The Dilbert Afterlife
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My former manager used to have Dilbert comic strips on his wall. It always puzzled me - was it self deprecating humor? At a certain point though it became clear that in his mind the PHB was one layer ABOVE him in the management chain and not anyone at his level. I suspect it may be a recursive pattern.
> “Dilbert” was a war cry against the management class — the system of deluded jerks you work for who think they know better. Workers posted it on their cubicles like resistance fighters chalking V’s on walls in occupied Paris. But their bosses posted “Dilbert” in their offices too, since they also had a boss who was an idiot.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opinion/dilbert-scott-ada...
History does not repeat but it rhymes indeed
(With apologies to:)
it's like "I hear you hate cubicles, so we can solve the cubicle problem and save money at the same time"
They did it because they saw in their work environment echoes of the environment portrayed in the comic, of which Dilbert was as much a part as the PHB.
This seemed so blatantly obvious (and the answer if asked "why did you put this one up?") that I'm agog at anyone thinking otherwise.
American corp in Europe for ref. Defence. Absolute top tier stereotype asshats.
Some 'trinkets' are worth more to the employees than they cost the company to provide. So it's rational to provide them. Think of Wally's beloved coffee for an example. Or look at Googlers' lunch.
He was right about the bad for the morale part.
Similar thing happened with Idiocracy recently...
- Constrained scope (they were the UI team on an internal product; by the time they got their marching orders the whole thing was a very well understood problem domain)
- Excellent manager (he has infinite calm, deep empathy for the fact that real people are messy and complicated, and an incredible nose for time estimates). There was basically no amount of pressure up-chain could put on him that would shake his cool; he seems to be completely confident internally that the worst-case scenario is he goes and lands on his feet somewhere else.
As a result, his team was basically always happy and high-performing and he consistently missed up-chain expectations set by project managers above him who had to consistently report that UI wasn't going to be delivered on the timeline they set because they had taken his estimates and shaved three weeks off of them, only to discover that the estimates were dead-on and they were the liars. He was insulated from this by (a) keeping consistently good notes on his initial estimates, everything that bumped them, and the final deliverable dates and (b) having skip-level meetings where he could present all of this to his boss's boss clearly.
Though some of my worst work periods was when I didn't have a manager either lol.
"His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive."
Did she just not get it? Or did she get it, and it was some weird flex making us watch it with her? I still don’t know.
Shit flows downhill, payday is on Friday.Even your CEO has a board to deal with.
I always think it's strange when people draw a mental dividing line between ICs and managers and think people on the other side are living in totally different experiences of the world.
And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.
Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.
Having been a manager: I bet your boss didn't want to be there any more than you did. They were forced to do corporate team-building and they recognized the absurdity of it all.
So they tried to come up with something entertaining that they could claim was passably work-related. They were trying to do their best by you within the constraints of what was mandated by their job.
This looks like a nice gesture. You are too occupied viewing your manager as "the other" to recognize when they were trying to bond and do something nice for the team within the constraints of their job.
You're lucky. At corporate team-building retreats I never got to watch any fun movies. One had us listen to lectures by a manager whose primary experience was as a little league coach and who thought leading his team was the same thing. The other involved the manager giving us a psychology test of his own creation and trying to lecture us about what he thought our learning styles and weaknesses were based on all the different self-help books he read.
Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?
And so, an act of rebellion against a shared reality that forces you to have fun on schedule when it's time for the quarterly offsite.
...they learned it by watching us?
That just means they valued their actual sentiments more than keeping appearances. Doesn't sound weird: it sounds humane.
>Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?
To point at the elephant in the room, as opposed to just go on with the program and have another forced fun session.
I mean, your questions amount to "why couldn't she just be a good cog and pretend like the rest of us?"
It's like being surprised a coworker is a human on the inside.
LLMs didn't come up with their quirks in a vacuum. Humans always influenced each other in their language use.
It used to be over sound waves mostly but they don't travel far, then came the printing press, later radio and TV. LLMs are just another language blender.
It is different. I won't deny that.
However, politics and corporate absurdist formalities aren't exclusive to management. A lot of the corporate politics and face-palm worthy office games I've dealt with came from ICs, either as my peers, reports, or as some other manager's reports.
We just tend to give a pass to ICs when they do it because they're not viewed as having as much power in the office.
But it's not as a result of that movie.
I remember when it was released, I graduated that year, and I remember the reactions at the time
it would still be anecdotal and it's hard to know how many people did in fact resign as a result of the impact from this film, and if it's something that would make any difference in the grand scheme of things
Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than being Peter Gibbons.
I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job like that.
Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.
I always thought Lumberg gets a somewhat un-derserved bad rap in that flick. He is characterized as the villain and of course is—from Peter’s perspective which is where the story is told. But within that universe and at a 10,000 foot POV was he? He seems to be the only one within the corporation that is actually functional, capable, motivated and excelling in his role. No doubt he is a dick, but that’s just part of his role and he’s good at it. He’s a cog, knows he’s a cog, but realizes the machine still needs to run. He recognizes that Peter has hit that competence/incompetence point. He also realizes the Bob’s are incompetent, but powerful. He really is the only one that seems to realize everything that is going on.
(Well, maybe not. Maybe being soul-crushingly efficient is optimal if you know most people will fluctuate out soon anyway, so your lack of ability to actually build a rapport with them is not a material impediment to deliver results sustainably.)
Plenty of managers see the absurdity in a lot of what they have to do, but it's mandated by the people above them.
My boss refused to allow people to call him boss, for example. He really hated the system.
Probably not how you meant it but I chuckled.
To use Dilbert terms: Adams would say that PHB is dumb and he is promoted into management as that's where he can do the least damage.
Rao would say that PHB is actually put there by upper management to be a combination of:
- fall guy/lightning rod to take blame for failed projects
- dumb subordinates are less likely to try to take your job (dumb doesn't mean unintelligent. Rather, Rao uses the term "clueless" to highlight smart people who are not political)
We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.
Then look at our leadership class. Look at the leaders of the most powerful countries. Look at the most powerful leaders in finance and business.
Look at that contrast. It’s very clear where the actually smart people are.
But those actually smart people keep putting leaders like that in power. It’s not a conspiracy. We do it. We need them for some reason.
I have two hypotheses.
One is familiar: they are sacrificial lightning rods. Sacrifice the king when things don’t go well.
The other is what I call the dopamine donor hypothesis. Compared to the speed and complexity of the modern world, most human beings are essentially catatonic. Our dopamine systems are not calibrated for this. So we sit there and do nothing by default, or we play and invent but lack the intrinsic motivation to do the hardest parts.
So we find these freaks: narcissists, delusional manic prophets, psychopaths. They’re deeply dysfunctional people but we use them. We use the fact that they have tireless non stop motivation. Dopamine always on. Go go go.
We place them in positions of authority and let them drive us, even to the point of abuse, as a hack to get around the fact that our central nervous systems don’t natively do this.
Then of course if things go wrong, it’s back to their other purpose: sacrificial scapegoats.
