Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden
thewrap.com
thewrap.com
He was the first to publish an open way to communicate with him in order to out the corporate crazies, and readers did in droves, explaining the inanity of their workplace and getting secret retribution for stuff they clearly couldn't complain about publicly.
A good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom.
Doing this seems to require identifying with your readers and their concerns. That could be disturbing to the author if the tide turns, or to the readers if they find out their role model was gaming them or otherwise unreal, but I imagine it is pretty heady stuff.
I hope he (and anyone facing cancer) has people with whom he can share honestly, and has access to the best health care available.
Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the author stating that when you're an author, people simply tell you stories and you don't need to come up with them anymore!
https://dynamicsgptipsandtraps.wordpress.com/wp-content/uplo...
"The clue meter is reading zero."
Everyone at Motorola recognized it immediately.
The IDE process at Motorola asked every employee to answer “yes” or “no” to six questions;
1. Do you have a substantive, meaningful, job that contributes to the success of Motorola?
2. Do you know the job behaviours and have the knowledge base to be successful?
3. Has training been identified and made available to continuously upgrade your skills?
4. Do you have a career plan, is it exciting, achievable and being acted on?
5. Have you received candid, positive or negative feedback within the last 30 days, which has helped in improving your performance or achieving your career plan?
6. Is adequate sensitivity shown by the company towards your personal circumstances, gender and culture?
This was done online every quarter and followed by a one-to-one with your boss to discuss how you could improve things together. Every manager in your reporting line could see your results and your own boss would expect to see your action plan to improve your team’s scores over time.
What do you think of this? A draconian measure or a positive statement of a minimum standard of expectation for all employees?
At the time of IDE being implemented, I was struck by the choice of language;
• INDIVIDUAL
• DIGNITY
• ENTITLEMENT
It’s a declaration of what we are choosing to become as an organisation; what we want the experience of being a Motorolan (and yes, that is a thing) to be. It’s universal and unbounded by grade, function or language and culture. It’s a clear message to every manager of the minimum expectation of them in relation to the people they lead. It humbles the role of “manager” to be in service of their employees’ entitlement to dignity at work.
Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.
The implementation of IDE was often painful. Employees worried about the consequences of saying “no”. Managers worried what consequences would arise from negative scores. Everyone was anxious about the one to one conversations.
A classic bit of corporate bullshittery: Insist on giving employees questionnaires that supposedly enhance their "dignity" and help them feel more comfortable about working for you, but design it all in such a tone deaf way that it only, and very fucking obviously, will create more stress about how they should respond to please your bottom line.
Or was it positive but just tone-deaf that they introduced random drug testing at the same time?
Isn’t that all comedy? It’s halting because it’s true. And sure, we may find striking truth through meditation. But it’s more likely to hit you in the real world.
I didn't understand it much as a kid, but later read an old copy of his book on how offices and office culture works (basically each chapter is Scott describing office did functionality with a liberal sprinkling of related Dilbert comics) and literally almost everything was 1:1 with the company I was at, only it was a good bit toned down of course. The beauty was that it was somehow generally applicable anywhere a company gets above a certain amount of employees. There was a lot of good information there such as how the company tries to get you to poop on yourself in your performance review in order to justify not giving you a raise or firing you (see - you yourself said that you needed improvement in working with others). There are many other insights as well that I found useful in my career. A lot of it is common sense, but it helped me come to terms with the irrationality of the corporate world. Every few years I reread it and find it more applicable than before.
He later wrote a book on why he thought Trump beat Hillary and it also had a ton of insights I didn't think about as I'm not a marketer. Anyone on Hilary's campaign team should read it. Of course it doesn't cover how Hilary was painted as some kind of evil queen from a fairy tale since the 90s. Scott kinda acts a bit nuts in this book though as he goes off on frequent tangents about being a trained hypnotist and how he recognized that Trump was doing the same thing. One of the many examples was that both of them went on SNL, but Trump attempted to act presidential, while Hilary was attempting to act more like the common person and it just didn't work and came off unprofessional. He also flew in a plane that looked like Air Force One and gave press conferences with a little fake Oval office desk.
Adams also came up with the term "confuseopoly" to describe companies that make it so hard to compare products and companies that you have to purchase on vibes. Economics textbooks use it now along with his blog example of trying to buy a truck. I see this dark pattern everywhere now.
I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish. I just attributed it to him running out of ideas for the comic and finding that grifting made him more money. I guess you really can see some of the shift in reading the more recent books, which is sad.
People were commenting on it long before 2016ish.
It’s been a long time since the name Scott Adams was associated with wit, subtlety, reason or honesty. But the Dilbert creator, men’s rights blowhard and world’s greatest imaginary fan of his own “certified genius” proved recently that as gross as you may already think Scott Adams is, he’s prepared to get even grosser.
— Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Scott Adams’ defense of rape mentality”, Salon, June 20, 2011
EDIT: forgot to link the article, https://www.salon.com/2011/06/20/scott_adams_dilbert_rape_re...
Scott just quoted a study saying black people didn't want to be around white people. Whether or not you agree with the above, it doesn't change the reality. Obscuring the history of the Arab slave trade, whites being enslaved, Africans selling Africans into slavery, and dozens of other historical deceptions, have backfired and permanently divided people.
I'm not sure how to respond to a post like this. It feels superficially earnest, and yet absolutely dedicated, at its core, to talking about black people without having ever talked with us.
sigh
Point-by-point:
Whiteness is a manufactured identity. It's the Kwanzaa of ethnicities. It was constructed as part of a centuries-long colonial campaign that, yes, sought to subjugate non-European peoples and places. It only exists in opposition to blackness, and delineates that which exists for and in opposition to this colonial campaign.
If you live in a segregated area, it is likely that white residents have pressed historical socioeconomic advantages and influence to secure their own livelihoods in a way that tends to prevent the accumulation and leveraging of resources on the part of black residents.
Black people are generally not promoting (incredibly flawed) violent crime statistics.
It is not a conspiracy that Black Americans focus on the way that American institutions have not made their families and communities whole from various injustices - some within living memory, often explicitly predicated on race - which continue to have direct or easily-traced ramifications for their contemporary lives.
I cannot remember or find the quote - I think it was by James Baldwin o MLK - tha essentially said that racial strife has never been a thing for black people to "overcome", but a thing for white people to stop instigating or propagating. Truly, the division between white and black people ends when white Americans decide that's what they want. Whether or not black people want it (and I, frankly, don't trust the Dilbert guy as an authority on the matter, or even as someone who can dispassionately assess sources), black people don't have the institutional power to force it.
I've come to believe that infohazards are real.
Consider alcoholism: some people never drink anyway, plenty of people can have one drink or a few drinks and then stop. But some people can't stop and destroy their lives. Consider gambling: similar distribution applies. Many people never gamble, many people have a little scratchcard or sport bet now and then, and some people get out of control and sink all the money they have into it.
Gambling is an idea that's a trap. Some people get like this with ideas on the internet. In fact there's an XKCD about it: "can't sleep, someone's wrong on the internet".
Usually there's a single atrocity or injustice that triggers it. Maybe it's real, maybe it's been subject to distorted reporting. But it becomes a monomania. You can't counter them with statistics or variations on "most people aren't like that".
The comic I remember was overwhelmingly about the banalities of working as a corporate engineering type. One of his peers was black, another was a woman, and they were not the butt of the joke. Pointy hair boss was.
AFAIK, the only non-White recurring Dilbert character was Asok the Intern, who was Indian.
A black character (who Adams himself described as the first black character in Dilbert) did appear in 2022, but, well...
https://www.reddit.com/r/onejoke/comments/ugunog/after_33_ye...
Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime. Your 2022 example only highlights the contrast.
The closest example I could think of from the 90s was a riff on whether you're supposed to open the door for women or not in these modern times, and it felt much more "confused everyman" rather than "aggrieved partisan".
