Scott Adams Has Some Ideas for a Calmer Internet | Hacker News Reader

Scott Adams Has Some Ideas for a Calmer Internet

wired.com

38 pointswolframio10 comments

"He lays out two such rules in his new book, Loserthink. His first proposal, which he calls the “48-hour rule,” states that everyone should be given a grace period of a couple of days to retract any controversial statement they’ve made, no questions asked. [...] His other idea is the “20-year rule,” which states that everyone should be automatically forgiven for any mistakes they made more than two decades ago—with the exception of certain serious crimes."

> “We live in a better world if we accept people’s clarifications and we accept their apologies, no matter whether we think—internally—it’s insincere,” he says.

That's absolutely laughable. Why would people accept apologies they think are insincere? And how would that possibly lead to "a better world," except for people who spout nonsense then pretend they're sorry later?

It's really easy to "mindread" that somebody is doing something for malicious reasons.

But that's frequently enough incorrect. Setting up a "virtual truce" where we all forgive quick apologies leaves us a little happier IMHO. Yeah we might be a tiny bit naive for this, and some bank robbers might slip through the cracks, but a less anap-judgy world is a nicer place to be overall (at least from my experience).

> Why would people accept apologies they think are insincere?

Societal engine lubricant. There is too little time for every squabble to matter.

I wish someone could teach me how to eject, with grace, from a conversation that's degrading into pettiness.

I don't care about winning or losing. But I don't know how to say, "whatever, moving on" in a way that itself doesn't get interpreted as further pettiness.

> I don't care about winning or losing. But I don't know how to say, "whatever, moving on" in a way that itself doesn't get interpreted as further pettiness.

I struggled with this for years. In the end I just settled on saying "Respectfully, I think we will need to just agree to disagree. No hard feelings." A few times I've had to drop the "This conversation is going nowhere good. Let's talk about something else."

Being direct is under-rated. I find people aren't offended when you do it, as long as you are maintaining some basic amount of social decorum / grace.

Scott Adams is a living personification of the sunk-cost fallacy at work.

According to Adams, we should forgive him for creating Dilbert more than 20 years ago. It's not him anymore.

People change. And Adams is now certifiably insane.

Glad someone said this. So weird that he has gone so deep off the deep end.

He’s always had some very strange ideas. He wrote a book that had the central premise that we are all made of the dust of a dead god.

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