So in a sense we are both victims of these people and exploiters of them. It’s a dysfunctional relationship.
If we could find ways to tweak our systems like amphetamine but without the side effects, we could perhaps replace this system with a pill.
It would be more compassionate for the freaks too. They’re not happy people. If we stopped using them this way they might get help and be happier.
There are a lot of smart and skilled people involved in making a cutting edge chip fab. It's not one ubermensch in a basement inventing a new TSMC process by thinking really hard. There's technicians, scientists, researchers in multiple disciplines. All of those people have to be organized.
I don't know where you think the "smart" people are, but maybe meditate on the fact that "smartness" is not a single variable that dictates a person's value or success. Someone who is an expert at researching extreme UV patterning isn't going to necessarily run a great chip manufacturer.
Governance creates markets -> markets create innovation. These things have feedback loops into governance, but the tail ultimately does not wag the dog.
Engineers-- especially in the Bay where discussion of such is written off as mental illness-- often dismiss politics and governance as nonsense subjects that lack rules and are run by the mob/emotions. The reality however, is that these societal constructs have their own "physics" and operate like a (very complex and challenging to study) system just like everything else in the natural world.
The attitude itself is of course something has been designed and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.
I am not sure this is necessarily the case, at least historically. We have good evidence of long distance trade from the Stone Age, and even some Neanderthal sites contain stones whose origin can be traced to distant regions (over 100 km, IIRC, which is far away in a primordial roadless countryside).
I would agree that markets cannot grow beyond a certain size without a government, though.
I don’t know if this particular statement is true or not, but the number of smart people I know who thinks they’re not affected by propaganda is wild. We’re all affected by propaganda.
Primary multi agent multi dimension probabilistic resolution problems model human and crowd interaction better than “code do this every time”.
I’ve spent a long time in the valley and I’ve come to the personal conclusion that engineers are often the dumbest (and most narrowly useful) in the room not the smartest. And the rest of them let them think they are very smart (tm) so they do what we say.
Of course someone who dedicated his time to climbing and understanding power systems will have more power than someone who doesn't.
We have all the skills to do all the things without these power systems so what are they for?
I don’t mean policing and courts. Those are administrative and managerial functions. I mean power of the sort that makes large numbers of people do stuff. I mean gurus and aggrandizers, basically. The people who con and goad us into doing hard things.
My hypothesis is that we can’t self generate that due to neurological limitations rooted in our evolutionary history in a much slower world that rarely changed.
Amphetamine could work too but it has ugly side effects. Social pressure is less hazardous and scales better.
Put two people with a lot of expertise in different domain. Require them to come up with a solution to a problem you have.
That's three people. You'll get at the very least four opinions about each and every step.
Scale the complexity of the problems and the number of people.
You end up with full time jobs consisting purely in routing information from brain A to brain Z.
Unfortunately, the skills to do this job are never properly taught, but learnt in the job. (MBA don't teach management - they either teach the mechanism of some administration, or ways to get rich consulting.)
Problems occur because we conflate management, supervision, decision making, strategy setting, etc...
P.H.B. is an antipattern, a caricature, a stereotype like all other : it's funny cause there is truth to it. But we are by no mean condemned to fulfill our stereotypes (should I remind all engineers here about the stigmas attached to nerd in the real world ?)
Since no one has all six working geniuses, and you're only a genius at two, it takes a collection of people, proportional to the work that needs to be done, of each type.
Eg they are not the best screenwriter, producer or cinematographer but they are the best at getting all of those people to work together.
Middle management is also an admininstrative and managerial function. Even in a best-case scenario, coördinating work among a huge amount of people within enterprises that are mostly run via command-and-control mechanisms and inside politics (as opposed to any self-regulating "market") obviously takes a whole lot of effort. That's really the natural job description for PHB's.
Which wasn’t just about refusal to interact with humanity but to acknowledge that complex multi factor problems can’t be solved as top down heuristics.
They failed because they tried to 'refactor' nature. Stalin’s 'Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature' and Mao’s 'Great Leap Forward' (which applied industrial throughput logic to biology/close-planting) are the ultimate warnings of what happens when you treat complex, probabilistic systems (ecology and humanity) like a closed-loop machine.
Mao wasn’t an engineer by degree, but he was a High Modernist by practice. He believed society could be 'debugged' and 'optimized' through central planning. The result wasn't a more efficient system; it was a total system crash that cost tens of millions of lives.
Current China is a perfect example of 'Success by Engineering'—high-speed rail and ghost cities built on a demographic 'memory leak' (the One Child Policy) that is now crashing the entire stack. This is exactly my point: Engineers optimize for the metric they can see, while ignoring the high-dimensional chaos that actually sustains life.
instead, the most engineers corresponds with some time after the mass death. an alternative explanation would be that they started with non-engineers wanting to enforce high modernism and it didnt work, and then they switched to engineers and it did
“line management” is the term I am familiar with
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
Why not just fire the incompetent employee? Isn't this obvious?
>The Peter Principle holds that people are promoted until they prove incompetent in their role, and then they remain there; competence is rewarded with promotion and incompetence is rewarded with the status quo.
>The Dilbert Principle, with more of a knowledge-worker focus, rings true to those of us who have seen terrible programmers promoted to project managers. It states that bad employees are promoted into management to prevent them from doing damage with their incompetence.
>The Gervais Principle gives a lot more credit to those at the very top (which, in my opinion, makes it far more accurate in its reasoning about corporate leadership); it says that the sociopaths that run the organization knowingly over-promote dedicated but relatively inept people into middle management [and this is done so execs can use them as canon fodder, buffer in interaction, and and avoid having their own jobs threatened]
Smart, moral people have practically a compulsion to improve things, or at least call out idiocy.
I would also add the need for an actual reason to promote the PHB, and I would argue that one quantifiable way upper management can try to argue for a promotion of the PHB is how "hard they work" (regardless if they achieve results or not). Putting in many, many hours also help promote PHBs who will defer to authority.
It also helps explain the phenomenon where the manager class becomes soulless. Institutions that focus on preserving their own power rather than creating value will promote people (at least to middle management) who are willing to put their nose to the grindstone, sacrifice their health and relationship, producing nothing of value, all to walk on some concept of a career treadmill faster.
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
A transcendent theory past both is Komoroske's "Coordination Headwinds"
So to be lazy you start posturing, selling people how great you and your project is. The more projects you have under you, the higher the chance of something very successful too.
It works, suddenly they can work even less and get promoted.
Ofc this is horrible for the company, having the worst people doing the most “internal sales for positioning”. This also creates a giant middle management layer.
I wouldn’t say they are dumb, they just noticed that great work has no correlation with performance. What does have a correlation is how you act and speak. The All-In Chamaths of the world (not saying he is dumb, he isnt, but damn if boosting isn’t everything for him).
This is why Manifesting, was so popular for the management layer, suddenly it wasnt “being untruthful” it was “manifesting into existence”.
>For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.