The origin story being resentment over his perception his career was not advancing because of women and minorities isn't an inference from the fact that he is white, it's based on his own description of the reasons for his dissatisfaction with his career before becoming a full-time comic artist (and not descriptions which first emerged in the 2010s or later, though I think the his description of his final exit from Pacific Bell as "being fired for being white" was a later evolution, but his story of his perception that he was passed over for higher management at Crocker National Bank where he was already in management and, and passed over for any management opportunity at Pacific Bell, because of a preference for women and minorities came out much earlier.)
>Scott Adams has claimed that during his early corporate career, he was explicitly told by his managers that he would not be promoted because companies were prioritizing minorities. According to Adams, while working at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco, his boss told him that "Whites could not be promoted." He then moved to Pacific Bell, where he says his boss told him directly, "you can’t be promoted because you’re White and you’re male"
I'm not sure him having been discriminated against makes all his office humor suspect.
That's nice, and it might even be relevant in a discussion where someone said that his claim to have been discriminated against made all his office humor suspect, rather than that it was a key turning point in his own narrative of how he came to make it.
https://archive.jsonline.com/greensheet/there-oughta-be-a-la...
Dilbert comes down to the caves where trolls (accountants) reside and gets a tour. The guide points to a troll sitting behind a desk, and mumbling in a stupor: "nine, nine, nine...".
Guide: And this is our random numbers generator.
Dilbert: Are you sure those are random?
Guide: That's the problem with randomness - you can never be sure.
Edit: Found it here: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-rand....
And thank you, Scott - many laughs thanks to you.
Very nice.
And also, what a cool read that was, thanks for sharing the article.
0 and 1 are special and so are all prime numbers. 6 is out because it's the maximum die throw. And one figure is more ordinary than two figures, or negatives, or decimals. That leaves 4 and 9.
I dunno actually. Maybe because 4*2=8? The two picks have the property of not being related really.
Douglas Adams said the same about 42. It’s the answer because it’s completely banal.
[Mordac] "Security is more important than usability. In a perfect world, no one would able able to use anything."
[Asok's computer screen]: "To complete login procedure, stare directly at the sun."
https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-08-24
It has hit home a time or two when the "managers" hire in a "consultant".
35" monitor 20 megs of ram 1.2 gigabytes of hard disk space
https://web.archive.org/web/20150205042406/https://dilbert.c...
Any bets which link stays valid longer?
I also like this related comic: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-07-12 https://web.archive.org/web/20150309041557/http://dilbert.co...
Dilbert is trapped in the bowels of Accounting.
Dogbert: I understand you have Dilbert. Free him, or else...
Troll: Or else what?
Dogbert: Or else I will put this cap on my head backwards! Your little hardwired accounting brain will explode just looking at it!
Dilbert: What was that popping sound?
Dogbert: A paradigm shifting without a clutch.
Not because somebody did that to me, but I had to migrate two racks of systems in one night under literal and proverbial heat due to former one.
You can think pointy haired as the embodiment of Murphy of Murphy's laws.
------------
pointy haired boss making making a presentation: "research shows that customers want high-quality products at low-prices.
but we make low-quality products.
so we are going to sell them at high-prices and call it a strategy"
-------------
If anyone has a link to the original comic, please share it, I would like to see it again. It captures so many themes succinctly, and was very very astute for the late nineties when corps were doing crazy things and calling it a "strategy".
Also the one where Wally insists his towel gets cleaner every time he uses it: https://br.omega.com/dilbert/311.html
There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins and Dilbert says he won't know until he's done eating.
> There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins
This one: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1994-10-29>
<Dilbert looks back with a blank stare>
---
Godspeed Scott. Thank you for all the laughs.
I've seen the pattern repeat with other data collection as well -- "anonymous" data collection or "anonymized" data almost never is.
It's been a fun exercise in software architecture. Because I actually care about this.
But we keep pushing this annual survey another year since we never seem to be ready to actually implement it (due to other priorities)
The thing is, as soon as you allow free-text entry, the exercise becomes moot assuming you got a solid training corpus of emails to train an AI on - basically the same approach that Wikipedia activists used to do two decades ago to determine "sockpuppet" accounts.
Over the course of 4 years I think it was only used 3 times. Most people assumed it was some kind of trap. It wasn’t, I genuinely wanted honest feedback, and thought some people were too shy to speak up in a group setting, so wanted to give options.
In most of the places I've worked, I would have assumed the same.
The thing is that there is no real technological solution that would instill trust in someone that doesn't already have trust. In the end, all such privacy solutions necessarily must boil down to "trust us" because it's not practical or reasonable to perform the sort of deep analysis that would be required to confirm privacy claims.
You may have provided the source, for instance, but that doesn't give reassurance that the binary that is executing was compiled from that source.
Management can 'drill down' to get information on how specific teams responded.
One of the things they mentioned doing is using a statistical (differential privacy?) model to limit the depth, to prevent any specific persons responses being revealed unless it was shared with a substantial number of other responses.
Surprisingly difficult when you consider e.g. a team lead reading a statement like "of the 10 people in your team, one is highly dissatisfied with management" - they have personal knowledge of the situation and are going to know which person it is.
They later decided to adopt it for an annual IT satisfaction survey that they sent out to users. In an ideal world we wouldn't participate because the respondents were grading my team's performance but we got invites because we were part of the Exchange distro the message was sent to. I quickly discovered that the dev team had left a bunch of default routes enabled so we were able to view a list of all responses and see who submitted which. We knew our customers well enough that we could reliably attribute most of the negative responses via the free-text comments field anyhow but the fact that anybody could explicitly see everybody else's response wasn't great.
I suppose the NTLM-authenticated username in the server logs would convey the same info but at least that'd require CIFS/RDP access to the web server...
So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it.
They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.
In reality, they cherry picked the questions that they wanted to talk about and ignored the hard ones. We could tell because all asked questions were publicly visible in the app. But not all answered “ah we’re out of time”
So I once posted a question about why were the interns unpaid while writing code we shipped in production. I posted this question just after the previous town hall so that it would stay visible in the app for the longest time until the next town hall and would also be top of the list of pending questions.
For a couple weeks they said they wanted to answer it but needed to ask clarification questions to make sure they understood correctly, so could please the asker reveal themselves as it’s only fair. I never said it was me and nobody said it was them either. They couldn’t just delete the question like they usually did with unanswered questions before as this had stirred quite a little storm between employees. And it would clash with the “we’re open and fair” koolaid they were serving us.
Eventually, they deleted the question without annswering it “since the asker doesn’t have the courage to reveal themselves” and I was laid off which was “totally unrelated to the question you asked”.
Before leaving I dumped the database for that app out of curiosity. You bet that every single question also had an entry of who asked which question. They knew all along.
After some shuffling at work, I ended up spending some time under an awful manager. She approached me after an anonymous round of feedback and said "I noticed you wrote _____." I had, in fact, not written that.
On some level, having her guess wrong seemed even worse, but it also felt nice to be able to honestly say "I did not." Hopefully taught her to respect anonymity next time.
That in and of itself puts him above what I've come to expect from this low-bar dip in American culture. Good for him.
> Our large-scale investigation of the relation between political orientation and prosociality suggests that supporters of left-wing ideologies may indeed be more prosocial than supporters of right-wing ideologies... However, the relation between political orientation and prosociality is fragile, and discovering it may depend on the methods used to operationalize prosociality in particular... Nonetheless, we are confident that our investigation has brought us one step closer to solving the puzzle about whether our political orientation is intertwined with how prosocial we behave toward unknown others—which we cautiously answer in the affirmative.[1]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10281241/
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19485506241298341
Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
But empathy is a feeling that an individual feels, group or no group. In fact, a group (collective noun) can't feel - only people can. Social groups can't have feelings, nor can they know/think etc - these events occur internally/within living humans, who themselves may then identify as part of a group. But empathy cannot be a group activity.
And even if we accept the linguistic shortcut, and agreee that the individuals in some group purport to feel the same thing, how can one know whether they feel it to the same extent? And that they are all of one mind to do whatever action?
