> This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something
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.
The open workroom was a relatively short fad pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright. If you look at office buildings before that, they're much more similar to houses and apartments. Lots of rooms connected by hallways, staircases, and atriums. You can imagine the difficulty and expense of lighting a large open space without electricity.
Your manager had a boss, too. She had to deal with the oddities and frustrations of corporate life and expectations, too.
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.
I get that we’re all part of the same system, but I consider Office Space a nihilistic rejection of the entirety of that system. It’s not just “my boss is dumb,” it’s “this whole system is anti-human and dumb, and we’d all be happier working outside with our muscles.”
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.
> but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.
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.
Totally valid that my boss probably didn’t want to be there either, but for context this was circa 2008 Google where “offsite” meant “go spend company money to do something fun.”
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?
Because your manager might have been dealing with something privately, and didn't feel like doing something fun, but had to because the Gods Of Corporate decreed it so.
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.
Don't worry, your use of its not X, it's Y did not trigger the LLM pattern match for me. I think the main reason is that your two clauses are of very disparate lengths. LLMs use its X not Y as a rhetorical device that relies on brevity and punchiness, while your longer quote has the authentic ring of clumsy, human phrasing.
It seems to me that line managers straddle the line somewhat and above that is where it is a really different world. I have started a company and now back to being an IC so been on both sides of it. It's not totally different, but it is a lot.
I've been back and forth between manager and IC, too.
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.
I don't have stats to back it up, but many people claim that Office Space made a lot of people resign their cubicle jobs and this was a sharp effect on its release.
Office Space was released in 1999, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. So, of course office jobs (particularly software jobs) would decrease when that bubble popped.
Shit rolls downhill...and most people just try to keep an eye on where the next turd comes from without bothering to watch where it goes after it's past them.
"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."
Great question. The best team I can name had these things going for them:
- 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.
I think everybody, with few exceptions, is in the system involuntarily. And also you can't say that that you don't want to be in the system. You have to fake it very hard if you want to "win". You have to demonstrate "passion" and such.
My boss refused to allow people to call him boss, for example. He really hated the system.
For those looking for a "successor theory" to the Dilbert Principle, I highly suggest Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle [0].
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)
The Gervais Principle is much more accurate in my experience. One of the important reasons middle management has to be "clueless" to drink the kool-aid and take on more responsibility for minimal extra compensation. The checked out employees of the world know their work is meaningless, but the clueless ascribe to it some greater meaning which makes them trustworthy.
No. A first level manager cannot be middle management. A small company might not have middle management but the first level manager is bottom management.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
Those games operate far more probablistically and high dimensionally than programming and I suspect engineers would rather dismiss them as “dumb” than accept they are simply inferior players in those games.
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.
How very Dilbertian. If one were to compress the above post into a comic, it would star Dilbert wondering why people with towering intellects like Dilbert weren't running the world in the first panel and then humorously demonstrating in subsequent panels Dilbert's disastrous and irreparable lack of understanding of messy human interrelationships and motivations that have to be navigated to not implode as a leader.
Well observed. And seen in tragic relief as the piles of dead in Russia and China during their most technocratic periods run by engineers.
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.
The piles of bodies in China came from Mao and his cultural revolution, and he can hardly be called an engineer. The recent success of China has come when it was run by engineers. And when was Russia ever run by engineers? So I think you have it backwards here.
"Russia was never run by engineers?" That's a massive oversight of 20th-century history. The Soviet Union was the world’s first and most committed technocracy. The GOSPLAN (State Planning Committee) was a literal attempt to run a continent-sized economy as a deterministic engineering problem. By the 70s, the Soviet leadership was more densely packed with engineers than any administration in US history.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's pretty simple: those people are the absolute experts in their field, similar to those top chemists or whatever. That field is societal power systems.
Of course someone who dedicated his time to climbing and understanding power systems will have more power than someone who doesn't.