A+, no notes
Adams used to tell people the secret to success was being in the top 25% at multiple things - he could draw and he could make corporate jokes, but he was not exceptional in either of those things. It's not really a pot shot, more of a tribute. He's still saying Adams was just below Leonardo da Vinci.
if you read the piece he touches on this
The only thing I can possibly see is Adams writing "the reader is supposed to be looking for flaws" but it's also clear that Adams is very interested in hearing people's reactions and responses to his work, which he (obviously) can't do any more.
Source: have been on the receiving end of a Scott Adams rage
I don’t know anything about Scott Alexander, but even well before Adams had cancer, there was a thread on Something Awful making fun of all the stupid weird shit Adams would say.
Why? Must every obituary be a hagiography?
Adams got plenty of criticism while alive and had plenty of chance to defend himself. He doesn't get a heckler's veto on the living. We are entitled to tell the truth about the dead to ensure the accuracy of their memory.
Of course Alexander, or anyone, has the right to be critical. It's just cowardly to wait till he's dead when he isn't able to refute any of the points (or even to absorb them and say, yea, he's right about this, I'm going to try doing better).
Of course it was an obituary. It did recall facts of his life. There is no rule requiring obituaries to be positive or published in mainstream, dead-tree newspapers. There is a long historical tradition of heavily opinionated obituaries. Here's a great example about Margaret Thatcher [1].
If we can set aside your nit-picking about the word "obituary," I still don't understand your position that it's somehow "cowardly" to criticize dead people. As I've already pointed out, Adams got lots of criticism while alive and the timing of Alexander's article certainly isn't motivated by cowardice. To say only kind things of the dead is to be dishonest. We owe it to ourselves to not sugarcoat the past. Or do you think that a history book that accurately recounts Joseph Stalin's rule of the Soviet Union is "cowardly"?
[1] https://socialistworker.co.uk/news/margaret-thatcher-a-bruta...
It's cowardly to go to a restaurant, smile, eat your meal, say nothing, and then decide not to leave a tip because you thought the service sucked - without ever speaking up or allowing the restaurant to fix the problem. Its just as lame to leave a 1-star review because you perecived the food to be awful without mentioning it and giving the kitchen a chance to prepare the food in a manner you'd like.
And to respond to your initial confusion, an obituary is about the dead person. This essay is about Alexander, his interpretation of Adams' work and how Adams' work affected his life.
Is this an obituary? I think we'd both agree it is not. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1157241415688...
You seem to frame many more things in terms of "coward[ice]" than I would. I'd describe the scenario above as rude but not "cowardly" and it wouldn't occur to me to frame it that way or think of it in those terms.
In the real world, in that scenario, I would leave a tip because I know how servers get paid. If this is a restaurant I've never been to before, I'm not going to speak up about it because I just don't really care very much. Not my problem.
It's also sort of hard for me to imagine hypothetically a restaurant where the "service sucked": it's not an experience I've ever had and I don't have much in the way of expectations about restaurant service. Just get me seated reasonably quickly (or tell me that you won't be able to), give me a menu, take my order, bring the food, bring the check. It's not a high bar.
"Its just as lame to leave a 1-star review because you perecived the food to be awful without mentioning it and giving the kitchen a chance to prepare the food in a manner you'd like."
Again, I can't really imagine this scenario. It's one thing, I guess, if there's something objectively wrong with the food. I remember, for example, once being served a steak marinated in whiskey that I had definitely not ordered, and I sent that back. To me, it was pretty much inedible, although I guess if someone didn't like it, it wouldn't be on the menu.
But if the food is just not very good? Ehh, I don't have time to fuss over that. I'm not gonna leave a one-star review because I don't leave reviews. I'm probably just not coming back.
All this strikes me as pretty normal, and definitely not something that can be usefully framed in terms of "cowardice." I mean, if it's "cowardly" to not complain about poor service right then and there, is it "brave" to do so? That characterization seems sort of absurd.
I don’t like Hitler, I think he was a bad person, but he’s also dead. Is it cowardly to insult him? You might argue that he died before I was born so it’s different but these kinds of dividers are getting kind of arbitrary at that point.
Just because someone dies should not make them immune to being insulted. Scott Adams is someone I have a complicated relationship with myself, but ultimately he said a lot of stupid, problematic shit. I was happy to insult him and make fun of him while he was still alive. I will also make fun of him and insult him while he’s dead.
I don’t know anything about Alexander but I don’t think it’s cowardly at all.
It's only here in the past few days that I have ever heard this particular view: that it's somehow "cowardly" or uncouth or otherwise inappropriate to speak critically of someone who has died because being dead, they are unable to respond.
I am genuinely curious where this idea came from. I've heard "don't speak ill of the dead" all my (by now, getting to be pretty long) life but I never heard this rationale for it except here in threads related to this guy.
I agree that it would be inappropriate to, say, attend someone's funeral and walk around saying you know, in a lot of ways, this guy was a real asshole.
But to claim it as some kind of general principle, with that rationale? That is... deeply weird, or at least it strikes me that way. How on earth could anyone ever discuss any historical figure while abiding by this rule?
Or on a much smaller scale, imagine a family with an abusive member who dies. Are the remaining members never to speak of the ways they were affected by that person? That's crazy.
People are who they are, live the lives they live, and do the things they do. Most people are better than the worst thing they ever did and worse than the best thing they ever did. There's nothing wrong with assessing that fully after they die.
But it's the "because they can't respond" rationale that surprises me. I had no idea that rationale even existed, let alone seems (at least here, with respect to this guy) to be somewhat widespread.
Were you caught off-guard when Scott Alexander wrote, of his own essay, I previously felt bad for writing this essay after Adams’ death; it seems kind of unsporting to disagree with someone who can’t respond.?
I think it boils down to the idea of "if you have something to say, say it to my face"
Abuse is an outlier, especially within a family, it is accompanied by complex, ongoing issues with trauma and possible retribution and isolation. It is perfectly normal that people would choose not to speak out while their abuser is alive. It's the reason why sexual abuse and DV victims are often granted anonymity as witnesses or accusers in criminal cases, which isn't allowed in normal situations.
That could be but seems a little unlikely. For now, I'm sticking with what I know, which is that I have heard this idea expressed in exactly one context: people who seem to be fans of the Dilbert guy on Hacker News.
Maybe this is really a widespread, commonly-held view in the broader American culture that I somehow never heard of my entire life. Like I say, could be, but seems unlikely.
What seems more likely is that it's a somewhat common view in some subculture that I'm not familiar with but that is over-represented on HN for some reason.
Maybe I'll encounter it in other contexts also as time goes by, I don't know.
In no way was Scott Alexander dancing on the man's grave, in fact he spends a considerable portion of the article going over the positive influence Scott had on his life, despite not endorsing his politics and being dubious of his self-help methods.
I disagree, for me, the most objectionable parts were subjective evaluations of Adams' last chapter of life, which come rather late in the article:
The man who had dreamed all his life of being respected for something other than cartooning had finally made it.