Politics and feelings are really worlds apart, and intermediated by one's perception of the world. If you believe it is the group that needs to feel and do, you will look for answers in entirely different places to someone who thinks that only individuals can feel and do.
Empathy is one of the main prosocial traits that the second linked study analysed.
> Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
No it doesn’t, it means your individual behaviour benefits others. Empathy is one of the most obvious things to analyse when investigating prosociality because empathy motivates you to behave in ways that benefit others.
In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing, which the economic games that the study uses may have a bias against. That would contradict the simplistic conclusion that the prosocial behavior is unconditional.
That supports the original comment, which asserted that right-wingers often only experience empathy for the ingroup while left-wingers also experience it for the outgroup:
> We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
Personal experience can definitively help to form identity, but it can also be completely abstract and arbitrary. In many situations there are just an abstract proxy of an implied shared experience that never happened.
Left and right-wing voters also divide the in-group and out-group categories differently, which adds an other dimension to studies looking at empathy towards in-group vs out-group based on political alignment, and they will definitively differ when looking across borders and culture. The in-group of a left voter in the US may be the in-group of a right voter in Germany.
But right back at you: you really don't think Communists or Fascists' political leaning doesn't alter their empathy?
>the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation
It isn't a question of caring about people. It is a question of being able to put yourself in the shoes of a stranger with which you might not have anything in common. If you can do that, you will likely have general compassion for immigrants, the poor, the sick, minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, and really anyone who is being persecuted, oppressed, or unjustly burdened by something outside their control. That is fundamentally a more left leaning mindset.
If you need more direct experience (and that includes hearing a firsthand account from someone you are counseling) to engender that compassion, you are more likely to only extend this compassion to people who you share a lot with like your family, friends, and community (not just geographically), while people outside those groups wouldn't automatically be granted that compassion. This is fundamentally a more right leaning mindset.
The respective "radii of emapthy" are just different sizes.
[1] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/empathy
"In my experience, the right wing is always asking 'What about me?' whereas the left wing asks 'What about them?' And that, in a nutshell, is why I will always lean to the left."
-Source unknown
EDIT: alternately, you could argue that the left simply has a more expansive definition of "in-group" than the right does, with fewer litmus tests as to who is granted membership. i.e. "I don't care about their skin color / sexual orientation / gender identity / disability status, they're still human beings and therefore we're on the same team." But it might be a distinction without a difference.
Then compare it to mirror issues, when something bad happens to someone on the right. It may be the rage-bait algorithms steering things, but I seem to remember snark from the left after Trumps assassination attempt, the healthcare CEO shooting, Teslas stock decline, etc.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1kqlri6/they_...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-jr-mocks-jill-230953...
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/19/nx-s1-5403887/trump-biden-can...
Literally from the president[1], his son[2], and his VP[3]. Do these conspiracy theories about Biden hiding his diagnosis sound sympathetic to you?
>Teslas stock decline
So you want us to be empathetic to the guy who has directly said that "The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy"?[4]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DrhLWbWiPU&t=147s
[2] - https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-jr-escalates-disgust...
[3] - https://www.13abc.com/2025/05/20/vance-questions-whether-bid...
When I see these stories, it's clear that nothing about that person has fundamentally changed. They didn't care that this same thing was happening to others; in many cases they cheered it on. Only when that same injustice is personally turned against them do they actually care, and they will go back to no longer caring the moment their own pain ends.
On the other hand...plenty of alcoholics know they're ruining their own and others lives but persist in their behavior.
> “I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it – well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said.
The use of the word "admitted" implies that Biden is either lying about how far it has progressed, or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
Which is probably true. And it's fine, he has no obligation to disclose this until he wants to. In contrast his dementia though ....... that's something he should have disclosed earlier.
Edit: "Several doctors told Reuters that cancers like this are typically diagnosed before they reach such an advanced stage." from https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bidens-cancer-diagnosis-pro...
The implied timelines don’t match.
The recommendation is not based around the public impact of the patient's death, but around the expected utility of the test in improving the length and/or quality of the patient's life, which is fairly low in the best of times for PSA screening.
Second, many recommendations are based on resource limitations that simply don't exist for a POTUS.
Last, and similarly, standard of care is based on standard doctors, treatment, and hospitals. They go out the window when these aren't true.
AFAIK, the PSA one isn't based on resource limitations, though.
It's based on the specificity being low enough and the risks, especially with advancing age, of the follow up tests being high enough that at a certain point the test is perceived as having zero-to-negative value in terms of QALY for the patient.
There's a segment of the population that thinks he knew while he was running for president but didn't disclose or "admit" the issue to the public. Given that this is an aggressively metastatic cancer, and Biden's campaign ended nearly 10 months ago, I think that's implausible to the point of being ludicrous.
Adams doesn't need to imply it when medical SOP implies it.
I understand why Biden would not want to share that info and think that he made the right call for the situation he was in at the time (even before you consider domestic politics it's generally unwise for heads of state to talk about medical problems unless they're imminently stepping down because of them) but every man in this country over 40 knows that this cancer is screened for and someone getting "head of state" level care doesn't just get surprised by this kind of cancer at this stage unless many people were negligent.
Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years. Regardless of what you think of him, as someone who has worked in Corporate America for over a decade, there really isn't anything quite like Dilbert to describe the sort of white collar insanity I've had to learn to take in stride. My first workplace as a junior developer was straight out of Dilbert and Office Space. I have a gigantic collection of digitized Dilbert strips that best describe office situations I've run into in real life – many of them including the pointy haired boss.
He's expressed a lot of what I would consider... stupid opinions these days, but I would be sad to learn he's no longer with us.
Probably also because, like e.g. "Yes (Prime) Minister", part of the depicted did come from anecdotes, instead of fantasy.
He spoke at MIT (early 90s?) and I remember him talking about making fun of PacBell colleagues in his comic: They would recognize themselves, ask him to autograph the comic for them, and then go away happy (thus making fun of them a second time.)
Catbert on work life balance: "Give us some balance, you selfish hag" https://steemitimages.com/p/7258xSVeJbKnFEnBwjKLhL15SoynbgJK...
The other, I can never seem to find. They're all in a meeting, and the Pointy Haired Boss says, "This next task is critical yet thankless and urgent, and will go to whoever next makes eye contact with me". Everyone stares at the desk, and then Alice pulls out a hand mirror and angles it between the PHB and Wally.
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-05-05>
> The other, I can never seem to find.
Here you are: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-08-30>
https://web.archive.org/web/20230301101359/https://dilbert.c...
"Remind me, when are we planning to finish switching over to the new system, again?"
"six months"
"I estimate that it will take 8 months to deliver your feature"
Just because the tech scene became this lefty hell circle, we should not consider controversial a thought that is so widespread in today's culture that it puts a president in the oval office twice.
If you squint so hard your eyes are closed, maybe
Nah there’s plenty of Trumpers in tech. Go on Blind, you’ll see.
At this point, he basically started leaning into controversy for pageviews. He'd start linking to the controversial section of each post right at the top of the post. After a few months or so I had to unsubscribe, after years of reading his blog and Dilbert cartoons/books.
He's become such a gremlin that I won't be 100% sure he's serious about this until he actually dies.
Well, that was already the first sign of senility. Trump, at that point, was already a know quantity for decades: a crook and a con man.
Was sad to me to see someone so good at lampooning absurdity get sucked into such a toxic mindset, but I'll also be sad to hear he's gone and I'm sad to hear he's up against it.
He has had some questionable views all throughout his life. In his book "The Dilbert Future", which was from 1997, the last 2 chapters are some wacky stuff about manifesting - i.e if you write something down 100 times a day every day it will come true and other stuff like that.
And while that may seem a far cry from the alt-right stuff he eschews, its really not - inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.
Of course, you are not going to write down that you will win the lottery and then win.