Sure, but then my question is why we need them. What service do they provide? That’s what I was speculating about. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that they’re pure parasites, since hosts without parasites would then be stronger and would ultimately outcompete.
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.
Managers are here to accommodate the need for cooperation, while compensating for lack of telepathy.
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 ?)
> I don’t mean policing and courts. Those are administrative and managerial functions.
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.
The WIDGET model of "working geniuses" is one possible answer, it does explain a lot of team dynamics in my experience.
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.
You got it backwards. We (which we?) don't need them, they need us. They can't play the games they like without massive resource extraction. If someone continually catches the flu, it doesn't mean they need the flu.
We don’t just use these people we create them. Since ancient Egypt the priest class of every society is employed to apply ritual trauma to psychologically prepare princes for their vocation of restless leadership.
>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.
I was caught off guard by how brutal this article was at points. I don't really follow Scott Alexander much, so I was pleasantly surprised by it. While I don't have the same relationship with Scott Adams... I can see parts of this in my relationship with Kanye.
Pretty easy to take pot shots at a dead guy who lacks the ability to punch back. Especially when the dead guy hosted a daily show and would have been thrilled to have him come on and debate! Why didnt Mr Codex get around to stating his opinion re: Adams for the past 10 years?
Seems like he's just quoting Adams himself. Adams was popular for his self-deprecating humor.
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.
Less about the degree to which Adams was talented (which, as you note, Adams might agree), more about how much his books sucked and the ideas within them were ridiculous, arguing that Adams' claims regarding hypnosis were entirely bogus, and that gaining popularity as Scott Adams the blogger-slash-podcast host (as opposed to "Dilbert guy") "destroyed him."
For what it’s worth, I think a lot of people were pretty happy to shit on Scott Adams for the last decade.
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.
That's fine - the man was certainly not above being criticized, and he had plenty of flaws. Point is, do it while he's alive, don't wait until he's dead (especially when his death was not a surprise)
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.
I actually watched the podcast in question. As I saw it he made a very reasonable and 100% non-racist comment (in the context of the discussion the soundbytes were later taken out of), which related more to the inflammatory, caustic nature of the media narrative on black-white relationships, and whether as a white person it is even fruitful to be engaging in that narrative, if the end outcome is that your engagement will be used out of context to cause even more strife and division by the people pushing this narrative. I.e. you will make more of a difference as a white person by trying to improve the "systems" around you, in a manner that benefits everyone, rather than by engaging in pointless arguments and debates with people who are blinded by a very deliberately promoted agenda.
I very much agree with that point, and have experienced it myself. Ironically, if nothing else, this whole affair and the rush to cancel him and call him racist and disgraced, ultimately proved his very point. Just look at how the links you shared choose to word their posthumous articles.
If you really want an accurate source, just go watch the (entire) podcast. No better source than this. Best case scenario you'll disagree with my take, but now your take is informed rather than misinformed.
And to set the record straight, Adams was the very opposite of racist in my view. He had very nuanced and pragmatic views, including how the best thing the country could do to help black communities should be investing in education across the board, instead of funding and pandering to apologists who inflame the masses but then drain the money from the education system, perpetuating ghetto-like communities.
Long before the racism thing, I remember how grossed out I was by him complaining that he only got to have sex when his girlfriend wanted it, therefore his girlfriend, and women in general, were the "gatekeepers" of sex.
Completing failing to recognize that consent is a two person affair.
Adams took an almost deliberately obtuse interpretation of a single poll and used it to state, explicitly and not ironically, that white people should completely avoid all black people.
Like the author I was fortunate enough to be exposed to Dilbert as a teenager, before I got caught up in the rush of the university-professional-yuppie-industrial-complex.
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.
I haven't seen full height cubicles since my 2006-2011 job.
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!
Power to you but I absolutely hate open offices. They’re often loud and it’s easy to get distracted by random conversations.
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.
I don't find open spaces noisier than cubicles but I am able to easily block out distracting sounds.