Obviously, it destroyed him.
and later, Adams was willing to sacrifice everything for the right to say “It’s Okay To Be White”
Who is Alexander to say he was destroyed, or sacrificed anything? Yes, it is factual that Dilbert was removed from newspapers and Adams' income probably dropped 99%. But Adams was already a senior citizen who had millions of dollars and no children. I doubt he cared about the money any more. Adams probably also lost a huge number of fans. But who cares? Those fans were at arms length at best. He found (or created) a community of people he could interact with daily who deeply, deeply admired him. He "found his tribe." I can't speak for you, or for most celebrities, as I've never been one, but I'd probably feel more satisfied having a few dozen super-close friends who I admire back and with whom I'm engaged in a two-way discourse than millions of anonymous admirers that I've never met and don't know anything about.
Adams was not entirely stupid. He knew that his comic strip would be in jeopardy if he made comments about black people, and he did it anyway. He made a calculation and proceeded. It probably isn't the same decision that most people, including Alexander, would have made, but that doesn't mean it "destroyed him" or even that it was a sacrifice. He shed all the "admirers" and distant "fans" and found out who his true allies were. Far fewer, yes, but now he knew those who stood by him were aligned. Especially later in life when you have less time and patience for fighting, for nonsense, for explaining things over and over, it seems like a win.
Adams is easy and fun to mock - as is everyone who lives their life uniquely and unapologetically. I’ve had a good time psychoanalyzing him, but everyone does whatever they do for psychological reasons, and some people end up doing good.
Though I can’t endorse either Adams’ politics or his persuasive methods, everything is a combination of itself and an attempt to build a community. And whatever the value of his ideas, the community seems real and loving.
> I previously felt bad for writing this essay after Adams’ death; it seems kind of unsporting to disagree with someone who can’t respond. These paragraphs cured me of my misgivings: after his death is by far the best time to disagree with Scott Adams.
Also I don't think this is a slander article only published after death so no one can answer. If anything I see this as a beautiful article from someone who (used to?) love him and it raises his image in my (not really cared about it before) mind.
b) yes he tries to make an excuse for "curing his misgivings" and ignoring his initial doubt but it's an awful one. Can you succinctly describe what it is about the quoted paragraphs that would indicate "after his death is the best time to disagree"?
I think you also have to mention along his talent stack, all his failed business ideas. He really seemed to give his ideas a shot even if they didn't make much sense. I don't think most people would even pursue the Dilbert idea.
I found the Dilbert principle book in my parents downstairs cloakroom (wedged between magazines and other generic bathroom reading material).
At a superficial level I just read the comic strips in the book and laughed, I thought to myself - haha look at those poor corporate workers, that won't happen to me.
In a way it didn't happen to me vis-a-vis cubicles, suits and water cooler gossip, TPS reports etc.
However, in other ways it did happen to me, the frustrations of working with incompetent people, working in teams who brainwash themselves that they are making something useful or being productive, hilarious executive decisions made without any scientific or rational thought. (startup - https://youtu.be/iwan0xJ_irU)
I still like to add Dilbert comic strips to closing slides in presentations, my go to one is this, when we are discussing new technologies to use.
https://tenor.com/nJfQSXLP8am.gif
We are in the Dilbert universe, it just keeps changing
p.s. if anyone is looking for Saturday TV binge material, all of the Dilbert TV show is on Youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7dgUq5Qe4
Still even half-height cubicle desks tended to give you a good sense of "your space" relative to the open concept rows of tables/flat desks.
Currently I go to the office once a week, where I sit at a tiny mobile desk pressed against the side of someone else's cubicle. I'm almost "in" a walkway. Can't imagine how that interferes with focus!
I also don’t like WFH, I wonder if people who like open plans also like RTO
I will never support forcing RTO on people who prefer WFH, nor the opposite (unless dire circumstances mandate it, like a pandemic or other natural disaster).
I can tolerate open offices, but prefer plans with private spaces which make it easier to go into and maintain full focus mode.
I've never done pair programming, but I imagine I would like it, if me and my colleague use my computer (set up how I like it, Dvorak layout and everything) for my part of the programming and we switch to my colleague's computer when it's their turn.
It suits people that coffee badge and serves as a way to scan who actually came in on a "required" office day.
Both are signs of dysfunction.
Sounds like, oddly enough, eighteenth century London when coffee houses provided venues for business transactions. People (ok men of the right class) toddled around visiting various offices and patronising coffee houses. Everyone knew the players. [2][3]
I think this might be a good development. Meet to drink beverage and achieve 'common understanding' in the sense of the Royal Navy. Then disperse to various private locations to actually carry out the tasks. Would suit a '15 minute' city layout very well.
[1] https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1864443/buzz-phra...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...
[3] https://www.layersoflondon.org/map/records/virginia-and-balt...
I am interrupted, and when I am is generally somebody giving me a useful quick update or an informal greeting from an office buddy when they notice I make welcoming eye contact.
I don't think I ever felt a lack of privacy in the office or expected it in any way? I wonder what kind of privacy I would need that the restroom doesn't cover, I'm sure there are some instances since it's been called out.
You're not working with enough people or they're handling sensitive matters elsewhere per policy.
I know people fantasize about these “random conversations” leading to innovations from overhearing, but that hasn’t been my experience at all; instead because it’s so distracting a lot of people would just wear headphones all day.
I would so prefer an office. Ideally something that allows me to play music at a reasonable volume without headphones, use my mechanical keyboard, and have my own desk that I am not neighboring up against someone.
As it stands I work from home so I actually have that, which is why I am dreading the eventual RTO. If I could get my own dedicated office at a company, I think I would have way less desire to WFH.
But the bigger reason it's useful is to get facetime with the decision makers and the folks adjacent to the decision makers who might think of you when opportunities arise.
Full walls, with a door: high status
Scott Adams was basically a classic Sophist, believing that rhetoric was the only thing worth cultivating. Nobody special; snake oil salesmen are up there with prostitutes and mercenaries in oldness of profession.
I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.
I quit that job and started freelancing. Not only because of those comics, but at least they didn't give me any doubts about that endeavour.
What I learned: engineering skills give you power, but it's not the only thing you can be nerdy at.
You can be nerdy about anything.
It just happens to be that software engineering is something that people with much money are willing to pay for.
Just imagine you're history nerd. Not much options to profit quickly from that.
Same goes the other direction. If you happen to really like financial markets and math, you might find ways to make even more money with less work than an engineer.
Employee happiness and team success is essentially random. More accurately: you can go to two “identical” companies directly competing in the same industry at the same scale and they can still be wildly different internally. One can be a depressing march to retirement and death, the other a place where people literally(!) sing with joy in the corridors.
Everything is likely to also be totally different: procedures (or lack thereof), policy, tools, training, etc…
Despite this, all organisations above a certain size are filled with people that are certain that their way is the only way things are done. They’ll argue until they’re blue in the face that nothing else could possibly work… with someone who was at their totally different competitor last week and saw that in fact a different approach is massively superior.
This variability is greatest for small scale workplace practices as typically decided by a “pointy haired boss” (PHB).
They also tend to be most convinced of their own methods, and the most resistant to change.
