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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

“Don't brag to me about riding your bicycle to work; a lot of energy went into building that bicycle. Stop being a hypocrite like me.”

That doesn’t make any sense, does it? Making something will always require energy, what matters is whether something needs more or less energy than the alternative. (Making a bike needs less energy than making a car, riding a bike needs less energy than driving a car.)

Scott Adams’ writings always seem very shallow to me. He says something that sounds sorta good if you don’t pay too much attention.

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"what matters is whether something needs more or less energy than the alternative"

Does it? Does Mother Earth care whether your pollution came from a car or bicycle? You're just another polluter, you big bad polluter you.

More seriously, I think the reference here is to the idea that you can somehow objectively measure your negative impact and that anything above zero is bad. Since I pretty comprehensively disagree with that statement (impact to something as dynamic as the ecosystem can not be measure concretely, most people's metric of "impact" are incoherent when you really examine them, zero impact isn't a useful metric in light of these things, and I have at least as much "right" to exist and impact an environment as a beaver), I tend to agree with you. My point here is that it depends on your point of view and there are common points of view that disagree with you, and the piece was very clearly invoking this "radical" green point of view very often.

The previous sentence was:

>Better yet, live in the forest and eat whatever the squirrels don't want.

I think he was building on his joke.

Yeah, you are right. I retract my comment. Shame on me and my nine upvoters :)

– edit: no irony

I still upvoted you for the last part of the post. I enjoy reading Adams's work, but he does do a fair amount of trolling.

I wouldn't really call it trolling. There's no intention of malice, he doesn't feign seriousness when making a controversial point, he is very self-deprecating, and everything is said interspersed with jokes (that of course are sometimes hit-or-miss).

In many ways, I think he uses one of the best techniques for coming up with new ideas and provoking discussions: asking questions (even ones that seem stupid at first -- and sometimes later as well), suggesting thought experiments, using humor, and above all, never taking yourself seriously.

I say he trolls sometimes because, if I recall correctly, he's said that he (at least once) has made a post he doesn't agree with, so he could see how people responded. I'll see if I can find the post where discussed this.

I guess that's either trolling or performing a psychological study.

Edit: the closest I could come is "...I enjoy yanking the chain of people who think they believe things for actual reasons as opposed to taking a side." Which isn't very close. It's in an interview with him at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/scott-adams... (Look for the second-to-last question)

Second edit: Found it! "As regular readers know, I sometimes like to make arguments for positions I don’t hold, just to test my viewpoint." (http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/12/next...) That's...actually not as damning as I remembered, given that his motivation is "let's see how logical I really am".

I think Scott's recommendation would be to buy a used bike. The analogy is to not build a new house, but to move into an old one. (This of course has its limits.)

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