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.
I actually think cubicles’ faux privacy might encourage more noise. When I was in cubicles years ago, there were people who would take calls on speakerphone. I’ve never experienced that in an open office space, but it’s hard to know if that’s just because I’ve had more conscientious colleagues in open spaces.
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.
I like being able to work at the office because then I don't have to pay for electricity and internet, although commuting is bad for my ecological footprint.
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.
Cubicles are terrible. Especially the full height ones. They have all the same noisy neighbor problems as open spaces but you’re stuck in a tiny box all day. You get a tiny modicum of privacy but not enough to make up for feeling like you’re stuck in a gray box all day.
I found Dilbert in 2013, when I was working in a dead end dev job in a small software company. Felt nice to see others seem to have the same issues.
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.
I thought the joke for Garfield is that some crazy annoying shit happens to him on Mondays, and as such he uses the same “I hate mondays” that a person might, just for different reasons.
> Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion / hypnosis.”
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 also read Dilbert books years before joining the workforce. Though the framing of the strip is the workplace, it averages out to all the people in one's life who are wrong but have authority. As a rebellious little shit, I could identify with how Dilbert's boss (PHB) was wrong in ways that I recognized in adults around me plus my inability to do anything about it.
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.
This article keeps saying that Adams was more clever than the others.
What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not.
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.
Yes, he was an idiot, but that doesn't contradict that he was smart. In his own words, from The Dilbert Principle book:
"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."
Not sure this really obvious analysis really helps. I've seen a lot of people thinking they are really smart for saying that everyone including them are idiots. Adams made a lot of declarations or actions that shows that he really thought of himself as "able to see what the idiot sheeple were not able to see", and this quote is not out of character at all: "you idiots don't even realise that everyone is an idiot including me".
I don't think white collar tech workers are uniquely predisposed to fascism. Blue collar tradesmen are more likely to be disposed to it and capable of getting their hands dirty.
> What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not.
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'."
I don't really identify with any particular movement, but it's important to note that there are plenty of people who legitimately oppose the core concept of rationalism, the idea that reason should be held above other approaches to knowledge, this being put aside from other criticisms leveled at the group of people that call themselves rationalists. Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.
Rationalism in philosophy is generally contrasted with empiricism. I would say you're a little off in characterizing anti-rationalism as holding rationality per se in low regard. To put it very briefly: the Ancient Greeks set the agenda for Western philosophy, for the most part: what is truth? What is real? What is good and virtuous? Plato and his teacher/character Socrates are the archetype rationalists, who believed that these questions were best answered through careful reasoning. Think of Plato's allegory of the cave: the world of appearances and of common sense is illusory, degenerate, ephemeral. Pure reason, as done by philosophers, was a means of transcendent insight into these questions.
"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.
Well empiricists think knowledge exists in the environment and is absorbed directly through the eyes and ears without interpretation, if we're being uncharitable.
Sure. The idea of raw, uninterpreted "sense data" that the empiricists worked with (well into the 20th century) is pretty clearly bunk. Much of philosophy took a turn towards anti-foundationalism, and rationalism and empiricism are, at least classically, notions of the "foundations" of knowledge. I mean, this is philosophy, it's all pretty ridiculous.
> Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.
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.
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.
Uh-huh. Rationality is open-ended, we're apparently not very good at it and room for improvement is plentiful. However, I can still try to be rational, and approve of rationality.
My apologies. But are you really saying that we're not even able to try to be rational, or to improve? "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. So why present it as a goal? Being slightly more rational is a practical goal, unless you're saying human nature won't allow even that much.
In theory, the name is supposed to imply that they're pursuing rational thinking and philosophies, not that their decisions are the rational choice.
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.
It's stupid, but it works. There are innumerable examples of it, The People's Democratic Republic of Korea, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, National Socialism, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Good guys, or at least people who are good in the context of your or my value systems, also do it. I've got zero beef with my local Humane Society, they're great, but clearly the name of the organization has been chosen for its strong emotional potency.