But most people are their own worst enemy and self limiting to some extent. Focusing on what you want in life, and affirming it to yourself over and over, is effectively a way to brain wash yourself to change your own self limiting behavior and it’s not surprising that this is often successful.
But that's mild compared to what he says. He basically says he can influence the stock market with affirmations.
You should read the chapters. https://www.scribd.com/doc/156175634/the-dilbert-future-pdf. Starts on 218.
He does not say that.
> Starts on 218.
Actually it’s page 246.
A premonition is a fancy name for an unconscious prediction.
Now does are the predictions "good", that is a completely different story. Probably depends on the information going in.
The problem with woo is you can always add more woo (bonus points if it has sciencey glitter). Goes from woowoo to woowoowoo.
Woo has no logical consistency and has nothing predictably predictive.
Ask manifestation believers why they are not successful or rich or whatever? You'll hear some fabulous reasons.
My neighbour paid money (I presume thousands) to do courses on learning how to unblock herself. The stated reason for the failure to manifest was due to blocks. Her explanation of the material was outrageous. I have yet to see the positive effect on her.
I don't manifest, yet I've got things others would like to manifest. Not sure there that fits in with the woo.
But after some time goes by and you get pinched in the mortgage crash, or your wife hits you with a divorce, or you get cancer, if you really believe you manifest everything into your life, then you have to believe you manifested the bad stuff too. So why did you do that to yourself? It's a rough belief system then.
Truly a master of manifesting my own reality, I suppose? heh. But seriously though, in think in the vain of the above, if "manifestation" is what someone needs to do as their trello or jira for themselves, more power to them.
Not even that. He says that affirmations resulted in him having a premonition. He does not generalize or predict that this will happen for other people, or even himself in the future.
Or it could be as you say. No way for us to know.
He does not. I can’t prove a negative, but you, being the one making an assertion, could provide a quote (with context) which shows your assertion correct. Please do so.
> Even more interesting was the suggestion that this technique would influence your environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goal.
> I don't know if there is one universe or many. If there are many, I don't know for certain that you can choose your path. And if you can choose your path, I don't know that affirmations are necessarily the way to do it. But I do know this: When I act as though affirmations can steer me, I consistently get good results.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I would say that "He basically argues that our thoughts can influence reality" is a fair description of these quotes and the rest of the chapter around it. Some of it is him referencing what other people told him, and he certainly hedges his statements a lot, but I certainly read it as him believing that his affirmations are directly influencing reality.
He said he wanted to get rich on the stock market. Wrote an affirmation. Had a dream to by Chrysler stock. Bought stock, stock went up. By his conclusion, he manifested stock going up (because of how thoughts and perception can influence reality and e.t.c)
He does not say that.
When I buy X, it is guaranteed that X will tank the next day. It usually takes about 2 months for the market to forget that I bought X, and X will return to normal.
When I sell X, it is guaranteed that I sold for the lowest price that day, and X will rise dramatically for the next 2 months.
This problem is why I rarely trade. I'll hold a stock for decades.
> If it's possible to control your environment through your thoughts or steer your perceptions (or soul if you prefer) through other universes, I'll bet the secret to doing that is a process called "affirmations."
> I first heard of this technique from a friend who had read a book on the topic. I don't recall the name of the book, so I apologize to the author for not mentioning it. My information came to me secondhand. I only mention it here because it formed my personal experience.
> The process as it was described to me involved visualizing what you want and writing it down fifteen times in a row, once a day, until you obtain the thing you visualized.
> The suggested form would be something like this:
> "I, Scott Adams, will win a Pulitzer Prize."
> The thing that caught my attention is that the process doesn't require any faith or positive thinking to work. Even more interesting was the suggestion that this technique would influence your environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goal. It was alleged that you would experience what seemed to be amazing coincidences when using the technique. These coincidences would be things seemingly beyond your control and totally independent of your efforts (at least from a visual view of reality).
He then goes on to discuss stock, him taking the GMAT, etc. He later continues:
> I used the affirmations again many times, each time with unlikely success. So much so that by 1988, when I decided I wanted to become a famous syndicated cartoonist, it actually felt like a modest goal.
Then he talks about syndicating Dilbert.
He doesn't say, "I can influence the stock market with affirmations," but if you read what he wrote, he is very clearly arguing that you can change reality with your thoughts.
Earlier today I was reading your comment on mobile and thinking about the reply I would make. Now I am on a desktop making that reply. I'm pretty sure, therefore, that I can change reality with my thoughts, at least to some degree.
Let's say you're not a confident person. If you tell yourself that you are a confident person, and try to act like a confident person would, you will likely become a confident person.
You changed your reality.
If you want to read a book that's closer to how the universe actually works, and how your mind should operate, read it: https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-709
Plausibly quite true. But given (1) how often the succession turned violent after a monarch died, and (2) how very little power the average person had - I'd say such prayers were entirely reasonable. If they made "life in the lower 99%" just 1% more bearable, that'd be a worthwhile RoI.
Demon-Haunted World is a book worth reading...but Carl often seems to forget that 99% of humans are neither huge science geeks (as he is), nor rationalist robots.
E.g when the Spanish Empire ruled the world, the British were not very happy about that. With the British Empire, the French and the Germans fought them with every opportunity.
I'm an atheist, but many of the arguments put forth by atheists seem very lame to me.
If you want to persuade them to believe otherwise, then you have to come up with arguments which are actually persuasive from their perspective. This is a problem I see with a lot of smug atheist literature. It's also a problem I see with all the arguments from Christians about why I shouldn't be an atheist. I guess I seem approachable to them, I get a lot of well meant but totally fruitless conversion attempts. They are arguments which doubtlessly seem very sound to them, one who already believes, but totally fall flat to me, somebody who doesn't. Like telling me how many different people claimed to witness Jesus resurrection... that seems like compelling evidence if you already believe that the bible is reliable. Christians tell each other these arguments at Church, find it very convincing because they are already convinced and find it hard to imagine the frame of mind of somebody who doesn't believe, then with great earnestness present these arguments to nonbelievers and are puzzled when it doesn't work.
Well that's exactly what's going to happen when you confront most Christians with "Your god isn't real because he doesn't do as you command him to with your prayers." Prayer failing any empirical test of efficacy is convincing evidence to people who already don't believe but totally falls flat with people who do.
Knowing how most kings and queens have behaved throughout history, I think Sagan suffered from a faulty premise. The queen everyone loved best made it to 96.
[1] https://theconversation.com/long-live-the-monarchy-british-r...
Have you seen the Sumerian King List?
And yes, that is basically what he says.
With infinite possible universes, you can guide which universe becomes your reality through affirmations.
Wacky perhaps, but the philosophies of consciousness and quantum mechanics are kinda wacky too...
---
On a relevant point, he talks about curing cancer.
Some minds only think when asked to.
A lot of time has past since I read Scott Adams view on manifesting. I got a decent way through before I realised it wasn't satire. It did seem clear to me that he was advocating a form of manifesting that went beyond either of those principles. That benefits came from manifesting in ways that no-other influence from yourself would be possible. That's essentially declaring it to be magic. Psychology I can believe, if you want me to believe in magic you're going to need a bit more.
From the point of view of an ADHD person, it doesn't surprise me at all that someone who had the ability to do a dumb task like manifesting would also have the ability to do meaningful things that that I find nearly impossible.
Can we not do this kind of thing please?
Why should we always handle the topic with kiddy gloves when it is staring us in the face and breaking thousands of lives?
Isn't that literaly "political correctness"?
And that was not an examination, just some low effort attacks on the out group.
Adams's version of manifesting is "if you write stuff down, it's more likely that outcomes outside of your control will help you achieve your goal."
Those are not the same thing.
The concept of the book, as I understand it, is focusing your consciousness on something you want ”will cause the universe to bring it to you”.
The concept is silly to me (it’s the steps that you take to actually achieve the goal that make the difference), but in a way, it is a prerequisite to achieving the goal.