As clues it is the case: 1) Adams came up with very stupid easily proven wrong physics theories and still was convinced it was correct, which is not what a clever will do, 2) as said in other comment here, some people who identifies themselves as "clever like Adams" were also incapable to get their head around the fact that their own boss was displaying dilbert comics, as if they were not clever enough to understand that the manager see themselves as "dilbert" the same way they do.
Anyone who identifies as a rationalist is immediately suspect. The name itself is a bad joke. "Ah yes, let me name my philosophy 'obviously correctism'."
one is, "is there a rational description of the universe, the world, humanity, etc.". Some people think there isn't, but I would like to think that the universe does conform to some rational system.
the other, and important one is, "do humans have the capability to acquire and fully model this rational system in their own minds" and I don't think that's a given. the human brain is just an artifact of an evolutionary system that only implies that its owners can survive and persist on the earth as it happens to exist in the current 50K year period it occurs in. It's not clear that humans have even slight ability to be perfectly rational analytic engines, as opposed to unique animals responding to desires and fears. this is why it's so silly when "rationalists" try to appear as so above all the other lowly humans, as though escaping human nature is even an option.
not at all
> "Perfect rationality" sounds like "perfect knowledge", it's a mind-boggling concept belonging to a such a far distant future that we'll probably revise the concept away before we get anywhere near it.
my statement refers to a general vibe from people who call themselves "rationalists" are going on the assumption that they are rational, while everyone else is not. Which is ridiculous. everyone "tries" to be rational. of course everyone should "try" to be rational. That's what everyone is doing most of time regardless of how poorly we judge their success.
> Being slightly more rational is a practical goal, unless you're saying human nature won't allow even that much.
Everyone should be "slightly more rational". The rationalists state that they *are* more rational, and then they go on to have fixations on such "rational" things like proving that "race" is real and determines intelligence. Totally missing what their brains are actually doing since they are so "rational".
Other areas of human experience reveal the limits of rationality. In romantic love, for example, reason and rationality are rarely pathways to what is "obviously correct".
Rationality is one mode of human experience among many and has value in some areas more than others.
"Empiricism" is a term for philosophical movements (epitomized in early modern British Empiricists like Hume) that emphasized that truths are learned not by reasoning, but by learning from experience. So the matter is not "is rationality good?" but more: what is rationality or reason operating upon? Sense experiences? Or purely _a priori_, conceptual, or formal structures? The uncharitable gloss on rationalism is that rationalists hold that every substantive philosophical question can be answered while sitting in your armchair and thinking really hard.
For what it's worth, the modern rationalists are pro-empiricism with Yudkowsky including it as one of the 12 core virtues of rationality.
https://parksandrecreation.fandom.com/wiki/The_Reasonabilist...
They are basically outing themselves as either having little curiosity, or as having had very limited opportunity to learn... Still if they expound on it, the curiosity deficit is the most likely explanation.
That said, I was surrounded by rationalists in my younger years by pure coincidence and spent some time following the blog links they sent and later reading the occasional LessWrong thread or SSC comment section that they were discussing each day in chat.
It's pretty easy to see that the movement attracts a lot of people who have made up their minds but use rationalisim as a way to build a scaffold underneath their pre-determined beliefs in a way that sounds correct. The blogs and forums celebrate writing of a certain style that feels correct and truthy. Anyone who learns how to write in that style can get their ideas accepted as fact in rationalist communities by writing that way. You can find examples throughout history where even the heroes of the rationalist movement have written illogical things, but they've done it in the correct way that makes it appear to be "first principals" thinking with a "steelmanning" of the other side along with appropriate prose to sound correct to rationalists.
I think it's very likely that people who can plausibly be considered "heroes of the rationalist movement" have written illogical things. But I don't know which specific people and which specific things you mean by that, so I don't know if I think you in particular are correct in your judgement or not.
Using first principles thinking and steelmanning are just rhetorical techniques for persuasive thinking and writing. Even people who are unfamiliar with those particular pieces of terminology do them.
Intelligent people are sometimes very, very weird. Grothendieck and Gödel come to mind as well. It is not smart to die of hunger because your wife is hospitalized, every lizard knows better than that; but that is precisely how Gödel met his end.
I think that's a bit harsh? Goethe's color theory is taught in every art school to this day.
Goethe and science is an interesting one. In some sense he may have been a Newton of another, separate (and in some sense orthogonal) approach towards a science of nature [0]. One that takes primarily an intuitive/integrative/phenomenological approach to the world, rather than a mathematical/analytical. Somewhat analogous to continental vs analytical philosophy (or German vs British, if you want to be reductive).
The latter showed its strength once the industrial revolution rolled around and it gave the tools to understand and design ever more impressive technology, with the Goethean approach becoming ever more fringe. And after WW1+2 the cultural sphere that nurtured it was basically done.
"People are idiots.
Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot. That's the central premise of this scholarly work. I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time."
Doesn't help you, sure. I'm not a fan, as a matter of taste and am self-aware enough to recognize it. The near-reliable output of his creativity and the pervasive notions, distilled and distributed to the culture are proof enough for history.
There are infinitely many things to know, but not all of them are important. Knowing finitely many things (which is all we can do) can still keep us alive and well, at least for a while. And we can know some of those finitely many things increasingly well, if never perfectly.
Just as an example, if you manage say your personal finances pretty well, your health pretty well, perform any civic duties you might have, maybe do some social good or social work or charity etc., if your relationships are reasonably agreeable, respectful and pleasant, etc. and if you have a good amount of joy or peace or satisfaction, etc. in your life, then I wouldn't call you an idiot. This is not an impossible ask to know infinitely many things or infinitely precisely.
And we can learn it over 30 or 40 years, or more, prioritizing the most essential first.
Moreover, I'd say whether you can be called an idiot is context-dependent. If you get a typical (non-idiot) person, and put him in a highly specific job (which he isn't qualified for), say manager of inspectors of nuclear power plants, then he might behave like an idiot; in this case the best ability is probably the meta-ability to recognize one's own limitations and refuse work you're not qualified enough for.
Like, any person (literally any person) can theoretically be put in a situation that he might do significant harm or something stupid, this just means we have to work in contexts and understand and do well within said context; we could only legitimately be called idiots while failing badly or unethically within a canonical chosen context.
I really just don't think it's generally a good idea to go around calling ourselves (or anyone else) idiots. Too broad, derogatory, and tries to put an irremovable label on a person, which as I've explained, almost never deserves such an absolute classification.
> For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything
This does not mean "bad at everything else", this is explicitly "not bad at everything else, even slightly better than usual".
It talks about his first new business attempt with the Dilberito, which was terrible. It quotes, it "could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste".
Then he tries to run a restaurant, which he is also bad at. Even Adams realizes he is bad at it. "After every workday, Adams and the waiters get together and laugh long into the night together about how bad a boss Adams is!"
Then he tries his hand at writing philosophy, which he is also terrible at. The article spends two long sections describing just how bad his books "God's Debris" and "The Religion War" are.