Well, I agree but think it is even worse than this. Anyone who hasn't got wind of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism is squarely placing themselves in a very ancient thought-space, more Plato than Kant, no Popper, no modernity.
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.
You don't look for smart people by looking for people who don't do stupid things, because you won't find any. You look for smart people by finding people who do smart things because stupid people don't do smart people things.
I'm not saying Adams is not smart because he has done stupid things, I'm saying that Adams has probably thought of himself as very smart while not smart at all in field X because it is pretty clear he has done that in fields Y and Z (which is the first clue).
The second clue is about the fact that the "smart thing" he came up with is quite simplistic.
Reminds me of my stoner friends in high school who would watch a few videos by Carl Sagan and then become convinced that they know everything about physics and come up with convoluted and ultimately silly “theories” for physics.
Makes me wonder if Adams was a frequent drug user.
I think the article explains that Adams "turned bad" because it is the sad consequence of him being smarter than the rest of the people. I'm pretty sure that someone who has time to lose can got through the article and pick up all of the quotes about how Adams was clever and the managers were so dum.
Scott Adams was more clever than most because, as the article says more than once, he was named "Scott A." and so was the author, to whom an elementary school teacher said he was going to "cure cancer", whatever that means. Maybe the teacher was sincere -- or maybe he was trying to be nice and got misunderstood.
J. W. Goethe was obsessed with "Farbenlehre" [0], which is so weird that it is "not even wrong". I don't think it detracts from his intelligence. It was just his blind corner, so to say.
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.
The example I gave what about Adams being convinced to "know better" while it was clearly not true, which is to me a clue that when it comes to his view on society and business, which already looks pretty simplistic to me, the idea that he "knew better" is more probably the result of him thinking that and managing to convince others people who also like to see themselves as smarter than others.
> I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show.
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.
> he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White
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).
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.
> 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 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.
> Scott Adams based Dilbert on his career at Pacific Bell in the 80s. Can you imagine quitting Pacific Bell in the 80s to, uh, found your own Pacific Bell?
Idk man, imagine quitting HP in the 70s to make your own HP or IBM. Inconceivable
Quitting Fairchild to make your own semiconductor manufacturer (twice), quitting Intel to make your own CPU manufacturer, etc. The point isn’t that people didn’t do it if brave/desperate enough, the point is that it wasn’t a Thing You Can Do in the collective consciousness. Also, relatedly, that the societal infrastructure to support(/profit from) this category of people wasn’t yet in place, so you needed to be wealthy or connected (even more so than now).
> But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job - become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to love it.
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.
Beautifully stated. A lot of the comics still apply, but certainly not directly to my job. I imagine government workers find it very relatable, however.
I’ve spent most of my career in the cushy Silicon Valley startup style work cultures you’ve described. Obviously I greatly prefer them… but the stodgy business casual+ 9-5 cube farms still exist, and in great numbers. I’ve worked in them out of necessity here and there, and they’re more common than one might believe reading HN. If the desperate recruiters in my metro are anything to judge by, it seems just about everything manufacturing and financial services firm is run by a Pointy Haired Boss or two.
There is still plenty of need for Dilbert strips in the workforce.
Software and computers is not all there is to technology. There are plenty of other STEM fields that didn't enjoy a decades long surge in demand. Dilbert still very much applies there.
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.
it is an admittedly long read but i could sense it. i have a few fallen heroes myself and id be able to write diatribes of why i loved them and simultaneously hold their nuts to the fire in modern times.
In the world of rationalist blogs, writing anything too negative about someone is dismissed as a "hit piece" which is license to ignore it. The only way to write negatively about a person is to write a both-sides style evaluation where you sandwich the criticism in between praise for the person. It's a way of signaling that you're a nice person who isn't just being mean, before you get to the meat of the issue.
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.