My biggest complaint is this type of thinking usually accompanies lots of “woo” thinking.
Our perceptions of reality are nearly always wrong.
> Those are not the same thing.
Here's an idea: get informed on the basics of what you are discussing before you tell me what it is and isn't.
The podcast If Books Could Kill manages to stumble on a fair amount of overlap between "power of positive thinking" / "The Secret" crap, and right wing politics in the books they review.
The sheer volume of "woo" and positive affirmation manifestation among my friends is vastly higher on the left side of the spectrum than the right.
Perhaps it's more to do with extreme personalities and wishful thinking.
That stuff is mostly harmless speculation/belief, and isn't equivalent to outright denying reality and seeking 'alternate facts'.
And while that obviously has limits, and is far from the magical technique some might claim - it's very hard to argue against things that work.
Visualization is a thing, something happens when you can see it happening.
It is absolutely not a unique failure to conservatives. But it does explain why there is so much interchange between crunchy granola hippies and qanon militias.
The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar. The danger arises when this instinct is hijacked by a rigid ideology that resists truth and seeks control rather than continuity.
Which is, you know, what the American right is doing.
... which inevitably breaks down when fundamental assumptions become disproven. And that's the point. Many "moderate" Conservatives still believe in the "trickle down" economy theory or that government debt is inherently bad and a government's budget needs to be balanced.
Both have been proven time and time again to be not just wrong, but outright disastrous in their consequences, and yet Germany voted that ideology into chancellorship, not to mention what is currently going on in the US.
The US seems to be combining the worst of both ideologies. I can't imagine what happens next.
Basically, conservatives got increasingly angry (because things inevitably do change), so they decided to give up on conservatism and flip the table instead. One intellectual upstream of Trumpism is the writings of Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin), who laid out how mere conservatism wasn't enough because "Cthulhu swims left" still, and coined his philosophy "reactionary". This also ties into one of the commonly-described dynamics of fascism - invoking an idea of some imagined idyllic past, as a reason that the current society needs to be attacked and destroyed.
I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election until Biden 2020 and Harris 2024. I consider those solidly actually-conservative votes, and partially attribute them to my getting older and more actually-conservative.
I grew up [second hand] listening to a lot of this, and as I came of age I could never understood why there was so much cynical condemnation of the system but yet the cognitive dissonance to keep voting for more of the system. But I guess farming this dissonant frustration was just the whole point. Another way of looking at it is that Trumpism is this populist monster escaping, devouring the Party traditionalists, and leaving Republicans with nothing but Trump.
In some sense I think that is large part of what's fueling the fascist energy is the fact that Trump is not a [traditional] Republican, a conservative, a moral person, a competent businessman, etc. So throwing your support behind him is already buying into a Big Lie where up is down, there are no values or morals, just purely allegiance to what Dear Leader has declared is true. That none of Trump's policy positions make sense is a feature for keeping that support in line - independent thinkers who would point out the contradictions are ostracized and othered. Essentially the worst social dynamics of "woke" most everyone was wary of, but we had/have forgotten how much worse they can be when power is wielded autocratically rather than bureaucratically.
We're going to find out if that is true or not.
Look at Germany: 16 years of austerity policy have left our infrastructure so thoroughly compromised it literally falls apart - we were damn lucky that that bridge collapse in Dresden end of last year didn't kill anyone!
And even in the US you see it with every presidential change: Democrat governments cut services and expenditures because the last Republican cut taxes for the wealthy, the frustration leads to people vote for Republicans who introduce yet another round of billionaire tax cuts and blow up the government debt by untold billions of dollars, rinse and repeat.
And "order" doesn't fully capture it either, because the concept it gestures at can be more accurately described as "hierarchy" - as Kirk puts it, "a conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions".
In other words, everyone has a proper place in society, with some above and others below, and any attempts to remove that hierarchy are moral wrongs which require the transgressors to be put back in their place.
You can see how that core belief is intrinsically dangerous, and how nearly every controversial conservative belief about social classes falls out of it.
(It's also worth noting that this explains why conservatism's earliest champions were supporters of the aristocracy, and also why conservatism is more beloved by the old-money wealthy than move-fast-and-break-things new-money tech.)
Yeah, that actually is an inability to process reality. Stuff changes, and things have never been stable or orderly.
If you are writing "Repetitive Strain Injury".
and with a population desperate for any improvement in life these things end up finding a place, just like all the betting platforms all over the place. the only reason to bet is if you think you'll win.
Ye be needing a mirror, lad. A mirror to help ye pull out the log in yer eye.
But I do think that the wild admiration of manipulative people was genuine.
Chapelle's SNL monolog about Trump is pretty spot on too.
However, the fundamental ideas of System 1 and 2 have made me rethink so many things.
Dilbert is about the 90s.
And Facebook too, which is the META-meta-joke.
Dream on.
Seriously, making your whole career deriding stupid, clueless, cruel top managers and then lionizing Trump... I guess there isn't a single mirror in his house.
Adams, himself? Not so much. I think he tends to have a rather nasty outlook on humanity, and I had a hard time reconciling it.
I do know that he was/is pretty much about as far away from Diamond Joe* as you can get. Interesting that they seem to be fighting the same battle.
Same thing with Blu-Ray of Pulp Fiction though I believe Weinstein Company has given up all rights to most of their movies.
Don't stream it and don't buy a new copy unless someone completely unrelated owns it now, but you can still listen to, watch, or read the stuff you loved before you knew what was going. Whatever you already owned didn't suddenly become toxic. Used book/music/movie stores exist. Piracy is always an option.
That's not to say a few people haven't managed to ruin it beyond my ability to enjoy their content no matter how much I used to love them, but there's no reason to give up something you enjoy just because you learn the person or a key person behind it sucks.
It's far more effective than apathy. Just look at how the tariffs are going
This has always seemed like the flimsiest argument. It costs nothing for JK Rowling to tweet. On the flipside, the joy and wonder her books have produced for the world dwarf what else she has wrought and in the end her life will be a net-positive, more so than your vegan co-worker. Doesn't make her a good person, just a net-positive.
And then the artist takes his fortune and his fame to get laws voted against you and your friends and family.
OneFTE was brilliant, and the creator explicitly talked about what he was doing differently from Dilbert - that you could mock the absurdities while still acknowledging the positives of the corporate life. And then he took the whole thing down :(.
I was surprised and disappointed with that as those Hasbara takes were the geopolitical propoganda equivalent to pointy-hair boss's office politics speech balloons ("the only way to rescue the hostages is to bomb everything, including the captors... and the hostages").
Wild disgusting times.
But Scott had gone full mask off a ways before that. It's very sad that people we once admired turned out to be disgusting.
(The way of overstock returns I was most fascinated by as the type of kid who loved deep dives into weirder parts of the libraries is that some libraries have an "illegal" section of books that they literally dumpster dive local bookstores for. These books had their original covers removed, which is the simple, minimal way how the bookstore "marks" them as unsold/unsellable/"destroyed" before tossing them in a dumpster, because by that point even the publisher doesn't want the overstock physically back collecting dust in a warehouse, but also still needs a good relationship with bookstores. Many publishers still to this day have some form of wording in print books like "if this copy was found without its original cover it is to be destroyed and is illegal to be resold". The bookstore would get some form of partial refund on all the "destroyed" overstock.)
The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? I first saw people wrestle with this idea for Michael Jackson and recently it has been a big issue related to Kanye West.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens%27_comments_about_...
More than anything, Islam seems ill equipped to handle these matters. And to be fair, he indicated he is not the guy to come to for this topic.
I would bolster that to say that if someone truly wanted a substantive, educated opinion about fatwa, they would have gone to someone capable of giving them that.
Great TV factual, devilish, host led open panel discussion about hair trigger dilemmas of real life and law staged by an international QC (now KC) and human rights lawyer.
It was literally about exploring the gap between written law, law as practicied, morals and ethics, and circumstances that would test anyone.
Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam was a typical guest .. an everyman of no particular deep study into such things, just one of many on the Clapham omnibus.
Taking anything said by anyone on that particular show, sans context, as a literal statement of their core personal belief is tenuous at best.
Good show concept though, pity it's not around anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Robertson#Media_caree...
There is no ambiguity here, Yusuf Islam called for Salman Rushdie's killing over a book that a Shia cleric claimed insulted the prophet. A book I might add that neither of them ever read. Later that year he again said Rushdie should be killed in a different context.
Any notion why you have such a PoV?
In the TV context it was clearly a rhetorical / hypothetical statement .. one of the two utterances was literally on a show titled "Hypotheticals" .. which I guess you watched along with reading the Qur'an, numerous commentaries, reading Rushdie's book, etc.
In a statement in the FAQ section of one of his websites, Islam asserted
that while he regretted the comments, he was joking and that the show was
improperly edited.[94]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2750537/Video-1...
The video you linked has been edited twice .. once from raw live footage in order to create the TV panel show that went to air, and again a second time to extract and join short specific sections from the TV show to create the segment you linked .. with additional voice over added.
The original TV footage appears to have been sourced from Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals.
The very name "Hypotheticals" might indicate to you how you the second round of editing has led you astray.
The segment you linked has removed all context .. there is nothing of Geoffrey Robertson setting up a situation and instructing panel members "to imagine they are ...".
All you have there is a tight segment lacking the larger context with an added voice over claiming that this is Islam speaking from his heart as himself, nothing about being asked to play himself as a more fundemental true believer.
another edit, steve martin's "king tut", now thats cosplay. Maybe whatever his name was trying to be serious as hypothetically speaking while simultaneously joking about terminating somebody's metabolism in a non consensual manner.
last edit:
I checked on whether cosplay is haram, it is not according to "gemini", can any humans verify this? I'd hate to get killed because I listened exclusively to "gemini" because these AI's are "hallucinators" or whatever tech bro's call it nowadays haha so indeed he could cosplay, be actual Muslim, be joking and hypothetical all at the same time so maybe you're right.
The transcripts of the TV show? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3616539-geoffrey-roberts...
That seems dry, but okay.
> Is he saying God is merely a "Hypothetical"?
Which "he"? Islam|Stevens or Robertson .. in either case, no, God being Hypothetical was not a central thesis of the show although it's likely something that was bantered about somewhere in the course of at least one of those scenarios.
Maybe look through the transcripts for some mention of any God(s).
> hehe I liked steve martins take on that egyptian thing
I confess I'm unsure as to how Steve Martin (Banjo playing comedian slash actor Martin?) ties into this .. but yes, Hypothetical is a partially scripted staged drama that explored tricky situations, Trolley Problems, and difficult judgements that creep up on people at the edges of law and morality.
The host literally assigned real people "personas" that matched some aspects of that persons real life experience and then asked them to react as their persona through a series of increasingly conflicting and escalating events of the sort that often end up in court.
What ever Cat Stevens is doing there in the show he is absolutely not independantly taking the stage on his own to declare a Fatwa on Rushdie and to call on all Muslims to hunt him down and punish him .. which was the original up thread claim about his behaviour.
Honestly, I doubt either of us will have our minds changed but I do like the guys own explanation
"In response, Yusuf Islam said that some of his comments were "stupid and offensive jokes" made in "bad taste," while others were merely giving his interpretation of Islamic law but not advocating any action."
the steve martin bit is how to do a proper cosplay. nobody is taking steve martin out of context lol
These shows by Robertson had no single scenario, each started with (say) news that people in a cafe had been taken hostage by a unknown assailant .. and built from there. First one guest representing law and order might be asked what their response would be, then they are informed that demands have been made to release convicted terrorists (say). This might build and involve a diplomat, a former singer in the public eye pressed for comment, etc.
I haven't said as I literally last watched the one in question some forty years ago.
Perhaps you can fill us all in given, as you said above, you've read the transcripts and hopefully still have a copy you can look up.
> the steve martin bit is how to do a proper cosplay
Riiigght. Okay. Sure. Bit random. Personally I largely preferred Damian Cowell over Cat Stevens and|or Steve Martin on a banjo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLAFy7o7Zvo
I don't really have a copy, I just link to the source material, which is the wikipedia page. Still, I can quote it to fill folks in:
"He must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear – if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."
>Bit random.
I thought Steve Martin would be a nice break from all the religious fundamentalism terrorism talk.
See my peer reply.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/sep/27/yusuf-c...
lot of Road Runner and Wheels on the Bus fans out there still.
The person who solved global warming/cancer/whatever turns out to be a terrible person? Should we throw away their work, and come to a different answer? Or wait a few generations so people forget and come to the same answer again but the people involved are “pure”?
I’m not advocating a decision here, but I wouldn’t call that low stakes.
>Fritz Jakob Haber (German: [ˈfʁɪt͡s ˈhaːbɐ] ⓘ; 9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives.[4] It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population.[5][6] For this work, Haber has been called one of the most important scientists and industrial chemists in human history.[7][8][9] Haber also, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.
The second paragraph gives the context:
>Haber, a known German nationalist, is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. He first proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock during the Second Battle of Ypres. His work was later used, without his direct involvement,[10] to develop the Zyklon B pesticide used for the killing of more than 1 million Jews in gas chambers in the greater context of the Holocaust.
For your thought experiment, I don't think we as a whole threw away the scientific work of the nazis. We have a concrete answer to that
Sure, some people take art seriously. But throwing it away is super easy. You don’t alter your quality of life much if you burn all your Harry Potter books even if that was a defining part of your childhood. Removing technology from your life on the other hand is hard. Doing something that has little consequence to your life is kinda meaningless in the scheme of things.
The problem with unethical behavior in sciences is that you have to check - which you should be doing anyway, but once someone has been exposed as a fraud the community as a whole needs to go back and clean out all the fraud by checking all their work. Unethical behavior in someone's personal life doesn't necessarily invalidate that.
Although I don't see many people talking about ReiserFS these days.
I'm mostly out of that environment now, but occasionally put myself in those shoes again and think how odd it would seem to me that people look up to and expect moral righteousness from these people.
I do expect him not to rape, murder, commit fraud, and so on.
One of the things I occasionally notice about conversations in this area is that some people care more about actions that hurt people than property.
If our hyopthetical rockstar trashes a hotel room, wrecks his car and then has a heart attack from cocaine, that might be judged differently than one that joins the local nazi party and attempts to murder someone.
…I’d assume that would be judged differently than an attempted murder and trashing a hotel room.
The question is what would be the judgement for all three?
Shouting "black lives matter" at a protest is a fairly minor virtuous action. Throwing a rock at a police car is a pretty minor sin.
Attempted murder is generally a pretty major sin, modulo quibbles about legal vs moral definitions of murder.
Air Shaffer does a stand-up bit where he says that society gives a pass to extreme artists because we value their art and we don’t really care about (or we downplay) the other aspects of their life.
It's an interesting conundrum isn't it?
H.P. Lovecraft is a case in point - Lovecraftian horror is a special sort of literary genius, in my opinion, and massively influential on other writers to this day (I'm a big fan of The Laundry Files, for instance, which draw on it). But it's clear that he was massively racist, and significantly more so than just "well those were the times". Some people (some people here in this thread) say that we should "separate the art from the artist", but there's quite a bit of veiled and not-so-veiled racism in the art as well. Not to forget the misogyny.
So we decide to disavow him? No Cthulu for anyone! Well, that doesn't seem like a good option either. There's no easy, feel-good answer here other than to understand that flawed people sometimes create great art, to understand we don't have to (probably shouldn't) make idols of artists, and to be nuanced in our appreciation of their output.
In this vein I did enjoy reading "Lovecraft Country" a while ago, which both explored the horror of racism and embraced mythos-style themes.
