
J. W. Goethe was obsessed with "Farbenlehre" [0], which is so weird that it is "not even wrong". I don't think it detracts from his intelligence. It was just his blind corner, so to say.
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.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farbenlehre_(Goethe)
The example I gave what about Adams being convinced to "know better" while it was clearly not true, which is to me a clue that when it comes to his view on society and business, which already looks pretty simplistic to me, the idea that he "knew better" is more probably the result of him thinking that and managing to convince others people who also like to see themselves as smarter than others.
> why should Garfield hate Mondays? He’s a cat! He doesn’t have to work!
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.
He seems to hate Jon, though. He seems to hate everything except food.
I got the impression he actually really likes Jon, he’s just kind of a jerk who can’t express himself.
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I thought the joke for Garfield is that some crazy annoying shit happens to him on Mondays, and as such he uses the same “I hate mondays” that a person might, just for different reasons.
I think that may have only been in the animated TV show?
I also read Dilbert books years before joining the workforce. Though the framing of the strip is the workplace, it averages out to all the people in one's life who are wrong but have authority. As a rebellious little shit, I could identify with how Dilbert's boss (PHB) was wrong in ways that I recognized in adults around me plus my inability to do anything about it.
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.
Pretty much everyone believes they can do the boss' job better than the boss. Until they get promoted and become like every other boss.
When you start your own business, though, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
> I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show.
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.
> He wasn't that motivated by commercial success since at least the 2010s, although he had achieved it.
Alternatively, he achieved enough commercial success and then was satisfied.
> he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White
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).
Regular listeners know he knew exactly what he was doing i.e. the cancellation was priced in.
^^;
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.
> 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 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?
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> Scott Adams based Dilbert on his career at Pacific Bell in the 80s. Can you imagine quitting Pacific Bell in the 80s to, uh, found your own Pacific Bell?
Idk man, imagine quitting HP in the 70s to make your own HP or IBM. Inconceivable
Quitting Fairchild to make your own semiconductor manufacturer (twice), quitting Intel to make your own CPU manufacturer, etc. The point isn’t that people didn’t do it if brave/desperate enough, the point is that it wasn’t a Thing You Can Do in the collective consciousness. Also, relatedly, that the societal infrastructure to support(/profit from) this category of people wasn’t yet in place, so you needed to be wealthy or connected (even more so than now).
Best read I had in months. That,or maybe cognitive dissonance because I spent 1h of my life on it (there is a Dilbert joke just on that, mind you).
Thank you Scott A.
While this was a well written essay I enjoyed reading, likely the only thing I'll remember from it in a year is "If God is so smart, why do you fart?"
Ok but what is this question trying to say? I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect"; it's entirely possible the universe we're in is a toy made for the amusement of an evil god-child, like we have ant farms, and they enjoy having meteorites and black holes and whatnot. It's not especially likely -- but it's not less likely than any of the other mainstream religious myths.
"I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect""
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.
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I'm remembering it not because it makes a good point, trying to reason about God is futile and pointless, but because it's funny both alone and because of its central role in the novel as saving humanity from a global holy war. Like that's just hilarious.
> In case it’s not obvious, I loved Scott Adams.
Based on this article, somehow I really doubt that.
I can relate to the author. Really loved the strip when I was younger and before I actually worked anywhere. The TV show on UPN was pretty decent too, it's a shame it didn't catch on more. Adams seemed to have a smart everyman quality to him and was doling out nuggets of wisdom like candy. His later years really troubled me because it difficult to relate the earlier idea I had of Adams to the later. It's a lesson in mortality and how much a person can change (not that I knew Adams or anything, maybe he was always like that). There are many other examples out there.
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.
I don't think you write a eulogy this long about someone unless you have something more than a simple dislike or even hatred for them.
it is an admittedly long read but i could sense it. i have a few fallen heroes myself and id be able to write diatribes of why i loved them and simultaneously hold their nuts to the fire in modern times.
In the world of rationalist blogs, writing anything too negative about someone is dismissed as a "hit piece" which is license to ignore it. The only way to write negatively about a person is to write a both-sides style evaluation where you sandwich the criticism in between praise for the person. It's a way of signaling that you're a nice person who isn't just being mean, before you get to the meat of the issue.
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.
An author who "actually wanted to write about" how Adams was a terrible person, but feels obligated to include some praise to pacify the Politeness Police, probably would not write these words:
"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 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...
[2] https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem
[3] https://fourminutebooks.com/whats-our-problem-summary/
You can absolutely criticize your hero’s and know they’re flawed humans like everyone else. I thought the author was pretty generous to be honest.
It’s been a consistent part of Scott Alexander’s character for over a decade now. I doubt Adams’ cancellation or death changed it.
Great eulogy and art, What saddens me is the lack of a friends around him, seems like he got isolated in the politics of 2015 and then got radicalized.
I could only hope for a eulogy like that.
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
> But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job - become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to love it.
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.
You are describing a top 2pct experience.
Beautifully stated. A lot of the comics still apply, but certainly not directly to my job. I imagine government workers find it very relatable, however.