Ok but what is this question trying to say? I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect"; it's entirely possible the universe we're in is a toy made for the amusement of an evil god-child, like we have ant farms, and they enjoy having meteorites and black holes and whatnot. It's not especially likely -- but it's not less likely than any of the other mainstream religious myths.
I'm remembering it not because it makes a good point, trying to reason about God is futile and pointless, but because it's funny both alone and because of its central role in the novel as saving humanity from a global holy war. Like that's just hilarious.
This article is great but it is insanely long and suffers from having no scroll bar on mobile. I read for over an hour, falling asleep at least three times, and wondering the entire time how far I was from finishing. Eventually I flicked the page upward to find out and could not believe how far I scrolled. I gave up at that point.
For those who haven't read it, Scott Alexander's "Unsong" (https://unsongbook.com/) is a very fun piece of historical fiction / religious fantasy. Basic premise is that the world is incredibly shocked when the Apollo 10 mission crashes into the Dome of the Sky and (a) proves that the Biblical cosmology was the true cosmology this whole time and (b) damages reality. It includes the idea that there is a whole cottage industry of people trying to apply technology to deciphering the True Name of God by essentially Mechanical Turking it ("If we divide up all possible syllable combinations into tranches and pay folks minimum wage to sit around reciting every syllable combination possible, we're bound to hit it sometime!").
The book is okay (I think I gave it three stars on Goodreads?) but in my opinion it suffers from Neal Stephenson syndrome: the book kinda just ends without a whole lot of anticlimax or resolution. The pacing is all over the place and the supporting cast are more like character sketches than characters.
I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.
I read the whole thing and enjoyed both the premise and the writing, but yeah, it would have benefited considerably from the attention of a professional editor and a couple of rounds of rewrites.
Great eulogy and art, What saddens me is the lack of a friends around him, seems like he got isolated in the politics of 2015 and then got radicalized.
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.
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
I was a long time Scott Adams fan with the Dilbert Principle being one of my favorite books.
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.
I think many who dislike Trump (myself included) don't really want to think of him as having skills of any sort.
But I think it's more so that he does absolutely have certain skills such as persuasion or, some argue, charisma. He just doesn't have any of that pesky morality or sense of responsibility to the greater good, the entire citizenship, etc. that often gets in the way of such ambitions.
So we're left with a master manipulator who will hurt a great number of people, maybe benefit a few if necessary, but ultimately a subset of people think he's genius and a net positive. And I can't help but think that the only ones who think he's a "net positive" are either personally benefiting, or have been persuaded to believe it, despite reality painting a different picture.
I dunno if the "just paraphrasing [...] Fox" works as an explanation for success. It sounds like you believe he just keeps unaccountably stumbling into piles of cash and power?
An ageing Biden and Dubya have also occupied that office and they don't exactly strike me as "master persuader" types either.
Nobody is accusing Trump of lacking ambition or charisma, and there's also no doubt the party machine that backed him is pretty sophisticated in the arts of political campaigning. But there's a difference between being a "master persuader" able to convince almost anyone of almost anything and being a shameless braggart in front of an electorate that's unusually impressed by a celebrity's overconfidence and wealth, and also being a lot less shameless about appealing to their chauvinistic attitudes than predecessors.
Trump was born rich to a father who taught him cruelty and insulated him from consequences. It was a golden ticket.
He still managed to go bankrupt 6 times, and couldn't get financing. He had to resort to selling his name or getting money from one of the most corrupt banks in the world.
He's rumored to have been despised in the NY social scene since his youth and up to the present.
He's been accused of rape by his own ex-wife and SA by more than 20 others. He bought pageants so beautiful women would have to interact with him. His longest relationship is with an illegal migrant (possibly trafficked) escort whose visa he had to pay for.
He gained no following during his time at the head of the Reform party.
Since 2015 his political base, like Nixon's, is largely built on white grievance and fear. It's incapable of building much once in power.