Then the article describes how Adams claimed himself to be a master hypnotist/manipulator in the most delusional and cringey way possible.
Then the article talks about Adams' many terrible political predictions. E.g. "His most famous howler was that if Biden won in 2020, Republicans “would be hunted” and his Republican readers would “most likely be dead within a year”."
Then there's how he responded to liberals beginning to see him as an enemy when he was predicting Trump would win the 2016 election: "As he had done so many other times during his life, he resolved the conflict in the dumbest, cringiest, and most public way possible: a June 2016 blog post announcing that he was endorsing Hillary Clinton, for his own safety, because he suspected he would be targeted for assassination if he didn’t"
Then in 2023, Adams stupidly gets himself cancelled.
> There are plenty of quotes like this one
No, there aren't. While the article/eulogy says a number of positive things about Adams, that very faint praise at the beginning is the only place the article describes him as being even only-slightly-above-average intelligence at anything other than Dilbert.
What it does mention several times is that Adams thought himself cleverer than everyone else. For example (describing Adams' thoughts):
> Thesis: I am cleverer than everyone else.
> Antithesis: I always lose to the Pointy-Haired Boss.
> Synthesis: I was trying to be rational. But most people are irrational sheep; they can be directed only by charismatic manipulators who play on their biases, not by rational persuasion. But now I’m back to being cleverer than everyone else, because I noticed this. Also, I should become a charismatic manipulator.
But the tone here is mocking Adams and not endorsing his view.
The second clue is about the fact that the "smart thing" he came up with is quite simplistic.
Makes me wonder if Adams was a frequent drug user.
"I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books."
There’s a fan theory that Garfield hates Mondays because he just spent two days with Jon and now Jon is leaving him alone again.
It was the comic too.
I do wonder if Scott Alexander means this in the sense that he watched a few shows because Adams had died, or if there were the first episodes of Adams' shows he had watched. Dying does reveal some interesting things about a person - in Adams' case he was doing his live podcasts right up to about the end. I tuned in to one out of ghoulish interest and he seemed to be the sickest person I'd ever seen. He was clearly doing that show because he loved it.
If he had his time over, he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White because of the disastrous impact on the Dilbert empire, but I do think Alexander has fundamentally misread what Adams believed it meant to be successful. He wasn't that motivated by commercial success since at least the 2010s, although he had achieved it. He seemed a lot more interested in getting ideas out there and making a difference to people's lives.
Alternatively, he achieved enough commercial success and then was satisfied.
Part of me knew a comment like this would show up. The trend itself is greater than Dilbert and not new, but it has certainly become more pronounced. What is interesting that while 'Dilbert empire' fell in the process for not accepting white inferiority, full blown resistance marketing market is taking ( or maybe has taken already ) shape fueled largely by highly polarized populace.
I am not looking forward to it, because it requires keeping abreast of currents I do not care for or even understand.
I must be daft. There must be some cultural context I'm missing so that I don't even understand what you're saying. Accepting white inferiority? Full blown resistance marketing market? Huh?
Because if you reject white supremacy, obviously the implication is white inferiority…
White supremacists generally deny that they have societal advantages and frame any attempt to give minorities equal opportunities as a plot to subjugate whites.
> Full blown resistance marketing market?
MAGA and the rise of neonazis.
White people are not a demographic majority in many places (including where I personally live), and yes most ostensible attempts to give nonwhites equal opportunities to whites wind up as blatant anti-white discrimination. White people are morally justified in politically resisting this even if leftists call white people who do so white supremacists or neonazis.
Off-topic: English is not classical formal logic. NOT("It's okay to be white") does not have the same meaning as "It's not okay to be white": it merely means "I reject what is communicated by the phrase 'It's okay to be white'". This observation fits quite well into any analysis of slogans: if he hadn't committed to the uncharitable misinterpretation, I'd expect him to write about this (though I'm not so sure he'd have used this particular example).
This is why every level of worker can see themselves as Dilbert and their superiors as the management who "don't get it." I bet there are even C-suite execs who identify with Dilbert and see their CEO or board of directors as PHBs incarnate. This was part of the appeal of the strip before it went off the deep end; almost everyone taking orders believes they know better than at least one of the people telling them what to do.
I'm surprised I don't see this acknowledged more.
When you start your own business, though, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Adams, Musk, Andreesen, Stephen Miller, Chappelle, Maher. They're everywhere.
With that said it's not exclusively a Gen-X thing to go from counterculture to establishment while preserving the same root personality driver of narcissism and selfishness. It's obviously recognizable as the trajectory of the Woodstock generation as well.
Now you're the institution
How's it feel to be the man?
It's no fun to be the man."
- Ben Folds, "The Ascent of Stan" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caCuRqedslY
And Eminem tone policing what people say because it might be hurtful.
The funniest thing I’ve read all week. Was anyone here lucky enough to eat one?
Idk man, imagine quitting HP in the 70s to make your own HP or IBM. Inconceivable
I think the lack of friends (heightened by his Titanic wealth) contributed to his isolation. Like how we all kinda got out of practice talking with people during COVID isolation. That then kinda spiraled him into algorithmicly fed nonsense as he didn't have anyone he could trust to tell him he was wrong. Just sycophants and fans and golddiggers.
Cicero is still right, a friend is the best thing to have, no question.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/cicero-on-friendship-de-a...
Eulogies are such good reading for those of us left here. They really drive the points home. Life isn't the grind, it's a journey. We're all just here for each other
At least in the technology sector, work has changed a lot in some regards since the days when Scott Adams was in the workforce.
No suits and ties needed, show up in a tee-shirt and denim jeans. Flexible work hours, and work-from-home. Top 2% salary. Free food. Clean, well-maintained, offices. No request for annual leave ever denied. Pick the work you like from the top of the backlog. No bosses sending interns to get them coffee or any nonsense like that. Go ahead, play some foosball or table tennis on the clock. Is two screens enough, you can have a third if it'd boost your productivity?
And senior leaders try to project the image of "Stanford CS PhD dropout" rather than "Wall Street Harvard MBA" - they're "just like us", look at that hoodie he's wearing.
The world of Dilbert, meanwhile, is trapped in amber. And the wry insights that fax machines are hard to use don't really land like they did in 1995.
There is still plenty of need for Dilbert strips in the workforce.
Aside from that, all the things you list are perks and benefits. The same old problems with BS budgets, hallucinated requirements, convoluted bureaucracy (seen at the tech giants), and mismanagement are evergreen problems even in the software industry.
My understanding from reading the bible while I was still christian is pretty much, that in the older parts, god was indeed not almighty. He was just the god of a desert tribe. And of course a stronger god than the other gods of the inferior tribes ... slowly evolving to obviously the strongest god up to the point that there was only one god. And there can be only one god if he is almighty. Or, so powerful that the difference does not matter anymore.
Anyway, the logical fallacy of the "almighty" thing was the main thing for me to give up on the concept. I cannot accept a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven), eternal damnation (or salvation) for being who I was made to be, influenced by an environment also totally controlled by the creator.