I’ve spent most of my career in the cushy Silicon Valley startup style work cultures you’ve described. Obviously I greatly prefer them… but the stodgy business casual+ 9-5 cube farms still exist, and in great numbers. I’ve worked in them out of necessity here and there, and they’re more common than one might believe reading HN. If the desperate recruiters in my metro are anything to judge by, it seems just about everything manufacturing and financial services firm is run by a Pointy Haired Boss or two.
There is still plenty of need for Dilbert strips in the workforce.
Software and computers is not all there is to technology. There are plenty of other STEM fields that didn't enjoy a decades long surge in demand. Dilbert still very much applies there.
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.
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Which race and gender do you need?
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> As another self-hating nerd writer put it, “through all these years I make experiment if my sins or Your mercy greater be.”
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.
I was also curious about this quote, and it sounded to me too like Donne (or Pascal or Robert Boyle, a bit).
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...
Don't know it, but this website attributes it to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: https://theomarkhayyamclubofamerica.wordpress.com/extended-r...
(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.
For those who haven't read it, Scott Alexander's "Unsong" (https://unsongbook.com/) is a very fun piece of historical fiction / religious fantasy. Basic premise is that the world is incredibly shocked when the Apollo 10 mission crashes into the Dome of the Sky and (a) proves that the Biblical cosmology was the true cosmology this whole time and (b) damages reality. It includes the idea that there is a whole cottage industry of people trying to apply technology to deciphering the True Name of God by essentially Mechanical Turking it ("If we divide up all possible syllable combinations into tranches and pay folks minimum wage to sit around reciting every syllable combination possible, we're bound to hit it sometime!").
The book is okay (I think I gave it three stars on Goodreads?) but in my opinion it suffers from Neal Stephenson syndrome: the book kinda just ends without a whole lot of anticlimax or resolution. The pacing is all over the place and the supporting cast are more like character sketches than characters.
I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.
I read the whole thing and enjoyed both the premise and the writing, but yeah, it would have benefited considerably from the attention of a professional editor and a couple of rounds of rewrites.
I imagine them coming together at some Bay Area house party on copious amounts of LSD or MDMA. One, the world’s greatest comic writer, who more than anything else wanted to succeed in business. The other, the world’s greatest businessman, who more than anything else wanted people to think that he’s funny.
Story of our times: Gen-X counterculture jerk grows up railing against The Man. Grows up, gets rich, famous, becomes The Man. His mind, however, is stuck in the past, still thinks he's a rebel, still thinks he's railing against The Man. In reality, he has become a sadistic asshole hurting others for his self-righteous pleasure. But no amount of pain inflicted on others will make him feel good, he dies a miserable crank.
Adams, Musk, Andreesen, Stephen Miller, Chappelle, Maher. They're everywhere.
"Once you wanted revolution
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
So true! And Maher is probably the worst of the lot.
That's a pretty wild take. Maher's views have been basically consistent, the others have not. Musk has also veered hard-right
While a little reductive and caricatured, as a Gen-X counterculture type myself I can confirm that there's quite a bit of accuracy in this comment. And a lot more examples in more boring parts of the world than these famous people you are mentioning.
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.
Yeah, probably unfair to name GenX exclusively - more of a late boomer/early gen-x phenomenon. Perhaps it's just the new mid-life crisis, "corvette in your 40s" is beyond silly these days, but rich, powerful 50-60 year olds thinking they're badass rebels is super common.
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I thought there were people whose lives followed that trajectory in many generations, but it's just the one. What a relief! /s
At the end of the day Dilbert was entertainment...
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
<And the most successful parasites are always those which can alter their host environment to be more amenable to themselves, and if you’re a parasite taking the form of a bad idea, that means hijacking your host’s rationality.>
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.
I was a long time Scott Adams fan with the Dilbert Principle being one of my favorite books.
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.
Interestingly, Adams also pointed out the persuasion flaws in Hillary's campaign. Evidently, the Hillary team noticed this and changed their messaging, which Adams then commented on.
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I think many who dislike Trump (myself included) don't really want to think of him as having skills of any sort.
But I think it's more so that he does absolutely have certain skills such as persuasion or, some argue, charisma. He just doesn't have any of that pesky morality or sense of responsibility to the greater good, the entire citizenship, etc. that often gets in the way of such ambitions.
So we're left with a master manipulator who will hurt a great number of people, maybe benefit a few if necessary, but ultimately a subset of people think he's genius and a net positive. And I can't help but think that the only ones who think he's a "net positive" are either personally benefiting, or have been persuaded to believe it, despite reality painting a different picture.
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I dunno if the "just paraphrasing [...] Fox" works as an explanation for success. It sounds like you believe he just keeps unaccountably stumbling into piles of cash and power?
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I stopped paying any attention to him a while ago. He didn't seem to be something that was worth the time.
Mostly seems like yet another case of snorting one's own tailpipe to the very end. It's a shame, the comics were great. But so many who experience success like that begin to consider themselves chosen ones and it only goes downhill from there unless you're a clown genius (tm).