Now the Trump family accumulates money by selling power, hot air, and fleecing fools.
> As another self-hating nerd writer put it, “through all these years I make experiment if my sins or Your mercy greater be.”
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.
<And the most successful parasites are always those which can alter their host environment to be more amenable to themselves, and if you’re a parasite taking the form of a bad idea, that means hijacking your host’s rationality.>
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.
I imagine them coming together at some Bay Area house party on copious amounts of LSD or MDMA. One, the world’s greatest comic writer, who more than anything else wanted to succeed in business. The other, the world’s greatest businessman, who more than anything else wanted people to think that he’s funny.
Mostly seems like yet another case of snorting one's own tailpipe to the very end. It's a shame, the comics were great. But so many who experience success like that begin to consider themselves chosen ones and it only goes downhill from there unless you're a clown genius (tm).
I think this article really nails it. Adams' ego and self-satisfaction contributed to his susceptibility to the forces of the internet. It could happen to anyone.
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.
Think he was always unusually susceptible to the feedback loop of social media.
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...
Story of our times: Gen-X counterculture jerk grows up railing against The Man. Grows up, gets rich, famous, becomes The Man. His mind, however, is stuck in the past, still thinks he's a rebel, still thinks he's railing against The Man. In reality, he has become a sadistic asshole hurting others for his self-righteous pleasure. But no amount of pain inflicted on others will make him feel good, he dies a miserable crank.
Adams, Musk, Andreesen, Stephen Miller, Chappelle, Maher. They're everywhere.
While a little reductive and caricatured, as a Gen-X counterculture type myself I can confirm that there's quite a bit of accuracy in this comment. And a lot more examples in more boring parts of the world than these famous people you are mentioning.
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.
Yeah, probably unfair to name GenX exclusively - more of a late boomer/early gen-x phenomenon. Perhaps it's just the new mid-life crisis, "corvette in your 40s" is beyond silly these days, but rich, powerful 50-60 year olds thinking they're badass rebels is super common.
> His next venture (c. 1999) was the Dilberito, an attempt to revolutionize food via a Dilbert-themed burrito with the full Recommended Daily Allowance of twenty-three vitamins. I swear I am not making this up. A contemporaneous NYT review said it “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste”
The funniest thing I’ve read all week. Was anyone here lucky enough to eat one?
(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.
TPOT is "this part of Twitter", a loose community of (roughly) post-rat affiliated people; the "squishy half" is presumably referring to the fact that a substantial number of such people end up quite big into woo of various sorts.
The weird thing about Adams was that he believed Trump was Dogbert, not the pointy-haired boss.
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.
Once the article made the claim that the was the greatest comic author of all time, it became clear that the article is overanalyzing the man. one aspect proving the overanalysis is the wild length of the article beyond that point.
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.
Can we talk about how he in the end buried himself in vile racist politics?
Sure I enjoyed Dilbert.
The story about the frustrated highly intelligent engineer at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. At the bottom of the social hierarchy.
So what does this archetypical mistreated highly intelligent nerd finally do? Reads up on junk psychology on how to manipulate and influence people. Goes to the gym to get buffed. Gets high on alt-right politics on how the white man now is under whipping hand of woke women and ungrateful immigrants.
>Can we talk about how he in the end buried himself in vile racist politics?
Can you point to anything other than the single post that he made saying “white should get/stay away from black people”?
I’ve seen how he lost his way, or fell, or whatever. But all I’ve seen anyone post is one tweet one time. And every single time it leaves out the context that he was replying to a poll of black people saying the same about white people.
There was also one comic strip that was actually a correct and decently good take on the failure/intersection of postmodernism and DEI. I don’t count that as it wasn’t a bad faith take it was on point.
There is a no-joke they’re serious effort to link gym and fitness with conservative values.
People on the left point to statistics and a study or two showing decent correlation. People on the right readily agree regardless of their fitness saying it’s because of discipline and personal responsibility.