Scott Adams gave us Dilbert. In the 90s I found it amazing. By the 00s I'd stopped paying attention, and then he started saying some somewhat less wonderful things which, if you squint, you could see foreshadowed in how uncharitable he was to people in his earlier writings. Another imperfect human, who gave us some good fun and insight, and in the end didn't live up to everyone's expectations. We shouldn't gloss over it, but perhaps we shouldn't pile those expectations on them anyway.
I had a decent lunch at Stacy's that time though...
Many painters, singers, composers and CEO’s are known to be horrible people. Unless they are actively harming humanity with the power they acquired, this is nothing more than a curiosity that is only relevant for people around him.
I don't really have an opinion on Wagner's music because he is dead. Michael Jackson similarly feels fine.
But it feels more and more terrible to stream Kanye, a contender for one of the best in producing and rapping, every time he opens his mouth because you know you're helping support his life style. But if you ripped his albums you can still enjoy the previous art.
But it's nice to know more about the riches finances and we should demand more. Papa John's fired their CEO for being racist, but he still holds significant stock, so I continue to avoid their pizza. Tesla could do the same and hopefully it still shouldn't matter without a complete sell off.
People also like to be selective about which artists they try to memoryhole. John Lennon was a wife beater, an adulterer, and a deadbeat dad but people still love his music (though I personally think his solo career was worse than Paul's).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Michael_Jackson_sexual_...
> Chandler demanded money from Jackson, threatening to go to a criminal court, but no agreement was reached. After Jordan told a psychiatrist that Jackson had molested him, the Los Angeles Police Department began a criminal investigation. The investigation found no physical evidence against Jackson.
Update, I just read that entire page and it seems obvious the whole thing was a set up.
Basically, what do you value more and what can you excuse?
His work had become associated with his opinions and folks were unhappy with having his remarks return to their mind again and again. Losing his books stopped that cycle.
I've gotten rid of stuff that had negative associations for me. It was good for me.
After reading his other work, I can’t really enjoy his comics anymore (and I’m a die hard HP Lovecraft fan, FFS).
Anyway, I recommend not looking his other stuff up.
That's how we have the life we have today. People now seem to be taking it to the extreme, ignoring the rest, even when there is no hint of any good.
Just in semi-recent history we had mccarthy 'cancelling' people for purportedly being linked to communism, and that was a whole lot more serious than some modern publisher refusing to buy your book or twitter banning you.
A few decades before that, it wasn't real uncommon that if your neighbors objected to who you were or what you said, for them to hang you by your neck from a convenient tree until you were quite dead.
Humans have always suffered penalties for being on the wrong side of their neighbor's majority opinions. These days the penalties are frankly pretty minor.
It seems so strange to me what this politicized bubble has become. So far it's an (attempt at) collaborative "vote with your wallet" [0] and one political party is loudly saying "not like that". But the political party most complaining about "cancel culture" is also the party most actually trying to ban things, yet that's not "cancel culture" it is "think of the children" (and it's not "vote with your wallet", it is town hall grandstanding and letter writing campaigns and lobbyists).
It is such a fascinating example of hypocrisy in our society right now. To entirely strawman it: "You can't tell me what to do [with my cash], but I can tell the libraries what you shouldn't be allowed to read. You are the real monster telling me what to do with my cash. Censorship of libraries is in the best interests of the children! Think of the children! They could be reading filth, oh no! Freedom of speech doesn't apply to children, just to me!"
I know in many cases not everyone that hates "cancel culture" also wants to ban library books, but the intersection seems large enough that it is concerning.
[0] Which carries its own terrible baggage. "Vote with your wallet" just means that the rich "deserve" more votes. That's not Democracy. Which isn't to say that boycotts and general strikes don't work or don't have some power in our economy, but that it isn't always the power you think it is, and to wield that power correctly takes collective effort (large enough boycotts and general strikes to hit a bottom line figure), not individualism.
The extremists on both sides are what you hear the most of, but the rest of the population is far more moderate.
Also I agree 100% with you that "one side" trying to pass laws to control access to books in libraries is exactly the same as the "other side" going around telling people not to buy tesla cars. Definitely not something to worry about.
The sitcom Rosanne was removed from my Apple library purchases after the actress went on a racist tirade. Was it banned by the government? No, but my access to the material was taken away. I think that there is censorship beyond government censorship, especially when competition is limited, as it typically is with art under copyright (as well as payment processors, etc).
If you lost previous purchases, that sounds like an account question between you and Apple. Other than your anecdote here I don't see complaints come up in web searches that they removed it from people's libraries.
Encouraging other people to not buy something is ALSO not censorship. It is the exact opposite of censorship: it is making a case that people are free to listen to (or not).
If I say the comment I'm replying to is stupid, have I just cancelled someone?
No, you would just be lying.
Yeah. Hanoi Jane and Beatles Burnings quickly come to mind.
Most of the things that alt right people talk about as though they're some amazing truth bombs, are - in fact - the basic realisations of adulthood. There's a reason there's such an overrepresentation of teens and young adults in that loud but tiny political segment.
Whether you take the hard facts of life and build an identity around lifting other people up - or whether you use those same facts to build an identity around cutting them down - is a reflection on you and you alone.
"I would never judge a book by it's cover."
> because I didn't want anyone to see it on my bookshelf
"Yet I am worried that someone else might."
I hope some pharma underling might have cooked up some good meds for Adams, despite all the pharma bosses and their backers.
Adams was an MBA, a manager that was resentful that his advancement in management was not as fast as he thought it should been when he left Crocker National Bank for Pacific Bell, and then resentful that he couldn't break into management at Pacific Bell, even while publicly mocking Pacific Bell management (I don't mean indirectly in the comics he was writing while working there, but directly in the media interviews he gave about the comics.)
His only problem with the PHB was always that it was someone else sitting behind that desk, and not him.
My dad's still ok. He had some localized radiation to beat back the biggest tumors on his spine, then did a round of chemo. This past summer he did a fun immunotherapy treatment, not CAR-T... but something more like that than checkpoint inhibitors. Otherwise his tumors have been kept to almost nothing due to hormone therapy.
Unfortunately, what eventually happens is you accumulate enough hormone therapty resistant cancer cells that the tumors start growing again in a meaningful way, and then there's not much that can be done. I assume this is the stage that Scott Adams has had and that he's been battling it for many years by now. With President Biden, it seems likely that his prostate cancer will respond to treatment, and if this is the case then he will likely die of something else, as is usual now for old men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Every time I see someone kitted out in VR gear, I think about his prediction that the Star Trek holodeck will be humanity's last invention and I'm very glad they don't have a button that can beam the next person waiting for their turn into a concrete wall.
A lot of men die with prostate cancer, because only very few die from it. And if you belong to the former group, knowing about it or doing any kind of intervention means a massive loss in quality of life. So the best course of action overall is to close our eyes and stop looking. And hope you don't belong to the latter group.
(Yes, yes whole body scans exist but these are largely pseudo-medical scams that don't deliver what they promise. I'm saying deliver on it, within reason.)
What does this mean?
Perhaps this plan just needs better marketing. Instead of dividing tumors into benign and malignant we could have a third category for malignant but slow-growing.
If there was a simple cure for it once detected, we could screen and test everyone all the time.
edit: Ah ok. Risk of over-treatment by broad scanning? "Active surveillance aims to avoid unnecessary treatment of harmless cancers while still providing timely treatment for those who need it." according to NHS.
But if we do scan and test and screen, a lot of men will find out they have it, become anxious about it and will want to do something about it, which leads to a lot of unnecessary treatments that decreases people's quality of life and wouldn't extend their lifespan anyway.
For a good short overview: https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet
And read “is the PSA test recommended…”
The harm is not the PSA test but in overtreatment too early on—a lot of prostate cancer is slow. Fighting it when it’s stage 4 is no fun, though.
I agree with the sibling advice to insist on PSA labs. You are your own advocate. The primary job of a doctor is actually to be a bureaucrat, the first line of offense for the health management companies whose whole function is to deny healthcare. They can easily rubber stamp a few labs once you change their risk calculus of not doing it, by explicitly laying out your risk factors.