> His next venture (c. 1999) was the Dilberito, an attempt to revolutionize food via a Dilbert-themed burrito with the full Recommended Daily Allowance of twenty-three vitamins. I swear I am not making this up. A contemporaneous NYT review said it “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste”
The funniest thing I’ve read all week. Was anyone here lucky enough to eat one?
Prediction: Dilbert will be bought by Paramount, all the old books will stop being published, and not-funny Woke Dilbert will get a Barbie movie treatment, a new not funny comic strip syndicated in daily newspapers only boomers read, a set of long books about social justice that have no comics in them, bad jokes, boring rehashed social justice narratives and just a picture of Dilbert on the cover to sell it. It will be called something like : "Dilbert’s Official Apology, Expanded Edition"
Paramount Skydance, the one owned by the right-wing Ellison family, is going to put out woke Dilbert?
If there's any truth to Dilbert, this is exactly what will happen.
I was hoping this was a series of Dilbert comics to be released after Scott Adams death about Dilbert in the afterlife and was a bit disappointed.
I think this article really nails it. Adams' ego and self-satisfaction contributed to his susceptibility to the forces of the internet. It could happen to anyone.
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.
Think he was always unusually susceptible to the feedback loop of social media.
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...
I thought this piece was nice but:
(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.
I'm probably missing something obvious but I can't parse what you mean by the squishy half of TPOT, or even TPOT on its own.
TPOT is "this part of Twitter", a loose community of (roughly) post-rat affiliated people; the "squishy half" is presumably referring to the fact that a substantial number of such people end up quite big into woo of various sorts.
The weird thing about Adams was that he believed Trump was Dogbert, not the pointy-haired boss.
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.
Trump's trademark skill is conning and taking advantage of people, just like Dogbert.
In another way Trump is actually rather like Adams himself: his one great talent is as an entertainer and self-publicist, but he feels that he deserves success in business and leadership, so that he can be hailed as a great builder and decision-maker. Trump does have the personal charisma and feel for manipulation which Adams longed for, though. (Though it does help Trump that he started with the charisma boosts of inherited megawealth and the associated upbringing.)
He even fooled Scott. Impressive!
Once the article made the claim that the was the greatest comic author of all time, it became clear that the article is overanalyzing the man. one aspect proving the overanalysis is the wild length of the article beyond that point.
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.
> one aspect proving the overanalysis is the wild length of the article beyond that point
I agree. I found the style tedious and the length exhausting. I'd occasionally read pieces from the author, and now I expected better. :/
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TRVKE.
Scott Adams hates this one weird trick.
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>Can we talk about how he in the end buried himself in vile racist politics?
Can you point to anything other than the single post that he made saying “white should get/stay away from black people”?
I’ve seen how he lost his way, or fell, or whatever. But all I’ve seen anyone post is one tweet one time. And every single time it leaves out the context that he was replying to a poll of black people saying the same about white people.
There was also one comic strip that was actually a correct and decently good take on the failure/intersection of postmodernism and DEI. I don’t count that as it wasn’t a bad faith take it was on point.
If there is more to I’d like to know.
What's wrong with going to the gym?
Also, I don't think you know what the word fascist means.
There is a no-joke they’re serious effort to link gym and fitness with conservative values.
People on the left point to statistics and a study or two showing decent correlation. People on the right readily agree regardless of their fitness saying it’s because of discipline and personal responsibility.
I think it’s funny to see people on the left lean into it.
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What do you expect from 3-panel funnies exactly? Biting deep social commentary? All of these were formulaic, they were pumped out every week.
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"Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee."
John Donne
The amount of comments about white superiority/inferiority with no awareness of how absurd it is... Is this site now a nazi bar? Damn.
> The amount of comments about white superiority/inferiority with no awareness of how absurd it is...
I haven't seen any. Could you give me an example?
> Is this site now a nazi bar? Damn.
Please don't turn Hacker News into a site for endlessly regurgitating lame social media "gotchas" or tropes. There are already many, many websites for that.
> I haven't seen any. Could you give me an example?
Sure, here's a few: https://wondermark.com/c/1062/
I'm afraid it might be, yeah. I stopped recommending this site to people years ago.
(Ohio meme)
That isn't how I understood Dilbert. Dilbert is a normal guy and PHB is actually mentally retarded.
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.
Scott Adams had a take on that. The "Dilbert Principle" (his version of the Peter Principle) is that useless engineers that are promoted away from doing real work to keep them from messing it up.
I have a much darker hypothesis about it - when people are left to compete, they often resort to badmouthing those who they think could outcompete them.
Thus, the reputation of the most competent gets destroyed, while the village idiot remains as the only one left unscathed.
This article is great but it is insanely long and suffers from having no scroll bar on mobile. I read for over an hour, falling asleep at least three times, and wondering the entire time how far I was from finishing. Eventually I flicked the page upward to find out and could not believe how far I scrolled. I gave up at that point.
Don’t read long form content on mobile then? IDK what else to say.
Regardless of how you feel about him, a good litmus test to go by is how Jews perceived him. This is the second article by a Jew throwing shade at the man.
We've had almost 100 years of the Talmudic dialectic, culturally speaking. Tiresome is not even the word for it anymore, it's time to give it a rest. We get it.