I think it’s funny to see people on the left lean into it.
That isn't how I understood Dilbert. Dilbert is a normal guy and PHB is actually mentally retarded.
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.
Scott Adams had a take on that. The "Dilbert Principle" (his version of the Peter Principle) is that useless engineers that are promoted away from doing real work to keep them from messing it up.
I have a much darker hypothesis about it - when people are left to compete, they often resort to badmouthing those who they think could outcompete them.
Thus, the reputation of the most competent gets destroyed, while the village idiot remains as the only one left unscathed.
Adams and his comics were childish, formulaic and repetitive.
Yeah, bosses are stupid and incompetent, I get it. But, guess what? Most people are stupid, one way or the other. Adams wasn't better than PHB, viz. the ridiculous polemics he got himself into.
And Dilbert was a crying baby incapable of taking action against his own misery.
Now, if you think it is so horrible to live under an incompetent boss, try being a peasant in a 3rd world country, living under a dictatorship, being a Palestinian in Israel, being an immigrant chased by ICE or being a minority in a democracy still beset by enormous inequalities; I'd suggest being a black and poor woman in Latin America. If you can't, read any book by Carolina Maria de Jesus[1]. It does give you a whole new perspective in "life sucks".
This dumb comics was "first world problems" all the way down.
Prediction: Dilbert will be bought by Paramount, all the old books will stop being published, and not-funny Woke Dilbert will get a Barbie movie treatment, a new not funny comic strip syndicated in daily newspapers only boomers read, a set of long books about social justice that have no comics in them, bad jokes, boring rehashed social justice narratives and just a picture of Dilbert on the cover to sell it. It will be called something like : "Dilbert’s Official Apology, Expanded Edition"
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
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.
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?
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.
Plenty of managers see the absurdity in a lot of what they have to do, but it's mandated by the people above them.
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."
- https://www.pacifict.com/story/
- 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.
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)
0 - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
“line management” is the term I am familiar with
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?)
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.
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.
>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
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.
Source: have been on the receiving end of a Scott Adams rage
"Consider the source".
I actually watched the podcast in question. As I saw it he made a very reasonable and 100% non-racist comment (in the context of the discussion the soundbytes were later taken out of), which related more to the inflammatory, caustic nature of the media narrative on black-white relationships, and whether as a white person it is even fruitful to be engaging in that narrative, if the end outcome is that your engagement will be used out of context to cause even more strife and division by the people pushing this narrative. I.e. you will make more of a difference as a white person by trying to improve the "systems" around you, in a manner that benefits everyone, rather than by engaging in pointless arguments and debates with people who are blinded by a very deliberately promoted agenda.
I very much agree with that point, and have experienced it myself. Ironically, if nothing else, this whole affair and the rush to cancel him and call him racist and disgraced, ultimately proved his very point. Just look at how the links you shared choose to word their posthumous articles.
If you really want an accurate source, just go watch the (entire) podcast. No better source than this. Best case scenario you'll disagree with my take, but now your take is informed rather than misinformed.
And to set the record straight, Adams was the very opposite of racist in my view. He had very nuanced and pragmatic views, including how the best thing the country could do to help black communities should be investing in education across the board, instead of funding and pandering to apologists who inflame the masses but then drain the money from the education system, perpetuating ghetto-like communities.
Completing failing to recognize that consent is a two person affair.
That’s racist.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
Also, so many reds (as in communists) became fascists it was a meme in Nazi Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefsteak_Nazi
I don't think white collar tech workers are uniquely predisposed to fascism. Blue collar tradesmen are more likely to be disposed to it and capable of getting their hands dirty.
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'."
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farbenlehre_(Goethe)
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.
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).
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.
Idk man, imagine quitting HP in the 70s to make your own HP or IBM. Inconceivable
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.
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 think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.
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
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.