Despite all that, as you say, you won't be sued for saying that stuff.
Anecdotally, healthcare management companies insist on individuals getting referrals from "primary care providers", who take several weeks to provide an appointment, a few weeks more to issue a referral, and will only do one referral at a time even for unknown problems despite it taking several months to get an appointment with a specialist. And finding an available new primary doctor is most certainly not easy, either. This has been my experience for myself and a handful of other people I've advocated for, across several different "insurance" companies. Obviously none of those requirements are necessary, except for expanding the bureaucracy to meet the needs of the ever expanding bureaucracy, but it has the net effect of constructively denying healthcare.
Might there be some regional healthcare system in the US where patients are seen promptly and where the bureaucratic procedures create efficiency rather than functioning as mechanisms to stonewall and run down the clock? Sure, of course. But given the terrible dynamics that are allowed to fester, it feels like a working system is the exception rather than the norm.
You have a direct genetic history of prostate cancer, thus you are at higher risk than most men. At age 57 I had no family history and no symptoms, yet my primary care doc suggested I be tested anyway. My PSA was in fact elevated. I got a biopsy and found my prostate was 80% cancerous. I got it surgically removed just in time. 10 years later I'm still cancer free.
Every day I five thanks that my doctor did NOT follow the standard medical advice back then NOT to test. Forewarned is forearmed.
surprised that it didn't escape prostate with that high load.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361217707_The_role_...
I've read very little about choosing radical prostatectomy very early after detection, but it's likely that it does little to improve survivability:
https://medicine.washu.edu/news/surgery-early-prostate-cance...
That said, if nerve-sparing surgery were done early instead of doing NON-nerve-sparing surgery later (a standard radical prostatectomy), perhaps that might diminish some of the typical side-effects of the standard surgery like impotence or incontinence. But I'm only speculating.
https://thennt.com/nnt/psa-test-to-screen-for-prostate-cance...
I wish they did, of course. I personally lost a close friend to prostate cancer last year. He was 41 and was, before the cancer, one of the healthiest and most athletic people I knew.
The first inkling he had that anything was wrong was a backache that wouldn't go away; a stage 4 diagnosis ensued. He held on for 21 months from the onset of symptoms before the cancer took him.
I don't have a strong opinion about the tests either way, but I wasn't the one getting the biopsies.
I have high psa levels. 17.
Had a biopsy. Turns out I have a really large prostate. My doctor said that some just naturally have larger prostates and the larger ones produce more psa. The psa density function put my levels at normal when taking in to consideration the size. The biopsy came back negative.
I know this will sound dumb, but it's really hard to put into words how much I enjoyed Dilbert in its heyday. I mean at one time Dilbert was one of three web-comics that I read religiously. It was Dilbert, User Friendly, and Sluggy Freelance. The comics weren't just "comics", they mattered to me. Seriously.
Then UF quit publishing new episodes, and then Scott went all alt-right and Dilbert disappeared behind a paywall, and now only Sluggy is still standing. I guess. I have to admit, I quit reading regularly quite some time for reasons I can't even explain.
Anyway... not sure what the relevance of all of this is. Just reminiscing about a day when the 'Net felt a lot different I guess. At any rate, while I'd become less of a "Scott Adams fan" over the last few years, this news still makes me feel absolutely sick. I wouldn't wish prostate cancer on anyone. :-(
If the hypothesis turns out to be true, prostate cancer could be easily defeated before it has a chance to take a hold.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/dilbert-creator-scott-ad...
I hope all of those Republicans feel safe now that the mean Biden administration stopped deporting them to torture prisons./s
Sad that this man is dying of cancer and letting his “enemies” live rent free in his head. I hope he can find some peace before he passes.
Why deal with six months of vicious comments alongside well intentioned pitiful condolences when you could only have to deal with one or two month’s worth?
I would have done the same thing. For what it’s worth, I think an exceedingly small number of people can actually refuse to let those who hate your guts “live rent free in your head”.
Today I am an on site high voltage test engineer. People respect what I do and let me do my work in peace, mostly.
Reading the horror stories I so often see coming from the IT world, I am grateful to use my computer skills mostly as a hobby. Although my computer and networking skills do come in useful in my profession, I’m glad it’s not the source of my income.
Thankfully with all the voice actors and other talent that went into the show, it's easier to disconnect it from the hateful person Adams ended up revealing himself to be.
I wonder what he has been up to the last couple years.
But thing is—boy who cried wolf—not sure if he actually has the prognosis of cancer he says he has? It sounds mean, I reckon he does have it, but his past descriptions of health problems were confusing enough that I wouldn't be surprised if he recovers next year and spins it into a story about how he found a cure.
I don't think he's making that up.
I absolutely don't think, 100%, not a chance in hell he's making this up.
But I appreciate your comment, it's more data for me to engulf, you never stop learning about the human mind.
* systems over goals: the theory that you shouldn't set yourself specific goals, but instead just find a system how to work towards your goals regularly
* talent stacks: the theory that, in order to succeed in life, you don't need to be the best in one skill, but good enough in a useful combination of several skills that can be used together
* the idea that managing your energy is more important than managing your time
* the Adams rule of slow moving disasters: any kind of disaster that takes many years to manifest can be overcome by humanity. Scary are those disasters that don't give you enough time to react.
* rewiring your brain: that by finding the right way to look at something, you can modify your own behavior. He wrote a whole book full of recipes to change your behavior and feelings.
* despite not listening to Rap, a long time ago when Kanye West had one of his first successful songs, someone sent Adams the lyrics to some song and by looking at the lyrics Adams recognized West as a unique genius
* you should never trust a video as proof of anything, if you can't see what happened before or after. It's most likely taken out of context. Just like most quotes are worthless without context.
* "perception is reality": that how someone perceives a fact is more important than what actually happened
* "simultaneous realities": realities are shaped by how people perceive them. And two people can disagree on something, while both are right at the same time, because they view the same thing through two different lenses and thus live in different realities.
* TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome): the observation that many people hate Trump so much that they lose the capability of rational thought and either just shut their brain down when talking about anything related to Trump, or want to do the opposite of what Trump wants
* "word-thinking": when someone find labels for things or people, and then forms opinions based on the label
* detecting cognitive dissonance: when someone just shuts down their brain because the experienced reality doesn't match their expectation
* "tells for lies", like analyzing people on TV and looking for clues that they lie
* coining the term "fine people hoax" for a video snippet that was constantly repeated on media to show Trump having one opinion, even though when watching the whole video it was clear that he meant the opposite.
* "logic doesn't win arguments", the rules of persuasion, and the theory of 'master persuaders'
* he predicted Trump winning the 2016 election when Trump had just announced his campaign, long before the primaries, because he recognized a 'master persuader' in him.
And there are probably many more things I don't remember right now, but his books and blog shaped my way of thinking, and I am using his way of looking at the world every day.
I must admit I didn't really follow 'Coffee with Scott Adams' - I think he kind of jumped the shark when having to fill at least 30 minutes every day, and I am not that interested in politics. But that doesn't diminish his accomplishments.
This isn't a real thing, it's just something his zealots throw at critics to dismiss them.
I've always thought the definition of TDS was completely backwards. I've too often seen legitimate criticisms of Trump deflected with claims of TDS. Certainly it's the zealous cult-like worshipping of Trump that's deranged.
Although I thought his comics growing up were quirky, I was probably too young to appreciate them (xkcd was more my thing anyway).
Knowing more about him and what he says / thinks turns me off Dilbert entirely.
I doubt he'll go as he says. Sounds like a plead for sympathy / attention.
I remember his remark about Hillary's campaign logo looking like directions to the hospital.
I'll miss him.
Maybe he's been recruited to work for a secret organization taking over the world and has to fake his death to quietly exit public life. /s
I still ask for the PSA test. I've never been offered ultrasound.