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Comment by ScottAdams | Hacker News Reader

Which is a good point.

Back when the internet was starting to bloom I got a nice email from Scott Adams of Dilbert.

Seems he had gotten a number of fan mails meant for me and was trying to find who to send it to. I also had a number of fan mails meant for him! We exchanged the mails and had a nice chat about it!

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In the completely random department, your picture was (I think) on the cover of some Apple magazine back in the 80s (maybe SoftTalk?) and my geometry class got a great deal of enjoyment out of the fact that you and our geometry teacher could have been twins.

I could indeed been on the cover. I hope he was a good teacher. I loved geometry and it was my first exposure to solving things logical. I remember it came naturally and I aced the course. QED

> Which is a good point.

Especially as he seems to have kind of gone off the proverbial deep end with his political fanaticism in recent years...

Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents, and especially not generic flamewar tangents. They have a way of taking over and drowning out actually-interesting discussion with repetitive, nasty stuff. Therefore the site guidelines ask everyone to try to avoid them here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah, that's fair... Thanks for the feedback (and for all you do for the HN community)

If you read his books, it’s obvious he’s doing that on purpose in order to get more attention (which eventually is converted to fatter bottom line for him).

Essentially, the dude is a professional troll.

Eh... He's always had... peculiar ideas. It's just that previously his detachment from reality was mostly in relatively harmless directions ("The Secret" type stuff, lack of belief in gravity, etc). I would buy that his current delusions might be genuine.

Totally agree, but it really felt like he had drunk his own kool-aid at times.

First rule of drugs and propaganda: Don't get high on your own supply.

If this is true (I honestly don't know) then he's a master of the craft.

And also unbelievably cynical, but looking at his work it's obvious that this is the case.

Are you implying that makes it better? Because I couldn't disagree more. It's one thing if someone just holds different political opinions, it's another to see problems in the world, acknowledge their cause, and fan the flames anyway. Things like posting that Republicans are likely to be hunted [1] if Biden wins are the sort of thing that led to a literal coup attempt.

[1] https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/127830983545328435...

If you examine the news he covers he’s pretty balanced with slightly more left than right (both hover around 40%).

Ground news has a tool for breaking down Twitter news users interact with called Blindspotter. Kinda neat seeing how much independent media and bias is consumed. Not affiliated just a happy user.

I think he'll probably recover. Satirists are among the best equipped of us to get out of these kinds of holes.

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