But I think it's more so that he does absolutely have certain skills such as persuasion or, some argue, charisma. He just doesn't have any of that pesky morality or sense of responsibility to the greater good, the entire citizenship, etc. that often gets in the way of such ambitions.
So we're left with a master manipulator who will hurt a great number of people, maybe benefit a few if necessary, but ultimately a subset of people think he's genius and a net positive. And I can't help but think that the only ones who think he's a "net positive" are either personally benefiting, or have been persuaded to believe it, despite reality painting a different picture.
He was literally born into wealth before he could even stumble.
Nobody is accusing Trump of lacking ambition or charisma, and there's also no doubt the party machine that backed him is pretty sophisticated in the arts of political campaigning. But there's a difference between being a "master persuader" able to convince almost anyone of almost anything and being a shameless braggart in front of an electorate that's unusually impressed by a celebrity's overconfidence and wealth, and also being a lot less shameless about appealing to their chauvinistic attitudes than predecessors.
I feel we've cheapened the title "master persuader" if every elected politician in semi-democratic nations, even the nepo babies, gets that accolade.
I'm really looking for masterful persuasion, preferably of people who haven't already poisoned themselves with a diet of misinformation.
He still managed to go bankrupt 6 times, and couldn't get financing. He had to resort to selling his name or getting money from one of the most corrupt banks in the world.
He's rumored to have been despised in the NY social scene since his youth and up to the present.
He's been accused of rape by his own ex-wife and SA by more than 20 others. He bought pageants so beautiful women would have to interact with him. His longest relationship is with an illegal migrant (possibly trafficked) escort whose visa he had to pay for.
He gained no following during his time at the head of the Reform party.
Since 2015 his political base, like Nixon's, is largely built on white grievance and fear. It's incapable of building much once in power.
Now the Trump family accumulates money by selling power, hot air, and fleecing fools.
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.
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.
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...
Adams, Musk, Andreesen, Stephen Miller, Chappelle, Maher. They're everywhere.
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
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.
The funniest thing I’ve read all week. Was anyone here lucky enough to eat one?
(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.
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.
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. :/
Scott Adams hates this one weird trick.
John Donne
Sure I enjoyed Dilbert.
The story about the frustrated highly intelligent engineer at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. At the bottom of the social hierarchy.
So what does this archetypical mistreated highly intelligent nerd finally do? Reads up on junk psychology on how to manipulate and influence people. Goes to the gym to get buffed. Gets high on alt-right politics on how the white man now is under whipping hand of woke women and ungrateful immigrants.
Just a fascist joke of a person.
Can you point to anything other than the single post that he made saying “white should get/stay away from black people”?
I’ve seen how he lost his way, or fell, or whatever. But all I’ve seen anyone post is one tweet one time. And every single time it leaves out the context that he was replying to a poll of black people saying the same about white people.
There was also one comic strip that was actually a correct and decently good take on the failure/intersection of postmodernism and DEI. I don’t count that as it wasn’t a bad faith take it was on point.
If there is more to I’d like to know.
Also, I don't think you know what the word fascist means.
People on the left point to statistics and a study or two showing decent correlation. People on the right readily agree regardless of their fitness saying it’s because of discipline and personal responsibility.
I think it’s funny to see people on the left lean into it.
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.
Yeah, bosses are stupid and incompetent, I get it. But, guess what? Most people are stupid, one way or the other. Adams wasn't better than PHB, viz. the ridiculous polemics he got himself into.
And Dilbert was a crying baby incapable of taking action against his own misery.
Now, if you think it is so horrible to live under an incompetent boss, try being a peasant in a 3rd world country, living under a dictatorship, being a Palestinian in Israel, being an immigrant chased by ICE or being a minority in a democracy still beset by enormous inequalities; I'd suggest being a black and poor woman in Latin America. If you can't, read any book by Carolina Maria de Jesus[1]. It does give you a whole new perspective in "life sucks".
This dumb comics was "first world problems" all the way down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Maria_de_Jesus