> a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven) ... for being who I was made to be ... by the creator.
Why do you think it needs to be an explicit action from the creator as opposed to being just the result of your own actions? When someone loves you, but you really don't love him/her back, that's quite the hell for you. Compared to the state of this being heaven to you, i.e. you do love back, there is no difference in intention or action from the other persons side.
There is no such thing as "my own actions" if I was created by an allmighty god. And the environment likewise. Then every action would be determined by the allmighty.
It all would be just gods playground to test and reward and punish his creations for being how he (or she or it) created them.
[0] ... I know that that is an translation error.
I know, but those concepts are at odds to me with the core concept of allmighty all knowing creator - but sure, anything almighty can also solve any paradoxon - it still does not make sense to me, nor do I see reason to follow that logic.
When the universe is deterministic, anything you think, is not because you recognized something to be truthful, or even reflects the truth at all, it all happens simply because that is what the deterministic rules make you think. So what you think does not imply anything about the universe at all.
That means that you can't think the universe to be deterministic and be actually right about it. Because if it would be, you couldn't be right about anything. Also along the way you throw away the post-enlightenment concept of science, because it assumes the existence of Laplace's Demon and the scientist having a share in it. Thus, when you believe in determinism, you actually place science at the same level as wizardry.
I really don't follow here. That demon was a simple thought experiment. Nobody ever assumed it is real. If it would be real, a all knowing entitiy, it would be godlike. But why should any scientist assume such a thing can exist for real?
If there is total determinism, there is no guarantee, that measurement tape next to an object for one person shows 10cm, for a second 9.3cm and a third sees a unicorn.
Thanks to Stephen Smale's Horseshoe map, Lorenz's Butterfly, the limits of instrumentation and Heisenberg's uncertainty the notion of perfect knowledge and strict determinism are out the window even for simple fully isolated systems that show chaotic behaviour with a few weights on coupled axles.
Even with all the datacentres on earth and in space there'll never be a precise and accurate forecast of a vortex in a stream.
Yes, but the also assume that the observer isn't part of that system, which only holds true if there is free will.
On the other hand, if God really does just determine everything, you basically get pantheism where everything is an immediate and direct expression of “God.” That sounds like atheism with steps.
Yes, or mysticism. We all exist within the mind of god. I do like those concepts more to be honest, but is indeed a quite different concept from the creator up in the clouds ruling the universe.
> the creator up in the clouds ruling the universe
is what e.g. the olympic gods were, i.e. something that Christianity decries as idols, doesn't accept to be the truth and intends to overcome.
But other people certainly do. And it is not just pictures, the lords prayer literally starts with "Our Father in heaven.."
Yep. It however does not say "Our Father in sky". In English you literally have that distinction.
If you begin personifying everything, if you represent spiritual/invisible concepts in concrete, human terms, if you reduce transcendent concepts to the pragmatic and the visible product of a sculptor's hands, people can get really confused. I promise.
People can lose sight of that transcendence and eternal meaning behind the symbols. They can get really wrapped up in the physical manifestations. This is also the central problem with the autism spectrum and such.
Aniconism attempts to free the mind from these limiting images. If you're Muslim and you contemplate a building with nothing but artistic words and text scrawled all over it, you obtain a far different result than contemplating a richly symbolic statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Many people have the intellect and the insight to go beyond that concrete imagery, but not all.
“Do not imagine God according to the lust of your eyes. If you do, you will create for yourself a huge form or an incalculable magnitude which (like the light which you see with your bodily eyes) extends in every direction. Your imagination lets it fill realm after realm of space, all the vastness you can conceive of. Or maybe you picture for yourself a venerable-looking old man. Do not imagine any of these things. If you would see God, here is what you should imagine: God is love“
Thank you Scott A.
Based on this article, somehow I really doubt that.
This blog fits that format: It starts with praise for the person, some signaling about being their biggest fan, and then gets into the topic he actually wanted to write about.
When articles started coming out about the author of this blog and some of his problematic past with reactionaries and race science, the common tactic to dismiss any criticisms was to claim they were "hit pieces" and therefore could be ignored. In this community, you have to write in both-sides style and use "steelmanning" to pretend to support something before you're allowed to criticize it.
"I loved Scott Adams. Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself."
You seem to think the only thing that matters is Adams' engagement with right-wing politics and race; all else is fluff that OP only writes under duress, to not get canceled by the rationalist community's weird norms.
That is a complex hypothesis; here's a simpler one: OP is writing his honest thoughts. He sees Adams as a complicated, flawed person who should not be wholly defined by their worst comments or bad decisions. Adams isn't an evil villain worthy of dismissal and contempt. He's more of a tragic anti-hero who made bad choices -- but very understandable ones if you know his character sheet, backstory, the times he lived in, and the immediate pressures. Or at least that's the way OP views him.
It's a careful, nuanced article. It's fine with me if you don't agree with the author's viewpoint! But I do object to your accusations of disingenuousness for what appears to me to be a sincere, heartfelt eulogy.
Were you perhaps hoping for an article along the lines of, "He said that about black people, he is the enemy, when we think about him we should have nothing but fury and contempt in our hearts, and the righteous should rejoice in his death"? Are you thinking "Of course every community has cancel-cudgel-wielding norm enforcers that everybody carefully censors their words to avoid, this community must just have different censorship rules than the ones I'm used to, because the possibility of a community that doesn't immediately ostracize people for wrongthink is absurd"?
If so, I...was going to make a snarky comment about how this blog and the rationalist community are not places for you, but actually, I just feel bad for you; the politics of the 2010s and 2020s has traumatized [1] you and a lot of other people. You need to spend more time in places like this, not less -- communities where people try to keep their discourse on higher rungs [2] [3].
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-traum...
https://gist.github.com/segyges/f540a3dadeb42f49c0b0ab4244e4...
(To be honest I would love for someone to write an essay engaging with Alexander in something of the spirit he engages with Adams here; he writes both good things, including IMHO this eulogy, but also a certain amount of garbage, and I do not claim to be wise enough to always distinguish on my own.)
One thing I think people make the mistake of is taking a look at a person as they are now and then retroactively applying that to their past persona. I think there is something more to learn from the idea that we all can change substantially over time, even without major life incidents. The mind is very complex and sometimes it can go down some dark paths.
Out of curiosity I searched this quote in Google, DDG and Claude and none of them found any source. Anyone know who the other self-hating nerd writer is? Sounds a bit like John Donne.
(Edited on reading more closely) Or possibly some fan work, since this "Extended Rubaiyat" isn't entirely from Omar Khayyam. So this doesn't pin down the provenance of the phrase.
But Gemini 3.0 knew what it was, and it is from Omar Khayyám like the sibling commenter said, but from the little-known E. H. Whinfield translation (1883) rather than the more famous Fitzgerald one:
—-
221. (395.)
Such as I am, Thy power created me,
Thy care hath kept me for a century!
Through all these years I make experiment,
If my sins or Thy mercy greater be.
——-
Link to the actual page in Google books:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NN_TAAAAMAAJ&q=Experimen...
What I remember that is notable about Scott Adams is way back he had The Dilbert Blog and it was pioneering in it's early adoption of the internet. Adams wrote his takes and theories back then, too. But he once wrote that he was going to scale those back, because they were not productive: he would lose followers for being controversial. But later something happened with the feedback loop of social media, because he eventually started to court controversy. I do think that the internet sucked him in.
Long before he was trying to be a political figure, criticism of his book resulted in this glorious piece of peak internet forum nonsense in which he responded to criticism by registering an anonymous account to say things like "I hate Adams for his success too" and "he's a certified genius which is hard to hide" until the mods decided to call him out...
https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Educatio...
What I found most interesting about him was around the time Trump was running for president the first time, Adams was one of the first people to point out that Trump was, to use Adams' terms, a "master persuader". No one else at the time seemed to be talking about this and it was fascinating to see a humorist have this take/insight.
And SA was weird as f who made money bye filling a niche.
His political views and other snippets made that quite clear.
And let's be honest just creating cartoons about our corporate capitalistic shit hole was easy enough hit a nerve but more than a chuckle was Dilbert never.
It became cultural because it was printed everywhere and it was fun enough for it's format
Every child is hypomanic, convinced of their own specialness. Even most teenagers still suspect that, if everything went right, they could change the world.
It’s not just nerds. Everyone has to crash into reality. The guitar player who starts a garage band in order to become a rockstar. The varsity athlete who wants to make the big leagues. They all eventually realize, no, I’m mediocre. Even the ones who aren’t mediocre, the ones with some special talent, only have one special talent (let’s say cartooning) and no more.
I don’t know how the musicians and athletes cope. I hear stories about washed-up alcoholic former high school quarterbacks forever telling their girlfriends about how if Coach had only put them in for the last quarter during the big game, things would have gone differently. But since most writers are nerds, it’s the nerds who dominate the discussion, so much so that the whole affair gets dubbed “Former Gifted Kid Syndrome”.
Every nerd who was the smartest kid in their high school goes to an appropriately-ranked college and realizes they’re nothing special. But also, once they go into some specific field they find that intellect, as versatile as it is, can only take them so far. And for someone who was told their whole childhood that they were going to cure cancer (alas, a real quote from my elementary school teacher), it’s a tough pill to swallow.
This sort of false expectation setting and feeling of exceptionalism eventually hits the cold hard reality of the limits of your capability somewhere and that can really break you
Reminds me especially of some people I saw in university who were absolutely brilliant, but so deeply affected by that one mistake they made or limit they had found where they had not expected one
Heck I felt the same, coming to terms with ones limits is a deeply challenging experience even if it is a very humanising one, I wasn't expecting to have that fall into my lap today
There's a few things I enjoy about reading Scott Alexander, he's got some really good takes now and again that in my eyes make reading his essays worth it
-[0]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184503512/its-not-funny-if-...
Just like how Jim Davis stumbled upon a reasonably funny, widely relatable gag that can be repeated for decades with minimal consequences, the success in Dilbert was being the first newspaper comic to live in the topic of corporate bureaucracy.
In case we all forget how newspaper comics work in a digital world of curated content, they are all successful based on broad appeal. Each newspaper has approximately two pages of funny content and each strip has to appeal to a large subset of readers if not all of them.
Family Circus is a perfect example. Dog funny. Reader like dog. Dog funny. Kids say funny thing with dog. Reader has kids and dog.
The topic of “my boss is incompetent” is just as widely appealing as “my cat is lazy and selfish.”
With all that context established we have to acknowledge that Scott Adams was a pretty normal guy with no particularly strong skills.
So as the article points out, when he pivoted his life to other endeavors, his limitations are strikingly apparent.
This is where I start not liking the guy. He had a smarter than thou attitude especially later in life when in reality, he was not himself particularly smart. I would stop short of calling him a narcissist but some vibes are there. He got lucky to be the guy who got a syndication deal at the right time making a specific type of comic. If he was born 20 years later he’d be a nobody, as the comic industry has completely changed.
His craft was largely surpassed by web comic authors with more specific audiences and more intelligent writing.
I agree. I found the style tedious and the length exhausting. I'd occasionally read pieces from the author, and now I expected better. :/
(1) It doesn't give Adams enough credit for his work on WhenHub. I was reading Scott Adams's posts about WhenHub contemporaneously as he worked through the startup's various pivots. He had a really good idea that people would want to see a map with a little live-location icon of where their friends & acquaintances were on the map and he pushed really hard on different ways of getting this idea towards reality. We have this now (in various other social map apps) and he showed good product sense.
(2) It gives Adams too little credit for the sincerity of his views.
> There’s a passage in the intro to one of Adams books where he says that, given how he’s going to blow your mind and totally puncture everything you previously believed, perhaps the work is unsuitable for people above fifty-five, whose brains are comparatively sclerotic and might shatter at the strain. This is how I feel about post-2016 politics. Young people were mostly able to weather the damage. As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
This is not fair. Adams knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what he was getting into for all of 2015-2026. He was an extremely smart guy. We should treat him seriously, not infantilize him. He was not a Nobel Prize winning chemist or Fields Medal winning mathematician coming up with wacky perpeutal-motion machines or cranky Riemann Hypothesis solutions that everyone politely agrees to ignore. His hypnosis stuff and all the rest were genuinely what he really believed -- it's not like Sir Michael Atiyah's Todd function.
Adams was in the prime of his life, he was doing what mattered most to him, and we should take him at his word that he genuinely believed what he said and we should judge what he said on its merits.
(3) I don't really have a disagreement but I am fascinated by the implication in the last 1/3 of the eulogy slatestarcodex view that Scott Adams was trying to establish a guru cult community - in convergent evolution with the sort of thing that the squishy half of TPOT tends to sprout in the East Bay. It's an interesting observation which tells me something about what is going on with Bay Area rationalism, though I don't know quite what.
I thought that many of the things that happened to Adams -- especially his family troubles with his stepson, but also his illness -- were really sad. I'm sorry things didn't turn out differently and grateful for the cartoons.
After reading this, I thought, damn he just described the current administration. Then I kept reading and saw:
<It all led, inexorably, to Trump.>
Yeah(!), I think I'm gonna bookmark that site and reread it a few more times.
It's essentially gallows humor for a world where, for no apparent reason, blithering idiots often seem to be the only people who wield any decision making power.
Thus, the reputation of the most competent gets destroyed, while the village idiot remains as the only one left unscathed.
If he'd stayed apolitical people would have kept clipping his strips and putting them up on cubical walls. Dogbert was not an appealing character. His sharper edge kept the sharp edges of Dilbert and the other engineers more out of one's attention. Then Adams revealed that he believed Dogbert was the one to emulate and tried to prove his theories (and he said black people were scary -- there was that) and he polarized himself. Much of his audience recoiled. He gained new, more ICE-esque followers, and then still more of his audience recoiled.
To his credit he pioneered the PR death spiral later made famous by Kanye and Rowlings. This was not the career capper he was looking for.